In the Front Line: A Doctor in War and Peace
| In the Front Line: A Doctor in War and Peace | |
|---|---|
| |
| Author | Alec Glen |
| ISBN | ISBN 1780271301 |
| Format | Hardbound, eBook |
| No. of Pages | 288 |
| Language | English |
| Category | Genocide, History, Biographies & Memoirs |
Chronicling the experiences of Alec Glen, a young doctor who joined the army and served as a medical officer for the duration of World War I, this autobiography provides a unique view of the great events of the early 20th century. Early on he provides a shattering account of the hopeless slaughter at Gallipoli, where he survived almost certain death many times as his companions fell around him; out of his battalion of 1,000, only 100 lived. His later service in the Middle East and Mesopotamia is an astonishing tale of courage and endurance, interwoven with spells of leave, during which the Scot encountered exotic experiences undreamed of back home. After the war Glen became a GP in Govan, one of the poorest areas in Britain, at a time long before the National Health Service and where preventable illnesses were often a death sentence for old and young alike. The extremes of poverty and suffering he witnessed brought home to him that he was in the front line once more, but in a different kind of warfare. This memoir is a work of keen observation, humor, and understated power that compares and contrasts life on the Western Front with life in the poverty-stricken East End of Glasgow after the Great War.
Further proof emerges of Turkey’s genocide[edit | edit source]
ROBERT FISK Sunday 13 October 2013 The Turks are preparing to smother the 100th anniversary of their Holocaust against the Christian Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915
To other, earlier refugees. The Turks are preparing to smother the 100th anniversary of their Holocaust against the Christian Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 with commemorations of their victory over the Allies at Canakkale (Gallipoli) the same year. But each month brings yet further proof – in the testimony of Westerners – of what Turkey still officially denies: that the genocide of the Armenians was a fact of history. Now come the memoirs of Alec Glen, a British army doctor of the 1914-18 war – written privately for his sons, but published by his family – which record the further agony of the Armenians.
Entitled In the Front Line: A Doctor in War and Peace, Dr Glen’s account includes the fate of the Armenians of Caucasia as the Turks tried to spread their pan-Turkic rule to the east in 1918 – after the original massacre of one-and-a-half million Armenians three years earlier. Marching through north-western Iran towards Baku, Dr Glen writes of how his British-Indian force began to pass several thousand Armenian refugees in a day.
“It was an amazing and tragic sight … now and then we passed at a roadside a dying person, or one already dead and half-eaten by dogs and jackals… we lifted some of the younger ones who might recover on to the mules and carried them forward to the next village.
“Salisbury Craig [a fellow British doctor] told me later that he attended an old refugee in the road who, before he died, gave him a leather belt full of sovereigns, which he asked him to spend to help the refugees.”
Greater love hath no man…