It’s the 100th anniversary of The Great War, now World War I. In the US, that’s the forgotten war, and little has been made of its centenary. Of course, we weren’t in the war a century ago. We joined the war in 1917, and certainly hastened its conclusion when our doughboys arrived “Over There” to join the Allies. On balance, however, that war’s impact on our social fabric was small; our military deaths in that war numbered 117,000. While hardly insignificant, that figure pales in comparison to the 800,000 war dead of Great Britain—a smaller country by far.
TOP: BBC/TODD ANTHONY; RIGHT: BBC/NICK WALL
Among the various documentaries and dramas that British media have produced in commemoration of The Great War, The Crimson Field has earned a deservedly popular following on PBS Masterpiece Theater. Nothing makes the reality of war quite so palpable as humanizing it.
The theater of war in The Crimson Field is a tented field hospital on the French coast, where doctors, nurses and volunteers treat the men wounded in the trenches. The hospital is the frontier between the battlefield and home. Shattered soldiers come and go, or die in their beds, but the doctors and nurses remain with the constant suffering and death.
At a personal level, the story revolves around the lives, dreams, motivations and secrets of three young volunteer nurses—Kitty, Rosalie and Flora—none of whom, of course, had any idea what they were getting themselves into. The entire ensemble cast, commanding officer and young doctors, matrons and volunteers, sooner or later have to experience Grace-under-Fire in an unrelenting environment of physical and emotional pain.
The changing relationships and self-discovery experienced by the young heroines and their older leaders alike unpack also the social frontier that the Great War represented for Great Britain as well. Whether on the home front, in the bloody trenches or in the halfway house that is the field hospital, the common cause of war inevitably blurs the distinctions of social class and the formalities of everyday life. Pain shared is pain lightened.
In this sense, life in the tented trauma hospital prefigures the historic demise that World War I would bring to the “old order” of Britain. The lack of manpower after Britain’s losses in the trenches created whole new opportunities for women in the workplace, and for men that could now aspire to advance themselves in a way never before seen.
For hundreds of thousands, domestic service was no longer an attractive option. In Downton Abbey, we have seen the social effects on the English landed aristocracy. In The Crimson Field we share life on the hard front lines where this new way of life was incubated. This is wonderful drama—and insightful social history as well.
—Dana Huntley
PBS Distribution, 2-disc boxed set, approximately 360 minutes.
Read an interview with Taff Gillingham, The Crimson Field’s military historical advisor, at britishheritage.com/crimson-field.