Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart
had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his
underwear. "I ran into a new problem when we walked," Stewart
wrote, "the shorts and I didn't get along. They would crawl up on
me all the time." Complaints of physical discomfort like
Stewart's-or worse-pervade infantrymen's memories of the European
theater, whether the soldiers were British, American, German, or
French. Wet, freezing misery with no end in sight-this was life for
millions of enlisted men. Crawling underwear may have been a small
price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the
utter wretchedness of the moment, it was quite natural for soldiers
like Stewart to lose sight of that end. Sheer Misery trains a
humane and unsparing eye on the corporeal experiences of the
soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last
two years of the war. In the horrendously unhygienic and often
lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down,
stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good
nutrition. Feet became too swollen to march, fingers too frozen to
pull triggers; stomachs cramped, and diarrhea stained underwear and
pants. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military
strategy that dominate many WWII histories, acclaimed historian
Mary Louise Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring
to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the "screaming
meemies," the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane
sight of rotting corpses. As Roberts writes, "For soldiers who
fought, the war was above all about their bodies. It was as bodies
that they had been recruited, trained, and deployed. Their job was
to injure and kill bodies but also be injured and killed." Told in
inimitable style by one of our most distinctive historians of the
Second World War, Sheer Misery gives readers both an unprecedented
look at the ground-level world of the common soldier and a deeply
felt rendering of the experience of being a body in war.
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