osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2020-12-08 10:31 am
osprey_archer) wrote2020-12-08 10:31 am
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Book Review: Wounded
Emily Mayhew’s Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I has precipitated me into a World War I obsession that I would resent if I weren’t too busy digging deeper into my new and absorbing fascination. I don’t need a new obsession! And if I do need one couldn’t it be the Civil War, so I could actually finish that blasted Sleeping Beauty retelling one day!
Maybe one day I will find the book that will tip me into a Civil War obsession. However, for the moment here we are, weeping over stretcher bearers and Sarah MacNaughtan, who (completely independently and without official support) set up an aid station at a railway station in Belgium when she realized that wounded men were more or less being dumped there, for hours or even days on end, without anyone to look after them as they waited for the next ambulance train.
(I’ve also been staring at this painting, Christopher Nevinson’s La Patrie, which shows wounded soldiers on stretchers waiting on a platform for a hospital train.)
The title is actually a little misleading. Although there are chapters that focus specifically on the experience of being wounded (mostly from guys who had severe facial wounds, which is a choice), the main focus of the book is on the chain of medical personnel and facilities that took wounded soldiers from front to hospital back in Britain: the stretcher-bearers who carried the wounded into aid posts, where they were patched up enough to be sent on to casualty clearing stations, and thence (if their wounds were severe enough) on a hospital train to a hospital farther from the front line, or even back in England if the wound was a Blighty.
The book wraps up with an ambulance from the London Ambulance Column trying to find a way through the wild armistice day celebrations in order to transport its latest load of wounded men from railhead to hospital. (Robert Graves wrote a very bitter poem about the armistice celebrations, which I feel is unfair in a way - of course people were celebrating! no one else was going to die in the stupid war! - but also, an understandable cri de coeur from someone who had already seen too many dead.)
It also makes World War II seem even more horrible to know that these wounded men, who fought and saw their friends die and often carried scars for the rest of their lives, then had children and watched them grow up and then the children (grown up, but still very young) went off to do it all again.
Maybe one day I will find the book that will tip me into a Civil War obsession. However, for the moment here we are, weeping over stretcher bearers and Sarah MacNaughtan, who (completely independently and without official support) set up an aid station at a railway station in Belgium when she realized that wounded men were more or less being dumped there, for hours or even days on end, without anyone to look after them as they waited for the next ambulance train.
(I’ve also been staring at this painting, Christopher Nevinson’s La Patrie, which shows wounded soldiers on stretchers waiting on a platform for a hospital train.)
The title is actually a little misleading. Although there are chapters that focus specifically on the experience of being wounded (mostly from guys who had severe facial wounds, which is a choice), the main focus of the book is on the chain of medical personnel and facilities that took wounded soldiers from front to hospital back in Britain: the stretcher-bearers who carried the wounded into aid posts, where they were patched up enough to be sent on to casualty clearing stations, and thence (if their wounds were severe enough) on a hospital train to a hospital farther from the front line, or even back in England if the wound was a Blighty.
The book wraps up with an ambulance from the London Ambulance Column trying to find a way through the wild armistice day celebrations in order to transport its latest load of wounded men from railhead to hospital. (Robert Graves wrote a very bitter poem about the armistice celebrations, which I feel is unfair in a way - of course people were celebrating! no one else was going to die in the stupid war! - but also, an understandable cri de coeur from someone who had already seen too many dead.)
It also makes World War II seem even more horrible to know that these wounded men, who fought and saw their friends die and often carried scars for the rest of their lives, then had children and watched them grow up and then the children (grown up, but still very young) went off to do it all again.
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That is fascinating. Thanks for the heads-up about this one, too.
It also makes World War II seem even more horrible to know that these wounded men, who fought and saw their friends die and often carried scars for the rest of their lives, then had children and watched them grow up and then the children (grown up, but still very young) went off to do it all again.
"Well, the suffering, the sorrow, and the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain
For Willie McBride, it all happened again
And again and again and again and again . . ."
—Tommy Makem & Liam Clancy, "Willie McBride (No Man's Land)"
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If you're looking for more about WWI nurses, I can recommend The Roses of No Man's Land by Lyn Macdonald and The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War by Mary Borden.
Not about nurses, but amazingly good: French Women and the First World War: War Stories of the Home Front by Margaret Darrow.
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Oh wow.
It also makes World War II seem even more horrible to know that these wounded men, who fought and saw their friends die and often carried scars for the rest of their lives, then had children and watched them grow up and then the children (grown up, but still very young) went off to do it all again.
Yeah </3
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