This was a wonderfully written, warm and deeply interesting look at the author's time with Queen. I can see where p Brilliant. Fabulous. Humane.
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This was a wonderfully written, warm and deeply interesting look at the author's time with Queen. I can see where people expecting to learn salacious, sarky tidbits and scandals would be disappointed with this book. Completely unlike what they expected, Peter Hince gives us here a genuinely respectful view of tour life - as one of the band, with the band. Yes, there are a couple of interesting bits included, but more so from the perspective of someone like me, who also used to tour with a band, than for someone reading the yellow press. I recognised a lot of what he described, and in a way it proves the veracity and overall benevolence making it from the pages.
I laughed quite a few times, out loud enough so I was stared at pointedly, and I nodded at a lot of things. The relationships between the crew and the band, Hince's respect of them and his loyalty to both Mercury and Deacon, especially his admiration for Deacon, came through time and again. And yes, this is indeed well-written and very readable. Lovely photos Hince shot himself at the end. One which foreshadows Deacon's reaction to Fred's death.
I stumbled across The Backwash of War while looking for accounts and diaries from medical personnel.
Already then I had been aware of something curiousI stumbled across The Backwash of War while looking for accounts and diaries from medical personnel.
Already then I had been aware of something curious in some of the (nurses') diaries I had been reading. You get to think, and it's maintained then as now, that all these nurses, whether professionals or VADs, were "angels in white", relieving the pain, sadnesses and stress of the freshly wounded soldiers, or holding their hands as they died. That sort of thing, the propaganda.
However, while there were a very few accounts which clearly showed very compassionate nurses, the vast majority were anything but. Some of these diaries came over as downright cold, distracted even, as if the patients were a nuisance, some disturbence to whatever else for they actually had undertaken this work.
It was quite awful considering all those broken men, shuttled through the medical system like so much barely alive meat and treated without much compassion at all. I was puzzled. I mean, why would anyone risk their life and well-being, ostensibly to help, only to treat the wounded patients worse than one would treat cattle on the way to the slaughterbank?
So, I came upon La Motte's small booklet, started reading and my jaw dropped so far under the table, I had to go hunt for it. This book is dripping with the most vicious kind of sarcasm and cynicism you can imagine. It is red-hot aflame, aggressive, so brutal that you back off a bit for fear it bites you, and badly at that!
Ellen La Motte is clearly very very angry about a lot of what happened during her time at the front. She tells it in short vignettes, the length of a letter, and she doesn't spare anyone. Not the cold fellow nurses, either too religious to dress a naked man, or too intent on meeting an officer for marriage, or simply out at the front to be away from a stifling home. Not the many callous surgeons, often experimenting on the fresh meat cycled through their OP theatres and wards, or testing how much the human body could deal with before dying. The army, which on one hand forces nurses and doctors to put together the deserters, so they can be shot, or pinning medals on the chests of those about to die. The soldiers and the veterans themselves, and those gullible people at home. She gave them all her anger and rage.
Acid will drip hotly from your brains after reading, but I finally grasped why so many accounts of medical people read so very curiously. It took another book, Not So Quiet...: Stepdaughters of War, also written by a woman, an ambulance driver, to set matters really into perspective for me. Because--I have to confess--I initially thought La Motte had to be way over the top.
Smith settles the score with her book, however. La Motte quite clearly was even comparatively mild in her accusations and descriptions. She also was absolutely truthful, as Smith's book bears out by referring to many exact same things, just from another perspective.
These two women have helped me to a deeper insight into what really was taking place at the front and directly behind it during the Great War than practically everyone else put together, maybe with the exception of several of the war artists.
It is by the way absolutely not astonishing that both books, La Motte's and later Smith's were forbidden rsp. taken out of print. They both do what George Scott Atkinson demands in his A Soldier's Diary: that the truth be told to the public without belittling it....more
Steelwhisper
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