This brief, intense and even savage novel is set in the trenches during the first World War, in which O'Flaherty himself fought and suffered shellshock. At nearly seventy years old, it carries its age well and must have been as revolutionary in its time as Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front of a few years earlier. No chivalry or glory here, just a group of men reduced to little more than animal status, and a remarkable psychological portrait of obsession and ultimate collapse in the character of Gunn, who goes crazy and murders the corporal who had bullied him. As almost always, O'Flaherty's style lacks shading or subtlety, but he was never stronger than when depicting violent men and violent situations, and some of the scenes have the stark power of a black-and-white woodcut. The same publisher has reissued O'Flaherty's A Tourist's Guide to Ireland, which is little more than a tract or diatribe against his favourite targets of the clergy, the politicians, and the publicans. It merely goes to show that O'Flaherty as a social thinker and analyst was a non-starter.