Although Jones had been known solely as an engraver and painter prior to its publication, the book won the Hawthornden Prize and the admiration of writers such as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.

The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse and prose, is highly allusive, and ranges in tone from formal to Cockney colloquial and military slang.

In Part 2, they receive instruction and training and travel towards the front, where Ball has the shattering experience of a long-range heavy explosive shell exploding nearby.

Part 4 concerns a typical day in the front line, from morning stand-to to evening stand-down, alternating between fatigue duty, horrendous violence, and boredom.

Part 5 is a montage of events in estaminets and work parties in reserve (behind the lines) where rumours abound, culminating in their long march south towards the Somme.

Far from "romanticizing" war, allusions to romance give to battle frightening archetypal force and express the combatants' preverbal intensity of emotion.

Paul Fussell contends that "The effect of the poem, for all its horrors, is to rationalize and even to validate the war by implying that it somehow recovers many of the motifs and values of medieval chivalric romance".

[citation needed] Dilworth, however, argues against Fussell's interpretation, stating the important battles that Jones alludes to - most of them Celtic defeats - are symbolically contained in the archetypal calamities of Camlann and the fall of Troy.