ludendorff offensive (1 resultados)

It is hard to do justice to this vivid, informative and well-written 250,000-word account of the author's First World War service as Medical Officer In Charge attached to three regiments on the Western Front, present during the Battle of the Somme, Kaiserslacht and Hundred Days Offensive. It is hard to conceive of a better account of the day-to-day activities of a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps on active service during the Great War. The author is observant, intelligent and diligent in his duties, which involve attending to the wounded, being called to certify deaths at all hours of the day or night, doing the rounds of the wounded, holding sick parade, the supervision of field ambulances and the maintenance - and on one occasion the construction under fire - of aidposts. He discusses the conduct of the war, describing in detail how he and his colleagues are informed about the forthcoming Battle of the Somme; and discusses the armaments and vehicles involved (there are a number of references to the war in the air), and describes (as a medical man) of the effects of poison gas, reveals the comments made by a German officer while under interrogation, following the capture of a German patrol, a 'stunt' which wins the DSO for his colleague Lieut. J. J. Tynan (see his 1948 obituary in the Irish Times). He pokes repeated fun at his corps commander 'Hunter-Bunter', i.e. Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston (see Oxford DNB), and describes 'our review' by Kitchener and the Prince of Connaught. The environment and everyday privations of active duty are described with occasional use of army slang, and there are frequent reference to the tangled maze of trenches, whose features are named to evoke life back home ( Edgware Road, Kings Road, Winchester Street, Tube Station, Chocolate Corner, the Covered Way). Instances of German subterfuge are also described, the writer not being well-disposed towards 'the hun', 'bosche' and 'Fritz'. There is much gossip and small talk, and description of pastimes, sightseeing and entertainment (while waiting for demobilization he purchases a piano and forms a 'jazz band'.), with mention of his activities while on leave in England. The weather is assiduously described, sometimes in eloquent terms (15 March 1916: 'A damp drizzly morning blossomed into a grand day' and 30 March 1916: 'The huns abused this beautiful warm morning by commencing early to shell the Rue de Bois just behind our H.Q.'). There are notes on terrain and other matters, and a number of transcriptions of official documents, and some statistical tables, including two pages of 'Operation Orders for Gas Beam Attack' in June 1918. He writer's attitude to the 'jolly old war' is surprisingly positive on demobilization. The eighth and last volume ends with an 'Envoi' summing up his feelings regarding his experiences, in which he expresses regret that 'the war is won and done', stating that it was something he 'would not have missed for anything', and noting that the 'periods of intense activity more than compensated for the monotony and boredom. It caused me to meet and to live with all sorts and conditions of men under all sorts and conditions of environment, from the magnificence of the Chateau de Selincourt to the misery of the front line trenches in mud and shellfire, where one had to trample over the bodies of dead comrades, sometimes inevitably over even the faces of men dead but a few moments, men one had seen and talked to day by day, to reach a spot ahead where lay ones work, the patching up of torn bodies of those still alive. At times it has been ghastly, but the ugliness, the sordidness, the discomfort, hunger, gas, death, all these miseries fade from the memory in time, from the conscious memory at any rate'. He feels that when most of the survivors have scattered, those who are left in the army will soon be 'seniors, looked to for advice and direction by a younger generation who have not had the - to them - enviable experience of s.