Herbert W. McBride was an American soldier who served with the Canadian forces during World War I. The library currently holds only one of his works, the sniper memoir The Emma Gees. Public information about his life is limited, and his birth and death years, education, and postwar career cannot be confirmed. This memoir shows that he wrote from a firsthand participant's perspective, focusing on the daily training of snipers, battlefield observation, and combat details. His style is direct and practical, with little dramatization, in the plain manner of a soldier's account. Firsthand records left by ordinary combatants like this offer concrete and vivid material for later generations seeking to understand infantry and sniper operations in the trenches of World War I, and they give him a place among writers of military memoirs.
