Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in World War I by Emily Mayhew (review)

In recognition of the World War I centenary, there has been a surge of new books, ranging from massive tomes like Max Hasting’s Catastrophe (William Collins, 2013) and Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (Harper, 2013), both devoted to the lead-up to the war, to more modest appraisals like Kate Adie’s Fighting on the Home Front (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013), which explores British women’s contributions to the war effort. Curiously, given the horrific carnage of the Great War, one of the more neglected areas of study has been the casualties and those who tended them. As Emily Mayhew explains in her introduction to Wounded: “we have become accustomed to the noise of the blasting, thumping barrage and the shrieks of officers’ whistles ordering the men over the top. We are much less accustomed to the sounds of the voices of the wounded. The scale and power of the fighting has drowned them out” (1). What we do know, she adds, largely comes from fiction: from novels like Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (Dutton, 1991–95), which weaves its narrative around the work of psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, who treated shell shock victims at Craiglockhart War Hospital; or from the stage and film dramatizations of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (2007), which follows the travails of man and beast in an ambulance corps.

Mayhew, a Research Associate at Imperial College and examiner at the Imperial College School of Medicine, restores the voices of the wounded and of those who treated their bodies and minds. Hers is a compelling narrative about the men and women who faced death with the British Army on the Western Front. Undeterred by the incompleteness of official records in Britain’s national archives—Mayhew explains that no one seems to have imagined that records of how the medical side of the war was conducted would be worth saving—the author has gleaned evidence from letters, journals, scrapbooks, and other ephemera to provide a clear and sometimes shockingly visceral account of what she calls “the central experience that was repeated hundreds of thousands of times up and down the Western Front [that] went beyond rank or status: the wounding of a soldier and the struggle of medics to save his life” (3).

Mayhew’s text is arranged in chapters that move from battlefield to dressing station to field hospital, and then via ambulance train to hospitals in Britain. Each chapter focuses on a small number of individuals whose experiences are emblematic of a greater whole: stretcher bearers, regimental medical officers, surgeons, nurses, orderlies, chaplains, and the individuals who staffed the ambulance trains, railway stations, and other reception points for wounded soldiers. The “Notes and References” section, all too often just a citation-laden appendix, offers brief supplemental essays on the different categories of participant that are well worth reading in their own right, and that reveal how thoroughly Mayhew has mined the existing literature on these interconnected subjects—despite the book’s highlighting of the personal story, this is not a history built on mere anecdote. Chapters that provide accounts of the wounded men themselves repeatedly punctuate the overall structure of the text, reminding readers that from 1914 to 1918, grievous injury was a recurring nightmare. The reemergence of the wounded in this narrative also helps to underscore one of Mayhew’s main themes: that both the volume and the severity of the injuries in World War I were unprecedented, forcing fundamental changes in triage, surgery, and postoperative care that continue to shape emergency—and particularly battlefield—medicine today.

Shell shock and surgery may be the “most thoroughly researched subject[s] in the medical history of the Great War,” but Mayhew observes that most accounts have tended to treat the war as primarily a “contributing factor in the overall development of civilian medical practice” (237–38). By presenting eyewitness accounts of battlefield medicine, Mayhew helps to...