Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front 1914-1915

Description

This great book is exactly what the title promises: the story of a nurse from England who spent a year in France, working in a hospital, taking care of the soldiers wounded.

The narrator of the story is a nun, a nurse who arrives in France to start working in the General Hospital in Le Havre, but soon she finds herself working on the ambulance trains that transport the wounded from the Clearing Hospital in the immediate vicinity of the front in Ypres to not only her initial place of service, the Le Havre General Hospital, but also the hospital in Boulogne. Later on she starts work at a station of Field Ambulance and this is where the diary ends all of a sudden.

The diary is an excellent read and it provides lots of useful and interesting details about World War I. It is really interesting to read about how the wounded were tended to and transported – the different sections on the ambulance trains served as different sections in a hospital, there were dorms, a kitchen, even an operating theater, allowing the medical professionals on the train to save lives by performing not only basic, but even more complex surgical interventions while on the go. The account is detailed, but without providing naturalistic descriptions of bleeding wounds or anything of the sort. It is more an account of the day-to-day life of a nurse during the war, a diary proper, with details about the weather and the food, written by a lady who was probably one of the bravest nurses on the Western Front.

The book provides an objective, unemotional and, at the same time, sympathetic and understanding account of life in the trenches, on the front and in the hospitals, in an easy to understand and straightforward style that make it an excellent period piece as well.
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