Field Hospital and Flying Column: Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia

Violetta Thurstan arrived at the front lines in 1915, when the war was still new enough to feel like an adventure and old enough to churn through the wounded by the thousands. This is her journal from the first months of the First World War: a nursing sister who traveled from Salisbury Plain, where the tattoo still drummed with martial optimism, into the shattered towns of Belgium and eventually into Russia, following the wounded and the retreating armies across borders that no longer meant anything except distance from the next field hospital. Thurstan writes with startling immediacy about the chaos of early war medicine, the refugees clogging every road, the young men whose legs she amputated by lantern light, and the terrible arithmetic of who would live and who would not. What elevates this above mere memoir is its historical position: Thurstan captured the exact moment when the initial fervor gave way to the grinding, endless reality of industrial slaughter. She was there at the beginning, and she recorded what she saw before the world learned to look away.