author
Henry Philip Picot
1857–1937
A British officer and colonial administrator, he wrote from firsthand experience about the unusual wartime world of British soldiers interned in neutral Switzerland. His best-known book blends official knowledge with a clear, practical sense of how people lived through the aftermath of war.
1 Audiobook
The British Interned in Switzerland
by Henry Philip Picot
About the author
Born in 1857 and dying in 1937, Henry Philip Picot was a British lieutenant colonel who also worked as a colonial administrator. Records linked to his career describe him in both roles, and they show that his life moved between government service and military duty.
Picot is best known as the author of The British Interned in Switzerland (1919). The book draws on his own wartime work in Berne, where he served as military attaché at the British legation and as the British officer in charge of interned soldiers in Switzerland. That background gives the book its steady, firsthand quality: it is not just a history of World War I internment, but an account shaped by someone directly involved in the negotiations, administration, and daily realities behind it.
For audiobook listeners, Picot is interesting because he writes as a witness as much as an author. His work offers a direct view into a lesser-known side of the First World War, focusing on relief, recovery, and the complicated lives of men removed from the front but still marked by war.