Postscript: Women and WWI
Much of what we know about the horrors of conditions during The Great War comes from women writers and nurses who worked in the field hospitals.
Writer Edith Wharton was in the middle of WWI when it began.You can read a fascinating account of her travels through the war ravaged countryside in the excerpts from Fighting France placed online by A Celebration of Women Writers.
Field hospitals brought together fiercely independent women and the soldiers who found themselves fighting The Great War. To get a feel for the territory, you can't get much closer to the conditions than reading some of the accounts put down by nurses near the front lines:
"My friend and I went out into the grounds and stood on a little mound watching the display. From the sea past Dixmude, Steenstraat, Ypres, round it swept in a half-circle, one blaze of flame and fire, while flashes and sudden bursts of light denoted huge explosions. The deafening roar of our guns could be heard to perfection in our long garret, whose sloping roof made an excellent sounding-board. Our ramshackle building rocked and swayed, shuddering from its foundations as in an earthquake. Blast after blast roared and belched forth, seemingly from under us. The laundry maids rushed shrieking down the stairs, thinking that the Germans were wiping us out of existence. Up till now none of us had had any idea that siege-guns lay hidden almost in our garden. Harmless-looking pig sties in the farms around sheltered the sinister muzzles of great guns; sunny springtime copses hid away under their branches giant siege-guns. We were really situated in the artillery-firing-line. Very soon we learnt to distinguish between the sound of shells sent from our guns and that of missiles travelling towards us from the German lines."
