experienced both World Wars. He served in the merchant navy during World War I from early in 1915 until he deserted to join the Canadian Army late April 1917. He was demobilized in the Spring of 1919. Hanley only briefly experienced frontline conflict in 1918 and was soon after invalided out. He was also in London at the beginning of the World War II during the Blitz of 1940–1. Hanley deals with his First World War experiences, on the battlefield, in his novella, The German Prisoner, and his experience in the merchant navy, on a ship commandeered by the British Admiralty to serve as a troopship, in works like the novella "Narrative" (1931), and his novel The Hollow Sea (1938). These experiences are also dealt with in Hanley's non-fiction work, Broken Water: An Autobiographical Excursion (1937). He uses both his earlier merchant navy experience, as well as the Blitz, in subsequent novels and short stories in the 1940s and 1950s. The Hanleys left Wales in July 1939 and led "an unsettled, almost nomadic existence" part of which was spent in London, and, while living in Chelsea, in August 1940 they "experienced the Blitz at first hand". Finally, January 1941, they returned to Wales, taking up residence in Llanfechain, Powys. The third novel in Hanley's The Furys Chronicle, Our Time is Gone, was published in 1940, and takes place in middle of the First World War, between in November 1915, and September 1916". The action takes place mostly in Gelton. The father Denny Fury has returned to the sea, "as a stoker on a liner that has been taken over as a troopship," and Desmond Fury is a captain in the army. Peter Fury is serving a fifteen-year prison sentence for his murder of Mrs Ragner. However, John Fordham comments on the fact that Our Time is Gone "discloses a surprisingly non-belligerent tone for a Second World War novel" and the "unprecedented" for a novel published during a war "central heroism of Joseph Kilkey" who is a conscientious objector. Two other works published during World War II, The Ocean (1941) and Sailor's Song (1943), explore "virtually identical" situations, that involve ships that have "been torpedoed and sunk mid-ocean". This is a similar plot to that of the conclusion of the earlier novella "Narrative", which is set during the previous war. Hanley also published, in 1943, No Directions, which is set during