author

Horace Gray Gilliland

A British officer turned memoirist, he wrote a vivid first-hand account of surviving more than two years as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War I and eventually escaping. His book offers the kind of close-up detail that makes history feel immediate and human.

1 Audiobook

My German Prisons

My German Prisons

by Horace Gray Gilliland

About the author

Born in 1891, he served in the British Army's Loyal North Lancashire Regiment and was held as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War I. Records from the Imperial War Museums' Lives of the First World War also note that he later married Violet Fletcher in 1923 and died in 1941.

He is best known for My German Prisons, published in 1919. In it, he recounts his captivity from November 14, 1914, to April 8, 1917, ending with his escape. The book has been preserved by major public-domain and library collections, which is one reason it remains the clearest window into his life and writing.

Gilliland's appeal today comes from his direct, personal perspective. Rather than writing a distant military history, he described imprisonment, endurance, and escape from the inside, giving modern readers a personal view of the First World War.