Literary Ambulance Drivers

I mentioned last week in my blog about another "The Greatest Author I've Never Heard Of" story about William Somerset Maugham, that he served in France during WWI as a member of the British Red Cross's so-called "Literary Ambulance Drivers."

Just to follow up.

At least 23 well known literary figures drove ambulances in the First World War.  Among them were Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Maugham. Robert Service, the writer of Yukon poetry, including The Shooting of Dan McGrew, and Charles Nordhoff, co-author of Mutiny On the Bounty, drove ambulances in the Great War.

Why Join?

According to Steve Ruediger in an article on the topic
https://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/ambulance.htm:

Many young men had a strong desire to be in the middle of the action but were not physically fit for acceptance in an army.  Hemingway, who had defective vision in his left eye, expressed these viewpoints when, prior to joining, he wrote to his sister, Marcelline, "But I'll make it to Europe some way in spite of this optic.  I can't let a show like this go on without getting into it."

Dos Passos was so myopic he couldn't see the top letter on an eye chart.  War was more dangerous than many thought.  After getting wounded, a soldier might be sped off to the hospital by a half blind ambulance driver.

Somerset Maugham at 40 and 5'6" was both too old and too short to enlist at the beginning of the war.  So he joined a British Red Cross ambulance unit attached to the French Army.  One of his co-drivers, Desmond MacCarthy, later became the literary critic for The Sunday Times.

It's possible that my Grandfather Kuhn may have had an encounter with one of these guys.  He served in the famous 107th Engineers, credited with road, bridge, and trench works.  Also, constructing not less than five complete hospitals.

The infantry motto may well be 'Follow Me', but in the mud-static war of WWI, the infantry was powerless without the engineers first going ahead to blow wire entanglements, construct roads and then bridges over barriers, and recon enemy positions. In this case, it was really 'follow the engineers,' for they lead the way!

The 107th motto:  Good as done!

Carpe diem Life,
David Kuhn