It can’t have escaped anyone’s attention that the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I is almost upon us. Huge amounts have been written about almost every aspect of the war. But some topics have received less attention than others. One of those is the role of French women during the war, a subject that is a theme of my novel, The House at Zaronza.
A role at one remove
Ostensibly, women had a limited role in the war. The men did the fighting. Despite running farms, working in munitions factories and undertaking other war work behind the lines, women were seen as removed from the war. They were wives, mothers, sweethearts, widows, daughters, but had no direct role. Things were very different in World War II, when women played an important part in the resistance.
The nearest women came to an active role in the war effort was as volunteer nurses. Even here, there was ambiguity about their involvement. Right at the beginning of the war, the French government even told women to stop volunteering to be nurses, so great was the flood of requests to set up hospitals and organise ambulances. As the war progressed and it became obvious that it would not all be over by Christmas 1914, attitudes changed and the essential role of nurses at the Front was acknowledged.
The first two parts of my novel are set in Corsica. But in the third part, the main character, Maria Orsini, becomes a volunteer nurse, first at a converted convent in Corsica. She then applies for training under a military nursing scheme in 1916. She works in a field hospital in Verdun and then transfers to Amiens during the German spring offensive of 1918.
A contemporary account
A big challenge for me was to find out what it was like to serve as a French military nurse. Plenty of contemporary accounts by British nurses exist, but there are few in French, or so it appears. Happily, I came across a memoir written by Claudine Bourcier. Her great-granddaughter found the memoir by chance and had it published.
This was the break I needed. This redoubtable character told it as it was. She was already in her fifties and so somewhat older than most of her colleagues. What she recounted about her experiences was incredibly valuable to me in writing my novel.
She writes about nursing practice and medical advances. She also describes the jealousy that sometimes existed between nurses, the predatory doctors who regarded themselves as lords of all they surveyed and the stultifying bureaucracy that got in the way of providing care. All this appears in my novel.
These heroines still went largely unsung. Some received medals individually. But French women were not considered to be worthy of receiving the vote until after the liberation in 1944. Some claim that the right-wing Charles de Gaulle allowed them the vote only because women were thought to be more conservative than men. In 1918, things went back to the way they were before the war, with the exception that there were rather fewer men around.
Here is a short extract from my novel, describing Maria’s early nursing experiences:
Corsica had been turned into a hospital island, a place where the war wounded came to recuperate – and in some cases to die. The convent just outside Zaronza had become a base hospital and each week, received its contingent of the wounded, who had been gassed, machine-gunned, mortared and torn apart by shells, patched up in the dressing stations, and then operated on in the hospitals behind the lines. Those considered well enough to travel were sent on. After a train journey of several days and a sea crossing they arrived here. Some were in a poor state, their dressings unattended to and infection setting in. This was the result of lack of personnel to clean and re-bandage their wounds after their operation, and a journey during which they received little care.
Some were sick with dysentery, piles, trench foot and other illnesses. These men required more nursing care than the wounded. A few with tuberculosis also arrived, although they should have been consigned to isolation hospitals near the Front. These men were put in a separate ward in the basement.
You always knew the ones who were going to die. They had a haunted look about their eyes, as if they could already see beyond this life to something we couldn’t yet make out.
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I have only just caught up with this post and I am so glad I did. Both my grandmothers nursed in WW1 and one of them in France. She actually contracted gangrene and had to have an arm amputated. Women certainly played their part and it is wonderful to have them celebrated by you here. Thank you.
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Your grandmother sounds an incredibly brave woman, as indeed most of them were. As far as I can make out, very little has been written about the contribution French nurses made to the war effort. What I have learned has been gleaned mostly from contemporary memoirs, on which I have drawn for my novel. They really are the unsung heroines.
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I am sure they all were and it is extraordinary that there is so little written … so glad that you have picked this up and looking forward to reading the book which will be ordered for my trip to the UK at the end of the month.
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I found very little about the contribution of French nurses – but that might just be my less than assiduous research. I hope you enjoy The House at Zaronza – and your trip to the UK.
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I’m fascinated by the nursing aspect of your novel! I can say after ‘way too many years as a nurse that jealousy between nurses, overbearing, arrogant doctors and the muddle of bureaucracy in healthcare hasn’t changed very much! Counting down the hours now to publication…yay!
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I hope you won’t find too many inaccuracies! I was lucky to find that memoir, since that helped me a lot with the nursing aspect.
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Very close family friends lived through the terrors of the Franco era. Their story was that out
of a concentration camp. Not much has been written about these events…..Many due to
finances, could not leave Spain. Lucky for the few that left and did not live in caves and eat
raw mountain cat…Hiding in the belly of these majestic mountains, said to be taller then the
alps gave incredible survival skills.
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That was a dark period in Spain’s history, without a doubt. I have written a post about the camp at Septfonds not far from us where Spanish refugees were interned and about the Spanish cemetery there.
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i did find your article and wanted to say this…..you are correct, a very dark past of
Spanish history. The only escape was to move out of the country as did the lucky
few. The history of this period is almost unknown, just as the ‘Spanish influenza’
So ignorant of those to think it started in Spain, when it was in USA and most of
Europe in the last two centuries. Interesting notation; researching this i found
the commentary mentioning how strongly it is believed it came from China.
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It is unfortunate that some topics in history are so little studied. As for ‘Spanish’ flu, unfortunately, it has got stuck with that name whereas, as you suggest, it may well have come from China or the Far East.
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yes, and did you know how the name was coined? Since most of Europe was involved with
so much unrest and war the thought never occurred to any of these poor ignorant fools to
communicate what this deadly virus was doing to their population. The focus was only about
war. Unlike Spain, since the days of Columbus and before, most of the history of their world
was well documented and one can even find in the library of Madrid carefully written events and
of course noble family coat of arms… So, since they were the only ones that wrote about
this virus and the many dying, the world ignorantly dubbed ‘Spanish influenza’ ….Now with so
much research that is available to be read by those that have interest, the real truth comes out.
You, as an author with published works, can very easily find this online with no problem.
It is not what i ‘suggest’ …it is historically documented.
Love, love history, i am certain you as well…….:)
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Thank you for this information.
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