Dr James Butland’s son is killed in a car crash. This nightmare scenario propels the doctor into the realms of his past — his preparation for studying history at Oxford, his fighting with a rifle brigade at the ill-fated Battle of Calais in May 1940, his astonishing escape back to England, and his subsequent action with his regiment in the sand and rock of Tunisia. Revisiting northern France 24 years later, suffering the mental and emotional chaos caused by his son’s death, has extraordinary consequences.
This remarkable piece of historical fiction, displaying the author’s deep and accurate knowledge of the battles of the Second World War, sets the predicament of the central doctor character in the context of his passage from youth through wartime ordeals to the all-consuming role of consultant physician. It is a multifaceted, many-layered account of a doctor’s aspiration, success, and failure, his vulnerability, guilt, despair, and anger. Although the curious title and some of the narrative suggests a military history, it is in essence not that at all. It is about a man who carries the identity of a physician but struggles with the ‘other people’ he has to be — ex-soldier, husband, father, and lover.
Doctors are human and as filled with uncertainty and a kaleidoscope of confused thoughts and emotions as anyone else. This elegantly written tale will ring many familiar bells for its medical readers.
Adrian Crisp, a recently retired rheumatologist, has been director of studies in clinical medicine for Cambridge medical students and, through his work in the Churchill College Archives Centre, has a rare mastery of military and medical narrative.
The world that he describes — both medical and personal — is our world and we all move in it with the same faltering steps as Dr Butland.