His work included articles for the English, American and Italian press, as well as King Albert's Book and The Drama of 365 Days: Scenes in the Great War.

Mona and her father's lives are disrupted first by her brother being called up to fight in France, and then by the authorities agreeing with the owner of the farm to set up an internment camp for enemy aliens there at Knockaloe.

Mona consents to live there still and supply food for "those Germans whose brothers are killing our boys in France",[5] greatly against her wish and only for the sake of her ageing father.

Mona's hatred of the German's now reaches a new pitch: She hears of frequent rioting, rigorously put down, and then of an attempt at insurrection in the messroom of the First Compound, and of four prisoners being shot down by the guard.

[7] This comes to a head on Christmas Eve 1917 when Oskar receives news that his young sister has been killed by an allied bomb as she slept in her home in Mannheim.

Realising that there is no future for them together in a world so divided by war, Mona and Oskar commit suicide together by leaping to their deaths from the cliffs overlooking the sea.

Such a view of Caine was shown in the blurb on the dust jacket which unflinchingly compared Barbed Wire with William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Émile Zola's The Attack on the Mill.

George Bernard Shaw wrote of his enjoying the novel: It was not until 5.10 yesterday that my wife put Barbed Wire (The Woman of Knockaloe) into my hands.

This review concluded with the dismissive observation of the book that: "we are inclined to take the author’s own statement, that it was all a bad dream which he had one night and wrote out in the morning".

Despite Cassell having included a disclaimer that "nothing in the book is intended to refer to real-life persons in the Isle of Man or elsewhere",[11] a "storm of abuse" was heaped on Caine for "daring to suggest, even in fiction, that a Manx girl could have fallen in love with a German prisoner of war".

The book was the basis for the 1927 American film Barbed Wire directed by Rowland V. Lee and starring Pola Negri and Clive Brook.

[14] The novel's Manx setting was changed to Normandy, France, and some plot alterations were made including the insertion of a happy ending.