No Man’s Land
By: Wendy Moore / Narrated By: Suzanne Toren
Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins
“Deeds not Words”
The book opens with Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, two vocal Suffragettes, being turned down by the British government when they offered their medical services at the start of WWI. Being met with only a resounding, Thanks but no thanks, they pushed on until their offer was gratefully accepted in France. The two women, who’d been forced to practice only on women and children despite their expertise, recruited a full staff of women-only medical practitioners, surgeons, anesthesiologists, dentists, nurses, orderlies… you name the position, filled by a woman.
Oh, and a couple o’ men… as orderlies… just a few…
Tho’ No Man’s Land would appear to be a better Read than Listen, going by reviews on Amazon and Audible respectively, I gotta tell ya? I was really quite happy with sitting at the table, sipping a hot coffee, and leaning back into a Listen of this, even tho’ I was a taaaaad disappointed by the narration… just a trifle, mind you: Not seething, at any rate. The details that charmed readers were apparently what put a few listeners off their kibble.
But details details details? Who likes details?
Meeeee!!! Huzzah!
I found No Man’s Land to be so inspirational as to Wikipedia it posthaste upon finishing it. Glorious painting to go with the Intro there, of fraught surgery on a soldier’s wounds being performed by serious and skilled women, gloved hands within and over an abdominal wound, an anesthesia mask by the unconscious man’s mouth/face (And there’s a bit at the end of the book that discusses how an earlier, desperately flawed painting was sent to the trash heap because of gross medical errors which would’ve depicted the women as ignorant and unskilled).
With that as a jumping off point, I made sure to check the facts of the Endell Street Military Hospital which the women set up in England after wounded soldiers began being shipped there after being wounded in France. Very happy to note that the facts jibed, leaving me to feel that I came out of just over 12-hours much more enlightened. I’ve been on a WWI kick, so I’m finally starting to feel that I’ve a bit of knowledge of the run-up, the various battles, the major players, the effects on the populace, and such all, but I’d absolutely no knowledge of the role of women as medical professionals. In a month celebrating Women’s History? This audiobook is not to be missed.
Though the details flesh out the women and their day-to-day lives as they worked incredibly long, incredibly exhausting hours, author Wendy Moore makes sure to include some pretty graphic imagery of what the brutality of that war, of the mechanization of mass slaughter was like. The most recent war, the Boer War, left surgeons prepared for round bullet holes and fairly clean wounds. New and more horrible weapons developed for this war left huge wounds, massive amounts of shrapnel to go with shattered bones, tattered organs. And lying in manure-fertilized pasturelands once wounded, slogs through mud and muddy trenches brought atrocious microbes that ravaged the body. The women, as they began their work, were shocked; tho’ they’d been prepared for surgery, this new devastation left them almost frozen.
But if you get anything from this book, it’s that Anderson and Murray were up to the task, and they performed, they led by fearless example. That they demanded all from the women who came to work with them was based on their own actions: They drove themselves even harder than they drove the women. Some young women came to be employed based on a romantic notion of how working for the war effort would be. One such well, she was sooo young! girl faced her first day discovering that her room was filled with the stench coming from the furnace where all the amputated limbs were incinerated. Soon she’d have much greater to be nauseated by: Endless days, the overnight bell tolling that signaled all to come out for convoys of ambulances with the new wounded, hours upon hours charting bloodied, filth and lice-ridden linens, always keeping tabs on what went out and on the need to provide clean sheets and blankets for all.
Awesome…
As I’m about to head into address the narration, p’raps here is where I should note that, given past histrionics, I almost aaaalways BEGIN a review with a pet peeve which SHOULD’VE damned this audiobook from the start: This is a story of strong British women who draw women professionals from many and varied countries. So whyyyyy is there a dadgummed American narrator?! Ahhhhh, but Suzanne Toren does NOT doom this audiobook to the Pits of Poor-Choice Hell. Rather, she delivers a rousing performance, a well-tweaked voice for the variety of emotions and states of energy/exhaustion/motivation/despair that run throughout the entirety of the book. I do fault her for the nuuuumerous pronunciations of places like the Somme (Good cow! Ask someone if you’re sooo unsure you have to attempt such a variety! and most of them incorrect…), and heavens, she baaaaarely tries accents for individuals hailing from countries such as Australia, France, Canada. Still, she was engaging as all get-out, so tho’ I DID have a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to a non-Brit being chosen, it did NOT keep me from being pleased with the experience as a whole.
War, real-world trials of experimental treatments for infection, shell shocked soldiers, and even the (Misnamed) Spanish flu, all within hours of stories that flew by. Such strong women! who never stopped their striving for equality (Not to mention the right to vote!), who championed the underdogs, who promoted themselves until a few, a very few, were accepted as actual War Women who operated within the Armed Forces, struggling against the bureaucracies that would thwart them, achieving first notoriety and then well-earned respect. Seriously great stuff. And there’s even, as the book winds to its close with its histories of post-war lives, of the great mutual Love Murray and Anderson had for each other, all in a time when such openness of reciprocal devotion between women was soooo taboo.
Truly a not-to-be-missed account of what should be better known, a history to embrace as Women!
Yeh yeh yeh, I kvetch a bit about a non-Brit narrator, but that’s just me… Come for the history, stay for strong women of self-determination, and sit back and enjoy the lives of women of dedication through well-fleshed out stories.
Yup, just awesome…!
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