Elsie and Mairi Go to War
Two Extraordinary Women on the Western Front
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Publisher Description
When they met at a motorcycle club in 1912, Elsie Knocker was a thirty year-old motorcycling divorcee dressed in bottle-green Dunhill leathers, and Mairi Chisholm was a brilliant eighteen-year old mechanic, living at home and borrowing tools from her brother. Little did they know, theirs was to become one of the most extraordinary stories of the First World War.
In 1914, they roared off to London 'to do their bit', and within a month they were in the thick of things in Belgium driving ambulances to distant military hospitals. Frustrated by the number of men dying of shock in the back of their vehicles, they set up their own first-aid post on the front line in the village of Pervyse, near Ypres, risking their lives working under sniper fire and heavy bombardment for months at a time.
As news of their courage and expertise spread, the 'Angels of Pervyse' became celebrities, visited by journalists and photographers as well as royals and VIPs. Glamorous and influential, they were having the time of their lives, and for four years, Elsie and Mairi and stayed in Pervyse until they were nearly killed by arsenic gas in the spring of 1918. But returning home and adjusting to peacetime life was to prove even more challenging than the war itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the heady days preceding WWI, two thrill-seeking motorcycle enthusiasts chucked their comfortable lives to join a small group of British women providing medical care on the Belgian front lines. Atkinson (Suffragettes in Pictures) utilizes wartime journals, interviews, family genealogies, and a sanctioned contemporary biography to give life to the pair of spirited friends who displayed extraordinary courage and plenty of attitude. Elsie Knocker, 30, was a divorced mother of one, and a trained midwife from a unconventionally broad-minded middle-class background; Mairi Gooden-Chisholm was an upper-class Scottish teenager. Together they found their calling in Pervyse, Belgium, as they drove packed frontline ambulances and nursed wounded soldiers in the midst of shelling and gravely unhygienic conditions. Elsie, unimpressed with visiting Marie Curie, who had created a mobile X-ray unit, effectively employed new, and potentially life-saving, methods of treating the soldiers for shock with simple rest, warmth, and comfort before shipping them to hospitals,. The startling end of the women's friendship remains the subject of speculation. And though the lack of footnotes is lamentable, , Atkinson details the gritty effects of trench warfare while fully celebrating the exploits of two intensely linked young women who benefited hundreds of lives. 14 pages of photos.
