Book description
'On the face of it,' writes Lyn Macdonald, 'no one could have been
less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked
straight out of Edwardian drawing rooms into the manifest horrors of
the First World War ...'
Yet the volunteer nurses rose magnificently to the occasion; in this
book they get a chance to tell their own stories. In leaking tents and
draughty huts they fought another war, a war against agony and death,
as men lay suffering from the pain of unimaginable wounds or diseases
we can now cure almost instantly. It was here that young doctors
frantically forged new medical techniques - of blood transfusion,
dentistry, psychiatry and plastic surgery - in the attempt to save
soldiers shattered in body or spirit. And it was here that women
achieved a quiet but permanent revolution, by proving beyond question
they could do anything. All this is superbly captured in The Roses
of No Man's Land, a panorama of hardship, disillusion and
despair, yet also of endurance and supreme courage.
