Isaac Alexander Mack

Isaac Alexander Mack was a British soldier and writer best known for Letters from France, a collection of his correspondence from the First World War. The letters were published after his death and give readers a direct, intimate sense of military life, written by someone living through it rather than looking back from a distance.

Sources from Jesus College, Cambridge and the Imperial War Museum’s Lives of the First World War project describe him as born in 1892, the third son of Mr. and Mrs. Isaac A. Mack of Bootle, Liverpool. He was educated at the Leys School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. in 1914 and was known as an athlete, especially in rugby.

He served as a captain in the Suffolk Regiment, attached to a trench mortar battery, and was killed on July 1, 1916, during the opening day of the Battle of the Somme. That early death gives Letters from France much of its power: the book preserves the voice of a young man whose life was cut short, and whose letters remain a striking firsthand portrait of war.