The death on December 30 of Ronald Searle, Britain’s foremost “graphic satirist”—to use his own designation—came as a terrific shock to his countrymen, many of whom thought he’d been dead for ages. Searle, ninety-one, had lived in Provence since 1966, and in France since 1961. He was untroubled by the possibility that his native land had forgotten him. “One marvelous thing about having left England,” he said in 2005, is that Frenchmen and other foreigners have “never heard of St. Trinian’s,” that Pandaemonium of a girls’ boarding school given diabolical life in Searle’s cartoons. Searle, complaining about a British “tendency to pigeonhole you,” thought it nicer to be presumed dead than remembered for work done in the 1950s.

Some were probably shocked for the opposite reason: Wasn’t Searle death-proof? A story known only vaguely to his more casual admirers, but retold with grim vividness by his many obituarists, was the ordeal he survived in his youth as a prisoner of war. At the outset of the Second World War, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers Corps of the Territorial Army. Soon he shipped out to Singapore, naïve, hopeful, and hopelessly ignorant of his adversary. Officers spoke of “yellow dwarves” who “couldn’t shoot straight.” It was 1942. After a month of jungle combat, during which fellow “sappers” were picked off by guerrillas hidden in palm trees, Singapore fell to the Japanese.

There can be no overstating the effect of his four-year captivity, split between Singapore, in Changi Jail,