‘Brave, compassionate and inspiring – it left me in floods of tears’ Adam Kay, author of This Is Going to Hurt

For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993, to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations and field surgery in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major London teaching hospital.

The conflicts he has worked in form a chronology of twenty-first-century combat: Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, Congo, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Gaza and Syria. But he has also volunteered in areas blighted by natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal.

Driven both by compassion and passion, the desire to help others and the thrill of extreme personal danger, he is now widely acknowledged to be the most experienced trauma surgeon in the world. But as time went on, David Nott began to realize that flying into a catastrophe – whether war or natural disaster – was not enough. Doctors on the ground needed to learn how to treat the appalling injuries that war inflicts upon its victims. Since 2015, the foundation he set up with his wife, Elly, has disseminated the knowledge he has gained, training other doctors in the art of saving lives threatened by bombs and bullets.

War Doctor is his extraordinary story

The Battle of Peach Tree Creek marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy, for it turned the page from the patient defence displayed by General Joseph E. Johnston to the bold offense called upon by his replacement, General John Bell Hood. Until this point in the campaign, the Confederates had fought primarily in the defensive from behind earthworks, forcing Federal commander William T. Sherman to either assault fortified lines, or go around them in flanking moves. At Peach Tree Creek, the roles would be reversed for the first time, as Southerners charged Yankee lines. The Gate City, as Atlanta has been called, was in many ways the capstone to the Confederacy's growing military-industrial complex and was the transportation hub of the fledgling nation. For the South it had to be held. For the North it had to be taken. With General Johnston removed for failing to parry the Yankee thrust into Georgia, the fate of Atlanta and the Confederacy now rested on the shoulders of thirty-three-year-old Hood, whose body had been torn by the war. Peach Tree Creek was the first of three battles in eight days in which Hood led the Confederate Army to desperate, but unsuccessful, attempts to repel the Federals encircling Atlanta. This particular battle started the South on a downward spiral from which she would never recover. After Peach Tree Creek and its companion battles for Atlanta, the clear-hearing Southerner could hear the death throes of the Confederacy. It was the first nail in the coffin of Atlanta and Dixie.

Ben Viljoen (1868–1917) was ’n prominente jonger generaal in die Anglo-Boereoorlog, maar ná die oorlog is hy nie opgeneem in die nuwe politieke elite van die Afrikaners nie. Nadat hy die eed van getrouheid op St. Helena onderteken het, het hy noot weer permanent na Suid-Afrika teruggekeer nie.

Carel van der Merwe het besluit om Viljoen se spore te volg na Brittanje, Nederland, Mexiko en Amerika en te gaan uitvind hoe dit gebeur het dat dié Boereoorloggeneraal burgerskap van vier verskillende lande gehad het, die ster was van ’n Boereoorlogskouspel, aan ’n Mexikaanse revolusie deelgeneem het, as vredeskommissaris tussen die Yaqui-Indiane opgetree het en voor sy dood op die punt was om ’n film in Hollywood te vervaardig.

’n Prentjie van ’n komplekse persoonlikheid kom na vore wat herinner aan ’n deel van die huidige generasie Afrikaners – minder godvresend, gemaklik in verskillende kulture, en bereid om te emigreer wanneer hulle dink dit tot hul voordeel is.