Robert Derby Holmes

Biography

Robert Derby Holmes (dates uncertain, fl. 1918) was an American soldier and memoirist who served in the trenches of World War I and recorded his experiences in one of the most vivid first-person accounts of the conflict. Little is known about Holmes’s life beyond his military service and his memoir. He served with the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, experiencing the full horror of trench warfare: bombardment, gas attacks, raids, and the grinding daily misery of life in the trenches. His memoir, A Yankee in the Trenches (1918), published while the war was still underway, provides an American soldier’s unvarnished account of what combat on the Western Front was actually like. The book was notable for its honest, sometimes humorous, and always vivid depiction of the soldier’s experience, avoiding both the jingoism of official propaganda and the despair of later war literature.