The Roses of No Man's Land

Description

'Macdonald writes splendidly and touchingly of the work of the nurses and doctors who fought their battle on the Western Front' Sunday Telegraph On the face of it', writes Lyn Macdonald, 'no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of the Edwardian drawing-rooms into the manifest horrors of the First World War...' Yet the volunteer nurses rose magnificently to the occasion. In leaking tents and draughty huts they fought another war, a war against agony and death, as men lay suffering from the pain of unimaginable wounds or diseases we can now cure almost instantly. It was here that young doctors frantically forged new medical techniques - of blood transfusion, dentistry, psychiatry and plastic surgery - in an attempt to save soldiers shattered in body or spirit. And it was here that women achieved a quiet but permanent revolution, by proving beyond question they could do anything. All of this is superbly captured in The Roses's of No Man's Land, a panorama of hardship, disillusion and despair, yet also of endurance and supreme courage.

Lyn Macdonald is one of the most highly regarded historians of the First World War. Her books tell the men's stories in their own words and cast a unique light on the experiences of the ordinary 'Tommy'. The Roses of No Man's Land, Somme and They Called it Passchendaele have been recently reissued by Penguin. She lives near Cambridge.

The tale is allowed to tell itself without any frontal assault on the emotions, and is all the more stirring thereby * Observer *