World War I
Whilst working as a clerk at the British Steamship Company in the City of London, he joined the London Scottish Regiment in 1909 as a Territorial Army soldier, and on being mobilised on the outbreak of World War I, crossed the English Channel in September 1914 to France to take part in the fighting on the Western Front. On 31 October 1914, at the Battle of Messines, Colman was seriously wounded by shrapnel in his ankle, which gave him a limp that he would attempt to hide throughout the rest of his acting career. He was invalided out of the British Army in 1915 in consequence. (His fellow Hollywood actors Claude Raines, Herbert Marshall, Cedric Hardwicke and Basil Rathbone all saw service with the London Scottish in the war).
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Famous quotes containing the words war i, world and/or war:
“The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters—not to talk in armies and nations and numbers—but to track it home.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
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—Eda Le Shan (20th century)
“Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor’s son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)