Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I
By: Emily Mayhew / Narrated By: Kelly Birch
Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
Brava, Ms. Mayhew! The urgency is captured, here, over 100 years past the event!
From the beginning, you know this is going to be a different kinda military book. It’s not about the battles, really, it’s about the people during the First World War, the men, the women, the injured as opposed to the dead.
Oh do expect the dead—they’re littered all over the landscape! It’s just that this book will be following those who live and breathe past the shelling, whose faces are blown away, whose limbs are torn from their bodies, whose abdomens are shredded. This is a very graphic listen, but it’s about the people first and foremost.
Yes, the War brought millions of military dead, but it brought nearly 21 million wounded. Mayhew opens with how this was a different kind of war with different kinds of wounds. And they’re all covered in this text. Bullets which once went in and out, or stayed in clean, now burst forth within the wounded, entering with bits of filthy uniform and airborne detritus, causing torn innards and later causing sepsis. Trench warfare ensured that the soldiers were standing in muck and mud, making trench foot very much a crippling ailment; and it also ensured the men would be living amongst rats thriving on the waste and dead left in them, the trenches. Then too, there was chlorine gas attacks, followed by mustard. There was the form of fighting wherein men stood and walked in long lines, easily mowed down by machine guns, death by mass slaughter.
But through it all, in this work, Wounded, we get to know several of the wounded and more interestingly, the network that developed to care for them. From soldiers, to stretcher-bearers, nurses, to orderlies, casualty clearing stations to ambulance trains, they’re all covered in this work which seems to rely heavily on diaries and letters and old interviews. It’s a fascinating study of how to survive when all around you the world is Hell.
From trainloads of wounded dumped and forgotten at stations comes a single woman who saw a need and addressed it. She took all the supplies she could get, and she covered the wounded with blankets, got them sips of water to drink, used her own money to buy food during the day so that she could prepare soups for each load of men forgotten overnight. Or there’s the young woman in England who is forever summoned and sent by Dispatch, a man whose name she’ll never know, to care for men as she works with an ambulance driver to get them from the train station to hospitals. At the beginning, crowds cheer the wounded men in her care, but by war’s end the bored public only peer in so that they can gape mindlessly at horrific wounds.
Chaplains are covered from those who would do ANYTHING that is asked of them, whether it’s sewing sheets or darning socks, or it’s tending to German POWs. Trust me when I tell you that it was the chaplains that I came to especially love, and I did tear up a time or two as I learned of this one or that one’s fate. As a matter of fact, I kinda sorta teared up plenty of times as Wounded is chockfull of suffering at its most dire. I can’t tell you how many of the wounded chronicled here had their jaws and parts of their faces blown away, but it made it just that much more of a struggle as they tried to get help for themselves, their words being unintelligible, sipping through a straw when they were so very very hungry but could no longer chew.
I was unsure of a female narrator doing the honors for something so masculine as a war book, but Kelly Birch did so very well. From the first wounded man we meet, to a stretcher-bearer with torn up and bloody hands, all the way to exhausted nurses at casualty clearing stations who find a single flower still existing amidst a backdrop of chaos and carnage, Birch manages it all well. At no time was I unengaged, and her performance of such a humane written work had me riveted.
This is about a war that took place over a hundred years ago, and it’s only a British-eye view at that. No matter all that, it’s fascinating and feels fresh.
And since when has suffering ever been a thing of the past…?
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