Arthur Guy Empey wrote the bestselling WWI memoir, Over The Top. He was an American who volunteered and served with the British as a bomber and machine-gunner, wounded at the Somne. After the war, he wrote fiction, creating Terence O'Leary.
The sinking of the Lusitania seemed to the cause Empey, an American sergeant, volunteered with the British, and was soon living in the squalor of the trenches in France - lice, rats, mud and Germans trying to kill you for the cherry on top.
Empey was wounded in hand-to-hand combat with a bayonet, but survived. Then he was trained as a 'bomber' - not in a plane, but tossing fragmentation grenades. He was wounded at the Somme going 'Over the Top' - 17 of his 20 men unit died - and he laid in No Man's Land for a day+
Unfit for further military service, the US wouldn't take him, so he did the rounds as a speaker drumming up support for US intervention in the war. Turns out he was a mighty good speaker. The book came out in 1917 and sold well.
A silent film was made of the book in 1918, starring Empey - but no print of the film exists and it is only loosely based on the book anyway (mostly a melodrama). He made a faux paus in front of Pres Wilson when he said voluteers are real heroes, unlike draftees.
Empey had a career in the silent pictures but couldn't make the transition to talkies. His scifi stuff was of midling success.
You can read about Arthur Guy Empey, including his less savory aspects in articles like this.
historynet.com/the-self-made-…
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