![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: Fanny Goes to War
Aug. 7th, 2021 07:27 amNever completely rehabilitated, they remembered their years of captivity with horror, but many also told me their lives would have been incomplete without that experience.
It was hard for me to accept this.
This quote comes from Monica Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag, but it kept running through my head as I read Pat Beauchamp Washington’s Fanny Goes to War, a memoir published in 1919 of Washington’s years in France and Belgium as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (F.A.N.Y.). She drove ambulances. She worked in the hospitals, nursing both typhoid patients and the severely wounded. She lost her own leg when a shell hit her ambulance.
She writes it all as a jolly hockey sticks romp. The basic tone throughout the book (and this is an exact quote) is “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
It was hard for me to accept this. I went into World War I memoirs inclined to dismiss the jolly hockey sticks stuff as mere propaganda; ditto anything about the glory and heroism of the war. But this is the third memoir I’ve read that takes this approach, and the third time I’ve gone “God, the writer really means it,” and it has occurred to me, finally, that I should actually listen to the memoirists. Otherwise what is the point of reading memoirs?
Not that I need to accept their interpretation of the war as a whole. But I need to accept that this is what they actually felt about their own experiences.
There’s an argument in World War I historiography which kind of memoir captures the “truth” of the war: the jolly hockey sticks memoirs most commonly published during and just after the war, or the brutality-of-war memoirs that tended to come later. (Although Ellen La Motte’s incredibly bitter The Backwash of War was published in 1916, so this is only a tendency, not an absolute division.)
But, as Hornung comments in Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, “what has interested me ever since [his time near the front lines] is the hopelessness of expecting two persons to give anything like the same account of a violent experience.” Pat Beauchamp Washington can write a jolly hockey sticks romp of a nursing memoir (after, let me repeat, losing her leg) and Ellen La Motte can write an embittered one and they can both be writing the truth of their own lives.
It was hard for me to accept this.
This quote comes from Monica Zgustova’s Dressed for a Dance in the Snow: Women’s Voices from the Gulag, but it kept running through my head as I read Pat Beauchamp Washington’s Fanny Goes to War, a memoir published in 1919 of Washington’s years in France and Belgium as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (F.A.N.Y.). She drove ambulances. She worked in the hospitals, nursing both typhoid patients and the severely wounded. She lost her own leg when a shell hit her ambulance.
She writes it all as a jolly hockey sticks romp. The basic tone throughout the book (and this is an exact quote) is “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”
It was hard for me to accept this. I went into World War I memoirs inclined to dismiss the jolly hockey sticks stuff as mere propaganda; ditto anything about the glory and heroism of the war. But this is the third memoir I’ve read that takes this approach, and the third time I’ve gone “God, the writer really means it,” and it has occurred to me, finally, that I should actually listen to the memoirists. Otherwise what is the point of reading memoirs?
Not that I need to accept their interpretation of the war as a whole. But I need to accept that this is what they actually felt about their own experiences.
There’s an argument in World War I historiography which kind of memoir captures the “truth” of the war: the jolly hockey sticks memoirs most commonly published during and just after the war, or the brutality-of-war memoirs that tended to come later. (Although Ellen La Motte’s incredibly bitter The Backwash of War was published in 1916, so this is only a tendency, not an absolute division.)
But, as Hornung comments in Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front, “what has interested me ever since [his time near the front lines] is the hopelessness of expecting two persons to give anything like the same account of a violent experience.” Pat Beauchamp Washington can write a jolly hockey sticks romp of a nursing memoir (after, let me repeat, losing her leg) and Ellen La Motte can write an embittered one and they can both be writing the truth of their own lives.
