Description

Originally published in 1917, this book tells the story of Harold Chapin, a US-born actor, author, and playwright who volunteered for the British Army following the outbreak of war in 1914. Chapin, who had lived in England since being brought over by his mother at age three, enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps on September 2 and embarked for the Western Front the following March as a stretcher-bearer. Though he brought a remarkable enthusiasm to the difficult tasks of a medical corpsman under wartime conditions, he nevertheless soon began to view the conflict as only winnable by slow, bloody attrition.

Chapin was killed as he collected wounded men during the Battle of Loos on September 26, 1915. Published posthumously, Soldier and Dramatist was assembled from the letters that Chapin sent back from the front to his wife and child in England. At the time, it was one of a number of memoirs by young men whose lives had been irrevocably changed--or ended--by the war; brought back from obscurity now, it serves as a window onto the experience of the ordinary soldier on the Western Front.