John Buchan is a fascinating case for anyone interested in the complex ways in which information circulation was changing during the turbulent years of the First World War. He was both a prolific author of wartime fiction, the author of a series of factual histories written during the War for a private publishing firm and a leading contributor to the British government's wartime propaganda effort. Buchan's productivity makes feasible an examination of his work at various points throughout the war, instead of the more static pre-war, wartime and post-war categories. Such intermediate sampling is useful since one risks glossing over the internal dynamics of cultural change at play across the War years by over-privileging the catch-all category ‘wartime’, where an effort to bound and unify the historical situation of the War demands primacy. Buchan's novels The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1919) are his best-known wartime texts, but here I examine ‘The King of Ypres’, a short story written and published in 1915. This story's brevity and straightforward plot belie an interesting commentary on the difficulties involved in capturing an accurate accounting of wartime experiences within the ‘official’ record of the War. Further, Buchan's choice to set the story in the Belgian town of Ypres puts the story into conversation with the Bryce Report, one of the most influential (and one of the most misleading) official documents produced during the first year of the War.