A Perfect Hell on Earth is a story that follows the travails of Ernst Frieslaven, a former government worker who enlists to serve in the German Army in the First World War. He meets and befriends an unlikely comrade, Maruska Yaroslav, a soldier of Gypsy blood whom the other soldiers mock and belittle for the swarthy color of his skin.

Together the two men will experience the hell of trench warfare in World War 1.

In 1916, commanders of the German Army engage in a plan to lure the French into a battle that they hope will inflict so many casualties it will “bleed the French white,” forcing them to surrender and ensuring a German victory. Instead, the Battle of Verdun turns into a months-long slaughterhouse, a ghastly human furnace where the lives of hundreds of thousands of men are discarded as easily as chaff in the wind.

The characters are Rosa Liber, the socialist activist who loves Frieslaven and who risks her life to sabotage the German war effort, the promotion-seeking Sergeant Kurt Schroder, the evil demagogue Colonel Reinhardt, and the heroic and decent Sergeant Major Ackermann.

An epic of battle the book portrays the waste, the tragedy the lunacy of a catastrophic war that millions initially welcomed but in a stalemate where the numbers of dead soared and found to their horror they could not stop.