 Graham returned to Britain and enlisted in the Scots Guards, as a private soldier rather than as an officer, because ‘to serve in the ranks is a unique opportunity to get to know the working man.’.He reached the Western Front in April 1918; and the following year published an account of his wartime experiences in "A Private in the Guards" (1919), in which he considers the human cost at which an elite military unit is created (one whose unofficial ethos was that ‘a good soldier was one who would not take a prisoner’.