This Week I am Reading ... Mrs Rebecca Jenkins-Handy

Mrs Rebecca Jenkins-Handy is Early Years Lead at Elmfield. Rebecca shares her review of Stretcher Bearer by Charles H. Horton, Edited by Dale Le Vack below.

I picked up this book at the National Memorial Arboretum a couple of years ago. I don’t usually choose war books, or biographies, however, through my family history research I discovered that my Great Uncle was a Conscientious Objector in the First World War and served on the front line as a stretcher bearer, so I was intrigued to see if this book shed any light on life for my great uncle during that period. I put off reading it until I was choosing a book for this blog and given that we are in the time of year for remembrance I thought I would give it a go.

The first thing to say is that it is not full of vivid descriptions of blood and gore, which I think was what held me back from reading it before. Rather, the author states that he does not want it to be vivid in its war descriptions, but rather he was moved to set down his memoirs some fifty years after the war, in order to draw attention to the forgotten men who were in the Royal Army Medical Corps. The men in this regiment didn’t bear arms at all, as they were mainly Conscientious Objectors, and the author asserts that these men who were on the frontline saving lives often under shellfire, were overlooked in military honours and their bravery overlooked, unlike the medics in the regiments who did carry weapons.

Whilst not full of grim accounts of battles, so far in the book there has been no shortage of the details of life as a RAMC soldier, such as the food they ate and how every meal was served in the one ‘mess tin’ with nothing to wash it out with but cold water, and how they were billeted in barns, with their boots and trousers for a pillow.

Charles describes the shock of being in their first trench, and the sense of foreboding and anticipation is quite overwhelming as they spend many days doing nothing, waiting for the ‘big push’. It is quite clear from his recollections that they were in no way prepared for any of the sights and sounds that were waiting for them as they wove their way across No Man’s land recovering the injured from where they had fallen.  I am at the battle of the Somme now, but the book will go on recall the author’s experience in Italy, too. It is a strange mixture of present tense diary entries and reflections based on hindsight of an event that had happened some 50 years previously (the account was first written in the 1970s). It certainly is giving me an intimate look at life as a stretcher bearer, and so that of my great uncle, which is what I had hoped for.