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Some nurses chose to work independently. Trained British nurse, Elsie Knocker, established, with her untrained associate, Mairi Chisholm, an aid post in the village of Pervyse behind the Belgian front-line trenches. Her memoir, Flanders and Other Fields, documents her innovative treatment for wound-shock as well as her experiences close to the front lines of war. Violetta Thurstan, a highly-trained professional British nurse, served with the Order of St John of Jerusalem in Belgium, with the Russian Red Cross in a flying column on the Polish Front, and then, again, on the Western Front. Her writings include one of the few technical manuals of wartime nursing practice to be published during the war.

This chapter discusses the experiences of the China Front's wounded soldiers, which details the levels of Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) medical care. Contrary to popular beliefs, IJA field medicine was adept in its handling of battle casualties, with the injured moving through a system of dressing stations, field hospitals, and garrison hospitals before being repatriated to Japan via hospital ships. The chapter illustrates the medical evacuation route taken by Private First-Class (PFC) Saijō, a combat amputee who narrated his tale of injury and rehabilitation in his 1941 memoir The Fighting Artificial Hand. Other supplementary sources include IJA tactical manuals and medical textbooks; studies of IJA overseas medical installations; casualty statistics; and firsthand accounts by Japanese wounded soldiers, IJA medical corpsmen, Japan Red Cross Society nurses, and foreign observers of Japanese frontline medical care.

American millionaire, Mary Borden, established three field hospitals in the French lines during the First World War. The first of these, L’Hopital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1, was both an effective military hospital and a cauldron of literary creativity. Although Borden’s contribution is well-documented, that of her head nurse, Agnes Warner, is less well-known. Warner’s book, My Beloved Poilus, was well-received in her home-province, New Brunswick, Canada, but has, until now, received very little attention from historians.

Accounts by physicians as well as combatants highlight the desperate conditions of field hospitals and of surgery in the field. Broadsides and a plea for an ambulance service are both shown here and the broader aspects of medical memoirs are examined by Susan-Mary Grant. In addition to physical injury, attention is given to malingering, nostalgia and the beginnings of medical welfare.

The author describes Camp Bastion and its fifty-bed field hospital. Prior to its handover in late 2014, Camp Bastion covered eight square miles of desert in southwestern Afghanistan and served as the coalition's logistical hub in Helmand. Some 600 aircraft flew in and out of the camp every day. The hospital featured an ordinary and intensive care ward, a six-bed resuscitation bay (or emergency department), a four-theater (or bed) operating room, GP and dentist practices, and a pharmacy. Each day in the hospital began and ended with a meeting of department chiefs and included many of the surgeons. It was here that patients were discussed on an individual basis and life-or-death decisions made. The author discusses the hospital facilities, services, and amenities as well as day-to-day activities.

The author comments about casualties with leg injuries who were brought to the field hospital each day. He first talks about his roommate named Brook, who was very critical of the efforts expended in Iraq and Afghanistan and struggled to make sense of the war. Brook despaired of having to feed injured Afghans daily into a second-rate health care system where levels of care were so much inferior to that at Camp Bastion. The author then describes the predicament of some of the patients at the hospital, including one who got some fragment wounds around his left knee and complained that his left leg was hurting. He also shares the story of a U.S. marine who called to the hospital to report the discovery of two partial legs belonging to Billy, one of the troops in his charge.

This chapter follows Arthur Conan Doyle on his journey with Langman’s Field Hospital from Cape Town to Bloemfontein, where he arrived just after the Battle of Sanna’s Post (Koornspruit), and the seizure by Boer commandos of the town’s waterworks. He had thought he would be dealing with the battle-wounded, but within days the Field Hospital was overwhelmed with cases of typhoid (enteric fever); the medics gave out their address as Café Enterique, Boulevard des Microbes. Meanwhile Doyle was gathering material for his history of the war, and writing it up. When the typhoid crisis was over, he travelled to Pretoria to make an official report on medical services, and while there visited Waterval, where 3000 British and Imperial soldiers had been held as POWs by the Boers.

The author recounts the day he reported for duty in the field hospital. Upon his arrival at Camp Bastion, the largest British overseas base since World War II, the author saw a wounded Gurkha being treated by orthopedic surgeons and scrub nurses. Orthopedic surgeons are plentiful in Bastion, presumably because of too many amputations. The attending anesthetist let the surgeons know periodically how hard he had to work to keep up with the fading Gurkha. The next morning, the patients had all been Afghans. The author describes the mayhem that morning, which he says soon became typical fare. Despite its predictability, he admits he never got used to this prebreakfast ritual, which speaks of the brutality of humanity at war with itself.

The author explains why and how he decided to write this book. He says the idea of writing something that would bring the lived experience of doctors at war closer to the general public was originally broached by a high-ranking medical officer, who had been instrumental in helping to secure permission for the author's deployment to Afghanistan. The officer had read one of the author's previous books, The Last Amateurs, and wanted him to come up with a similar work about rear-located medical personnel. There was quite clearly a sense that a candid account of the everyday experience of combat surgical teams would be a welcome addition to the war literature. The result is a candid narrative that chronicles the commitment and fearlessness of the doctors and nurses at the field hospital “who have strong enough stomachs to mop up what we destroy.”

The author reflects on the boredom that strikes doctors and surgical staff stationed at the field hospital. In principle, boredom should have been good news—after all, no one was getting hurt—except that it left the doctors with nothing meaningful to do. And so they found themselves pining for work to come in, even if this invariably came at the expense of someone else getting hurt. Boredom can also drive doctors to criticize each other's handling of patients and treatment and discharge decisions. The military is no stranger to boredom, not even on deployment to some of the most volatile, conflict-ridden regions in the world such as Afghanistan. According to the author, the surgical staff at Camp Bastion's hospital, with idle time on their hands, became introspective.

The author talks about the midsummer Christmas celebrated at the wards of the field hospital. He first discusses patrol-free days, which give insurgents plenty of opportunity to dig in new explosives, meaning that the next few days can be particularly dangerous as troops struggle to identify freshly upturned soil in an otherwise familiar, arid terrain not helped by the wind blowing topsoil all across it. He then turns to the day's casualties, which include three American soldiers, two of whom were victims of gunshot wounds; an eight-year-old girl who had been intubated inflight with an endotracheal tube; an Afghan double amputee; and a badly burned baby with a contagious infection. The author also mentions a major military campaign that was scheduled to be launched in forty-eight hours' time; the hospital had been warned to expect up to sixteen new casualties per day.

The author, having been in Camp Bastion for more than a week, talks about the casualties of war that doctors and nurses at the field hospital had to attend to on a daily basis. Two of the casualties had been dropped off by helicopter, the elder of whom was badly inebriated. Another casualty was a thirteen-year-old who had sustained shrapnel wounds from an improvised explosive. The author also reflects on the key principles that medical professionals expect to enact, such as “making the care of your patients your first concern” and “providing a good standard of practice and care.” Pre-deployment training for surgeons and anesthetists was predominantly technical in nature. This general technical focus is designed in part to desensitize doctors to emotions that may interfere with their ability to provide the best possible patient care.