Unknown
Warriors
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y
n6
THE YPRES TIMES
By K. E. Luard.
THE main object of a review is to encourage the public either to read or to
avoid the book concerned. To women whose hearts are still bleeding from
the loss of sons and husbands, I say, "avoid 'Unknown Warriors'; it is
bound to tear open; your wounds for what blazes out of its pages is the vivid,
first-hand record of the heroic conduct and the pathetic sayings of men dying or
broken in the field.
Sister Luard was in charge of the nursing in various Casualty Clearing Stations
on the Western Front, and she kept an almost daily dairy of all that would seem of
interest to her family at home. This she has revised into clear, telling English,
giving us a book which the present writer, an old R.A.M.C. officer, could not put
down until he had finished it. Men who know but little of the high spirit of the
front line under every kind of trial and adversity, and particularly those who saw
nothing of the heroic bearing of the wounded in the forward hospitals, and who
saw patients only at the Base, after sepsis often enough had. for the moment,
robbed them of the spirit of comradeship with its motto Think of the other fellow
first these cannot afford to leave Sister Luard's book unread, for it gives both
a vivid and an obviously unvarnished picture, not merely of what men can do
impelled by esprit de corps, but what Tom, Dick and Harry, identified often by
initials, actually did do and say.
To the fighting man I wish to say this: The book may give you rather a
gloomy view of the mortality at a casualty clearing station. That view would be
a distorted one, easily corrected by references to statistics in the official medical
history of the war. Sister Luard naturally sees no purpose in regaling her friends
at home with the figures of admissions and immediate transfers to the Base; she
was a picked member of the Nursing Service and entrusted with jobs requiring
special skill, and was posted to units pushed up well to the front to deal quickly
with the gravest type of casualty. Her record, then, is one which deals mainly
with the very worst cases.
There is a point suggested by this book which seems to me worthy of
consideration by young officers destined in the future to hold high combatant
command. The surgical policy of treating grave wounds close to the front line
was justified by results and has established itself in Army Medical Service opinion.
That branch of the service thoroughly recognizes the fact that its primary function
in war is to keep the fighting units up to strength by the rapid restoration to fitness
of the lightly wounded. The combatant branches are inclined to criticize the
Medicals for expending too much time, energy and material upon men who would
never fight again. There is, of course, some basis for such criticism, but two
replies have to be made. Some of the gravest cases, notably chests,' abdo
mens and heads,' if treated promptly at the front, were able, in due course, to
return to duty as perfectly fit soldiers. Of the strictly economic value of saving
those badly crippled in limb, criticism cannot be so well met. But financial and
material economy proved in the long run not to be the decisive factors in the war,
for the moral of the home fronts" finally invaded the fighting units and con
tributed largely to the decision. Is it too much to claim that the meticulous and
