10 Famous Ambulance Drivers of WW1

Walt Disney Publlic Domain(notice the cartoon he has drawn on his ambulance)

1. E E Cummings (writer) - volunteer Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps

2. Jerome K Jerome (writer) - French Army ambulance driver

3. W Somerset Maugham (writer) - volunteer British Red Cross ambulance corps

4. Maurice Ravel (composer) - volunteer ambulance driver or truck driver

5. Ralph Vaughan Williams (composer) - Royal Army Medical Corps

6. Jean Cocteau (dramatist and filmmaker )

7. Stafford Cripps (politician)

8. Walt Disney (Animator and film producer) - volunteer American Red Cross, but served after the armistice ending WWI was signed.

9. Ernest Hemingway (writer)  - volunteer American Field Service

10. John Masefield (writer) - served as hospital orderly in British hospital for French soldiers in France

Novelists 45 - W Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a medical doctor. The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During World War I, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into Secret Intelligence, working in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels. He wrote many novels including Ashenden: Or the British Agent, Cakes and Ale, Catalina, The Magician, The Moon and Sixpence, Mrs Craddock, Of Human Bondage, The Painted Veil, The Razor's Edge, Then and Now and Up at the Villa.  I've not read any of them. 

Unusual words 04 Mien Taciturnity

Mien and taciturnity are not so unusual but I came across them together recently in the same sentence and although I could tell you what mien is easily enough, I would struggle a little with taciturnity. The sentence is "Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien; but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word." The sentence is from near the beginning of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.

Mien is, of course, face or look. It's a bit of a literary word and comes up in R L Stevenson's famous book in the sentence "The middle one of the three windows was half-way open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll ..."
Taciturnity derives from a word for silence and means incommunicative (I'd thought it meant obtuse or difficult to be honest). See W Somerset Maugham Of human bondage "Perhaps his taciturnity a contempt for the human race which had abandoned the great dreams of his youth and now wallowed in sluggish ease; or perhaps these thirty years of revolution had taught him that men are unfit for liberty, and he thought that he had spent his life in the pursuit of that which was not worth the finding."