Chapters 1-3.  This is a woman’s story but it is not unique.  It is about the Great War and what participation in that endeavor can do to people.  Unlike “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, there is no poetry here, no heart-rending esoteric descriptions of the war and what it does to men.  Here, the writing is a bald description of what daily life is like for a company of British women ambulance drivers who take wounded and dying men from the transport trains to the field hospital locations behind the lines.  Of equal weight in the writing is descriptions of daily life in their encampment that covers everything from sleep deprivation, to mail call, to daily cleaning activities and readying their ambulance buses for the next night of casualty evacuation and funerals.  Smith has the reader right there next to these women ambulance drivers as they clean out the vomit and blood of the previous night’s run, tuning their bus engines, making tea and learning to live with sleep deprivation, fear, lice, hunger (alternately called “hungry”, starving” and “ravenous”).  The reader sees the spare and close quarters of these women where a hot water bottle in the night can make the difference between crying yourself to sleep or waking up the next morning with hope. 

Most of the women are from relatively wealthy homes that are “doing their bit” for the war effort.  They are called “the splendid daughters of England” and are the pride of the families back home that they can have their girls “doing their bit” for the war effort in France.  What they do not realize, and the women serving will never tell them, is that their experiences have caused most of them to lose faith in what is being done in the war.  Much like the shattered men they shuttle from the trains to the field hospitals everything is questioned.  As the lead character “Smithy” says in chapter 1, “we will not tell them that all the ideas and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears – that you don’t believe in God or them or the infallibility of England or anything but bloody war and wounds and foul smells, smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise noise.  That you live in a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair that you want to crawl ignominiously home away form the painful writhing things that once were men, these shattered, tortured faces that dumbly demand what it’s all about in Christ’s name.”  Stunning.   

In chapter 2, there is page and a half of the food that is inflicted on these women. “Not only is the food badly cooked, but is actually dirty with hair combing in the greasy gravy.”  “No wonder we regularly get food poisoning and have so many dysentery cases”.   Also in chapter 2 is a passage which is very indicative of the time when the book was published, 1930.  The women’s rights moment was strong in the late 1920s and 30s on both sides of the Atlantic.  In the passage Smith states “The men are failures, this war shows that.  It is time women took a hand”.  “Once women buckled on their men’s swords.  Once the believed in that “death-or-glory” jingo.  But this time we are in it, we have seen it ourselves, and pretty much the romance has gone.  War is dirty,  there is no glory in it.  Vomit and blood.  Look at us – we came out here puffed out with patriotism.  Ther is not one of us who would not go back tomorrow”.  Stunning again. 

Published in 1930, there are words used that are now unfamiliar to the modern-day lexicon, even if this book is read by a modern British citizen.  Bovril, spirit lamp, The V.A.D., the chamber pitch, Maggie-Ann, Debrett, etc.  Understanding the context of these words allowed me interesting research as to their meaning and background.  This was a history lesson it itself and adds to the learning from the writing.