Jeffrey Reznick's Healing the Nation is an account of the physical and psychological care that soldiers in the First World War received between the front lines of the trenches and the home front, what soldiers described as the route “from battlefield to Blighty” (1). Reznick is particularly interested in what he calls “the culture of caregiving” (1) and provides a mass of fascinating detail about the interactions of medical knowledge, social relations, official concerns, and physical environments that produced the culture he identifies. This study is timely: while there has been a considerable amount of research on its events, its legacies, and its memorialization, far less attention has been given to the organization and culture of caregiving in the First World War.

Reznick's story begins with the rest huts behind the front lines that provided a brief respite, during lulls in the fighting or when on leave, from the horrors of trench life (18). These huts are shown to be spaces where middle-class domestic life was replicated as far as possible. Run by voluntary agencies, such as the Young Men's Christian Association, the Church Army, and the Salvation Army, huts were staffed by middle-class women who, along with others, provided “home comforts” in the form of cups of tea, biscuits, newspapers, music, games, sing-alongs, and religious services. The aim of these huts was to restore morale among soldiers by bringing the familiarity of the (middle-class) home into the chaotic experiences of war. Their organization was predicated on a prewar model of saving the urban poor and underpinned by the religious views of Victorian and Edwardian society. The care they gave was linked to spiritual regeneration and based on middle-class ideals of domesticity and moral order, with the aim of returning a restored masculinity to the battlefield. The soldiers who used rest huts, according to Reznick, enjoyed the comforts and were often able to appropriate the spaces for developing camaraderie and friendship.

Military hospitals, however, despite their avowed aim of returning soldiers to the front or to a dignified civilian life, were less comfortable, according to the soldiers who experienced them. Reznick examines two hospitals, the First Eastern General at Cambridge and the King George Hospital in London. Although the authorities who ran the hospitals were committed to making the experience a comfortable one, to providing havens for heroes, and to promoting awareness of the soldiers’ sacrifices in the public mind, these lofty aspirations frequently vied with the demands of a war machine that privileged efficiency and economy. Using hospital magazines, Reznick discusses the ways in which injured soldiers made sense of their often less-than-comfortable hospitalization, employing humor and satire. Moreover, military hospitals catered, in the main, to “other” ranks and nonofficers. The majority of hospitals for officers were in private homes. Whereas fifty soldiers shared one bathroom at the First Eastern or the King George, officer patients in the Kensington Officers’ Home had single rooms and two bathrooms on every floor. As Reznick goes on to discuss, these differences were exacerbated by uniform rules that exempted officers from wearing the standard-issue blue uniform required of all other ranks during their recovery time. These uniforms were disliked by soldiers and the butt of much satire in the hospital magazines. They were ill fitting, without pockets, and seen, by many, as effeminate in contrast to the uniform worn on active service.

Reznick ends his account with a discussion of the rehabilitation of the war disabled. The underpinning ideology of rehabilitation centers was a belief in the restorative powers of useful work. Thus, centers such as the one at Shepherd's Bush provided workshops where disabled servicemen had opportunities to develop new skills that, it was hoped, would provide employment opportunities for them in the postwar world. In the event, these centers failed to achieve their goal of rehabilitating men who had fought in the war. By the mid-1920s many rehabilitation centers had been dismantled, and disabled ex-servicemen found themselves out of the labor market as able-bodied returning soldiers took the bulk of available jobs. Reznick concludes that the “culture of caregiving … was integral to shaping wartime experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. For soldiers, this culture helped to foster a comradeship of healing that combined with comradeship of the trenches to underscore sentiments of being a class apart from the rest of society. For the public, it served as a means to express appreciation of Tommy despite the existence of a true gulf in experience” (137).

This study is based on a wide range of primary sources that are read through the lens of contemporary cultural theory to produce a sophisticated analysis of the ways in which a culture of caregiving was produced during the First World War. Reznick draws on insights from historical and cultural geography to discuss the design and architecture of hospitals, on gender theory to think about the gender politics of wartime caregiving, and on the work of Michel Foucault to consider how discourses of the wounded were constructed and informed the care they received. Healing the Nation will be of interest to all those interested not only in the events and social relations of the war but also in its legacies. The conclusion postulates a number of questions that the study has been unable to answer and calls for more research into “the work of healing the nation both during and after the war” (142). It is hoped that Reznick's call is answered.