Publisher's Synopsis
From the Crimean war to the Korean war, wartime nurses have been facing their own battles. In the Crimea, Florence Nightingale defied male prejudice and the conventions of the time, caring for soldiers in hospitals seething with cholera and "awash with sewage". Reports from the South African wars of 1899-1902 told of nurses calmly dressing wounds in shell-bombed streets. Over 10,000 nurses and 23,000 women of Voluntary Aid Detachments served worldwide in the First World War. From the icy conditions of Archangel to the heat of Mesopotamia, nurses battled away in tented hospitals. By the time of the Second World War, the Forces finally conceded that there was a place for military nurses close to the battlefield itself. Exactly one hundred years after proving themselves in Crimea, the wartime nurse was officially in action in Korea - ready and willing to meet all demands, as had the generations before them.
