American Field Service to fight for France, the land of his birth.After a period of training as an ambulance driver, he and his comrades were sent to the Argonne forest on the North-Eastern front where, shortly after his arrival, he heard the rumble of gun-fire reverberating from the forts of Verdun. It was not long before the horrors of war began to make their impression on his young mind: his first sight of a dead soldier made him a pacifist for life.Later, when it was discovered that he was actually too young to be at war, Green was sent home to Paris, but he soon managed to enlist in the American Red Cross and set off to serve as an ambulance driver once more, this time on the Italian front, north of Venice.A shy, serious and intensely devout boy who had lost his mother when he was only fourteen, his sudden and violent exposure to loneliness, suffering and death, and his first experiences of self discovery and sexual awakening were to mark his rise to maturity and permanently influence his development as a writer. Written many years later, by which time, Julian Green at the age of 64 was an acknowledged and distinguished writer, The War At Sixteen recreates those early years in a moving, revealing and ruthlessly honest account of adolescence.
