Winifred Kenyon, a nurse working just behind the first world war frontline at a French casualty clearing station, was delighted the first time a surgeon congratulated her on saving a soldier's life. "Then she did it again, and every day after that. Eventually, it didn't seem like anything at all." Tracing the bumpy journey of injured soldiers from the battlefield back to "Blighty", Emily Mayhew's Wellcome prize-shortlisted account of medical treatment on the western front is sensitive to how quickly the extraordinary can become everyday in the heated atmosphere of war. Drawing on the diaries, letters and personal accounts of the nurses, surgeons, stretcher bearers and orderlies who were themselves blooded and rebuilt by modern warfare, Mayhew deftly describes such daily horrors as shattered jaws and severed arteries, filthy uniforms and decay. What takes the book beyond the standard accounts of the trenches, however, is its depiction of how such terrible circumstances forced people to respond in remarkable ways. This includes the grand drama of the brave chaplain conducting burials in no-man's land, but it also stresses the resourcefulness of the medical machine, rapidly innovating to save as many lives as possible in the face of unprecedented destruction.