Max Plowman was born in Tottenham in 1883. He enlisted in the Territorial Field Ambulance on Christmas Eve, 1914 before accepting a commission in an infantry regiment. He was 31 years old and a journalist at the time of his enlistment, and he had already begun to establish a reputation for himself as a writer of the Romantic Socialist sort. His mind was full of Blake and Shelley's poetry, and he did not seem the sort of person to rush to enlist. He himself wrote to a friend only a few days after enlisting to say that the war was 'insane and unmitigated filth', and that his enlistment was the easiest way of dealing with the whole situation.1 At the Somme, almost two years later, he described the fighting as 'a bloody fool's travesty of life and excitement'.2

Plowman was near Albert with his regiment and he continued at the Front until January 1917 when he suffered a concussion which resulted in him being blown up by a shell. He was returned to England suffering from shell-shock, where he was treated at Bowhill Auxiliary, a branch of Craiglockhart, by W. H. R. Rivers; he does not appear to have met Owen, despite being there until July 1917, and in all likelihood he missed Sassoon, since the latter did not arrive at Craiglockhart until July 20, 1917.

During the summer and early autumn of 1917 Plowman prepared two books for publication; one was a collection of poems, A Lap Full of Seed, published in October 1917. The collection was not primarily made up of war poetry, and at that mid-war period, Plowman felt obliged to explain why this was the case: 'Of the war poems at the end of the book your forbearance and a word. They are few, because warfare itself is comparatively unimportant: the spirit (though not the brain) of man having already outgrown the bestial occupation. They sound one note, that of individual responsibility, because from a personal standpoint, I do not know another worth sounding'.3 There are a total of eight war poems in the collection, and almost all of them date from the first year of the war; according to Samuel Hynes, Plowman had long since lost interest in the subject before he saw combat.4

Plowman's other book was an anonymously published pamphlet entitled The Right to Live, which he completed just after leaving hospital in the summer of 1917. A polemic, it is less against the war than against the kind of society which made war inevitable. Plowman took it for granted that the war would continue to the end; he was not attempting to stop the war, but to change the post-war world. When he had returned to England in January 1917, he had found an England where attitudes had changed and ideals had gone, and it was this that had prompted him to his polemic.

By the time The Right to Live had been published in February 1918, Plowman had made a protest against the war and was under arrest. On January 1 he had been called for a medical examination and been given another month of home service before returning to the Front. Two weeks later he wrote to his battalion's Adjutant, asking to be relieved of his commission, on the grounds of conscientious objection, an objection that was largely on religious grounds. Plowman's protest was rather different from Sassoon's Declaration of 'wilful defiance' - Sassoon had protested against the change in Britain's war aims, whereas Plowman protested against all war.

Following the arrival of his letter, Plowman was arrested and confined to quarters, under guard. In April 1918 he was court-martialled and dismissed from the Army, although he was not given a prison sentence, and by early May he was a civilian once more. Plowman sent a copy of his letter of resignation to Sassoon, as well as to the Army, although Sassoon did not reply, he mere passed the letter on to Rivers. Rivers wrote back to Plowman sympathetically, to ask if he could be of any use, and to report that Sassoon had 'returned to duty and [was] quite happy in it'.5Although Plowman did not take up Rivers' offer then, he did meet with Rivers again later that summer. Being a civilian he was, at that time, threatened with conscription, and Rivers again offered to help. Plowman was unadmiring of Rivers, writing of Rivers to a friend, he said 'He's a very clever liberal-minded person whom I regard as a fundamental ass'. He explained his view:

Such a line would do for an officer who protested against the war's aims (such as Sassoon), and even for those who were hysterical with guilt over their failure to function adequately in combat, but for Plowman, who had seen the war and resigned from it altogether, such a line was useless.

Plowman may not have admired Rivers, but he evidently did admire Sassoon. Plowman sent the latter a copy of his 1919 book, War and the Creative Impulse. A year earlier he had praised Sassoon's Counter-Attack and Other Poems, asking, in a review in the Labour Leader of July 25, 1918 'What recognition is the country going to give to Mr Sassoon for writing this book ?' He argued that Sassoon, by publishing Counter-Attack had 'rendered the best public service it is as present possible to offer. He has delivered the finest counter-attack in the war by making a breach in the sinister ranks of official reticence and official ignorance and self-complacency. He has told the truth about the war.'7

Plowman joined Dick Sheppard's Peace Pledge Union after the war, and became its secretary in 1937-8. He wrote an account of his wartime experiences, A Subaltern on the Somme which was published under the pseudonym of Mark VII. He died in 1941 and is buried in Langham churchyard (Essex).