Channel 4, 27 February at 7 30 pm

Rating:

As the conventional phase of the recent Iraq war ended, the padre conducting a service for the personnel of 202 Field Hospital said, “We have stood up against tyranny and won.” The rest of this documentary on the work of the hospital would have given most viewers a different impression. Nearly all admissions were Iraqi civilian victims of trauma, many of them children. Cue close-up after grisly close-up of surgical debridement, skin grafting, unstable fractures, punctured bowel. Modern war inevitably generates such scenes, and television lets us all share the resulting sense of horror and futility.

Battle Hospital followed the 650 men …