The German Ward by Pip Williams
Pip Williams is the author of The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookseller of Jericho, both of which have been bestsellers.
The book is set during WW1 in Étaples, Northern France, which was home to one of the largest British Army bases, Commonwealth reinforcement camps and hospital complexes on the Western Front. The camps could hold 100,000 soldiers at any one time, and the hospitals could treat up to 22,000 sick or wounded soldiers. It was also considered the centre of the 1918 flu pandemic.
The German Ward is primarily a love story, which intertwines the lives of three characters.
Tilda is a VAD, a member of the Volunteer Aid Detachment, an organisation of civilian volunteers formed in 1909 by the British Red Cross and the Order of St John. VAD members provided vital medical, nursing and support services in Britain and overseas during World War I. The book opens in England in 1937 with Tilda receiving a letter. She recognises the handwriting and retrieves a box of mementoes and a diary that she has not looked at for 20 years. Her reading of these memories drives the story.
Iso is an Australian artist who is living in Étaples with her sister and mother. They had migrated there from Australia before the war, when the town was just a fishing village and an artists’ colony. Iso volunteers for the YMCA, but she also continues to draw and record the people and events taking place in the town during this seemingly endless and dreadful time in history.
In present-day Canberra, Eva researches the little-known artist Iso Rae and visits the Australian War Memorial archives to view the few of Iso’s works that have been preserved there. As she examines the drawings, she begins to question the stories behind the art. Often simple sketches, they hint at a powerful, emotional relationship between two people who appear in them.
After complaints have been made about her attitude, VAD Tilda is sent to work in the German Ward, a medical ward where injured German POWs are treated. A German doctor, also a POW, works on the ward. In the eyes of the staff, the German ward “is like any other ward, but less so”. Meaning the food is colder, the blankets are rougher, and the care is there but lacking in empathy. Dr Henning, the German doctor, is referred to as a Hun.
Tilda and Dr Henning grow closer through the long hours and horrendous situations they share in the ward, and inevitably they become close. The undercurrent of desire and lust is testing them. Meanwhile, Iso observes and sketches.
Reading about wartime through the eyes of the women who were a part of it sheds a different light on history. It’s an awful time. The absolute waste of life and the basic human instincts that come to the fore when people are required to take sides are disturbing. It’s cruel, messy, bloody and traumatic. But this story shows how, even in the depths of this, the basic and sometimes desperate human needs for love and caring are still there. The emotional strain is immense. Tilda keeps seeing her own younger brother among the ‘boys’ that come into the German Ward.
Reminiscent of Kirsten Hannah’s novel The Women, this view of wartime through the female viewpoint, through memoir, art and historical research, gives a different perspective that can simultaneously move you while also highlighting the tragedy that is war.
It’s an emotional read, quite graphic and gritty, but the sort of book you want to keep reading because finding out what happened is so compelling. The stories of the three separate characters are woven together very well. May we learn from these lessons of the past.
Reviewer: Rachel White
Simon & Schuster
