Shock, horror and humour of war explained by ex-Army surgeon through poetry
A former Army surgeon general has explained the unique challenges facing medical teams in modern war using something that came to the fore in the First World War - poetry.
Frontlines and Lifelines: Collected Poems from an Army Doctor in Crisis and War draws inspiration from Major General Tim Hodgetts' deployments to Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maj Gen Hodgetts, who served in the Army for 40 years, said: "I started to use it to help me reflect on a series of really quite traumatic events and quite morally injurious events.
"It was written originally for me. I never had any intention of sharing it with anybody.
"But as I have over the last couple of years started to share it, people have said 'why not put it together and put it into a book?'.
"I see this really is a slice of social history as a series of events.
"I could have written a diary, I could have written a book in prose, but I've chosen to reflect on my particular military history in this way so I hope people will see it as a historical record.
"Some may be shocked by what they read, but there is also some darkly humorous content as well, so some may cause a laugh and indeed it will bring a tear or two to some people's eyes."
The poems chart his career from being caught up in the aftermath of the 1991 Musgrave Park Hospital bombing in Belfast to dealing with casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maj Gen Hodgetts was commissioned into the Army in 1983 and served as head of the Army Medical Services in 2018 and surgeon general in 2021.
He explained how he turned to poetry to help him cope with the demands of being a senior military doctor.
"I've deployed - which I've done very frequently - and on six occasions I was the medical director of a field hospital," he said.
"I was the senior doctor in the field hospital - there was no one else to turn to to decompress.
"Everybody was looking to me for leadership so I had to find a way to come to terms with some of the really difficult things that I'd seen that particular day.
"The way I found it was to turn it into contemporaneous poem and I have found that a really useful way to reflect and to move on from that particular incident and potentially to grow from that incident."
New war poet at the same site as old
His book was launched at a performance at Edinburgh Napier University's Craiglockhart Campus that previously served as a hospital during the First World War and is home to the War Poets Collection.
Maj Gen Hodgetts added: "I have been inspired by poets of the past, particularly World War One poets.
It's absolutely fabulous to be launching a book at Craiglockhart, which is the site of the World War One shell shock hospital where Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves met here as patients."
Frontlines and Lifelines: Collected Poems from an Army Doctor in Crisis and War is out now, with royalties from the book being donated to the Poppy Factory.
Join Our Newsletter
