Rating:
(5 reviews)
Author: Emily Mayhew
ISBN : 0199322457
New from $16.73
Format: PDF
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The number of soldiers wounded in World War I is, in itself, devastating: over 21 million military wounded, and nearly 10 million killed. On the battlefield, the injuries were shocking, unlike anything those in the medical field had ever witnessed. The bullets hit fast and hard, went deep and took bits of dirty uniform and airborne soil particles in with them. Soldier after soldier came in with the most dreaded kinds of casualty: awful, deep, ragged wounds to their heads, faces and abdomens. And yet the medical personnel faced with these unimaginable injuries adapted with amazing aptitude, thinking and reacting on their feet to save millions of lives.
In Wounded, Emily Mayhew tells the history of the Western Front from a new perspective: the medical network that arose seemingly overnight to help sick and injured soldiers. These men and women pulled injured troops from the hellscape of trench, shell crater, and no man's land, transported them to the rear, and treated them for everything from foot rot to poison gas, venereal disease to traumatic amputation from exploding shells. Drawing on hundreds of letters and diary entries, Mayhew allows readers to peer over the shoulder of the stretcher bearer who jumped into a trench and tried unsuccessfully to get a tightly packed line of soldiers out of the way, only to find that they were all dead. She takes us into dugouts where rescue teams awoke to dirt thrown on their faces by scores of terrified moles, digging frantically to escape the earth-shaking shellfire. Mayhew moves her account along the route followed by wounded men, from stretcher to aid station, from jolting ambulance to crowded operating tent, from railway station to the ship home, exploring actual cases of casualties who recorded their experiences.
Both comprehensive and intimate, this groundbreaking book captures an often neglected aspect of the soldier's world and a transformative moment in military and medical history.
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- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (November 12, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199322457
- ISBN-13: 978-0199322459
- Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I
I was fortunate enough to be able to read this book before its official release as an Ebook, which for some reason did not have the illustrations working properly. Nevertheless I found it an easy to read, fascinating, and important book on the western front and the great war in general.
It is not a typical history book. The author does not use much in the way of official documents, manuals and after action reports as I would normally expect. Instead, she pieces together the route a wounded British serviceman would take from the front line to the British Hospitals by telling the stories found in memoirs of men, and women, who served in the various jobs along the evacuation route. Unlike the work of Lyn McDonald, where the quotes are offset, Mayhew has written the participants of each chapter into a very readable and coherent narrative.
It's unusual in that each chapter deals with a different 'type' of jobs: stretcher bearer, orderly, hospital train nurse, chaplain, field hospital staff, and even the volunteers who moved the wounded from trains arriving in London onto ambulances that took them to the Blighty Hospitals. Even the medical services to POWs are mentioned. Normally, this type of book I find relies too much on direct (and often erroneous quotes) but pardon the pun when I call it 'ripping well done.'
It opens up a while new area of the war that is not often talked about, and portrays chaplains (well, the good ones) in a whole new light. It's not a technical history of medicine in the war by any means, but a view from the ground up of what wounded soldiers went through, and what their caretakers went through.