In the Front Line

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.