Chapters 1-3. This is a woman\u2019s story but it is not unique. It is about the Great War and what participation in that endeavor can do to people. Unlike \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front\u201d 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\u2019s run, tuning their bus engines, making tea and learning to live with sleep deprivation, fear, lice, hunger (alternately called \u201chungry\u201d, starving\u201d and \u201cravenous\u201d). 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the women are from relatively wealthy homes that are \u201cdoing their bit\u201d for the war effort. They are called \u201cthe splendid daughters of England\u201d and are the pride of the families back home that they can have their girls \u201cdoing their bit\u201d 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 \u201cSmithy\u201d says in chapter 1, \u201cwe will not tell them that all the ideas and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears \u2013 that you don\u2019t 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\u2019s all about in Christ\u2019s name.\u201d Stunning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In chapter 2, there is page and a half of the food that is inflicted on these women. \u201cNot only is the food badly cooked, but is actually dirty with hair combing in the greasy gravy.\u201d \u201cNo wonder we regularly get food poisoning and have so many dysentery cases\u201d. Also in chapter 2 is a passage which is very indicative of the time when the book was published, 1930. The women\u2019s rights moment was strong in the late 1920s and 30s on both sides of the Atlantic. In the passage Smith states \u201cThe men are failures, this war shows that. It is time women took a hand\u201d. \u201cOnce women buckled on their men\u2019s swords. Once the believed in that \u201cdeath-or-glory\u201d 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 \u2013 we came out here puffed out with patriotism. Ther is not one of us who would not go back tomorrow\u201d. Stunning again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chapters 1-3. This is a woman\u2019s story but it is not unique. It is about the Great War and what participation in that endeavor can do to people. Unlike \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front\u201d by Erich Maria Remarque, there … Continue reading