A College Man In Khaki.
—
Scarce posthumous memoir of Wainwright A. Merrill, the first soldier to enlist from Cambridge, Massachusetts and one of the first Americans to die in the conflict. At 17, as a Dartmouth College undergraduate, Wainwright A. Merrill joined a college military battalion preparing for the United States’ possible entrance into World War One. Turning 18, he transferred to Harvard in Fall 1916 to be with his family in Cambridge and joined the school’s Officer Training Corps program. An Anglophile, Merrill was eager to do more to support England’s cause against the Germans. Merrill did not wait for the U.S. to enter the war. He left school that November and traveled to Kingston, Canada and volunteered as a gunner in the 6th Siege Battery of Canadian Garrison Artillery. Considered a minor in Canada, and without his father’s consent to volunteer, Merrill assumed a new name: Arthur A. Stanley. He died at the front at Ypres, Flanders in 1917.
Description: A College Man In Khaki.
New York: George H. Doran, (1918). 234 pages. First edition. Illustrated with plates. Publisher’s drab green cloth with gilt lettering. Gilt sine lettering dulled; heel of spine lightly bumped, p47 with small paper loss in bottom margin from original paper flaw. A tight, clean and very good copy.
[3731264]Price: $125.00