Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 140

mess wagon and set his pants on fire. Ball chronicles
the meals of cold beans and cold coffee, putting the
reader in the trenches with the men from Texas and
Oklahoma.
They Called Them Soldier Boys is good reading. Ball’s
tone is objective and his prose is clear and direct. Those
interested in infantry organizations, National Guard
integration, and especially those interested in Texas
history, should find the book interesting and enjoyable.
Michael L. Waller, Ph.D., Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

WOUNDED: A New History of the Western Front
Emily Mayhew, Oxford University Press,
New York, 2013, 288 pages

T

he Great War centennial is here, and so is the
usual onrush of mass market histories bred
by such anniversaries. Many consist of the
usual cast of czars, kaisers, generals, or doughboys,
and are illustrated with the typical stock photos and
symbol-saturated maps. Emily Mayhew’s Wounded: A
New History of the Western Front breaks rank from this
lockstep approach to the war and provides one of the
most gripping, humanized histories in recent scholarship. Her history of the war ignores the political elite
and military hierarchy in favor of telling the story of
the most common yet least understood way of experiencing the war—that of being wounded.
While roughly 8.5 million soldiers died in the war,
their suffering did end and their memory was enshrined in national glory. Civilians tried to forget the
war and resumed their lives. Yet over 21 million men
suffered wounds during the conflict, beginning a searing, painful journey that often began in no-man’s land
and continued throughout the rest of their lives as they
sought healing for both body and soul. Their story has
largely gone untold until now.
Mayhew focuses on the British experience along the
Western Front, examining the lives of wounded soldiers, chaplains, stretcher-bearers, nurses, medics, surgeons, and other medical auxiliaries. Even though the
British medical system processed millions of wounded
men, later government workers disposed of much of
the documentation, leaving Mayhew to piece together
this story from personal journals and letters combined
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with remaining official papers. While that is a regrettable loss of historical knowledge, the sources ensure that
the story is told with the voice of the wounded man
and not that of the government statistician.
Mayhew’s storytelling is compelling and powerful,
bringing images of both the characters and the battlefields to the reader’s mind. While geography and
campaigns are referenced, they do not serve as part of
grand strategy discussions; instead, they are described
as the soldier would have known them—an unfamiliar foreign town where his life changed forever. The
reader quickly becomes invested in each character’s
story, rooting for the soldier, nurse, or chaplain to come
through the experience alive. Yet all too often, the narratives abruptly end as those trying to save the lives and
souls of others met death themselves.
Like Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front,
Mayhew’s work places war in its full human context
and shows the depth of pain that conflict can bring.
While the emotional and physical suffering are not gratuitously described, the experiences Mayhew highlights
are so intensely sobering and emotionally draining that
the reviewer could only read a few chapters at a time.
These realities of pain and suffering are the true legacy
of the Great War and should temper all future cries for
a rush to arms. Mayhew has done a truly remarkable
service by ensuring that we can still hear the stories of
these soldiers one hundred years later. In this way, the
book’s material is timeless, providing a much needed
reminder that the call to war will require a generation
of a nation’s young men and women to bear irreparable
scars from the battlefield through the rest of their lives.
Jonathan Newell, Hill, N.H.

SOUTH PACIFIC CAULDRON: World War II’s
Great Forgotten Battlegrounds
Allan Rems, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis,
Maryland, 2014, 312 pages

A

llan Rems adds breadth and context to our
understanding of World War II’s South
Pacific campaigns in an accessible, highly
readable and well-packaged new book that is especially timely given the approach of the 70th anniversary
of VJ (Victory over Japan) Day. While others h fP