Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (review)

The focus on suffering and dying in Leo van Bergen's book follows from a trajectory of First World War studies begun by contemporary war poets and visual artists and critically investigated by historians such as Jay Winter, George Mosse, Joanna Bourke, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, Roger Cooter, Deborah Cohen, and Jeffrey Reznick, among many others. Instead of privileging the military medical perspective, Leo van Bergen's Before My Helpless Sight conceptualizes men's bodies and minds in battle through the experiential pathway of fighting, wounding, suffering, and dying. In this way, medical intervention is constituted as relational to the social experience. For scholars of military and medical history and the cultural history of war, there is not a lot new in this book; it treads a well-worn path of understanding, does not uncover new lines of enquiry, and relies largely on secondary sources including popular military history. The author establishes from the outset that the book does not intend to open new archival sources or advance new arguments. Drawing on published sources, the author alerts the reader to the fact that the book is "not the result of weeks or months spent in dark bunkers and damp cellars, leafing through old documents" (p. 1). As a work of synthesis, it surveys many of the major themes of interest in the field.

The book is nicely structured into five evocative themes: Battle, Body, Mind, Aid, and Death. There are some important discussions, such as how statistics on casualties were gathered and how they can be easily misinterpreted. Yet the structure of the chapters, while interesting and original, is often haphazard and needed to be explained more. The chapter on "The Body," for instance, is usefully separated into smaller sections that link physical experiences to environmental conditions. Under "Conditions in the Trenches" are vignettes that come under titles such as clothes (e.g., discussing the weight men had to carry), hunger and thirst, rain, mud, and cold, vermin, noise, and stench, and finally the trenches themselves. "Disease" is a further section that considers sickness, wounds, "the chemical horror," and "the lucky wound" (which English-speaking soldiers called the "Blighty wound"—a light wound treated in an English base hospital).

The difficulty with this book's attempt "to bring together in a single readable volume all the diffuse knowledge" (p. 1) on this subject is that the primary sources, when drawn from the secondary scholarship, are dislocated from the arguments that scholars have advanced. Their original research is cited without sufficient attention to their arguments or to their different approaches to key questions or evidence and how considerable historical debates have been conducted. This problem can be seen, for instance, in regard to the social, cultural, and medical history of shell shock and mental illness. The absence of a conclusion, supplanted by an afterword, amplifies the absence of argumentation. The book misses the opportunity to overview the various historical debates—readers could have been offered more in being made aware of how historians both produce and contest the "diffuse knowledge" of the First World War.

Although "not an original work" (p. 1), as the author explains, this book nevertheless makes a contribution in the way it draws together well-known English language published sources and those in Dutch, German, and French. Some of this latter scholarship will be unfamiliar to many readers, and therefore it is very useful indeed to have the compare and contrast effect of experiences and imaginings of wartime suffering. Moreover, this book is quite accessible to ordinary readers and will be useful for undergraduates seeking broader understanding of the impact of the First World War beyond the focus on the British experience.