Somewhere in France: A Novel of the Great War (28 page)

I just recalled a question that you were famed for having used on the final exam for your course about the First World War: “Was the Great War great, and if so, why?” Care to take a crack at it?

Historical change is often cited as evidence of the “great” impact of war, specifically the world wars. I’m not so sure. One has to mess around in the counterfactual with this: What would have happened had not the wars occurred? I would think most changes were in the works and that war, as Lenin said, served as the midwife of change. The shifting of borders, the collapse of dynasties and empires, and the emergence of new nations are often attributed to the wars but clearly would have happened in any case, if not, of course, in the same way.

What war left to posterity was the brutalization of life. The great American physicist I. I. Rabi once observed that it was easy to kill people if you set your mind to it. He was thinking about the Manhattan Project, but it applies to the two world wars as well. They provided precedent, excuses for the angry, methods for the psychopathic, and opportunities for the “ordinary men” in, say, the Einsatzgruppen. This is where Wilfred Owen was prophetic:

Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil blood, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

My God, but he was right. Recently I’ve been reading some histories of the Second World War, and the accounts of the Eastern Front and the Pacific War are horrifying. I know where a lot of that originated: the trenches.

Professor Stuart Robson grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, and graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1962. A Rhodes scholar, he attended the University of Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate in modern history. From 1966 to 2001 he taught at Trent University in Ontario; he then taught part-time at the University of Victoria in British Columbia until 2012. Although he specialized in modern German history, his heart was drawn to the cauldron of the two world wars for much of his teaching career. He is the author of the bestselling
The First World War
(Pearson, 1998 and 2007), now in its second edition.

About the book

Glossary of Terms Used in
Somewhere in France

A.B.C. tea shops
: a chain of tea shops in Great Britain operated by the Aerated Bread Company from the 1860s to the early 1980s. Its largest competitor was the chain of tea shops operated by J. Lyons and Co.

ADS
: Advanced dressing station. After receiving first aid on the front lines, a soldier would be evacuated to the nearest ADS, and from there to a casualty clearing station.

AOC
: Army Ordnance Corps. Its members repaired and maintained small arms and artillery, and were also responsible for the disposal of unexploded, or “dud,” shells.

ASC
: Army Service Corps. Its members were responsible for military transport and supplies.

Base hospitals
: Larger facilities, well behind the lines, that received casualties from the casualty clearing stations.

BEF
: British Expeditionary Force. Generally used to refer to those forces in France before the end of the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914.

Belgravia
: A small district in central London notable for its grand squares of large Georgian houses. Lilly’s family lives in Belgrave Square, from which the district takes its name.

Blighty
: Soldiers’ slang for Britain. A Blighty wound was a coveted injury, just serious enough to merit evacuation from the front lines but not bad enough to kill or permanently maim a man, and ideally would result in a period of convalescence in England.

Carrel-Dakin solution
: An antiseptic solution, also known as Dakin’s fluid. Developed early in the war, it treated infected wounds with greater success than anything previously devised.

CCS
: Casualty clearing station. A hospital, in most cases situated within miles of the front lines, where soldiers were cared for until their condition was stable enough to allow evacuation to a base hospital. 

Ceilidh
: Pronounced “kay-leigh.” A social gathering that typically features traditional Gaelic music and dancing.

Chilblains
: Tissue injury that occurs when a person is exposed to cold and humid conditions, often resulting in swollen skin, itching, blisters, and infection.

Clearing hospital
: Another term for casualty clearing station.

Clippie
: Popular term, coined during the First World War, for women conductors on bus and tram lines.

FANY
: First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. One of the smallest and most selective of the women’s services, the FANY was founded in 1907 and provided nurses, motor ambulance drivers, and general volunteer aid in France during the war.

First Week
: Term used at the University of Oxford for the first week of each eight-week term, of which there are three in a year (Michelmas, Hilary, and Trinity).

Frontline aid station
: Also known as a regimental aid post, this is where a soldier would first receive care, typically by a medic, before being evacuated to an ADS.

Gaiters
: Protective covering for the lower leg, typically made of leather, which officers might wear instead of puttees (see below).

Kiltie
: Affectionate term for a Scottish soldier or member of a Scottish regiment. “Jock” was another common slang term for anyone Scottish.

LGOC
: London General Omnibus Company. Lilly works for the LGOC as a painter and then as a clippie. The LGOC was the largest bus operator in London from the mid-1850s to the mid-1930s and was eventually absorbed into what is now Transport for London.

Mithering
: To fuss or whine about something; popular term in central and northern England.

Mufti
: Civilian dress worn by someone who typically wore a uniform (such as a WAAC).

NCI
: Mix of naphthalene, creosote, and iodoform used in powder or paste form to control lice.

Nought Week
: Term used at the University of Oxford for the week immediately preceding the first week of term; typically the week when students arrive and settle into their lodgings.

OC
: Officer in command. The CCS where Robbie works has an OC—a colonel, rather than a CO (commanding officer). A CO would typically command a larger entity than would an OC.

Other ranks
: All ranks that are not commissioned officers. This usually includes noncommissioned officers such as sergeants and warrant officers.

Persian insect powder
: A powder made from
Pyrethrum
flowers and used as an insecticide.

Pipped
: Soldiers’ slang for being hit by a bullet.

Puttees
: Lengths of fabric that were wrapped over a soldier’s trouser legs from the ankle to just below the knee; meant to serve as further protection from damp and cold.

RAMC
: Royal Army Medical Corps. Its members included not only medical staff such as physicians but also support workers such as orderlies. By 1918 it had 13,000 officers and 154,000 other ranks serving in all theaters of war.

RAP
: Regimental aid post. See
frontline aid station
.

Receiving room
: Roughly the equivalent of today’s emergency room, it was the area of a hospital where patients with acute and often life-threatening conditions were examined on a triage basis. Robbie worked in the receiving room of the London Hospital for several years after first qualifying as a physician.

Reception marquee
: The large tent where wounded soldiers were brought upon arrival at a casualty clearing station.

Resuss
: The tent or building at a CCS where grievously wounded soldiers were stabilized before surgery or were sent for palliative care.

Sam Browne belt
: A wide belt, typically made of leather, with an additional support strap that passes over the right soldier. Worn exclusively by officers.

Scout
: A servant, typically male, who saw to housekeeping and other chores for undergraduates in residence at Oxford colleges.

Tommies
: Term for British soldiers, usually other ranks, derived from “Tommy Atkins,” and popular for at least a hundred years before the Great War.

VAD
: Voluntary Aid Detachment. The VAD was founded in 1909 with the aim of providing nursing and support services throughout the British Empire. Nearly forty thousand women served with the VAD during the war, among them Vera Brittain, Agatha Christie, and Amelia Earhart.

WAAC
: Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The WAAC was renamed Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps in late 1918 in recognition of its members’ achievements. Nearly sixty thousand women served in the WAAC during the war.
WAAC
was also the term used for an individual member of the corps.

A note on currency
: Before British currency was decimalized in 1971—that is, before pounds and pence were measured in divisions of one hundred—it was measured in pounds, shillings, and pence. Twelve pence made up one shilling and twenty shillings made up one pound, with a total of 240 pence in a pound. Written in numeric form, a pound was symbolized by the term still in use, “£,” while a shilling was “s” and a penny was “d.” Other coins were circulated: the farthing (worth one quarter of one pence); the halfpenny, threepence, and sixpence; the crown (worth five shillings); and the half-crown (worth two shillings and sixpence). Less commonly seen were the florin, worth two shillings, and the guinea, which actually referred to a gold coin no longer in circulation, and in practice was simply the amount of one pound and one shilling.

Women Ambulance Drivers in the Great War

by Jennifer Robson

W
HEN
I
BEGAN
TO
WRITE
Somewhere in France
, the character of Lilly came to me straightaway, together with the notion that over the course of the novel she would break free of her conventional upbringing through the work she does during the Great War. What I wasn’t sure of, and in fact took months to decide upon, was the exact nature of that work.

At first I thought I would make Lilly a nurse, just like Vera Brittain, author of the classic memoir
Testament of Youth
. But since Lilly had no formal education, at least as I imagined her, and would have required several years of schooling in order to be considered for even the most junior of nursing positions, I knew I had to consider other possibilities.

There were many jobs she might have done as a volunteer or member of the women’s services, few of them requiring the sort of specialized training necessary for nursing. I could have made her a clerk, a laundress, a mechanic, a cook. But the work that intrigued me most was that of ambulance driver.

In the early years of the war, ambulance drivers (both of motor vehicles and horse-drawn wagons) were as likely to be volunteers as members of the military. The Army Service Corps (ASC) provided the lion’s share of drivers, all of them men. There were American volunteers, too, most notably the 2,500 members of the American Field Service, though this number decreased once the United States entered the war in 1917 and AFS members moved to join the U.S. military.

And there were many hundreds of women drivers among the members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD), and the International Red Cross (IRC). Yet none of these fit my narrative, for I wanted a service that would accept Lilly even if she were estranged from her family and could provide little in the way of references. I wanted her to belong to a service that would have ordinary women as its members, with little of the veneer of exclusivity that characterized the FANY, for instance.