Audiobook

War Letters From A Young Queenslander

Robert Marshall Allen

Letters from a Brisbane doctor posted to the Western Front from 1914 to December 1915. He tells anecdotes of World War I including stories of "de-lousing" an entire regiment, the precise arrangements of the urine trenches and his eyewitness accounts of the battles of Neuve Chapelle and Ypres and a contemporary comment on the Gallipoli campaign. He describes how the enemy rains shells on the ambulances and the retrievals of the wounded from the trenches at night. This was also a time of great medical advances, so we hear from a participant the fascinating story of some of the first mass Tetanus inoculations, and the series of experiments surrounding the invention of "vermi-jelly", along with the darker stories of the invention and first uses of chlorine gas. This story of an Australian doctor in The Great War is read by another Australian doctor, and comes complete with Australian slang read in an authentic Aussie accent! (Summary by Beth Thomas)