ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of World War I, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway's stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle World War I." The popular literary characters Biggles and Bulldog Drummond were created by veterans of the war, W.E. Johns and H.C. McNeile respectively. Both characters served in the war and shared some their creators' history. The Bulldog Drummond books were popular among veterans after the war. Writers like Paul Fussell and Janet S.K. Watson have questioned '[w]hat role [...] memory play[s] in historical reconstruction’ - arguing that retrospective accounts are often disillusioned. French writer and former infantryman on the Western Front Gabriel Chevallier wrote a novel Fear in 1930, based on his own experiences in the Great War. The novel was not published in English until 2011. Although most famous for his popular Hornblower series of Napoleonic War adventure novels, C.S. Forester also wrote three novels set in the First World War. Of the three, only one- The General (1936) was set on the Western Front, the others The African Queen (1935), which was famously filmed in 1951, was set in German East Africa and Brown on Resolution (1929), was a naval adventure set in the Central Pacific. According to one source, Adolf Hitler admired the novel The General in the late 1930s and recommended it to his generals due to its depiction of the British military mindset. Writer William March, who fought with the U.S. Marines in France during World War I, wrote a novel Company K in 1933, loosely based on his own experiences. Another American writer Dalton Trumbo wrote a bitterly anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun in 1938 which won a National Book Award the following year and was made into a film in 1971. New Zealander John A Lee, who fought as an infantryman in World War I and who lost an arm, produced a novel Citizen into Soldier (1937) inspired by his own experiences. Late 20th-century and beyond Novels concerning World War I continued to appear in the latter half of the 20th century, albeit less frequently. The novel Return to the