The German Ward

Pip Williams has delivered us another extraordinary read after the success of both The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho.
There are two main timeframes - WW1 at the hospital in Ētapes, France, with Tilda a volunteer nurse aide, and current times with Eva researching the art work of Australian Iso Rae who missed out on being an official war artist but nonetheless sketched and painted what she saw at Ētapes through her older woman’s thoughtful eyes (the work of Rae really exists).
Tilda, living in England’s 1937 Oxford, opens an old Red Cross tin of her things from her war years. We flashback to her work in the German Ward of captured, wounded, dying enemy Germans, Matron’s “Huns” (her way, we learn, of distancing and coping with interminable horrors and the deaths of her patients). The first person narrative evokes our intimacy and empathy, and makes us feel as co-conspirators as we witness the developing relationship with the “Hun” doctor-prisoner Hugo - Hugo of the unopened post-war letter in the red tin. Iso also witnesses the personal side of war, capturing the gaps between hands that shouldn’t touch, the gentle nursing of the enemy, the inevitable intimacies and sorrows of years under seige. It is this war art that Eva’s research unpacks.
Another fantastic read from Pip Williams, about love, grief, the human aspects of war and the often unappreciated efforts of women. The PB book cover is beautiful: mauve like the Ētapes lavender, the background a faint palimpsest of an Iso Rae sketch and the symbolic dominant image of an Ētapes swallow with its blood red throat, reminding us of the return of birds as battle fields quieten. A beautiful start to a delightful, clever, thought-provoking novel.