author
Robert Derby Holmes
An American volunteer who joined the British Army before the United States entered World War I, he wrote with unusual immediacy about trench life. His best-known book brings the mud, danger, and dark humor of the Western Front close to the reader.
1 Audiobook
A Yankee in the Trenches
by Robert Derby Holmes
About the author
Robert Derby Holmes is remembered for A Yankee in the Trenches (1918), a firsthand World War I memoir. Contemporary catalog and public-domain book records identify him as the book's author and connect the work with his service on the Western Front.
Available author and library sources describe him as a Bostonian who enlisted in the British army in 1916, before America formally entered the war. He served with a London battalion and later turned those experiences into a vivid personal narrative rather than a distant military history.
His writing stands out for its direct, readable account of trench warfare and soldierly life. While biographical details about him are scarce in widely available sources, his memoir has endured as a compact, personal view of the First World War from an American who chose to fight early.