AS butler to the Earl of Dudley at Witley Court, in the halcyon years before the First World War, Adams had seen plenty of guns fired. The Earl’s magnificent country estate in Worcestershire’s rolling Teme Valley regularly played host to glamorous shooting parties, where members of the royal family would stand alongside top society names of the day.

All the time Adams would serve and observe. But not once did he pick up a gun. It was not his place to do so – and Adams knew his place.

Just as he knew that when war broke out, it was his place to serve King and Country. So he enlisted in the Queen’s Own Worcestershire Hussars (QOWH), a yeomanry regiment of cavalry in which officers were drawn from the county’s social elite and troopers, in the main, from their estates.

Although the abiding image of the Great War is of the rattle of machine guns and the ear-splitting boom of the big guns across the mud, the blood and the gore of The Somme, there was a major conflict elsewhere. It was in the east, where the British Empire faced the formidable strength of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, particularly in campaigns in the Sinai and Palestine.

So it was the Worcestershire Hussars found themselves at the hellhole of Oghratina, which lay five miles east of Katia and south of Port Said, where they had been sent to guard a party of Royal Engineers sinking wells into the Egyptian desert. Here, the Hussars came under attack from a huge Turkish force of more than 3,000, which outnumbered them 10 to one and made the outcome of any battle inevitable.

By this time Adams, no doubt for his skill in running the Earl’s household, had been promoted to mess sergeant to oversee the day-to-day running of the regimental messes. During the fight, he tended the wounded and brought them hot drinks, but bravely though the British fought, there was only ever going to be one outcome. As the Turks attacked the camp, their hail of gunfire cutting down Hussars like corn before a harvester, one can only imagine Adams’s thoughts.

With his men falling around him, the Hussars’ commanding officer gave the order to surrender. But not Adams. The man who had never handled a gun in his life, suddenly picked up a rifle.

But instead of firing it, he fixed the bayonet, stepped outside and charged downhill towards the Turkish lines for King and Country. Bullets slammed into him and he fell and died in the desert sand, a long way from the green fields of Worcestershire and home. The Turks, for their part, behaved well and as the British survivors surrendered, they called out “Brave. Brave”.

The remarkable story of Adams, his Lordship’s butler, is actually only a sidepiece in a very readable new book by military historian Douglas Bridgewater, who has turned the war diaries of Arthur Valentine Holyoak, a lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Worcestershire Hussars, into The Road to Yozgad (Menin House £15.99).

While researching another project, Mr Bridgewater had a chance conversation with Arthur Holyoak’s son Frank and this has led to the book.

Before the war, Arthur was a solicitor’s managing clerk in the family law firm, which had offices in Bromsgrove, Droitwich and Alcester. He went to Abbey Croft prep school in Droitwich and then Bromsgrove School. His army service began when he enlisted into the QOWH on September 10, 1914.

Douglas Bridgewater’s book is compiled from the notes Arthur made as his regiment trained in England – “I don’t care if you are a professional jockey out of a job, you’ve got to pass the riding test before we’ll take you on”, a sergeant at the riding school told him – his campaign and capture with others from the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and his subsequent incarceration in the Ottoman prison camp at Yozhad in Central Turkey. Hence the title of the book.

In a foreword, John Bourne, a lecturer in war studies at the University of Birmingham, writes: “Holyoak and his brother officers tried, and largely succeeded, in making the best of their situation. Within the camp they organised theatrical entertainments, set up a Masonic Lodge and even formed a hunt, with Holyoak as master.

“The pack consisted of a couple of local breed ‘hounds’ and was allowed out into the surrounding countryside.

“It seldom failed to account for at least one hare or fox between the hours of 4am and 9am each Monday and Thursday in the spring and summer.

“Even so, the experience of being a prisoner of war was essentially humiliating and disempowering. This can be glimpsed in the splendid response of the British officer at Yozgad, Colonel Moore, when told by the Turkish commandant on October 31, 1918, that the Ottoman Empire had surrendered.

“The Commandant offered his hand and said, ‘The war is over. Now we are friends’. Moore, an Indian officer who had surrendered at Kut (where the Turks had been more brutal) replied, ‘The war is over. You have lost. We have won. In future you will take your orders from me’. Confronted by this brutal reality, the Turkish Commandant burst into tears. I don’t blame him.”

l After the war Arthur Holyoak returned to the family law firm in Worcestershire and served from 1922 until 1945 as town clerk of Droitwich. He lived at Wychbold and died in 1977 at the age of 89.