The Remembrance Day Talk: Dr Emily Mayhew, Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914-1918

Date(s): 11 November 2013

Time: 18:00 to 19:30

Cost: Free

Booking Link: http://wounded-remembrance.eventbrite.co.uk/

Join us for a special lecture and book signing with author Dr Emily Mayhew. Her new publication (Sep 2013) Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty traces a journey made by a casualty from the battlefield of the Western Front to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him – stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, often mentally and physically unprepared and frequently on the verge of collapse nurses – from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty. We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home. There are the unspeakable injuries: the officer with a hole in his torso so big the doctor can see the sky beyond him; a man with no legs holding a hymnbook for a man with no arms. Together, the experiences in Wounded encapsulate what it was to fight, live and die for four long years at the Western Front. Wounded is a homage to the courageous and determined men and women who saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and an important contribution to our understanding of the First World War.