View from the trenches

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Dear Mother

I hope this letter finds you well. There is so much to tell you and so little time, because tomorrow morning is Monday and we’re being sent back into No Man’s Land. So few of the Old Pals remain for this ‘final’ mission. Most of them have left or are at least planning to leave. As for the big push, it’s a worry because Field Marshall Stevens’s FYFV doesn’t seem to have been the walkover we were promised in Blighty a couple of summers ago. There have been soundbite explosions but they don’t seem to have made much impact on the trenches.

I was reminded of all the hullabaloo around the great plan yesterday when I visited an end-of-life patient. As she lay tearful, distressed, and frightened I held her hand and realised that I was the only team member left to do it — so many colleagues better placed have been deployed to do other things.¹ It seems humanity no longer has a value here. Sustained Trimming and Privatisation plans promise much good and who is this squaddie to suggest otherwise? Let’s hope virtual care is as good as they say it will be. It’s probably shellshock but it seems like there’s precious little scientia and even less caritas in these schemes. Has our fight really been worth it?

Signing off now Mother, if we don’t make it, do remember us not as we have become but rather as we were, and promised to be.