Authenticity and gender.

Public responses to Great War memoirs by nurses and frontline soldiers in Britain,

France and Germany.

In Field Hospital and Flying Column Violetta Thurstan (1915) narrates her experience of the

first year of the Great War, spent as a nurse in Belgium and Russia. Reviewing it, the Times

Literary Supplement (September 2, 1915) said that the first thought evoked by any war book

was that the author had been there and had indeed seen what s/he saw. This is early

testimony to the value that rapidly attached to the war literature of eye-witness in the three

nations with which this article is concerned; it is visible both in the war books themselves and

in the public response to them. It is this literature and the public response to it that provide

our primary source material.

The centrality of eye-witness became a commonplace. As the French literary journal Les

Annales Politiques et Littéraires noted, “witnesses accounts are the most interesting part of

our war literature, as pretty phrasing and clever composition cannot replace the impression of

what is seen and lived” (October 15, 1916). Indeed, as has been shown elsewhere, the

authority of the eye-witness account was one of the central features of war literature: authors

stressed it and reviewers accepted it (Palmer, 2018, 98-102, 161-9, 193-9, 209-12, 232; 2021,

131-2). In France, the memoirs of frontline soldiers were usually called ‘témoignages’

(witness statements), underlining the value of the link between memory and lived experience;

when Maurice Genevoix’ Sous Verdun (1916) was excerpted in the Revue de Paris, the

editor’s introductory note was headlined ‘Un Sincère Témoignage’ (Revue de Paris, 1916,

673-80). After the war, this valuation continued: reviewing A Subaltern’s War (Edmonds,

1929), Country Life stressed the author’s use of his diaries and letters in the composition to

1
achieve something that is authentic beyond reconstruction and marked by “unconditional

sincerity” (August 31, 1929). Surveying the massive public response to Remarque’s All

Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Schneider (2004, 377-91) shows that it was dominated by

the belief that the book was both factual and authentic, despite the politically motivated

accusation from the Right that it was a defeatist lie.

Reviews of nurse’s writings show a similar response. The few brief reviews of German

nurse memoirs published during the war praise them in terms which derive from the fact of

eyewitness: Baroness von Babo’s memoir (1918) is a “gripping” and “fresh and lively

portrayal” of women’s war service (Badische Beobachter, April 29, 1918; Badische Presse,

May 1, 1918); Emmy von Rüdgisch’s (1916) is a “warm and lively portrayal” of her

experiences on the Western Front (Volksfreund, December 5, 1917; Badische Presse, June

28, 1916).i British and French reviews show the same pattern of response. Kate Luard’s

Diary of a Nursing Sister (Anon, 1915) is an “exactly detailed” “simple record of personal

experience” (Daily Mail, November 7, 1916; Times Literary Supplement, December 16,

1915). The “frankness” of Sarah MacNaughtan’s Woman’s Diary of the War (1915) is

“moving and genuine”, bringing home to the reader “the real squalor, as well as the real

glory, of war …” (Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 1915). The simple realism of

Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire’s Hommes de Bonne Volonté (1919) gives the reader a

clear sense of actually being there with her, it is “so loud with truth” that it’s surprising it got

past the censors (Figaro, May 18, 1919; Excelsior, May 20, 1919). Madame Eydoux-

Demian’s memoir consists of “sketches taken from life” marked by the care taken to “see

clearly and say it right” (Le Mois Littéraire et Pittoresque 32: 177; Annales Africaines, April

1, 1916).

2
The fact that this commonality of response crossed the gender divide is a noteworthy feature

of the reception of war memoirs, especially given that women’s roles in the Great War were

subject to some measure of controversy, even if nurses were largely exempt from complaints

about women’s war work.ii Nonetheless, we shall see that behind the commonality of

response lies a gender-based divergence. It is this divergence that is the subject to be

addressed here. The argument centres around the role of frankness about war experiences in

memoirs by both soldiers and nurses, and the public response to it, in particular to an absence

in the public response which coincides with the gender divide.

When the first soldiers’ memoirs that were frank about conditions at the front began to

appear, in 1916, the fact of eyewitness was cited by reviewers to demonstrate the truthfulness

of an account that contradicted public expectations. The most famous example is Barbusse,

Le Feu (1916). Barbusse’s exemplary war record was well-known: he had been refused by

the army in 1914, on the grounds of both age and health, but appealed the decision and was

eventually accepted; he served in the trenches, near Soissons - Le Feu is dedicated to “The

comrades who fell beside me at Crouy and on Hill 119”. The book was a revelation, a

profoundly shocking one. In the words of a contemporary review: in the name of those who

are “crushed by the heavy burden of defence, he has not deigned to think of those whom he

might wound with this vision of reality …” (Mercure de France, January 1, 1917: 443).

Despite being published as a novel, it was assumed that Le Feu was in fact largely based on

his experiences: reviewers bluntly stated that it was not a novel at all but a diary. iii His

presence as a witness then justified the claim that this was the real war, not

… the false Tommies and joyful Rosalies, almanacs full of sublime language, the

pasteboard lyricism, the heroic good humour, the sterile professions of civic and patriotic

3
 faith, all the shameless, saccharine sophistry of that awful image hidden from us by the

distance and the complicity of the scribblers whose job it is to maintain the glittering lie

about the war … (L’Oeuvre, December 16, 1916).iv

In the same year, Patrick MacGill (1916a, 1916b) published his memoirs The Great Push and

The Red Horizon. While they never achieved the iconic status of Le Feu – it was the fastest

selling book in the history of French literature - they were a substantial success, selling

40,000 copies during the war years.v Their detailed descriptions of the battlefield clearly

shocked the original readers, revealing “a reality so much more terrible than the imagination”

(English Review, April, 1916, 416). Yet the author’s status as participant established the

authority of the account he gave. In the words of the Times Literary Supplement (June 9,

1916), the author has seen horrible things and therefore we cannot “dismiss his narrative as

overcharged”: in other words, even if the reader thinks that the experiences in question are

not typical of the battlefield, nonetheless the narrative must be accepted at face value because

it records something genuinely experienced.

However, frank revelations about the battlefield were not universally acceptable. Perhaps

the clearest example is given by the history of Fritz von Unruh’s Opfergang (1919). Hailed

on publication as the classic German pacifist novel because of its unrelenting portrayal of the

‘Hell of Verdun’, it was in fact originally written in 1916 at the behest of the German Army

High Command: the intention was to create a text that would prepare both troops and

civilians for the sacrifices demanded by the next stage of the war. However, von Unruh’s

merciless description of the battlefield and the gradual destruction of human beings was not

at all what was wanted, and publication was refused. He was punished for his dereliction

and only saved from what would have been a suicide mission by the intervention of the

4
Crown Prince (an acquaintance from the Military Academy). On its publication in 1919 he

was hailed as a militant pacifist in wartime, a “soldier of peace”, as he later described

himself. At the time it was assumed that the 1919 version was the same as the rejected 1916

original. However, when his literary estate was finally opened to scholarship, long after

World War Two, the earlier version was revealed to be a nationalist, bellicose text that the

author had reworked so that the horror of the battlefield changed its meaning.vi In 1916, the

reality of Verdun as he had experienced it and chose to portray it was publicly unacceptable,

even though German propaganda policy was relatively open to showing what the battlefield

was like, in order to convince the civilian population of the competence and morale of the

troops (Schneider, 1997, 103). In 1919, following defeat and disillusion, and suitably

modified, it became an icon of an alternative conception of the war.

Indeed, the refusal to publicly admit the full ghastliness of the battlefield was probably

widespread. Ellen LaMotte’s (1916) utterly disillusioned portrayal of the war as seen

through the eyes of a military nurse was banned in Britain and France until after the war. vii

Jane de Launoy (1936, 9) is candid: “Horrible impressions will appear crude … but there

were many other things that were much cruder which are impossible to publish!”. Kate

Luard, who is far from squeamish in her accounts of her experiences, notes a horrific scene

with the laconic addition “the details are unprintable” (Anon, 1915, 53).

Nonetheless, despite the occasional official wartime rejection of eyewitness, it was largely

accepted as the guarantee of the authentic value of the accounts. While the word itself was

not in common use at the time, at least not in this context, it is clear that the concept underlies

the constant references to sincerity and truthfulness.viii The truthfulness in question is not

necessarily a generalised truth, or the truth of a historical overview, because it was accepted

5
as axiomatic that the truth in question was truth-to-experience: in the words of a review of

Edmonds (1929), what the reader seeks from a war book “is some conception of what it was

really like. … there were as many wars as there were men in the armies. This strikes me as

being an entirely convincing war” (Saturday Review, 24, 1929). What creates conviction in

the reader is the sense that the writer is recording what they genuinely experienced. While

praising Blunden’s (1928) Undertones of War for its truthful account, the London Mercury

(XIX, 300-01) nonetheless blames him for stylistic devices that create some distance from the

real event; for example, in a description of an artillery barrage Blunden notes the arrival of

heavy rain with the words “Nature came to join the dance”. For the reviewer, this is false to

experience, it is clearly a retrospective addition to it: “reality in the line was different from

relief recollected in billet tranquillity”, and Blunden should have “re-created” his experience

so that “a youth reading might experience exactly” what Blunden himself had experienced.ix

The reviews of nurses’ memoirs insist less on this dimension of their impact. While it is

clear that praise for their vivid depictions or lively portrayals is premised on the same

perception, the fact that the implications of personal witness are not foregrounded with the

frequency, and analytic depth, typical of the responses to the soldiers’ texts should alert us to

a significant, gendered difference in the reception of the two sets of memoirs.

The central element of the difference is visible as soon as we pay attention to one specific

omission in the response to nurse memoirs: communicating personal experience is largely

unproblematic when the author is a nurse, whereas it is controversial, because sometimes

rejected, when the author is a frontline soldier. This is the absence – noted above and

observable in all three nations - that lies at the core of the argument here.

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We have already seen one response to Patrick MacGill’s memoirs: however shocking the

revelations, they have to be accepted because he was an eyewitness. Other reviews reject

this validation: the revelation of the truth of combat is dismissed either as morbidity - even if

the truth is palpable - or as an exaggeration that is out of place, as it plays down “heroism …

[and] gallantry” and hides the “ideal aspect”, the war aims, which “would have lent dignity

and purpose to a realism that becomes almost sordid without such a reinforcement”

(Scotsman, June 19, 1916; Country Life, July 1, 1916, 24-5). This countervailing insistence

on war aims is central to the critical rejection of those frontline memoirs which are firmly

based in personal experience. In Britain, the clearest and most explicit version of this

condemnation is to be found in Douglas Jerrold’s The Lie about the War. The lie was

essentially the simple device of “writing of the war always and continuously from the

standpoint of the individual”. The mendacity consisted in using this device to divorce the

experience of the individual from the purposes of the war:

By the simple device of omitting from the book the relationship of the part to the whole,

the writers of these books make every incident seem futile, purposeless and insignificant.

This is the ultimate, dastardly lie. (Jerrold, 1930: 23).

This rejection is elaborately developed in German nationalists’ remarks about war literature.

They reject both factual, news-like reporting of combat and accounts which represent only

individual experience. All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, is condemned on the

grounds that although Remarque may have a good understanding of the individual soldier, he

has no grasp of the overall meaning of the war since he sees it exclusively “from the self

outward” (Widerstand 4, April, 1929, 97-104). And if some soldiers did indeed have the

experiences narrated there, thousands of others returned home without being broken by the

7
war (Hochland 26: 98). In parallel, a review of a nationalist war book, Beumelburg’s

Sperrfeuer um Deutschland, praises it for “absorbing the individual” into “group fate”, thus

making the war “a storm under whose clouds the individual is invisible” (Süddeutsche

Monatshefte 27, 869). Elsewhere, in the preface to his book about Verdun, Douaumont,

Beumelburg sets out the underlying principle: such books are to reveal the “inner coherence”

of the war. Here the soldiers are largely an anonymous collective, represented by the

impersonal pronoun ‘man’ (the German equivalent of ‘one’, but more commonplace than the

English term), in which individual motivations amalgamate into a generic expression of the

Fatherland, a “commonality of blood” (Brückner, 2017, 102-111.) The news-like language

of many war books is rejected, concomitantly, because it eschews generalities. A long

group review of new war books argues that it is completely irrelevant whether Dante was

actually walking through Hell at Virgil’s side, for poetic truth is more profound than mere

eye-witness, which only refers to externalities, whereas experience must be “deep in the

nerves, in every drop of blood” (Die Tat 22, 54-6). A similar article from 1929 argues that

the ‘reportage’ style can only grasp superficial things, whereas the epic “explodes the

surface” to find a deeper place where reality and unreality, memory and fantasy are creatively

mixed (Neue Rundschau 40, 843-51).

In France, the same principle obtains. The reception of Le Feu during the war was by no

means as unequivocal as the book’s iconic status suggests. For the nationalist right, it was

one-sided: “Barbusse has only remembered the savage, horrible, material side of war and has

said nothing about noble feelings and acts of heroic sacrifice …”. The only elements of the

war that he has retained are the filth and squalor – moral as well as physical – the horror and

foul deeds, depicting humanity only as squalid and bestial; he is incapable of understanding

the nobility of sacrifice; the author calls on all those who have “felt the soul of our country”

8
to denounce this denigration. While the book contains a good portrait of a soldier’s life, and

avoids the earlier, false image of the war, the insistence on the horrors of war is a false

emphasis because it is not balanced by what transforms them: “the vision of purpose and the

heroism that achieves it”, the “good humour, the nobility and the patriotism”, which makes

war literature encouraging. Authors like Barbusse deny all heroism and courage, and

peddle “so-called authentic” information which is always defeatist, they stifle enthusiasm by

criticising military leadership, and snigger at the word victory (La Croix, June 19, 1917;

Nouvelle Revue Nationale, May 25, 1917, July 25,1917; Action Française, March 30 and 31,

1917). While these comments are not as clearly focussed on the centrality of war aims as

others we have seen, the weight given to heroism and sacrifice clearly references them: it is

they that consecrate heroism and sacrifice.

If it is not surprising that Barbusse’s vision of the hell of the Western Front should arouse

nationalist indignation, it is more surprising that even the convinced patriot and war

enthusiast Maurice Genevoix should receive the same treatment: in an attack which is similar

to the attacks on Barbusse, Genevoix is blamed because his “scrupulously careful realism

finally gives an inexact idea of this war and those in it, whose moral grandeur is scarcely

visible …” (La Croix, May 28, 1916).

The nationalist and bellicist accusation was not that these accounts were lies - everyone knew

perfectly well that wartime suffering was real – but that the suffering was not the essence of

the war; if they thought mendacity was involved, it was the mendacity that Jerrold alleges:

deliberately missing the point. In this view of the personal experience of war, the truth of

subjective experience is insufficient justification: the experience may well have been what it

was alleged to have been, but it should not have been what it was: it was an inadequate

9
experience in the first place. In short, authenticity was all very well, provided it was the

right authenticity.

Even if in the long run it was the value of personal experience and honesty about it that came

to dominate public opinion about the Great War, it is clear that the insistence on the value of

authenticity, based in eyewitness, was far from universal at the time. However, while this

ground for criticism was not uncommon in responses to soldiers’ memoirs, it is vanishingly

rare in comments on the nurses’ writings – this is the ‘absence’ noted above. It is

occasionally visible in praise for them: Sarah MacNaughtan’s memoir provides “a helpful

answer to those who do not see the fulness of the issues of this war, but whose whole sky is

clouded by their personal griefs and fears” (Liverpool Daily Echo, October 29, 1915). Here

the superordination of war aims over mere personal experience is explicit. On one occasion,

but only one, this principle is used as the basis of an extended and virulent attack on a nurse:

a review, written by a woman, of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933).

The opening paragraph lays out the fundamental grounds of rejection:

When the writer of an autobiography sets out, as Miss Vera Brittain claims to do in her

“Testament of Youth,” not only to speak of her own experiences and of her personal

reaction to them, but above and beyond this to stand as representative of her generation,

she should, one would think, be able and willing to show that she has the capacity to view

the period she has lived through as one who sees the essential behind the accidental

characteristics of the age: the universal and constant appearing in its special and fleeting

phenomena (New English Weekly, October 12, 1933).

10
The detailed accusations are manifold. Snobbery: she sees “the common experiences [of the

war] as one who stands in isolation (and – as she would have it – in superior isolation)”.

Self-pitying bitterness: the proper response to suffering and loss, the reviewer says, is “Do it

and don’t talk about it. If you’re hurt, don’t cry.” Hypocrisy: claiming to be the “doomed

generation” and throwing the blame onto the warmongers of the previous generation; whereas

the blame truly lies with “the windbags and sentimentalists who pursue the ghoulish trade of

making capital out of a tragic memory …To honour our dead, the most fitting memorial is

silence.” Outmoded, irrelevant ‘blue-stocking’ feminism: the writer claims the pre-war

generation of women were already entirely independent in mind and spirit – “we were proud

to have done with the fragile feminine”. In all of these respects, the review claims, Vera

Brittain shows that she is not representative of her generation.x

While Vera Brittain is scarcely in need of defence, the implication of this attack is central to

the argument advanced here. It makes clear that it was possible to criticise a nurse’s

personal reminiscences on the same basis as a soldier’s: she is accused of only seeing the

“accidental”, not the “essential…. the universal and constant”. The New English Weekly

position is essentially the same as the nationalist right’s criticism of MacGill, Barbusse and

Remarque: the failure to see the essence of the war behind the ‘accidents’ of purely personal

experience. However, the rarity of this criticism aimed at a nurse should alert us to what is

at stake here: it is the role of gender in the relationship between these accusations and the

value of eyewitness accounts of wartime experience. Here we see a significant divergence in

the reception of war memoirs. In soldier’s memoirs, authenticity was valued by many, if not

the majority, but it was permanently at risk of politically-motivated objections; in nurse

memoirs, it was valued too – and was largely not at risk of such objections.

11
This disparity is observable through the absence in the public response to the nurse memoirs.

Of course, the absence is relative: it is only by making the comparison with the relevant

theme in the response to the soldiers’ memoirs that it becomes visible. The question that

remains to be asked is: why did this disparity exist? It is due to a fundamental asymmetry

between the two sets of memoirs: the authenticity of soldiers’ memoirs derived from the

portrayal of their activities in their own right, a part of which was their response to these

activities; they showed people back home what it felt like to occupy the central role of the

war. Authenticity in the nurses’ memoirs, on the other hand, consisted of eyewitness

accounts of what the soldiers went through and what the nurses did for them: the focus is

firmly centred on the soldiers and their care, and the nurses’ own experience of their role is

secondary.xi

This displacement of the centre of attention from the nurse to the soldier is also visible in two

other forms.

Most reviews take this focus for granted, simply saying that the nurse memoir shows the

men’s nobility. These responses to Madame Eydoux-Demians are typical: she “gathers

together the marks of their heroism … wherever blood flows, or the tears of expiation and

redemption”; her account is “filled and as it were ennobled by the simple narrative of

heroism”, showing our duty of gratitude (Le Mois Littéraire et Pittoresque 32, 177; Le

Temps, March 13, 1915). Or these comments: Kate Luard’s Diary of a Nursing Sister

(Anon, 1915) consists of “vivid pictures of our wounded soldiers … all testify to their

wonderful spirit”, they are “sad stories and gallant records of brave deeds” and the author

“cannot conceal her feelings over their wonderful pluck” (Daily Mail, November 27,1915).

Sarah MacNaughtan is “cheered by the gay spirit of our gallant soldiers” and understands

12
“the greatness of the sacrifice” (Aberdeen Press and Journal (September 13, 1915), Army

and Navy Gazette (October 2, 1915). While the reviews of course point out many other

elements of the texts, comments such as these are a constant refrain. Moreover, the self-

effacing modesty of nurses’ accounts is seen as entirely appropriate: they “withdraw their

presence from between us and the wounded” (Le Journal des Débats, April 16,1915), even if

it is occasionally noted that alongside the admiration they evoke in the reader for the soldiers,

there ought to be some admiration for the nurse herself (Excelsior, October 22, 1915). Some

nurses explicitly state that the focus on the soldiers is the purpose of their writing: in her

Foreword, Käthe Russner says that she did not intend to publish what she had written during

the war because she found it extremely difficult to share her experiences, except among those

closest to her; however, she has belatedly chosen to do so in order to show that the heroism of

the ordinary soldiers was to be seen in the hospitals as much as in the trenches (Russner,

1936, Foreword: n.p.

While admiration for the nurses is frequently expressed in the reviews of their memoirs, it is

clear that the admiration is largely for what they did for the soldiers, rather than for the

personal qualities that a nurse might have manifested in her commitment to duty and care.

Rarely is the stress clearly upon the qualities that the nurses themselves exhibit, whereas

those qualities are emphasised in the soldiers themselves. “Many of the girls are as noble as

the boys” and “the uncomplaining heroism of the soldiers and the nurses …” are among the

few direct tributes to these qualities (Sheffield Independent, December 21, 1917; The Globe,

December 2, 1915). Viscount Allenby also paid the same tribute in his Foreword to Kate

Luard’s second volume of memoirs:

13
 I remember well those days and nights of bitter fighting, and how crushing was the burden

which fell upon the gentle women who tended our wounded. I look back, still, with

admiration on the amazing endurance and self-sacrificing devotion of those Nursing

Sisters in their work of mercy (quoted Acton and Potter, 2015, 37).

The rarity of such tributes, in comparison with the voluminous tributes to soldiers’

endurance, is evidence of where the emphasis lay in the public response to their nurses’

writings.

Secondly, recent studies have shown the extent to which nurses themselves suffered, even if

the majority of their own published narratives demonstrate cheerful resilience and

enthusiasm. The majority of the evidence for their own suffering derives from publications

after the end of the war and unpublished (or recently published) archive material. The

apparently common factor is traumatisation: the constant exposure to horrific sights and

extreme suffering on the part of the soldiers led to disabling forms of emotional instability,

even if usually temporary. Alice Essington-Nelson, who nursed in a rest home for nurses,

wrote:

They sleep sometimes for nearly 24 hrs. Some of them come just dead tired and others

have small septic wounds and others again have had their nerves shattered, one of those

latter when she came just cried if you spoke to her but we nursed her up and in three

weeks she was as fit as ever. ... [S]he told me what had finished her was the night after

Neuve Chappelle when 45 terrible cases had come into her bit of ward and 15 had died

before morning ... her weary body and tired nerves then gave way; …

14
 In an interview long after the war, when Nurse Hitchens is asked about her emotional

response to treating terrible injury, she acknowledges that the work did result in

breakdown for some nurses, but that her medical interest and satisfaction in her nursing

work prevented her own collapse: ‘[T]he friend who went with me and my cousin to

Rouen broke down. She was haunted by the wounds. She was haunted by the suffering …’

(quoted Acton and Potter, 2015, 41, 45-6).xii

Public frankness on the subject had to wait for nurses to publish after the war. Mary Borden

(1928, n.p.) says that she simply does not recognise the woman who did what she did: “I

think that woman, myself, must have been in a trance, or under some horrid spell”.

Henriette Riemann (1930, 77) recalls one of her colleagues being unable to cope: the

operations are so horrible she keeps on bursting into tears, which drop on the operating

instruments. Suse von Hörner-Heintze, who nearly fainted in the operating theatre, quotes

the doctor’s words to her and the others after this difficult night in their frontline hospital:

“Get used to it. Today was the first shit on the table. Going pale, rolling your eyes, spilling

iodine – not on. So get used to this bloody dump: there’ll be a lot more of this” (Hörner-

Heintze, 1936, 123).

As Acton and Potter argue (2020: 348), such things form the background to the revelation of

nurses’ resilience: this is what they fight to avoid, by taking refuge in professional

detachment and in the satisfaction of service, the knowledge that however horrific the things

they are forced to witness may be, they are at least alleviating suffering:

It is common for First World War medical life-writings, especially those published during

the war years, to exalt and foreground the courage of the enlisted or conscripted soldier

15
 and officer alike. Their accounts bear witness to the physical and psychological trauma of

those they care for (and tend to be read in this context), but in doing so they obscure their

own psychological wounds, in what Margaret Higonnet identified as “a history [that] ‘lies

concealed’ beneath that of combatants’ psychological injury”.

These two features – the focus of admiration and the invisibility of trauma - suggest that the

personal qualities that nurses in fact demonstrated in their work had low visibility in their

memoirs and the public response to them.

This analysis has focussed on the public response to the foregrounding of personal experience

in war memoirs and has highlighted a discrepancy which is gender-based. In essence,

nobody questioned nurses’ right to record their personal experiences, which was not the case

for soldiers; and the cause of the discrepancy is the nature of the sense of authenticity that

pervades the nurses’ writings. However, thus far no attention has been paid to the

chronological contexts of these publications, which in fact are crucial because the political

context changed with time. There are two essential changes: firstly – and obviously - the

end of the war; and secondly, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The second is relevant

because whereas the great majority of the French and English language nurse memoirs

appeared during the war, the overwhelming bulk of German nurses published after the Nazi

takeover in 1933.xiii

The French and British post-war nurse memoirs are largely different in tone to the wartime

ones, being franker and darker: the often horrific nature of wounds is more candidly

revealed, the emotional difficulties nurses themselves experienced sometimes come into the

foreground. In most cases, this change of emphasis did not attract criticism. However,

16
when Mary Borden’s Forbidden Zone appeared, the public response – while largely

favourable - did include some criticism for excess candour: “There is too much of the wrong

sort of Eternity about these horrors” (New York Times, June 15, 1930). Vera Brittain herself

condemned sensational accounts of suffering, blaming women such as Mary Borden for

following the example of male war writers (Manchester Guardian, May 2, 1930). The

military historian Cyril Falls gives a measured argument against it:

It is perhaps right that this aspect of the war should be made clear to the public which

knows nothing of it; but there is some risk that the fashion in which the subject is handled

will make it appear that the hospital was for the wounded a place of horror rather than of

relief” (Times Literary Supplement, December 5, 1929).xiv

On the other hand, this criticism was minoritarian. Mary Borden’s book was widely praised,

and not only in publications which supported a negative view of the war, as was Monica

Salmond’s (1935), which was candid about the emotional trauma caused by nursing two of

her brothers, who both died. The only German nurse memoir that received any public

attention between the end of the war and 1933 (Riemann, 1930) was well-received, across the

political spectrum; it was candid about both suffering and shortcomings in the military health

system.xv The new frankness is no doubt due to the fact that in the late- and post-war years,

soldiers’ memoirs had clearly publicly shown the horrific nature of the war, and the nurses’

frankness was no longer the shocking revelation it would have been.xvi

The political context is primarily a question of nationality: the evaluation of the war was not

the same across the three nations in the post-war period; and the majority of the French and

British nurse memoirs were published either during the war or shortly after it, whereas the

17
opposite is true for Germany, where the overwhelming majority of nurse texts appeared after

the Nazis took power. In all three countries, opinions about the war were divided, but in

different ways, and responses to memoirs largely followed those divisions (Palmer, 2018, 96-

103, 191-9, 203-13). With the significant exception we have seen, these divisions were little

reflected in the response to the nurse memoirs in Britain and France, and indeed in the single

pre-Nazi case in Germany (Riemann). However, the German nurse memoir texts that

appeared under the Nazis need a separate analysis, as both the context and the contents were

significantly different.xvii The context is dual: firstly, the debate about the position of

women in the Nazi social order (Palmer, 2021, 183-206); and secondly, the uses to which the

nurse memoirs were put by the Nazi Party (Palmer, forthcoming). The contents are

noticeably franker and darker than the great majority of previous nurse publications, both

about what happened to the soldiers and what happened to the nurses.xviii In both cases,

shortcomings in the military health system figure prominently, yet the texts are also entirely

patriotic. All were well-received in reviews, some of which stressed the extent to which the

nurses shared the hardships endured by the soldiers. In Nazi Germany, nurses’ frankness

was welcomed, not criticised.

In short, although the tone of nurses’ writings post-war was markedly franker than the

wartime writings, for the most part this did not affect their reception, no doubt because the

frankness did not detract from the level of commitment they demonstrated to the soldiers.

That Vera Brittain was the significant exception was due to the exceptional nature of her text.

Testament of Youth is very untypical of nurse writings: firstly, it is overtly critical of the war;

secondly, it is the only one which approaches the autobiographical norm of dealing with a

whole life and not just a limited arena and time frame. The overwhelming bulk of the nurse

memoirs, to the contrary, deal exclusively with their wartime experience, and concentrate

18
overwhelmingly on the actual nursing. Wanting to show “what the whole War and post-war

period has meant to the men and women of my generation”, Vera Brittain set out to write

history in terms of personal life, to quote her original Foreword. By writing something that

is overtly an interpretation of the larger experience of a generation, she enters a terrain that is

foreign to the nurse memoir as a genre.xix

This article set out to analyse a commonality in the public reception of the nurse memoirs and

the soldiers’ memoirs: in both cases, the status of authentic eye-witness was a central feature.

However, behind this commonality we have seen a divergence along gender lines: what was

recognised as authentic was not the same in the two cases. This divergence was especially

visible in a symptomatic silence in the public reception of the nurses’ memoirs: whereas the

soldiers were blamed for speaking in purely personal terms, without reference to the wider

frame of the purpose of the war, this criticism was only once aimed at a nurse, because the

memoir in question was substantially different from the others. In short, where war memoirs

were concerned authenticity lay in the eye of the beholder as much as in the words of the

author, and gender acted as a filter in the process.

19
References.

Where no English translations of French and German books exist, I have not translated the

title.

Acton, C. and Potter, J. 2015. Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and resilience in the

narratives of medical personnel in warzones. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Acton, C. and Potter, J. 2020. ‘“Sticking it”: resilience in the life-writing of medical

personnel in the First World War’. In The First World War and Health: Rethinking

Resilience, edited by Leo van Bergen. Leiden (NL): Brill.

Allenby, E. 1930. “Foreword” in Kate Luard, Unknown Warriors. London: Chatto and

Windus.

Anon. (Luard, K.). 1915). Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front. London:

Macmillan.

Babo, E. von . 1918. Aus dem Kriegstagebuch einer badischen Schwester. Karslruhe: Braun.

Barbusse, H. 1916. Le Feu [Under Fire]. Paris: Flammarion.

Beumelburg W. (923. Douaumont. Oldenburg: Stalling.

Beumelburg, W. 1929. Sperrfeuer um Deutschland. Munich: National-Archiv.

Blunden, E. 1928. Undertones of War. London: Cobden-Sanderson.

Borden, M. 1929. Forbidden Zone. London: Heinemann. Cited in the unpaginated edition

available at https://archive.org/details/forbiddenzone00bord

Braybon, G. 1981. Women Workers in the First World War: The British Experience.

London: Croom Helm.

Brittain, V. 1933. Testament of Youth. London: Gollancz.

Brückner, F. 2017. In der Literatur unbesiegt: Werner Beumelburg. Berlin: LIT Verlag.

20
Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, M. 1919. Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.

Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, M. 1931. Les Hommes de Mauvaise Volonté. Paris: Editions des

Portiques.

Crémieux, J. 1918. Souvenirs d’une Infirmière. Paris: Rauff.

Crémieux J. 1934. Croquis d’Heures Vécues. Fourmies: Imp. Bachy.

Daniel, U. 1997. German Working-Class Women in the First World War. Oxford: Berg

Darrow, M. 1996). ‘French Volunteer Nursing in the First World War’, American Historical

Review 101, 80-106.

Dent, O. 1917. A V.A.D. in France. London: Grant Richards.

Edmonds, C. (pseud., i.e. Carrington, C.). 1929. A Subaltern’s War. London: Peter Davies.

Eydoux-Demians, Mme. 1915. Notes d’une Infirmière 1914. Paris: Plon.

Genevoix, M. 1916. Sous Verdun [Neath Verdun]. Paris: Hachette.

Genevoix, M. 1923. Les Eparges. Paris: Flammarion.

Grabolle, H. 2004. Verdun and the Somme. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado.

Gramont, E. de. 1932 Clair de Lune et Taxi. Paris: Grasset.

Grayzel, S. 1999. Women’s Identities at War. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of

North Carolina Press.

Hadeln, C. von. 1934. Deutsche Frauen, Deutsche Treue. Berlin: Traditions Verlag Kolk.

Hämmerle, C. 2014. ‘Mentally broken, physically a wreck. Violence in War: Accounts of

Nurses in Austro-Hungarian service’. Chapter 6 in Gender and the First World War, edited

by Christa Hämmerle, Oswald Überegger and Birgitta Baader Zaar. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Hörner-Heintze, S. von. 1934. Mädels in Kriegsdienst. Leipzig: Köhler & Amelang. Cited in

the 1936 edition: Munich: Verlag Hermann Wiechmann.

Jerrold, D. 1930. The Lie about the War. London: Faber and Faber.

21
LaMotte, E. 1916. The Backwash of War. New York and London: Putnams.

Launoy, J. de. 1936. Infirmières de Guerre en Service Commandé. Brussels: L'Edition

Universelle. Cited in the edition Memogrammes, 2015.

Luard, K. 1930. Unknown Warriors. London: Chatto and Windus.

Macgill, P. 1916a. The Great Push. London: Herbert Jenkins.

Macgill, P. 1916b. The Red Horizon. London: Herbert Jenkins.

MacNaughtan, S. 1915. A Woman’s Diary of the War. London: Nelson.

Palmer, J. 2018. Memories from the Frontline. London: Palgrave.

Palmer, J. 2021. Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain, France and Germany.

London: Palgrave.

Palmer, J. Forthcoming. ‘The Nazi Party use of Great War nurse memoirs’ (work in

progress).

Panke-Kochinke, B. (2004) Unterwegs und doch Daheim. Frankfurt a. M.: Mabuse-Verlag.

Pflugk-Harttung, E. von. 1936. Frontschwestern. Ein deutsches Ehrenbuch. Berlin: Verlag

Bernard und Graefe.

Planert, U. 1998. Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich. Munich: Vanderhoek and Ruprecht.

Pöll-Naepflin, M. 1934. Fortgerungen-Durchgedrungen. Konstanz: private edition (2nd

impression) published under the name ‘Schwester Maria’.

Pöll-Naepflin, M. 1948. Heimatlos, Staatenlos. Zürich: Splügenverlag, published under the

name ‘Schwester Maria’.

QUAIMNS. 1922. Reminiscent Sketches by Members of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial

Military Nursing Corps. London: J. Bale.

Remarque, E. 1928. Im Westen Nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front]. Berlin:

Propyläen-Verlag.

Riemann, H. 1930. Schwester der Vierten Armee. Berlin: Karl Vögels Verlag.

22
Roger, N. (pseud., i.e. Pittard, H.). 1915. Les Carnets d’une Infirmière. 5 vv. Paris: Attinger

Frères.

Rüdgisch, E. von. 1916. Unterm Roten Kreuz. Lahr in Baden: Heim und Herd.

Russner, K. 1936. Schwesterndienst im Weltkriege. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.

Salmond, M. 1935. Bright Armour. London: Faber and Faber.

Schickedanz, M. 1936). Das Heimatheer der deutschen Frauen im Weltkrieg. 4vv. Leipzig

and Berlin: Teubner.

Schneider, T. 1997. Kriegserlebnis und Legendbildung, vol 1. Osnabrück:

Universiteitsverlag Rausch.

Schneider, T. 2004. Erich Maria Remarques Roman ‘Im Westen Nichts Neues’: Text,

Edition, Entstehung und Rezeption. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Senftleben, E., Foerster, W. and Liesner, G. 1934. Unter dem Roten Kreuz im Weltkriege.

Berlin: Vaterländischer Verlag C. A. Weller.

Thébaud, F. 1986. La Femme aux Temps de la Guerre de 1914. Paris: Stock.

Thurstan, V. 1915. Field Hospital and Flying Column. London: Putnam’s.

Unruh, F. von. 1919. Opfergang [The Way of Sacrifice]. Berlin: Reiss.

Wenzel, A.M. 1931. Deutsche Kraft in Fesseln. Fünf Jahr Schwesterndienst in Sibirien.

Potsdam: Ernte-Verlag.

23
24
i
Media archive searches found very few reviews of German nurse memoirs in wartime; in general, German wartime
media paid little attention to nurses, unlike British and French media (Palmer, 2021, 103-24).
ii
Darrow, 1996; Daniel, 1997; Planert, 1998; Thébaud, 1986; Grayzel, 1999; Braybon, 1981. See also Palmer, 2021,
103-26. There were significant differences between the three nations in this respect; however, this is largely beyond
the scope of our analysis, with the exception of German nurses who published their war memoirs in the Nazi period, to
which we shall return.
iii
Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, December 31, 1916; La Revue 119: 538-41; Le Radical, January 29, 1917. See
also Figaro, December 18, 1916; Revue Bleue, April, 1917; Revue Hebdomadaire, September 29, 1917.
iv
. The grammar is very condensed: it is the shameless sophistry that is hidden from us – i.e. the fact that the false
Tommies, etc., are lies is hidden by writers’ complicity. ‘Rosalie’ was slang for a bayonet. This is a reference to a
constant theme in early official propaganda about the French army, that they did best in charges with fixed bayonets
that led to hand-to-hand fighting; the reality was rather different.
v
Palmer, 2018, 93, 153-4.
vi
This account is taken from Grabolle, 2004, 27-8, citing a 1980 study by D. Kassang, the first based on Unruh’s
original version. Although there is no doubt that Unruh’s pacifism was genuine, along with his commitment to the
post-war Republic and his opposition to its right-wing enemies, it appears that his political conversion came somewhat
later than he claimed.
vii
See the author’s Preface to the second edition, available at https : //babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?
id=mdp.39015005016855 ; view=1up ; seq=13. See also Johns Hopkins library website: http :
//exhibits.library.jhu.edu/exhibits/show/hopkins-and-the-great-war/johns-hopkins- hospital/neutral-interventions/ellen-
la-motte. The ban cannot have been entirely effective, since the book is occasionally mentioned in wartime media; see
The Outpost VII (1), June 1, 1918, Labour Leader, September 19,1918.
viii
I only came across the word once, in a French essay about recent German war books in Revue du Christianisme
Social (January 1, 1930: 57); the context is a contrast between “témoignage authentique” and propaganda.
ix
Original emphasis. See also Clennell Wilkinson, ‘Back to All That’, The London Mercury XXII, 540.
x
Two other reviews criticised Testament of Youth for excessive self-pity, but without invoking the principle that is so
explicit in the New English Weekly, and that links to the nationalist attacks on soldiers’ memoirs: Country Life
(September 2,1933), Daily Express (August 31, 1933). One French paper criticised Clemenceau-Jacquemaire on
roughly similar grounds – insufficient admiration for wounded soldiers’ heroism: Libre Parole, June 29,1919.
xi
That the focus was indeed on the soldiers has been demonstrated elsewhere, through extensive quotation from the
memoir texts (Palmer, 2021, 131-41. See also Acton and Potter, 2015: 34. It is striking that these memoirs deal
virtually exclusively with the nursing experience; any extraneous material is limited to their journeys to and from their
postings and their days off. They share this exclusiveness of focus with the soldiers’ memoirs.
xii
See also Hämmerle, 2014:, 91, 102; Panke-Kochinke, 2004: passim.
xiii
I am assuming that memoirs published in the immediate aftermath of the war, such as Clemenceau-Jacquemaire
(1919) and QUAIMNS (1922) are effectively wartime texts, since the short intervening period suggests they were
written substantially in the war. The chronology of publication is in Palmer, 2021, 4.
xiv
The later French texts were largely ignored: I have not found any reviews of Julie Crémieux’s frank but enthusiastic
second memoir (1934), and Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire’s second (1931) received little attention.
xv
Borden, reviewed Morecombe Guardian, February 8, 1930; Daily Herald, November 22, 1929; Aberdeen Press and
Journal, May 8, 1930; Dundee Courier, November 5,1929; Yorkshire Post, March 19, 1930; Times Literary
Supplement, December 5, 1929; Sunday Times, November 24, 1929; Dundee Evening Telegraph, January 10, 1930.
Salmond, reviewed Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 1935; Times, September 13, 1935; Daily Telegraph,
October 8, 1935; Aberdeen Press and Journal,January 1, 1936; Derby Evening Telegraph, November 22, 1935; Sunday
Times, September 22, 1935; Country Life, September 21, 1935; Spectator, September 20, 1935. For an analysis of the
reception of Riemann, see Palmer, 2021, 167-8. One other German nurse published a war memoir in this period
(Wenzel, 1931); it is untypical as it narrates her time in Siberia inspecting prisoner-of-war facilities, one of several
nurse memoirs on the same theme; on this literature, see Palmer, 2021, 267-75.
xvi
In the case of two nurses who published both during and after the war, the second memoirs are notably franker than
the wartime ones (Anon., i.e. Luard, K., 1915 and Luard, 1930; Crémieux, J., 1918 and 1934). In addition, many of
Borden’s reviewers thought hers was the first war book by a woman, which suggests that the wartime nurse literature
was largely forgotten ten years later. The Frankfurter Zeitung made the same assertion about Riemann (November 11,
1930).
xvii
The numbers are also striking: several large compilations contain extracts of more than 100 authors (Hadeln, 1934;
Senftleben et al., 1934; Pflugk-Harttung, 1936). In addition, there were eight substantial individual memoirs and further
compilations of reprinted extracts for use in schools (e.g. Schickedanz, 1936).
xviii
This is partly because many German nurses served on the Eastern Front, where conditions were markedly worse,
including for the medical system, than on the Western Front.
xix
Two other nurse memoirs have some similarity in this respect. Elisabeth de Gramont’s 5 volumes of memoirs
include one (1932) about wartime, which includes her nursing experience, but gives it little space. Maria Pöll-
Naepflin’s memoir of wartime (1934) includes a substantial amount of material about other matters, but is dominated by
her time as a nurse; it is the first of two volumes, the second of which deals with her life post-war (1948).