J. R. Ackerley - World War I

World War I

As World War I had begun, Ackerly was accepted immediately as a Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment, part of the 18th Division, then stationed in East Anglia. In June 1915 he was sent to France. The following summer he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. He was shot in the arm and suffered shards of a whiskey bottle becoming imbedded in his side from an explosion. After lying wounded in a shell-hole for six hours, he was rescued by British troops and sent home for sick-leave.

He soon volunteered to go back to the front. As he had been promoted to captain, when his older brother Peter arrived in France in December 1916, Ackerley was his superior officer. He later wrote that the cheerful Peter saluted his brother "gladly and conscientiously." In February 1917, Peter was wounded in action on a dangerous assignment. Though he got back to the British lines, Ackerley never saw his brother again, as he was killed on 7 August 1918, two months before the end of the war. Peter's death haunted Ackerley all his life; he suffered from survivor's guilt.

In May 1917 Ackerley led an attack in the Arras region where he was wounded, this time in the buttock and thigh. While he was waiting for help, the Germans arrived and took him prisoner. As an officer, he was assigned to an internment camp in neutral Switzerland, which was relatively comfortable. Here he began his play, The Prisoners of War, which expresses the cabin fever of captivity and his frustrated longings for another English prisoner. Ackerley was not repatriated to England until after the war ended.