Owen's biographer Dominic Hibberd draws parallels with Owen's 1917 poem, Anthem for Doomed Youth, finding a Romantic nostalgia in both which was only expunged in the later poems written at Craiglockhart and after.
It was drafted at Craiglockhart in the first half of October 1917 and later revised, probably at Scarborough but possibly Ripon, between January and March 1918.
The book finishes as George Sherston prepares to attend 'Slateford War Hospital' (Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh) after a medical board had decided he was suffering from shell-shock.