Surgeon Grow

Malcolm Grow’s commentary presents us with a fascinating personal account of wartime experience, one that highlights a number of pertinent issues of Russia’s experience of total war. While military historiography is replete with studies of battle plans and strategies, troop movements, numbers of casualties, territorial gains, and decisions of state actors, war is so much more than these, as a fundamentally human experience. Unlike most other foreigners’ accounts of Russia’s war, written by journalists, diplomats, or civilian observers who spent little, if any, time at the “front,” Grow’s narrative provides a firsthand perspective of someone embedded with the Russian troops. Although his primary duty as a regimental doctor was medical care of wounded and ill soldiers, Grow’s narrative focuses much attention on combat, particularly his experiences observing operations from the trenches—even occasionally being drawn into the fighting.