R.O.A.D.: War Stories

By the end of the Great War, forty-five Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over two hundred had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them. Their strength and dignity were remarkable.
Using diaries and letters, Peter Rees takes us into the hospital camps and the wards, and the tent surgeries on the edge of some of the most horrific battlefronts of human history. But he also allows the friendships and loves of these courageous and compassionate women to shine through and enrich our experience.
Profoundly moving, Anzac Girls is a story of extraordinary courage and humanity shown by a group of women whose contribution to the Anzac legend has barely been recognised in our history. Peter Rees has changed that understanding forever. (From Allen and Unwin).

The 'War to end all Wars', as seen through the eyes of three young women.  It is 1915. War is being fought on a horrific scale in the trenches of France, but it might as well be a world away from sixteen–year–old New Zealander Midge Macpherson, at school in England learning to be a young lady.

But the war is coming closer: Midge's brothers are in the army, and her twin, Tim, is listed as 'missing' in the devastating defeat of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli .

Desperate to do their bit – and avoid the boredom of school and the restrictions of Society – Midge and her friends Ethel and Anne start a canteen in France, caring for the endless flow of wounded soldiers returning from the front. Midge, recruited by the over–stretched ambulance service, is thrust into carnage and scenes of courage she could never have imagined.

And when the war is over, all three girls – and their Anzac boys as well – discover that even going 'home' can be both strange and wonderful. (From Jackie French).

Remarque used his personal experience as a German soldier to write All Quiet on the Western Front. He was drafted at age 18, and he fought on the Western Front of World War I, where he witnessed many of the atrocities he later depicted in the novel. All Quiet on the Western Front works both as a vehicle for overwhelmingly realistic and graphic depictions of war and as a mode of underscoring the disillusionment of the period. Remarque tied his individual experience to something much larger and more abstract: the novel, while focusing specifically on the German-French conflict in World War I, expresses sentiments about the contemporary nature of war itself. Paul’s self-reflection and the conversations between the soldiers feature not only ghastly images but ghastly truths about the effects of war on young soldiers. (From Britannica),

As a young man and a prisoner of war, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the 1945 US fire-bombing of Dresden in Germany, which reduced the once proudly beautiful city to rubble and claimed the lives of thousands of its citizens.
For many years, Kurt tried to write about Dresden but the words would not come. When he did write about it, he combined his trademark humour, unfettered imagination, boundless humanity and keen sense of irony to create one of the most powerful anti-war books every written, and an enduring American classic. (From Penguin).

Billy Pilgrim, the novel’s protagonist, has become “unstuck in time.” He travels between periods of his life, unable to control which period he lands in. As a result, the narrative is not chronological or linear. Instead, it jumps back and forth in time and place - from studying at night for optometry school, to being a POW in Germany, to Dresden, to being abducted by aliens and taken to another planet to be kept in a human zoo (from Sparknotes).