A Surgeon in Belgium

In 1915, twenty-two-year-old Henry Sessions Souttar arrived at a Belgian field hospital as an assistant surgeon, his head full of the excitement and romance of war. What he found was something else entirely. This is his account of those months: the endless stream of mangled soldiers, the primitive anesthesia, the colleagues who became family, and the particular horror of wounds made by modern industrial warfare. Souttar writes with a young man's frankness about his own terror, his moments of failure, and the strange camaraderie that blooms among those who operate in a world stripped of pretense. He describes Antwerp under bombardment, the civilians caught in the crossfire, and the peculiar clarity that comes when death is no longer abstract. This is not a memoir of generals or grand strategy. It is the work of someone who saw the war's true cost up close, written while the blood was still wet on his hands. For anyone who wants to understand what WWI actually felt like to those inside it, there are few accounts as immediate and honest as this one.