A Volunteer Poilu

by Henry Beston

Henry Beston Sheahan (1888-1968) was an American writer and naturalist, best known as the author of The Outermost House, written in 1925. He grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts and attended Adams Academy in Quincy before earning his B.A. (1909) and M.A. (1911) from Harvard College. After leaving Harvard, Beston took up teaching at University of Lyon. In 1914 he returned to Harvard as an English department assistant. Beston joined the French army in 1915 and served as an ambulance driver. His service in le Bois le Pretre and at the Battle of Verdun was described in his first book, A Volunteer Poilu (1916). Following the end of World War I, Beston began writing fairy tales under the name "Henry Beston". In 1919, The Firelight Fairy Book was published, followed by The Starlight Wonder Book in 1923. During this time, he worked as an editor of The Living Age, an offshoot of The Atlantic Monthly.

Genres: History

124 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2007

About the author

Henry Beston was an American writer and naturalist, best known as the author of The Outermost House, written in 1925.

Reviews

[Mikey B.]

This is a description of events in France during World War I by an American who joined as a volunteer in the French medical corps for the transportation of wounded French soldiers to hospitals for medical care.

He describes his journey over to France in chronological fashion, but after everything becomes rather hodgepodge in terms of a timeline as dates were not mentioned. At times the writing was rather awkward.

The author favours descriptions of settings and landscapes over people. It gave the book a rather distant feel. I found it odd that there were hardly any passages of the wounded that he serviced.

A similar and better book, that is far more intimate, is The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs.

[Michael McCue]

Henry Beston is better known as the author of The Outermost House, an account of his time living alone on Cape Cod. In 1915 Beston joined the French Army as a volunteer ambulance driver. He served at the Battle of Verdun and other fights and lived to write about it. Perhaps the best parts of this book are his retelling of conversations with ordinary French soldiers and citizens. Beston spoke French well having been a professor at a French university between times of teaching and studying at at Harvard. His descriptions of the casualties are hard to read. Soldiers, whole families living in the way and thousands of horses died in that conflict. War is not glorious and Beston did not glorify it. This book is well worth reading, I recommend it.

[Thomas Warger]

Superb. One of the best memoirs from WWI, filled with humanizing detail.