H. E. L. Mellersh

Who is H. E. L. Mellersh?

Harold Edward Leslie Mellersh was a British author, primarily of text books, and also of a novel and an autobiography about his experience of World War I. The autobiography, Schoolboy Into War is an account of his recruitment at the age of 18, directly from school as an officer in the British Army. He was commissioned into the East Lancashire Regiment in 1915, served on the Western Front, and was wounded twice.

Quote: "I and my like entered the war expecting an heroic adventure and believing implicitly in the rightness of our cause [sounds like Cather's hero Claude]; we ended greatly disillusioned as to the nature of the adventure, but still believing that our cause was right and we had not fought in vain."

In 1921 Mellersh joined the Inland Revenue as a tax inspector.