Gilbert Nobbs

Born in London on February 3, 1880, Henry Gilbert Nobbs served with the London Rifle Brigade after enlisting in 1899. During the First World War he fought on the Western Front as a captain and was seriously wounded in the Somme fighting in 1916.

After treatment in a German field hospital, he was held as a prisoner of war before returning to England later that year. Those experiences became the basis of his best-known memoir, first published in 1917 as On the Right of the British Line and later reissued as In Battle & Captivity, 1916–1918.

Nobbs's writing is valued for its direct, personal view of combat and captivity. Rather than offering a distant military history, he gives readers a vivid sense of what it felt like to endure the fear, pain, and uncertainty of war at the front.