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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Nurse Memoirs
from the Great War
in Britain, France,
and Germany

Jerry Palmer
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine

Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK

Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK

Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series
that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in liter-
ary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised
of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the
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with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all
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as well as established ones.

Editorial board:
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages
and Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies,
Stony Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M
University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies,
University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
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State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State
University, USA

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613
 Jerry Palmer

Nurse Memoirs from

the Great War in
Britain, France, and
Germany
Jerry Palmer
London, UK

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-82874-5    ISBN 978-3-030-82875-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82875-2

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Emmy von Rüdgisch, Unterm Roten Kreuz (1916)

“This is not a ‘men’s war’, as wars have been hitherto, but one in which both
sexes … must share the burden and responsibilities.” Lady Jellicoe, Preface to
Women War Workers (1917).
“One can see the war from many angles. The nurse sees it from a very special one.”
A report of a conversation with a nurse in Vorwärts, 20.8.1915.
“Soldiers and civilians … are two nations, not one. But there is a third nation, the
nation of nurses. They are midway between us. Their point of view is unique.”
Birmingham Daily Gazette (16.3.1918), review of Enid Bagnold, Diary
Without Dates.
 Writing this book during the Covid lockdowns in 2020–2021 I saw daily
images of doctors and nurses working under exceptional, and exceptionally
wearing, circumstances.
All allowances made for the differences between a war and an epidemic, the
echoes of what I was reading in nurse memoirs were loud and clear.
I dedicate this book to doctors’ and nurses’ commitment to duty under
circumstances whose difficulties others can only imagine.
 Praise for Nurse Memoirs from the Great
War in Britain, France, and Germany

“Jerry Palmer’s book is the first to offer a sustained comparative analysis of pub-
lished British, French and German First World War nurse memoirs. His well-
informed discussion of the political, socio-cultural and medical contexts in which
the memoirs were written and read not only reveals fascinating similarities and
differences between the nurses’ writings, but equally sheds light on lesser-known
examples, particularly from Germany and Austria.”
—Alison S. Fell, Dean of the School of Histories, Languages & Cultures,
University of Liverpool, UK

“The memoirs of nurses bring us closer to the challenges and trauma of the Great
War as they do the increased involvement of women in conflict arenas and in writ-
ing about their experiences. Palmer’s book draws our gaze when we may wish to
look away. Both frank and reassuring accounts reveal the core business of nurs-
ing—dealing with the blood and guts while sustaining optimism and hope. They
also reveal the constraints of such writing to avoid criticism, negotiate political
sensitivities about retaining morale, etc., and not letting personal narrative disrupt
national priorities. As such, these memoirs offer a ‘limited revelation’, signalling
the largely non-activist trajectory of nurses in their commitment to soldier-cen-
tred/patient-centred care. Stuck in a pandemic, we may all be grateful for this
pivot to the individual over and beyond the political knockabout. Quietly, power-
fully, with an eye to the wounds of others, the rise of nursing marked the rise
of women.”
—Paul Crawford, Professor of Health Humanities, University of Nottingham, UK

“Jerry Palmer’s book on nurses’ writings on World War I – English, French and
German – is a fascinating contribution to the scholarly work on war-memoirs. It is
not so much about what has been done, but how this work is reflected upon, by
the nurses themselves and by the reviewers of their books. Palmer places their work
in multiple contexts: in time (written and/or published during or after the war);
in ideology (feminism, nationalism, nazism), and geography (looking for interna-
tional comparisons and national differences). It makes it a highly important con-
tribution to the medical-history of war in general and World War I especially.”
—Leo van Bergen, Leiden University Medical Centre, Netherlands, author of
Before my Helpless Sight. Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the
Western Front, 1914–1918; and editor of Medicine, Conflict and Survival
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Bibliography  17

2 Hospitals and Nursing Before the Great War 19

Great Britain  22
France  27
Germany  31
Summary  36
Reform and Wartime  37
Bibliography  43

3 Nurses and the Military Medical Services in the Great War 47

Medicine and War  48
Military Medical Systems  52
Bibliography  68

4 Women and War Work (1): Debates and Issues 73

Women’s Work and the War Effort  74
Women’s Rights  77
Women in the Labour Force: (1) Germany  82
Women in the Labour Force: (2) France  88
Women in the Labour Force: (3) Great Britain  92
Conclusion  97
Bibliography  98

xi
xii Contents

5 Women and War Work (2): Nursing103

Conclusion 125
Bibliography 126

6 The Nurse Memoirs (1)129

The Narrative Strategies of Nurse Memoirs: The Generic
Framework 129
The Narrative Strategies of Reassuring Texts 141
Bibliography 152

7 The Nurse Memoirs (2)155

The Narrative Strategies of Frank Texts 155
The Spectrum of Possibilities 169
Conclusion to Chaps. 6 and 7 178
Bibliography 180

8 The Nurse Memoirs (3): Nurse Memoirs in Nazi Germany183

The German Nurse Memoirs in the Context of Their Publication 189
Bibliography 206

9 The Rhetorical Strategies of Nurse Memoirs211

Bibliography 233

10 After the War: Nursing Reform and Collective Memory237

Bibliography 249

11 Conclusion253
Bibliography 264

Appendices267

Index283
 List of Tables

Table B.1 Mentions of nurses and of soldiers in the omitted titles,

combining the two search terms for soldiers 276
Table B.2 Mentions of nurses and soldiers, combining the search terms
for soldiers, by title across the first post-war decade,
measuring the disparity in numbers of mentions 278
Table B.3 Mentions of soldiers by search terms and by title, 1919 and
1928279

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Nurses’ memoirs from the Great War form a substantial body of literature,
which offered their contemporaries a public record of something unprec-
edented: the experiences of large numbers of women directly involved in
war. Each text is of course a unique record of personal experience, and this
is the element that dominates these writings; it has the appeal and the
authority that derive from the implicit statement “I was there, I saw it”.
However, while each text is indeed the record of personal experience, the
commonalities are massive, dictated as they are by the shared circum-
stances—circumstances, moreover, so dramatic and so demanding that
they form the core and the overwhelming bulk of these texts.
The experiences and the circumstances place these memoirs at the heart
of a group of historical processes, or—to vary the metaphor—at the inter-
section point where these processes converge. Viewed from one perspec-
tive, they record the experiences of ordinary women directly caught up in
the cataclysm of the Great War; in this respect, they take their place along-
side soldiers’ memoirs, as both soldiers and nurses were ordinary people in
these most extraordinary of circumstances. From a second perspective, the
history of gender relations, they record some of the actions that brought
the first wave of feminism to its culmination in the expansion of European
women’s suffrage and their enlarged presence in the labour force. Thirdly,
these nurses’ writings sit at the heart of a turning point in the development
of the medical profession and public health systems, a point marked by the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Palmer, Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain, France,
and Germany, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82875-2_1
2 J. PALMER

widespread recognition of the need for a skilled medical workforce along-

side doctors.
A playful parallel illustrates what is at stake here. A character in David
Lodge’s academic novel Small World proposes a thesis on T.S. Eliot’s
influence on Shakespeare. Behind the historical absurdity lies a defensible
position: that reading Shakespeare in the context of the twentieth century,
mindful of the poetic innovations of modernism, may lead one to see dif-
ferent things in Shakespeare’s verse; the wilful quality of the proposition
provokes reflection on the multiplicity of possible contexts in the act of
reading. Similarly, the place that the nurses’ memoirs occupy in relation to
processes with different dynamics implies that both their composition and
their reception have multiple contexts. While it is beyond obvious to say
that all writing implies some context or other, it is in the specification of
context(s) that the interest lies: the choices of context for a reading of the
nurse memoirs may lead to different interpretations of the texts them-
selves. This is the starting point of the analysis that follows, which exam-
ines them in the context of the conduct of the war, of women’s rights and
roles in the war, and of the wartime nurses’ position in the history of the
medical profession. We shall see that the focus on multiple contexts leads
to an analysis attentive to the range of experiences that the authors record,
and especially to symptomatic silences in the corpus—in other words, to
what is not said, and not said for good reason. In such an analysis, the
personal, subjective dimension of experience, which dominates the surface
of the texts, is incorporated in attention to the themes of shared experience.
In all the European combatant nations the Great War saw an unprece-
dented involvement of women in activities for which, according to con-
temporary norms, they were unsuited—unprecedented both in terms of
types of activity and in terms of numbers; military nursing was only one
among others.1 This new situation was widely commented at the time,
both favourably and unfavourably; beneath the myriad detail was the per-
ception that the scale of the involvement was such that the social order
might be irretrievably altered. On the positive side, there was close to

1
More exactly, it was unprecedented in collective memory. Women in combat have a long
history, but it was little known at the time, and war was seen as overwhelmingly if not exclu-
sively masculine. There were in fact a number of women soldiers in the Great War, on the
Eastern and Balkan Fronts; two wrote memoirs available in English (Bochkareva, 1919;
Sandes, 1927; extracts of both are in Higonnet, 1999). Various British newspapers carried a
eulogistic report of Marie Bochkareva on 28.7.1917 (e.g. Daily Telegraph, “Russia’s Joan
of Arc”).
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

universal recognition that women’s new roles were to be welcomed, given

the scale of manpower loss to the armies. In reformist circles the changes
were welcomed for the impetus they would give to female emancipation,
both social and political; in conservative circles, these changes were viewed
negatively, even if accepted as necessary in the circumstances. In the three
nations with which this analysis is concerned, the war did indeed bring
about lasting changes in some respects—women’s moves into jobs previ-
ously considered exclusively male, and voting rights (although not in
France). Nursing, as we shall see, was one of the activities most affected by
wartime and post-war innovation. In addition to the universal acceptance
of the necessity of women’s new roles in wartime, there was widespread
admiration for the way in which they adapted to these new roles.
The nurse memoirs form part of the successive international waves of
war literature that were published from 1915 onwards. There were two
major waves (Palmer, 2018: 41–3); the first lasted until 1921, after which
there was a trough until the second wave started in 1928; contemporaries
ascribed the second to the outstanding success of Remarque’s All Quiet on
the Western Front (1928).2 War literature consists of disparate groups of
texts, of which the most significant for our purposes are military histories
(some of which were commercially very successful), the memoirs of mili-
tary and political leaders, and the memoirs of ordinary people plunged
(actively or passively) into the conflict; of the latter, memoirs by frontline
soldiers are by far the most numerous and include the great majority of the
best-selling war texts. Nurses’ memoirs form part of this third group: the
authors’ status as nurses clearly locates them as ‘ordinary people’, even if
some were women drawn from the ranks of the nobility.3 While their social
status no doubt drew attention to their activities, as nurses the experiences
they record in their memoirs are comparable to those of ordinary soldiers,
with the important proviso that—unlike most of the soldiers—the over-
whelming majority of the nurses were volunteers.
Nurses’ memoirs are far less numerous than soldiers’, between 100 and
200 against several thousand. That there should have been large numbers
of soldiers’ memoirs is unsurprising: there were some 20 million soldiers

2
It sold well in excess of 1 million copies in Germany alone before it was banned by the
Nazis; domestic plus international sales in 1928–1930 amounted to 2 million copies
(Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 6.7.30).
3
Among the authors, Baroness von Babo (1918), Madame de la Boulaye (1919), Lady
Salmond (1935).
4 J. PALMER

in the three armies, and they were drawn from literate populations. The
numbers of nurses involved in the war was only a fraction of this num-
ber—some 300,000 across the three nations, roughly pro rata by nation
(see Chap. 3 for details). However, the number of texts by nurses appear-
ing over a period of roughly 20 years is substantial, albeit that some were
only published in extract form. The bulk of the French and British texts
were by volunteer nurses; in the German case, many were by nurses who
were members of the patriotic women’s associations that were the back-
bone of the German Red Cross; these women were not “professional”
nurses in the usual sense, but were often trained and experienced. Since
the focus of this study is nurse memoirs in their original context(s), the
texts considered are those published before World War II.4

Nurse memoirs by date of publication and by language:

1914–1921 1922–1932 1933–1939

English 24a 2 2
French 15 2 2
German 9 3 80a

a
These figures include edited collections of short texts. The German figure for 1933–1939 is an underes-
timate as it does not include the dozens of extracts from nurses’ correspondence in Senftleben et al. (1934)
The English-language figures include some by American authors, the French include one Belgian and the
German memoirs include texts by Austrian and German-speaking Finnish and Swiss nurses.

The periodisation in this table is based on the external events that cre-
ated the contexts in which the nurse memoirs were written and received.
Up to around 1920–1921 war memoirs (both soldiers’ and nurses’) were
essentially contemporary with the events they recorded and their publica-
tion is part of the first wave of war literature. This division, even if the
exact date is arbitrary, shows two things. Firstly, that the first wave did
indeed come to an end: although memoirs continued to be published, the
quantities diminished substantially during the mid-1920s, in the case of
both soldiers and nurses.5 Secondly, analysis of the texts will reveal signifi-
cant differences based on the context of publication; these differences are

4
Many more manuscript diaries and memoirs have been published over the last three
decades and I occasionally refer to them for purposes of comparison.
5
This may be partly because publishers were reluctant to publish war memoirs during the
mid-1920s, in all three countries, on the (mistaken) grounds that the public had lost interest
(Palmer, 2018: 95, 192–3, 208–10).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

strongly marked by both nationality and chronology, despite the many

commonalities of the nursing experience which are clear in the texts
themselves.
This temporal division is seen also in public attention to nurse memoirs.
Given their publication history, it is inevitable that most of the British and
French attention appeared during the war years, in the form of reviews, of
reprints of extracts, and of news items devoted to the nurses themselves.
This attention was very unequally divided, with the bulk of it devoted to a
few nurses.6 In Britain, the women of Pervyse (Reuss, 2012) received
extended media coverage, and a few memoirs were widely reviewed. In
France, only three nurse memoirs—out of 15 wartime publications—
received extensive attention, in the form of both reviews and reprints.
Reviewing of German nurse texts during the war years was extremely
restricted, to the extent that it is unusable as an indicator of public opin-
ion.7 After the war, the memoirs by Mary Borden, Henriette Riemann,
Vera Brittain, and Monica Salmond were widely reviewed. Post-1920
French nurse texts were largely ignored, as indeed were most of the war-
time texts.
The second wave of war literature started around ten years after the
Armistice and its massive success shows that the publishers’ estimate of
public interest was wrong. At the time, it was said that the ten years’ gap
allowed the possibility of retrospection and some analytic distance (Palmer,
2018: 96–7, 208–10). In the cases of both soldiers and nurses, there is
some support for this theory. For example, Edmund Blunden wrote two
versions of his memoirs, one in 1918 and one in the mid-20s, and the dif-
ference in tone is marked; Ernst Jünger re-edited his 1919 memoir, with
many significant additions during the 1920s; and Ludwig Renn (1928)
adopted a narrative structure which created a clear distance from his real
wartime experience (Palmer, 2018: 113–6, 227, 241). Three nurses pub-
lished two versions of their memoirs with around a decade’s separation

6
I have excluded Edith Cavell from this account, on the grounds that although she was a
nurse, public attention to her was not based on this element of her activities.
7
I have found a total of four reviews of the wartime texts (three in small circulation jour-
nals) in a search based on the annual bibliography of book reviews and online searches of
German media archives; however, the annual review bibliography is far from complete where
newspaper reviews are concerned, and the amount of full-text searchable material in the
online archives is limited.
6 J. PALMER

and with significant differences between the earlier and later versions.8
Maria Pöll-Naepflin only published in 1934 and her book is very different
from the majority of nurse memoirs (see below). Vera Brittain made sev-
eral unsuccessful attempts to write her memoirs before settling on the
version published in 1933: the book is as much about the way in which the
war changed her, especially her opinions about the war and women’s posi-
tion in society, as it is about the experience of nursing, and there is clear
evidence of retrospective re-evaluation of her experiences (Layton, 1987).
Mary Borden found it impossible to publish her memoir (1929) during
the war. In these cases, retrospection clearly played a role. German nurses
who published belatedly wrote in an entirely different way about their
experiences to the ones who published during the war or immediately
after it. In Germany, only two published between 1920 and the Nazi
period received any substantial public attention: Riemann (1930) and
Brändström (1922/1929).9
The introduction of a second dividing line at 1932–1933 is dictated by
the Nazi seizure of power. While there is no visible evidence of the change
in Germany exerting an influence upon the few British and French nurses
who published after this date, the difference in German nurses’ writings is
dramatic; the numbers alone suggest that the existence of the new regime
changed nurses’ understanding of their experiences; at the very least, the
Nazi seizure of power provided new opportunities for nurses to publish.
German nurses’ use of these opportunities created a set of memoirs that
are distinctively different from the rest of the body of nurse literature, and
will be analysed separately (see Chap. 8).
Central to the analysis pursued here is the history of changes in the
place of nursing within the medical profession during the decades that
preceded and followed the Great War: these changes are part of the con-
text in which wartime nurses wrote memoirs. Of particular significance is
the role of volunteer nurses, who produced many of the memoirs. At the
outbreak of war in 1914, the medical systems of the armies were rapidly
shown to be inadequate. This recognition provoked many changes, among
which was the enrolment of very large numbers of volunteer nurses—in

8
Kate Luard (Anon, 1915; Luard, 1930), Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire (1919,
1931), and Julie Crémieux (1918, 1934).
9
The Swedish nurse Elsa Brändström’s memoir (1922/1929) was very well received in
Germany, and she became a folk hero. Hers is a special case: her status as a neutral allowed
her to take care of German prisoners of war in Russia. See Appendix A.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

fact, the overwhelming majority of the nurses who served, of the order of
90%, were women with no previous experience of nursing; they either
served on a voluntary basis, or were enrolled in the military health organ-
isations, often with a minimum of training. In the decades preceding
1914, the status of nurse training had been a substantial issue within the
medical professions and public health authorities of all three countries. As
has been clearly established by historians of British nursing, there were
tensions between volunteer nurses and professional nurses during the war,
which were multi-dimensional. On the one hand, professional nurses had
good reason to fear that widespread volunteer nursing would hinder their
efforts to establish nursing as a distinct profession, with its own skills; in
addition, they were outraged—at least some of them, some of the time—
by what they saw as the unprofessional attitudes of volunteer nurses. The
latter, on the other hand, accused professional nurses of an excessively
rigid attitude towards hierarchical discipline and a lack of sympathy for
patients’ suffering (Fell, 2011; Hallett, 2013). As Hallett points out else-
where, professional nurses tended to adopt a different style in their writ-
ings, focussing on the facts of their activities rather than on the emotional
impact that nursing wounded men had on them personally; whereas vol-
unteer nurses—who were more likely to write with a view to publication—
were also more likely to “reflect on the meaning of suffering, and to
express their emotional responses to it”. There are no studies of French
and German wartime nursing which systematically address this issue and
despite contemporary doubts about the adequacy of volunteer nursing,
there is little evidence of professional/volunteer tension, although there is
certainly evidence of other tensions within their military health systems
(see below).
Nurse memoirs also form part of the medical history of the war—both
Leo van Bergen (2009) and Ana Carden-Coyne (2014) draw on them as
sources. While the clinical details lie beyond our scope, it is clear that the
nurse experience was largely dictated by the medical systems in which they
worked. As we shall see, wartime saw extensive innovation in medicine,
which was also a significant element of the politics of wartime. In practice,
nurses say little in their memoirs about the changes in practice which are
the focus of medical history, perhaps because many of the memoirs were
written by volunteer nurses with relatively little training. Nonetheless, the
relationship between the nurse memoirs and the medical systems which
framed them will indeed figure in our analysis.
8 J. PALMER

The literature about the nurses’ war memoirs considers them in the
variety of contexts suggested here. In a wide-ranging analysis of women’s
writings about the war, including nurse memoirs, Claire Tylee explores the
ways in which the experiences of the war changed both women’s self-­
perception and their perception of the world around them. Her starting
point is the difference between women’s contemporary writing about the
war and men’s, which focussed overwhelmingly on the battlefield experi-
ence: women cast their net wider, to encompass “the social context of
belligerence and its connection with personal relations and the quality of
ordinary life. … The female dimension of the history of the First World
War concerns politics, employment, national service. Women’s war litera-
ture reflects these concerns”. She notes the wide variety of ways in which
the gendered experience was reflected in this literature. For example, con-
trasting Vera Brittain’s record of her war years with the poet May Cannon’s,
she reflects on the similarity of their experience—both lost their fiancés—
and the divergence of their conclusions. In May Cannon, we never sense a
gulf that separates her generation from the previous one, whereas Vera
Brittain’s account is marked by “the gap across which she regards the
enthusiasms of her youth from an ironic distance”.
While many of the interactions women record in their writings are cer-
tainly real, and with real effects, Tylee largely disregards the boundary
between fiction and factual narratives in the interests of the flow of ideas
about gender and how it is to be lived. From this point of view, the war is
seen primarily as the ideological context of gendered experiences, which
Tylee shows was subject to multiple interpretations because gender was
inevitably a point of potential contention. In the present context, nurses’
gender had implications for the way in which they represented their expe-
riences due to tensions surrounding the deployment of women in wartime.
In a second way of considering the nurse memoirs, historians read them
as the record of women negotiating the unprecedented experiences
brought about by their employment. Even professional nurses with war-
time experience were shocked by what they saw. The majority of the Great
War nurses were volunteers, many from relatively privileged backgrounds—
inevitably so, since volunteering was not easy for working class women, for
economic reasons. The ubiquitous presence of damaged male bodies was
way beyond the experience of the overwhelming majority of women.
Some of the nurse memoirs can be read as an elaboration of coping strate-
gies, designed to enable them to live through the terrible situations in
which they found themselves (Panke-Kochinke, 2004; Acton & Potter,
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

2015: 31–51). More precisely, the coping strategies may be seen as a

response to the pressure caused by the contradiction between prescribed
gender norms and the reality of war (Hämmerle, 2014: 91–5). According
to both Hämmerle, and Acton and Potter, several nurse writers were
clearly traumatised (2014: 95; 2015: 36–40). Alternatively, to take a more
immediate focus, these strategies were designed to help in the process of
mourning their own losses (Fell, 2011), or—to cast the net wider—to
convey the personal experience of a unique situation, “the precipice
between the exhilaration of service and the trauma of witnessing” (Santanu
Das, quoted Hallett, 2016: 58). In this instance, the role of gender is less
central than elsewhere, since male orderlies and doctors record similar
nervous stress (Acton & Potter, 2015: 31–50). Here it is less the ideologi-
cal significance of experience that is the focus than its lived quality. In
addition, nurses’ experiences of the war varied greatly depending upon
where they nursed: conditions for nurses on the Western Front were mark-
edly better than on the other fronts; the majority of British and French
memoirs are about the former, whereas the German nurse texts include a
lot of attention to the Eastern Front, where conditions were often
appalling.
The role of shock in nurses’ experience is visible to different degrees in
their memoirs. Often this is due to differences in previous medical experi-
ence. As Christine Hallett has shown in several texts, there are significant
divergences between volunteer and professional nurses’ writings. She
shows the different values incorporated in the act of nursing by the two;
this turned around the question of professional detachment, to which
some volunteer nurses opposed a form of commitment to and involve-
ment with patients which she calls “emotional nursing” (Hallett, 2013).10
In particular, she considers the relationship between nurses’ motivation
(doing a job versus making a contribution to the war) and their interpreta-
tion of their experiences in different circumstances. For example, the vol-
unteer nurses who were able to work largely independently from military
and political chains of command during the first part of the war, due to the
inadequate planning of the military health services, were able to give
accounts which are as close to adventure stories as to accounts of nursing

10
There is a telling instance in Pöll-Naepflin: her supervisor wants to remove her from care
for a wounded officer, due to her obvious emotional attachment. The situation is resolved by
the man’s death, and Pöll-Naepflin reflects that she did indeed probably love him (Pöll-­
Naepflin, 1934: 90–1).
10 J. PALMER

work (e.g. 2016: 29–47). As we shall see, “adventurism” was a criticism

aimed at some nurses, especially in the early part of the war; this too is part
of the context of their writings. At the same time, she compares the auto-
biographical accounts with public understandings of the war, especially
propaganda. In approaching nurse memoirs in this way, Hallett shows the
relationship between personal experience and the ideological dimension of
the nurses’ writings. In a telling example, she takes four nurse memoirs
based on the common experience of working in the same hospital, even
nursing the same patients, and shows how the accounts vary in accordance
with the writer’s overall interpretation of the wartime experience (2016:
87–92). The articulation of personal experience and the public meanings
of the war is central to the analysis that follows, based on the difference
between accounts which are largely reassuring to the reader and those
which are unsettling, a difference which can be traced in contemporary
responses to the texts.
Nurses’ memoirs are only one of the ways in which women recorded
their contribution to the war effort, or recorded their attitude towards the
war. Among the myriad ways in which women wrote about the events of
the war, two are of particular relevance here: women’s political stances,
and their accounts of their contribution through work. While the details
are certainly relevant to our analysis of the nurses’ memoirs, two common
elements stand out beyond the detail. Firstly, in women’s political state-
ments, two questions inevitably arose because of women’s previous
involvement in campaigns: pacifism and the right to vote. Secondly, in
women’s remarks about war work, discussion of women replacing men
and women’s place in the social order could not be avoided. In both cases,
women’s voices were varied, but what is immediately obvious, when read-
ing the nurses’ memoirs, is the latter’s near-silence on both issues. It is not
difficult to see why: firstly, nursing was already substantially a female occu-
pation and here there was little question of women replacing men; sec-
ondly, involvement as a nurse bypassed the question of pacifism: by
definition, the nurse was both a patriot and a humanitarian, which placed
her outside the realm of this debate. However, this is not to say that any
of these issues are irrelevant when analysing the nurse memoirs: they are
indeed relevant, but as part of the context in which nurses wrote and were
read, not as part of the content of their writings.
It has been strongly argued that women’s involvement in war work
constituted a transgression of gender boundaries. To quote a French
source, writing in 1912: “It seems paradoxical to unite these two words:
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

woman and war” (Darrow, 1996: 80). That it was transgressive was based
on the distinction between the homeland and the front—women “natu-
rally” belonged in the homeland. As many historians of wartime nursing
have shown, the distinction was largely fictitious for nurses—many of
them young and single—placed as they were in the immediate proximity
of single men and involved in the pre-eminently masculine activity of war.
Whatever the geographical separation, nurses were placed on the border
between them by virtue of their job, where the “perpetual intersection”
produced a “tension of prescribed gender norms and antagonistic experi-
ences” (Hämmerle, 2014: 90–1). This tension, or transgression, may have
been revealed between the lines of women’s writings rather than explicitly
addressed; or it may have been explicit, showing that women were aware
of this implication: the “political analysis of the boundary between battle-
front and home front” in women war novelists and memoir writers
“interrogate[s] the more enduring boundaries drawn between public and
private, between men’s worlds and women’s worlds” (Higonnet, 1994:
155), revealing “a consciousness that women’s roles deviated from the
‘home front’ domesticity to which ideology consigned them” (Higonnet,
1999: 149).
Another way of understanding this transgression is in terms of the new
visibility thrust upon a group of women whose voices had previously been
marginal in the public realm, a visibility deriving from the tension between
their quite traditional role as carers and the toughness they were expected
to display in this new version of it (Hallett, 2016: 7). Understood in these
terms, transgression of gender boundaries may be seen in a very positive
light, as is often explicit in German nurses’ diaries published after 1930.
While the “hardening” demanded of a nurse by the dreadful experiences
she necessarily undergoes does not “correspond to contemporary visions
of womanhood”, it is presented as part of womanly care for the nation and
thus transmuted into a virtue (Vollhardt, 2014: 601–2). Here the blurring
of gender roles is arguably not transgressive, since the nurse is the repre-
sentative of the homeland in her figuration as carer.
The nurse memoirs are a form of autobiography.11 Specifically, memoirs
are a sub-set of autobiography in that they are not concerned with a whole

11
The status of autobiography has been substantially debated in recent decades (e.g.
Saunders, 2010). In particular, the “truthfulness” of autobiography is always subject to cau-
tion, since unconditional truthfulness depends upon the transparency of subjectivity.
However, in practice, it is subject to the vagaries of memory, of retrospective evaluations of
12 J. PALMER

life, since they commonly show the author/narrator in a limited number

of settings. This is especially true of the texts analysed here, as they all deal
with only one set of the author’s experiences: war. To this extent, these
nurse memoirs share something fundamental with soldiers’ memoirs. Not
only do they substantially reduce the chronological span of the narrative in
relation to life span, but they are also as much the history of this set of
external events as they are a narrative of a life: while the nurse memoirs
usually say little about the conduct of the war, they frequently say more
about the soldier patients than they do about the nurses themselves (Acton
& Potter, 2015: 34). In this respect, two nurse memoirs stand out from
the corpus: Vera Brittain (1933) and Maria Pöll-Naepflin (1934). They
stand out because their scope extends beyond an account of wartime expe-
rience alone; indeed, in both cases, this is the explicit intention. Vera
Brittain starts her text with the assertion that she wants to “show what the
whole War and post-war period … has meant to the men and women of
my generation” (1933: xxv). Maria Pöll-Naepflin says that she only wrote
about the war because it was unavoidable in writing an account of her
life—although she insists that it is also a memorial to her fellow nurses, for
whom no memorial nor honour book existed (1934: 3–4).
The war memoirs fall largely into two fundamentally different catego-
ries: those written by military and political leaders, and those written by
“ordinary” men and women such as junior officers, other ranks and
nurses—in other words, memoirs written “from above” and “from below”.
As I have shown elsewhere, these two types of texts display a range of fea-
tures that make them entirely distinct from each other (Palmer, 2018:
1–2, 31–6). The memoirs written from above give accounts of the large-­
scale events which constitute the conduct of the war; they are largely
objective in their approach, not in the sense of being dispassionate histori-
cal accounts, but in the sense of explaining the relationship between indi-
vidual decision-making and the processes of which the decisions were part.
The memoirs written from below, to the contrary, are universally charac-
terised by their overwhelming focus on the experiences of the individual:

experience that overlay memory, and of the uncertainties of self-awareness—let alone the
infinite possibilities of omission and distortion studied by psycho-analysts under the heading
of repression.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

their prime characteristic is their authenticity, which serves as the basis of

their authority.12
The nurses’ memoirs deliberately foreground their lived, personal
dimension (see Chap. 6); in this respect they are similar to the soldiers’
memoirs: in both cases, the decision to speak only from lived experience is
an authorial strategy which uses the fact of witness as a guarantee of
authenticity, while satisfying the public’s desire to know “what it was really
like over there”. While very few challenged the nurses’ right to speak from
experience, the fact that it was indeed a significant and potentially conten-
tious authorial decision is made visible in the debates about the soldiers’
memoirs. On the one hand, personal witness was widely accepted as a
guarantee of truth. Reviewing one of the first of the soldiers’ memoirs,
Patrick MacGill’s The Great Push (1916), the Times Literary Supplement
says that we cannot “dismiss his narrative as overcharged”, and the reason
is that we know that he saw these horrible things (29.6.16). In other
words, first sight suggested to the reader in 1916 that MacGill was exag-
gerating, but the fact of witness annulled that response; that the balance
swung in this direction was due to the accumulation of authentic detail.
This judgement was absolutely commonplace in the response to soldiers’
memoirs at the time (Palmer, 2018: 98–9, 116–7, 163–4, 249–51). On
the other hand, the Country Life review of MacGill argues that the focus
upon personal experience leads him to ignore the aims of the war, which
“would have lent dignity and purpose to a realism that becomes almost
sordid without such a reinforcement” (1.7.16).13 This emphasis on the
purpose of the war, counterposing it to personal experience, is another
commonplace of contemporary arguments about the war memoirs. The
primacy of personal experience was always potentially contentious because
placing it in the foreground risked relegating the purpose of the war to the
background; if the presentation of the war omits its purpose, then—
according to this argument—soldiers’ experiences risk becoming close to
incomprehensible and the focus on the purely personal becomes a lie
about the war. In 1930 Douglas Jerrold condemned the negative books
about the war on precisely this ground. The technique of the lie consisted
12
Leed (1979) made this case clearly. In my 2018 I added the proviso that the definition
of what constituted authenticity was subject to substantial ideological variation, more so in
France and Germany than in Great Britain (303–12).
13
Those with an acute memory for dates will note—and note the irony—that this com-
ment was published on the first day of the battle of the Somme, the day on which the British
army lost more men than on any other day in its history.
14 J. PALMER

of the simple device of “writing of the war always and continuously from
the standpoint of the individual”. The lie is to use 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 debate about the value of personal experience was widespread. It

has a fundamental implication: that the focus on personal experience is not
simply an authorial strategy, at least not where involvement in war is con-
cerned; to the contrary, it is a choice that is loaded with ideology. If the
contention it raises is sufficiently widespread, it becomes a directly political
issue, as it did in France during the war and Germany in the Weimar years
(Palmer, 2018: 161–9, 205–13, 304–5). That is to say: if it is a banality
that autobiography is a textual strategy, the context of the nurses’ and
soldiers’ memoirs gives the assertion a specific local value. Here, to insist
upon the personal is to insist upon foregrounding one dimension of the
war, it is therefore in and of itself an interpretation of the war. The extent
to which this was contentious was a product of local political circum-
stances. In the case of the nurse’s memoirs, contention was largely absent,
which in its turn constitutes a significant silence.14
The primary sources that are used in this analysis are the published writ-
ings of the nurses themselves, in the three languages. I have not tried to
include the numerous American nurses who wrote about their experi-
ences, as my analysis of the memoirs is heavily dependent upon the national
contexts in question; including the United States would have excessively
broadened the scope of the book. I have however used the memoirs of
three American nurses—one Canadian and two from the United States—
who worked throughout the war with French forces.15 Nurses moved
extensively across national boundaries during the war. There were many
American and Empire nurses with the British and French armies, also
British nurses with the Belgian and Serbian armies; a few British nurses
were with the Russian army; German and German-speaking Swiss nurses

14
The rare but significant exceptions are discussed in Chaps. 7 and 8.
15
Ellen LaMotte and Agnes Warner. Mary Borden was American by birth but married to
a Briton.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

worked with the Austro-Hungarian army. The selection of texts is based

on language, not on nationality; in particular, nurses’ mobility within the
German-speaking services has led me to treat Germany and Austro-­
Hungary as if they were a monolithic block. Most of the texts in question
were intended for publication, even if many originally took the form of
diaries and correspondence; however, there were several German compila-
tions which included substantial extracts from nurses’ correspondence—
mainly with the headquarters of their organisations—where it is unclear
whether the authors intended them for publication. In several French
cases, the status of the authors as nurses is questionable; where contempo-
raries accepted them as factual accounts I have not queried their status and
the analysis makes no distinction between texts on these grounds.16
The analysis consists of identifying recurrent themes in the memoirs
and in public responses to them, primarily in the form of book reviews.
The choice of material is dictated by the main purpose of the analysis: to
see how nurses’ accounts of the war fitted into public opinion about their
involvement in it—taking into account the multiple contexts surrounding
their involvement and publication—and more broadly into public opinion
about the war in general. Although this could not be predicted in advance,
the recurrence in fact largely cuts across national boundaries, despite sig-
nificant differences in the military health organisations and in the circum-
stances responsible for the nurses’ experiences. In particular, the analysis is
directed at significant silences in the texts, in other words things that cir-
cumstances suggest could have been said but were not, or only rarely.
The interpretation of both the recurrent themes and the silences
depends directly upon an analysis of the circumstances in question. For
this reason, the analysis includes extensive material about women’s involve-
ment in the war in general, as well as about the history of nursing and its
place in the medical profession during the period preceding and following
the war. Central to the analysis of the background circumstances is an
assessment of public opinion about the nurses, and more widely about
women’s involvement in the war. Here the evidence will be what was pub-
licly said, mostly in the form of reporting in news media. There is no
attempt at an original interpretation of these background matters, although
it is possible that the elements of international comparison may add

16
One of the striking features of Great War literature is the extent to which contemporaries
ignored the distinction between fact and fiction in personalised accounts, often explicitly
rejecting its relevance; see my 2018: 12, 98–9, 154–7, 199.
16 J. PALMER

something to existing knowledge of them. The background material is of

central importance to the analysis of the texts because it alerts us to the
range of issues that were considered of public importance in and around
the war in relation to women’s involvement in the war itself.
There is a small group of memoirs written by Great War nurses that is
fundamentally different from the others and will only figure at the margins
of the analysis that follows. They are the ones published after the end of
the war by nurses who went to European Russia and Siberia to organise
relief and inspect conditions in prisoner of war (PoW) camps. The women
were German, Austrian, and Swedish. These memoirs are exceptional for
two reasons. Firstly, these nurses did little actual nursing, in the sense of
tending the sick and wounded, as their duties were overwhelmingly
administrative: inspection of facilities, arranging the delivery of relief sup-
plies from the homelands, collecting names and messages for transmission
to homeland authorities and relatives. The Swedish nurse Elsa Brändström
did perform nursing duties during some of the time she was in Russia but
said little about it in her memoir. Secondly, these women saw soldiers
under very different circumstances to the other nurses: the conditions
under which the soldiers lived were controlled by the enemy. In particular,
any denunciation of inadequate medical treatment would not be directed
at their own military health service. What these women saw was known to
contemporaries: their visits gave rise to press reporting about German and
Austrian PoWs during the war, and two of their memoirs received public-
ity after 1918, in particular Elsa Brändström’s; she became a folk hero in
Germany and Austria, reported widely in German-language media. The
differences between their and other nurses’ relationships to soldiers makes
most thematic comparison fruitless, at least in respect of the elements of
the nurse writings which are central to this analysis, since their subject
matter makes them predominantly part of public opinion about the enemy,
not about the conduct of the war by the home nation or women’s part in
it.17 These texts are analysed in Appendix A, and the implications of the
analysis are spelt out in Chap. 8.
All translations are mine unless otherwise stated in the bibliography.
Where I have modified quotations in the interests of brevity the inserted
words appear in square brackets. Works to which only passing reference is
made have been omitted from the bibliography.

17
However, Vollhardt (2014) draws parallels between one Siberian memoir and other
German nurse writings.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

Bibliography

(1) Nurse Memoirs

Anon. (1915) [Kate Luard]. Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front.
Macmillan.
Borden, M. (1929). Forbidden Zone. Heinemann.
Brändström, E. (1922/1929). Among Prisoners of War in Russia and Siberia.
Hutchinson, 1929 (original Swedish edition 1921, German translation 1922).
Brittain, V. (1933). Testament of Youth. Gollancz; quoted in the Virago edi-
tion, 2014.
Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, M. (1919). Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté. Calmann-Lévy.
Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, M. (1931). Les Hommes de Mauvaise Volonté. Editions
des Portiques.
Crémieux, J. (1918). Souvenirs d’une Infirmière. Rauff.
Crémieux, J. (1934). Croquis d’Heures Vécues. Imp. Bachy.
La Boulaye, Mme de (1919). Croix et Cocarde. Plon-Nourrit.
Luard, K. (1930). Unknown Warriors. Chatto and Windus. Cited in the History
Press edition, 2014.
Pöll-Naepflin, M. (1934). Fortgerungen-Durchgedrungen. Private edition (2nd
impression) published under the name “Schwester Maria”. Cited in an undated
edition with no publisher given, probably Meiringen: Loepthien. (1934 is the
date of the earliest edition available in German libraries; however, according to
the second volume of her autobiography (1948) she was selling her first book
in Germany, acting as her own salesman, in 1933).
Riemann, H. (1930). Schwester der Vierten Armee. Karl Vögels Verlag.
Salmond, M. (1935). Bright Armour. Faber and Faber.
von Babo, E. (1918). Aus dem Kriegstagebuch einer badischen Schwester. Braun.

(2) Other Contemporary Literature

Bochkareva, M. (1919). Yaschka. My Year as Peasant, Officer and Exile. Constable.
Jerrold, D. (1930). The Lie About the War. Faber and Faber.
Renn, L. (1928). Krieg. Frankfurter Societäts Druckerei.
Sandes, F. (1927). The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier. Witherby.
Senftleben, E., Foerster, W., & Liesner, G. (1934). Unter dem Roten Kreuz im
Weltkriege. Berlin: Vaterländischer Verlag C. A. Weller.

(3) Secondary Literature

Acton, C., & Potter, J. (2015). Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience
in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in Warzones. Manchester University Press.
Carden-Coyne, A. (2014). The Politics of Wounds. Oxford University Press.
18 J. PALMER

Darrow, M. (1996). French Volunteer Nursing in the First World War. American
Historical Review, 101, 80–106.
Fell, A. (2011). Myth, Countermyth and the Politics of Memory: Vera Brittain
and Madeleine Clemenceau-Jacquemaire’s Interwar Nurse Memoirs. Synergies
Royaume-Uni et Irlande, 4, 11–22.
Hallett, C. (2013). Emotional Nursing. In A. Fell & C. Hallett (Eds.), First World
War Nursing. New Perspectives (pp. 87–101). Routledge.
Hallett, C. (2016). Nurse Writers of the Great War. Manchester University Press.
Hämmerle, C. (2014). Mentally Broken, Physically a Wreck. Violence in War:
Accounts of Nurses in Austro-Hungarian Service. In C. Hämmerle et al. (Eds.),
Gender and the First World War (pp. 89–107). Palgrave Macmillan.
Higonnet, M. (1994). Borderwork. Feminist Engagements with Comparative
Literature. Cornell University Press.
Higonnet, M. (1999). Lines of Fire. Penguin Plume Books.
Layton, L. (1987). Vera Brittain’s Testament(s). In M. Higonnet et al. (Eds.),
Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (pp. 70–83). Yale
University Press.
Leed, E. (1979). No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War 1. Cambridge
University Press.
Palmer, J. (2018). Memories from the Frontline. Memoirs and Meanings of the Great
War from Britain, France and Germany. Palgrave Macmillan.
Panke-Kochinke, B. (2004). Unterwegs und doch Daheim. Mabuse-Verlag.
Reuss, T. (2012). Fighting for Fame. Women: A Cultural Review, 23(3), 302–322.
Saunders, M. (2010). Self Impressions. Oxford University Press.
van Bergen, L. (2009). Before My Helpless Sight. Suffering, Dying and Military
Medicine on the Western Front 1914–18. Ashgate Press. (quoted in the 2016
edition, London: Routledge).
Vollhardt, M. (2014). Es ist ein anständiger Beruf, Schwester zu sein. Zur
Figuration der Krankenschwester in der Erinnerungsliteratur des Ersten
Weltkrieges. Zeitschrift für Germanistik, 24(3), 597–608.
 CHAPTER 2

Hospitals and Nursing Before the Great War

In the early nineteenth century, nurses had a bad reputation, summarised

by the famous grotesque caricature in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit
(1843–4): Sairey Gamp, the lazy, drunken, cruel hypocrite happy to have
benefited from murder. Victorian readers would have recognised her as
the incarnation of all the worst rumours surrounding nurses at the time:
“let us banish the Mrs Gamps … and substitute clean, intelligent, well-­
spoken Christian attendants”, wrote the reformer Edward Sieveking in
1852 (quoted Summers, 1989: 365); such was her fame—or infamy—that
umbrellas became known as “gamps”, thanks to their association with her
in the novel. Victorian reformers’ literature is replete with similar accusa-
tions; Florence Nightingale, for example, wrote that nursing had previ-
ously been done by those “who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too
dirty, too stolid or too bad to do anything else” (quoted Abel-Smith,
1960: 5). Indeed, hospital archives from the early part of the century
record many examples of drunken disorder and petty theft (Helmstadter
& Godden, 2011: n.p.).
The nurse’s reputation was no different in France and Germany. The
author of an early textbook of nurse training, a doctor at the Charité hos-
pital in Berlin, wrote in 1831: “People think that any old, boozy, bleary-­
eyed, blind, deaf, lame, bent, decrepit, no-good-for-anything will do as an
attendant for the sick” (quoted Schweikardt, 2008: 44; see also
Riesenberger, 2003: 23). This is not to say that the reputation was

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Palmer, Nurse Memoirs from the Great War in Britain, France,
and Germany, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82875-2_2
20 J. PALMER

deserved. In the words of a French historian talking about the relatively

poorly trained men and women who worked in Parisian public hospitals in
the late nineteenth century, “the absence of a recognised qualification
doesn’t mean an absence of competence” (Chevandier, 2011: 69). Many
untrained nurses were “clever and dutiful”, even though rates of pay were
too low to attract educated women (Abel-Smith, 1960: 7). The case of
Elizabeth Davis is exemplary: a former servant who then worked as a dom-
iciliary nurse, and went to the Scutari Hospital with Florence Nightingale,
who found her perfectly satisfactory. Indeed, the blanket condemnations
of pre-reform nursing were suspiciously useful in the process of demand-
ing change (Summers, 1989: 370, 382–3).
An analysis of war memoirs is no place for a history of medicine.
However, the context in which nurses published their accounts contains
significant elements which derive from changes in the organisation of
nursing. As is well known, the overall trajectory of these changes is from
nursing in the form of domestic service or charity to its integration into
the medical profession; this trajectory covers a period that runs from the
early nineteenth century until well after 1918. We shall see that the major-
ity of nurse memoirs are characterised by a limited thematic repertoire and
our analysis will explore the possibility that this feature of the texts is
related to the history of nursing in the preceding decades.
If nurses had a bad reputation, so too did hospitals. Historically, hospi-
tals evolved from charitable institutions for the shelter or isolation of the
indigent sick to become institutions for the treatment of wounds and ill-
ness. It was this origin that lay behind their bad reputation: rather than the
location of treatment and cure, they were places where people went to die.
In France, in the mid-nineteenth century, the hospital was still marked by
these mediaeval origins, “a place of asylum or a hospice, often founded by
a religious congregation, whose management would fall more and more
on the municipal authorities”, following the law of 1796; “this status only
disappeared with the consolidation of its healthcare function during the
nineteenth century” (Chauveau, 2011: 82). This purpose was incorpo-
rated in the public assistance law of 1851, which also distinguished
between hospitals and hospices, the latter designated as shelters for the
aged and the incurable (Chevandier, 2009: 37). In Germany, hospitals in
the first half of the nineteenth century were “socially stigmatised care insti-
tutions for the lower classes, to whose care you only entrusted yourself in
the absence of other alternatives. Well-to-do patients avoided the hospital
like the plague” (quoted Schweikardt, 2008: 45). In England, both the
 2 HOSPITALS AND NURSING BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 21

“voluntary” hospitals and the infirmaries for the indigent sick in the work-
houses suffered from the same poor reputation, and families who could
afford it preferred domiciliary care (Abel-Smith, 1960: 2–3, 9–10).
Although many nurses in the nineteenth century were male, care of the
sick was thought to be “naturally” feminine.1 Florence Nightingale,
although insistent on the need for nurse training, was also certain that
only women would benefit from it, as it “could only be satisfactorily be
done by a woman”, a position which she saw no need to defend as it was
self-evident (Holton, 1984: 63). A German encyclopaedist, writing in
1789, had already argued for a natural affinity between women and nurs-
ing, a view which dominated thinking about recruitment throughout the
nineteenth century. By the outbreak of the Great War, German nursing
was virtually entirely a female employment, with the exception of psychi-
atric care and military nursing, which remained predominantly male
(Bischoff, 1984: 66–134; Hähner-Rombach, 2012: 138–9); arguably,
German male doctors’ insistence in the late nineteenth century on the
femininity of nursing was also caused by fear of competition from women
doctors (Schweikardt, 2008: 182). In France, hospital care had been
evenly divided between men and women at the time of the Revolution; in
the mid-nineteenth century, despite the continuing role of the female reli-
gious orders, still only a small majority of the personnel was feminine; but
by the twentieth, female domination was clear (Chevandier, 2011:
138–42).
Histories of nursing reform tend to focus on changes in hospital organ-
isation and practice, which included changes in the recruitment and train-
ing of nurses; however, many other features of the organisation of the care
of the sick also played a role: the registration of doctors, which restricted
the practice to those who fulfilled the training regulations; public health
legislation and insurance; the reorganisation of provision for the poor;
scientific discoveries which affected medicine; and on the continent, the
role of the churches continued to be a significant factor in the organisation
of health care until 1914.

1
Using the word “nurse” (or its usual equivalents in other languages) in the context of
mid-nineteenth-century medicine is rather anachronistic, as it was only one word among
many used to designate various activities in the care of the sick; it only came to acquire its
clear modern definition as a result of the reforms discussed here. I only distinguish between
the historical variants where necessary to understand the process of reform.
22 J. PALMER

The history of nursing in the period before 1914 is the history of mul-
tiple moves to introduce elements of training and organisation into what
had previously been a service supplied by an unregulated labour market,
alongside religious orders which included care for the sick in their self-­
appointed tasks and which followed their own norms of practice.2 In Great
Britain, this form of care was marginal, thanks to the marginalisation of
the religious orders in public life from the Tudor period onwards, but in
France and Germany the congregations continued to play a substantial,
even dominant role until well into the twentieth century.3 Internationally,
the moves for reform came from a number of individuals and organisa-
tions, in the context of very varied circumstances. Insofar as there was an
overarching trajectory shared across national boundaries it was based on
the establishment of training programmes largely but not exclusively dic-
tated by the recognition of the public utility of scientific medicine; this
could only be achieved by substantial reforms involving public bodies and
ultimately the state. As a result, the national histories are substantially dif-
ferent in the period before 1914, and far from homogeneous after 1918.

Great Britain
For reasons that will become apparent, the British history played a sub-
stantial international role. Although it was not a template, an outline of its
main features can serve as a starting point.
As is well known, Florence Nightingale took nurses to care for the
wounded in the Crimean War (1853–6), where their attentions had a sub-
stantial impact on care. Their success and the publicity it attracted estab-
lished her as a public figure: “an upper-class woman had saved the British
Army. This was the first step towards making nursing respectable” (Abel-­
Smith, 1960: 20). She was not the only innovator in nursing in the mid-­
century and her initiatives in the Crimean War were not the starting point
of nurse training: for example, Elizabeth Fry had already started a training

2
My analysis is anything but original; it is a summary of a number of works, primarily
Schweikardt (2008), Schultheiss (2001), Knibiehler (1984), Abel-Smith (1960), and
Rafferty (1996). It also marginalises the important relationship between public health reform
in general and the development of nursing. My focus is on the question of nurse training, as
it is this element that is relevant for an understanding of the nurse memoirs of the Great War.
In the interests of sanity, I have reduced the references to a minimum.
3
To speak of “Germany” before unification (1871) is a misnomer, but the focus here is on
the following period.
 2 HOSPITALS AND NURSING BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 23

school in 1840, and Florence Nightingale herself had spent some months
in 1851 at Kaiserswerth—an early German nurse training initiative (see
below). However, it was the success of the Crimean War nurses in reduc-
ing the mortality rate among wounded soldiers which gave her the author-
ity to instigate reforms, notably the foundation of a school of nursing at
Saint Thomas’ Hospital in London in 1860.4 In so doing, she also publicly
established both the desirability of training and the skills that the trained
nurse should have.
The Nightingale programme placed a low level of importance on medi-
cal knowledge in nursing: hygiene—both personal and in the hospital in
general, obedience to the doctor, discipline, and dedication to service
were the main elements5; however, the nurse was also to be a skilled assis-
tant who would constantly attend the patient and would “handle, super-
vise and treat each patient” as the doctor directed (Abel-Smith, 1960: 20).
Nursing textbooks from the second half of the century continue to list
these elements of her programme (Rafferty, 1996: 29–32), and her model
was much cited in France and Germany. She also saw that morality and
willingness to learn were more important than social status in recruitment.
This was significant, because although charity was eminently respectable in
Victorian Britain, in the mid-century nursing was still tainted with the
aura of unrespectability, and recruiting educated women was difficult. On
the other hand, she encouraged “lady nurses” to train for supervisory roles
in hospital nursing, and her ex-students moved into hospitals elsewhere
and became missionaries for the Nightingale programme; this led to a
rapid expansion in the number of trained nurses. This complemented her
insight that the administration of the hospital was central to medical suc-
cess; the nurse “leaders” would become matrons and sisters, who would
act as intermediaries between doctors and less trained nurses, and take on
tasks previously done by doctors and lay hospital administrators (Abel-­
Smith, 1960: 23–8).
The drivers of nursing reform at this time came largely from hospitals,
especially the large urban ones and the teaching hospitals, even though the
bulk of nursing was done elsewhere, in the home and in the workhouse
4
For the details of the public recognition of her efforts—the “Nightingale mania of
1855–6”—see Crawford et al., 2020: 87-95, 133.
5
Her reform efforts were by no means chiefly directed towards professional, hospital nurs-
ing, she was at least equally focussed on public health and health education for the home;
indeed, her influential Notes on Nursing (1860) were not originally targeted at nurse training
but at women at home (Crawford et al., 2020: 54–60).
24 J. PALMER

infirmaries. These forms of nursing stayed unreformed, uncontrolled, and

indeed largely ignored until late in the century (Bullough and Bullough,
1979: 83; Abel-Smith, 1960: 12–16). Such reforms as there were of work-
house nursing came late in the cycle of reform and derived from changes
in care for the poor rather than in care for the sick.
Anne-Marie Rafferty lists the drivers of nursing reform in hospitals.
Firstly, the need for competent surveillance of patients in the absence of
the doctor in hospitals, where they were often only intermittently present;
doctors needed assistants upon whose reports they could rely; this was also
true of domiciliary care, for the same reason, as at this time most hospital
doctors also had private practices involving care in the home. Secondly,
the economics of health care: nurses were cheaper than doctors. Thirdly,
hospitals still had a bad reputation as foyers of infection, and the presence
of trained nurses helped to rehabilitate their reputation. Fourthly, training
was integral to the smooth organisation of the hospital (1996: 24–5). In
addition, another feature of Florence Nightingale’s reforms should be
noted, as it is especially relevant in any international comparison: although
she was personally pious, she rejected the involvement of religious organ-
isations in nursing. She made a rigorous distinction between the care of
the body and the care of the soul, a distinction which the religious congre-
gations, especially Catholic ones, absolutely rejected; she considered that
their involvement led to sectarian rivalries; and nuns tended to be prudish,
which was counter-productive (Rafferty, 1996: 36–7; Abel-Smith,
1960: 19).
The reforms instituted by Nightingale and others were successful in
several respects. Firstly, by the 1870s, nursing came to be recommended
as an occupation for respectable women; secondly, as a result, there were
large numbers of recruits—although the drop-out rate during training was
substantial, due to a frequent mismatch between motive and reality. By the
end of the century, the training period had been extended to three years
and even in the workhouses some care of the sick was being done by paid
and trained nurses, even if in many cases it was still the pauper nurses who
did it.6 In 1901, across all fields of nursing in England and Wales, there
were 63,500 women and 57,000 men; of the women, perhaps half were
actually trained and over half worked in domiciliary care. Moreover,
because private domiciliary care was better paid and easier than hospital
nursing, recruitment into hospitals was difficult, especially since they still

6
“Pauper nurses” were workhouse inmates who performed these duties.
 2 HOSPITALS AND NURSING BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 25

had the reputation of being primarily for the poor (Abel-Smith,

1960: 50–60).
During the late century, hospitals throughout Europe had evolved
under the impulse of scientific discovery. Medical histories usually cite a
small number of principal discoveries of the mid-century that played a
determining role in the creation of the modern hospital: Semmelweiss’
discovery of the role of contamination in spreading infection, Snow’s real-
isation that infection was transmitted by some organic agent, Lister’s
introduction of anti-septic methods in surgery, Pasteur’s identification of
bacteria as agents and Koch’s demonstration of a direct causal connection
between the presence of bacteria and disease.
In each of these cases, scientific analysis led to changes in practice as
doctors became convinced of the soundness of the analysis. Semmelweiss
is particularly instructive in this respect, as his success was very limited. He
showed, convincingly, that post-birth fever among women in the mater-
nity ward was far more prevalent among women attended by doctors than
among those attended by midwives, and hypothesised that the difference
was due to doctors carrying something from outside the maternity ward,
in particular from autopsies. He insisted that they should wash their hands
in an antiseptic solution before entering the ward, and the infection rates
dropped. However, by coincidence, the hospital had recently adopted
ventilation of wards as standard practice, and the hospital authorities pre-
ferred to believe that it was this that had caused the change, because it
fitted the then-prevalent theory that diseases were carried by foul air. As
Semmelweiss could not explain what happened because of hand-washing,
due to lack of knowledge of germs, he was unable to prove his point.
Snow, on the other hand, although also hampered by a lack of knowledge
of germs, persuaded the authorities that his analysis of the spatial distribu-
tion of cholera infection showed there must be a common object involved.
He suggested it was a public pump, and when the pump was disabled, the
infections dropped—it later emerged that the water was contaminated by
faeces. What Pasteur and Koch showed was that the agent could be seen
and identified in the causal chain. In these two instances, laboratory exper-
iments demonstrated the validity of the analysis. It was the elements of
scientific method in the explanations that provided their persuasive power.7

7
In France and Germany, the success of infection control, driven by science, was decisive
in establishing doctors’ authority within hospitals in the late century (Knibiehler, 1984: 44;
Schweikardt, 2008: 183).
26 J. PALMER

In addition, the new emphasis on hygiene in hospitals could avoid both

post-operative infection and cross-infection between patients and staff. In
combination, these discoveries allowed practitioners to turn hospitals into
centres of cure rather than the ante-chambers of death that they had been:
epidemics could be controlled, or at least mitigated, and post-operative
infection could be avoided. Crucially, these changes demanded trained
staff: people who understood hygiene, who could reliably keep an eye on
patients’ progress, who could be trusted to carry out doctors’ instructions
and to administer medicine and other treatments correctly. At the very
least, they had to be literate, which was far from assured in the nineteenth
century.
The Medical Act of 1858 had obliged doctors to demonstrate their
competence and to register in order to be allowed to practise medicine.8
In the late century, nurses started to demand a similar basis for their pro-
fession. The process was politically fraught and slow: the Act establishing
nurse registration only came in 1919. While the more intricate political
details are not relevant for our purposes, that the process was so politicised
derived in large measure from the fact that “nursing” was a far from uni-
fied occupation. By the late century, it was very divided by levels of train-
ing, from the highly trained nurses in the big metropolitan teaching
hospitals to virtually untrained domiciliary nurses; in addition, training
was uneven between institutions. Demands for registration came from
qualified nurses, whose demands included forms of inspection which
would certify correct training programmes; different groups of nurses had
different interests and therefore interpreted the situation differently.
Skilled nurses, and especially the “lady-nurses” who had been trained to
be matrons and sisters, saw advantages in a regulatory framework that
would certify their excellence; in that way, nursing could become a respect-
able, middle-class profession. Not all agreed, even among those with that
background: some matrons opposed it on the grounds that it would
reduce their authority; some doctors opposed registration, on the grounds
that it would reduce recruitment without bringing any advantage in skill
levels. Consultants were largely in favour, as they were dependent upon
nursing assistance; general practitioners, on the other hand, were more

8
For a discussion of the ambiguities involved in the act, see Roberts, 2009. There were
similar acts in France and Germany—see below. These laws, along with other public health
legislation, mark the beginning of the recognition that the state has responsibility for the
health of its citizens. See, for example, Crawford et al., 2020, n.p.
 2 HOSPITALS AND NURSING BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 27

likely to see qualified, registered nurses as a competitive threat. In 1887

two associations were formed to promote regulation and registration: the
British Nurses’ Association (later the Royal British Nurses’ Association),
whose most public figure was Mrs Bedford Fenwick, an ex-matron; and
the Hospitals Association, which set up its own register of trained nurses—
few of whom bothered to enter it. That the registers did not succeed in
attracting large numbers of nurses suggests that the urgency of registra-
tion was a minority opinion at the time. These organisations, despite inter-
necine rivalries and splits—some of them highly personalised—developed
public pressure for registration and for standardisation of training pro-
grammes, with a three-year minimum, enshrined in law. The attempts at
legislation failed, but the three-year minimum training period became
policy by the end of the century. Subsequently, these organisations devel-
oped enough public pressure for the creation of a Select Committee to
debate the issue of registration, and in 1904 it decided in favour. Of
course, the Select Committee decision did not give force of law to regis-
tration; in the pre-war years there were repeated attempts to introduce this
legislation, none of which succeeded in reaching the statute book; more-
over, registration as envisaged by the Select Committee was not to lead to
the exclusion of unlicensed practitioners, only to preventing them claim-
ing to be qualified (Abel-Smith, 1960: 61–80).

France
In France, the association of the hospital with religious orders was close to
continuous from the middle ages until the late nineteenth century; this
association also linked care for the sick with charity, rather than any form
of payment or state action (Dufoy Fresney & Perrin, 1996: n.p.). Although
the Revolution abolished religious orders and the sisters became paid pub-
lic servants staffing hospitals, the orders were re-established in 1801. It
was also Revolutionary legislation that established in law the obligation to
demonstrate competence in order to practise medicine, in 1803—albeit
with exemptions that lasted for nearly 100 years. The public assistance law
of 1851 established hospitals as legal entities, thus reducing their depen-
dence upon municipal authorities and religious orders. However, they still
remained primarily places for the care of the indigent sick, and were still
largely staffed by nuns supervising unskilled assistants recruited from
among the poorest and least educated people in France; the pay was even
lower than the pocket money received by the nuns. Supervision of nuns
28 J. PALMER

was dominated by their religious superiors. In 1878 there were still some
20,000 nuns in 225 religious orders engaged in nursing, and the move in
the Third Republic to laicise the nursing corps only had a marginal impact
upon the centrality of the religious orders, and then only in the major cit-
ies (Knibiehler, 1984: 9, 41–2). It was only with the legal separation of
Church and state (1905) that hospitals started to recruit nurses primarily
from among the lay population.
The evolution of nursing and hospitals in late nineteenth-century
France is inseparable from the final establishment of the Republic as the
form of the French state, following the collapse of the Second Empire in
the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Two particular political trends are
important in this context: the move to make the state responsible for many
elements of the welfare of the population, as the incarnation of social soli-
darity; and the secularisation of activities previously dominated by the
Church. The welfare element was incorporated in the introduction of uni-
versal primary education (1882) and in various social insurance and health
care acts of parliament, in particular the law on the national administration
of public health (1886) and on “public assistance” (1888), which defined
the responsibilities of the state towards things that had previously been the
object of charity. The secularisation element was especially pronounced in
education, where the law of 1882 effectively removed the churches from
teaching. It was also central to health reforms, in an attempt to reduce the
previous dependence upon the religious orders. Until then, doctors had
little part in decision-making about how hospitals were run. This situation
continued through the 1870s; in Paris at this time, 472 nuns supervised
the work of some 2300 untrained orderlies. At the same time, the medical
advances of the mid-century had given the medical profession the confi-
dence to publicly demand the primacy of medical decision-making over
the independence of the religious orders (Poisson, 1998: 35–7).
The situation changed in 1880, when the Paris city council decided in
principle to secularise the hospitals and the clergy lost their place on the
oversight councils; the hospitals were actually secularised in 1881 and the
new administration moved to replace nuns with a secular workforce, using
public money to fund salaried staff and training programmes. The secu-
larisation was largely driven by politics, but the new post-Pasteur medicine
played a part. The nuns were seen by modernising doctors as incapable of
providing the skilled assistance that the new medicine required: for exam-
ple, as well as refusing instructions from anybody except their religious
superiors, they opposed vaccination, they refused epidemiological
 2 HOSPITALS AND NURSING BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 29

measures and their dress made a mockery of asepsis (Knibiehler, 1984:

42–5). On the other hand, a section of the medical profession opposed the
training of a reformed workforce. Some of these doctors were opposed to
the post-Pasteur/Lister conception of antiseptic practice, still believing
that festering wounds were proof that the immune system was doing the
cure unaided (Poisson, 1998: 42–3), but many were convinced by the new
medicine; what they shared was a conviction that the nun’s supervision of
untrained assistants was adequate. Some of their argument was dictated by
costs—by this time, nuns cost a fraction of the budget needed for nurses—
and part was an ideological conviction of the superiority of charity over the
“venality” of wages for care: a conservative doctor who was also a member
of the French parliament went so far as to say that women working in
hospitals were “either nuns or whores” (quoted Knibiehler, 1984: 45).
Part of the argument was that the newly trained nurses would never be
competent to supervise their juniors, and that nuns would do the job bet-
ter (Poisson, 1998: 43–53). These arguments continued till the end of the
century. In so far as the reforms produced changes in nursing, these were
mainly confined to the major cities and in 1914 France was still a predomi-
nantly rural nation.
In practice, the early attempts to replace the nuns with a skilled lay
workforce were relatively unsuccessful, due to the poor educational stan-
dards of the section of the population from among whom nurses were
recruited, in combination with poor conditions of employment. The
attempts to create this new workforce were also driven by two competing
models of nurse training, associated with the leading public personalities
driving them: Desiré-Magloire Bourneville in Paris and Anna Hamilton in
Bordeaux.
Bourneville’s municipal training programmes started in Paris in 1878,
followed by other cities (Knibiehler, 1984: 47–50; Poisson, 1998:
63–100). They were intended to produce “auxiliary” personnel by remod-
elling their essentially domestic duties into a programme of hygiene. This
training was explicitly aimed at producing a non-congregational work-
force whose loyalty would be to medical superiors, not to a religious hier-
archy. However, most of his recruits had only a minimum of education,
and preliminary programmes—effectively, primary school literacy teach-
ing—were needed before training proper could begin. Critics of the
Bourneville programme blamed him for taking on anyone and for award-
ing diplomas for what was essentially housework, with no element of
actual care of patients; many doctors simply ignored Bourneville’s
30 J. PALMER

constant attempts to improve nurse training (Poisson, 1998: 26;

Schultheiss, 2001: 90–1). Despite advances in the general educational
level of the French working class in the Third Republic, thanks to univer-
sal primary education, these training courses ran largely unchanged
until 1914.
Anna Hamilton’s training school came later (Diebolt, 2017). She
wanted a training programme that was neither congregational nor aggres-
sively secular: one of her criticisms of the Bourneville model was that its
anti-clericalism itself created factional disputes (Schultheiss, 2001: 86);
her admission policy was independent of religion and based solely on apti-
tude and commitment. The programme was based on work experience
along with medical training given by the doctors or professors of medicine
at the hospital. She systematically recruited nursing teachers from
Protestant countries which had imitated the Nightingale model. Like
Florence Nightingale, she aimed to produce nurses who would be capable
of becoming leaders of their profession in other institutions, and her
recruitment preferred women with substantially more than primary edu-
cational achievement (Diebolt, 2012: 95).
Lay visiting nurses were largely unknown in France before the begin-
ning of the twentieth century. Two initiatives drove this innovation:
Léonie Chaptal’s foundation of a school for nurses in 1905 in which the
training was not tied to hospital work, but domiciliary; and the opening of
a series of local “dispensaries” which were in effect centres for (usually
male) district nurses to stem the spread of tuberculosis through hygiene
education in the home. Indeed, the two initiatives were linked, and Léonie
Chaptal set up one of these dispensaries herself (Diebolt, 2012). Until
1916 this network was limited and had a limited impact, but laws passed
in 1916 and 1919 imposed the public obligation to set up such centres in
all administrative areas of France; at the same time the personnel became
largely female (Henry, 2012).
In 1907, the International Council of Nurses held its third congress in
Paris, attended by pioneers of the nursing reform movement from across
Europe, the British diaspora and the United States (Diebolt, 2017:
89–91). All of the French nursing leaders discussed here—Hamilton,
Bourneville, Chaptal, as well as leading figures from the French public
welfare system—were in attendance, and the French were the first to admit
that they had a lot to learn from the Anglo-Saxon models of nurse training
and practice. In reality, little changed in France before 1914: the majority
of nurses working in French hospitals never attended a professional
 2 HOSPITALS AND NURSING BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 31

training programme, and far from being organised in a professional asso-

ciation such as the British Royal Nurses’ Association or the other bodies
affiliated to the International Council, the bulk of the hospital labour
force was organised in a large number of trades unions and friendly societ-
ies. Between 1890 and 1914, 20 such trades unions registered with the
Ministry of Labour; they acted as unions, not as professional associations
and regarded professionalisation as a threat. These organisations tended to
be dominated by male members, who were often opposed to domination
of nursing by women; Bourneville feared that union militancy would lead
employers to prefer nuns to trained nurses (Schultheiss, 2001: 119–25).
Noticeably absent from the French history are two features of the
British experience: the creation of a minimum training period, with an
agreed skill set, which produced a substantial proportion of the nursing
corps by 1914, even though it was not mandatory for employment; and
the political drive to centralised registration, which would eventually lead
to a legal monopoly. While neither of these features of what subsequently
became the normal model for nursing in Europe was fully achieved in
Britain before 1914, the process was well under way, whereas in France the
conditions which would allow it were still in their infancy.

Germany
In Germany—or more exactly, what later became Germany—there were
moves in the eighteenth century to introduce formal training for nurses
(Schweikardt, 2008: 47–50). A school for midwives existed in Mannheim
from 1780 and the Berlin Charité Hospital attempted to create a nurse
training school in 1800, with eventual success in 1832. The training
period was three months, which stayed unchanged until 1904; the small
numbers of recruits were of both sexes and the skill set was very limited.
They were not trained for even the most rudimentary medical procedures,
in order to avoid any possible competition with doctors (Schweikardt,
2008: 53–4). Indeed, when doctors’ monopoly of medical practice was
later threatened by a reform in employment law which allowed non-­
doctors to practise some forms of medical care, their response included
blocking attempts to extend nurse training (Hähner-Rombach, 2012:
141).9 Various other attempts at creating training centres for nurses

9
The Kurierfreiheit law, 1869–1871, only rescinded in 1939. In Prussia practising as a
doctor had been limited by law in 1845 (with precursor laws dating back to the seventeenth
32 J. PALMER

f­ollowed in the first half of the century, of which the most successful was
the Kaiserswerth institute, founded in 1836. It was set up as a Protestant
equivalent of the Catholic religious nursing orders, reviving the long-­
disused position of deaconess.10 Florence Nightingale spent some time
there before the Crimean War and she praised its culture of dedication to
care.11 Inspection reports from the mid-century show how little impact
the early attempts at training had had, in the sense that hospitals had only
few trained care personnel. Moreover, the training in hospitals was less
effective than the informal training done in the confessional nursing
orders, there was no obligation to do it in order to find employment and
there was no legal enforcement of minimum standards; in 1868, the direc-
tor of the Charité was still complaining about the incompetence and lack
of commitment of the care assistants. Nonetheless, the Charité school had
an impact insofar as its training programme continued to be used, adapted
for the new medicine after the mid-century (Schweikardt, 2008: 55–60).
During the bulk of the nineteenth century little attempt was made by
the state to encourage professionalisation of nursing, a situation which
continued until the 1880s. In part, this was due to the perceived success
of the congregational nursing orders, both Catholic and Protestant, which
shared the same system of recruitment, training, and work, based around
the convent-like “Mutterhaus” (mother-house); Protestant orders adopted
the Charité training programme and Kaiserswerth deaconesses were work-
ing in that hospital by the mid-1840s; their training model included
instruction by doctors. However, women recruited into the mother-house
system were largely trained in the workplace, often by older nurses, lodged
and fed and kept in care in old age—a level of security not shared by most
elderly women in nineteenth-century Germany. The overwhelming bulk
of nurse training was done within the religious congregations until the
1880s. As these organisations were charities, the cost to hospital authori-
ties was low. Discipline in these orders was strict; nurses were entirely at
the beck and call of their religious supervisor and worked when and where

century) to those who could prove competence. The new law restricted the use of the title
“doctor”, but allowed other health care workers to practise; from 1871 it applied to the
newly unified nation (Schweikardt, 2008: 173–4).
10
Various other Protestant nursing orders were subsequently founded, some tied to a
church, others independent but following the quasi-conventual model adopted at
Kaiserswerth, for example, Viktoria Schwesternschaft and Erika Schwestern.
11
Her book on Kaiserswerth is a positive encomium (The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the
Rhine, 1851).
 2 HOSPITALS AND NURSING BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 33

they were sent. Because of the faith-based discipline, the sisters set a stan-
dard of commitment to care and personal asceticism which lay organisa-
tions found difficult to emulate. The success of the system produced
dependence upon the mother-houses among public authorities and acted
as a disincentive to both professionalisation and science.
Even in 1912 nurse numbers still showed massive domination by the
religious orders: 26,000 Catholic nuns, 12,000 deaconesses and 1500
evangelical order sisters against 4500 secular Red Cross nurses and around
3000 independent practising nurses who were members of the new pro-
fessional nurses’ union.12 In the period before 1914, the independent
nurses were less well regarded by the general public than the congrega-
tional nurses: they were associated in the public mind with untrained
nurses, in part because the term “sister” was not legally regulated and any
woman could claim to be one. This association included the old belief that
they were drunken slatterns, and those who worked in private homes were
often rumoured to be prostitutes (Schmidbaur, 2002: 60–1; Hähner-­
Rombach, 2012: 132).
Despite the continued numerical dominance of the congregational
orders, there were other initiatives aimed at both secularising and profes-
sionalising nursing during the closing decades of the century. The
Nightingale model of nursing inspired the anti-clerical reformer Rudolf
Virchow, who in 1877 set up a nurse training school in the new Berlin
communal hospital at Friedrichshain, with a six-month training pro-
gramme (Schweikardt, 2008: 76–80). The second half of the century also
saw the creation of two other linked institutions (Schweikardt, 2008:
81–9; Riesenberger, 2003): the Red Cross and the patriotic women’s
associations, linked through nurse recruitment and training The associa-
tions gained great credit during the wars of the 1860s and 70s, and were
successful both in giving impetus to the Red Cross and in recruiting
upper-class women who were capable of taking supervisory roles in the
Red Cross sisterhood “mother-houses”; the success was such that by 1913
there were 48 Red Cross sisterhoods, with 5500 trained nurses. This
model of nursing was rigidly hierarchical and focussed more on discipline
12
Figures from Schmidbaur (2002: 65); an alternative set of figures, for 1909 (Hähner-
Rombach, 2012: 136), gives a different proportion based on a different total figure, but still
attributes over 50% to the congregations. Schweikardt comments that all pre-1914 statistics
for nurses are bedevilled by uncertainties deriving from the ways in which they were col-
lected. In particular, many non-congregational, non-hospital care assistants registered with
the police, not with medical or public health authorities (2008: 101–5, 118–22).
34 J. PALMER

and commitment than on technical training; in addition, it was charitably

funded and recruitment and training were very dependent upon the initia-
tives of local women’s association leaders. The Red Cross formed part of
military planning following the military health law of 1878, and its overall
direction was overseen by military personnel.
The model of nursing created through the Red Cross and the patriotic
women’s associations had repercussions on nursing in general. The role of
charitable patriotic dedication associated nursing with nationalism; the
rigid discipline, based on the convent and the barracks, and the insistence
on moral character rather than knowledge, hindered the development of
nursing as ordinary employment with associated rights as well as obliga-
tions; this influence continued long after the Great War (Grundhewer,
1987: 140; Riesenberger, 2003). The congregational orders fitted well
into this model, as they too were based upon the religious duty of charity
and upon a disciplined hierarchy. In the decade before 1914, the military
health system opposed the introduction of extended training for nurses,
preferring to concentrate on what they saw as the primary military needs
(Schweikardt, 2008: 243–4).
The Prussian state made some attempts at setting up secular nurse
training, starting in the 1870s, driven partly by the demands of the wars
and partly by cholera epidemics. However, the state was unwilling to
shoulder the costs involved, and the training programmes that were intro-
duced—in Dusseldorf and Silesia—attracted low numbers of recruits
through the 1880s.
From this point on, the presence of the new medicine increased the
demand for trained nurses, as the discrepancy between what was needed
and the existing levels of training started to become visible. For example,
a Catholic doctor writing in the Catholic magazine Charitas in 1899
stressed that in modern medicine, the nun’s habit was not enough—“a
mass of knowledge and preparation” was needed (quoted Schweikardt,
2008: 140). Confessional nurses began to take lessons from doctors, not
just from older nuns. Doctors wrote new training manuals and from the
1880s these started to lay emphasis on the demands of the new medicine;
for example, the Charité textbook of 1874 made little mention of disinfec-
tion, but it was a substantial theme in the 1889 edition. Doctors also set
up private nurse training programmes, often to create specialised assistants
for their own work and from 1902 the Berlin medical association issued its
own centralised certificate of nursing competence; by 1914, 17,000 had
been issued (Schweikardt, 2008: 131–5). In the 1900s, Catholic doctors
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Title: Häpeä
Romaani

Author: Veikko Korhonen

Release date: October 25, 2023 [eBook #71956]

Language: Finnish

Original publication: Helsinki: Kust.Oy Fundament, 1918

Credits: Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HÄPEÄ ***

HÄPEÄ

Romaani

Kirj.

VEIKKO KORHONEN

Helsingissä, Kustannusosakeyhtiö Fundament, 1918.

I.

Kesäkuun sunnuntaiaamu valkeni poutaisena ja kirkkaana. Kaste oli

maasta haihtunut auringon paisteessa ja hiljainen etelätuuli värisytti
puiden lehtiä. Heinämäen Tuomas käveli morsiamensa Annan
kanssa kirkkomaan aitaviertä mietteisiin vaipuneena.

— Tänään siis meitä ensikerran kuulutetaan, virkkoi Anna

naurahtaen.

— Niin.

Tuomas sanoi sen alaspainetuin katsein ja hieman masentuneella

äänellä.

— Mikä sinun on? kysyi ihmetellen Anna. Sinähän näytät niin

kovin alakuloiselta.

— En ymmärrä itsekään, mikä minua vaivaa. Se on jokin outo

ahdistus, jota minä en ymmärrä. Olethan sinä, Anna, minun aivan
yksin, aivan kokonaan?

Tuomas käänsi katseensa Annaan ja hapuili tämän kättä

omaansa.
 Anna naurahti iloisesti, melkeinpä vallattomasti.

— Etkö sinä nyt sitä tiedä? Kenenkäs muunkaan minä nyt enää
olisin.
Kuulethan sen kohta kirkossa, jollet muuten usko.

Tuomaankin täytyi jo naurahtaa. Mitä hän turhia kyselikin.

Hänenhän oli kaunis, Rotkan mökin kaksikymmenvuotias Anna.
Kohta hän tulisi liitolleen saamaan vahvistuksen, jota hän oli
odottanut rauhoittuakseen. Tästä huolimatta hän ei voinut vapautua
kokonaan painostavasta tunteestaan. Niinkuin jokin näkymätön,
raskas käsi olisi häntä painanut. Ja niinkuin jokin salainen ääni
hänen korvaansa kuiskannut outoja, selittämättömiä aavistuksia.

Anna pyörähti portista kirkkotarhaan ja Tuomas seurasi hänen

perässään.

— Vieläkö sinä yhä vain murjottelet? virkkoi Anna happamesti.

Tällaistako se nyt onkin? Toisenlaiseksi minä tämän päivän
kuvittelin.

Anna käveli ripeästi nurmettunutta käytävää ja heitti olkansa yli

halveksivan katseen Tuomaaseen.

— Kuulehan! ehätti Tuomas hänen rinnalleen. Enhän minä sillä

mitään tarkoittanut. Et nyt suuttuisi tuommoisesta. Olenhan minä sitä
jo niin monesti sinulta ennenkin kysynyt.

Anna katseli Tuomaaseen epäluuloisesti.

— Etkä vieläkään sitä tiedä?

— Kyllähän minä sen jo…

 — Niinpä elä sitten…

— Ka, kun ihan suuttui.

Tuomas koetti naurahtaa ja laskea kätensä Annan vyötäiselle.

— Mitäs kun aina sitä samaa…

Anna pyörähti edelleen kävelemään Tuomasta odottamatta.

— Anna.

— Mitä?

— Muistatko illan siellä Halmeahon rinteellä? Silloin lupasit, ettei

enää milloinkaan riideltäisi.

— Itsehän sinä riitaa rakennat aina epäilemällä minua.

— Mutta itsehän sinä olet sanonut…

— Mitä?

— Että sinulla on ollut muitakin…

— Eikö sinulla sitten ole ollut?

— Ei. Sinä saat minut aivan koskemattomana. Kaikki unelmani ja

tuulentupani olen sinun kanssasi rakennellut.

— Niin mitä sitten?

Annan kysymys oli särmikäs eikä Tuomas ehtinyt siihen mitään

vastaamaan, kun kellot tapulissa helähtivät soimaan. Hän paljasti
päänsä ja seisahti Annan rinnalle. Hänen vakavat kasvonsa
värähtivät liikutuksesta ja hän etsi Annan käden omaansa ja puristi
sitä lujasti.

— Meidän on mentävä kirkkoon, sanoi Anna hiljaa.

Kirkkomäellä kulki heidän ohitseen Topias Isotalo hymyillen ilkeästi

morsiusparille. Anna huomasi tämän ja punastuen kiirehti Tuomaan
edellä kirkon ovelle, josta kuului ulos urkujen humina ja virren
veisuu.

Kirkonaidan luona seisoi ryhmä miehiä verkkaisesti keskustellen.

Hekin olivat huomanneet Heinämäen Tuomaan morsiamineen

kirkkoon menevän ja vaikenivat hetkeksi.

— Nuorenpa se Tuomas vielä saikin, virkkoi vihdoin yksi joukosta.

— Vaikka itse on jo yli kolmenkymmenen…

— Muuten on kunnon mies.

— Miesten parhaita. Saa syntymään käsistään mitä vain tahtoo.

— Olisi Tuomas ollut paremmankin vaimon veroinen, virkkoi

Isotalon vanha isäntärenki.

— Miten niin? kysyi joku.

— Niin vain, että pietyn piikaisen taisi Tuomas saada, virkkoi

edellinen.

— Olisikohan…?
 — Isotalon palveluksessa ei kukaan säily koskemattomana. Omin
silmin sen olen tullut näkemään, vahvisti isäntärenki ja lähti
astumaan kirkkoon.

— No sen korvaa nuoruus ja kauneus. Anna on pulskin tyttö

paikkakunnalla, virkkoi siihen joku miehistä ja keskustelu raukesi.
II.

Tuomas kyntää paloa helteisenä kesäkuun päivänä, yllään hurstiset

housut ja paita, hattu kannon nenään nostettuna, jaloissa paikatut
lapikkaat, saumoista auenneet.

Jo varhain aamulla on Tuomas käynyt työhönsä ja raatanut

levähtämättä joskus hihallaan hikeä otsalta pyyhkien.

Taloissa on ruokakello kutsunut aamiaiselle, mutta Tuomas ei ole

sitä huomannut. Vasta keskipäivällä hän seisottaa ruunansa, painaa
sahrat kannon juureen ja istuu kärventyneen koivunrungon tyvelle
lepäämään.

Kohta kaksi vuotta ummelleen on Heinämäen Tuomas raatanut

isältään Korpi-Tuomaalta perimässään mökissä Isontalon
takalistolla. Parannellut kartanon, perkannut peltoja, lisää raivannut
niittyä koskemattomaan korpeen ja iloinnut työnsä tuloksista. Anna,
hänen vaimonsa, ei vaan osannut iloita. Pyrki mukisemaan muka
puutteista, joita ei ollut, ei edes torppaa rakennellessa. Valitteli aina
paljoja töitä, vaikka Tuomas oli vuosi sitten, kun pikku Matti syntyi,
ottanut palvelijan vähentääkseen työtä vaimoltaan.
 Tuomas pyyhkieli hikeä otsaltaan koivunrungolla istuessaan ja
mietti sitä yhtä ja samaa, mitä oli jo viikkokausia miettinyt.

Miksi Anna oli yhtämittaa pahalla tuulella ja tyytymätön oloonsa?

Mikä häntä vaivasi? Olihan kaikkea mitä tarvitsi, leipää yltäkyllin ja
koti semmoinen, josta olisi saattanut moni ylpeillä, toki olla ainakin
kiitollinen. Anna vaan ei ollut. Yhtämittaa mutisi, milloin mistäkin.
Viimeksi tänä aamuna siitä, että hän vaati joka aamu varhain
nousemaan. Ja siitäkin, ettei saanut kylissä käydä, vaikka mieli teki.

Tuomas puraisi piippunsa vartta. Hänen sisässään kuohahti.

Maatkoon, maatkoon vaikka päivät läpeensä. Juoskoon kyliä, kun
haluttaa ja kun ei koti miellytä. Menköön, menköön vaikka hiiteen.
Moni tyttö olisi varmaankin ollut kiitollisempi saadessaan semmoisen
kodin kuin Heinämäki. Anna ei vaan ollut.

Kylillä häntä kiitettiin uutterimmaksi ja kykenevimmäksi mieheksi

paikkakunnalla, mutta tuskin sitä Anna huomasi, koskapa yhtämittaa
kohteli olantakaisesti.

Semmoiseksiko se elämä nyt muuttuikin? Ainako vain saisi

Annalta nurjan mielen palkaksi vaivoistaan ja hyvyydestään?
Tokkohan Anna enää rakastikaan häntä?

Se ajatus sattui kipeänä ja vihlaisevana.

Tuomas tuli tahtomattaan muistelleeksi menneitä päiviä. Valoisat,

vuoroin synkät kuvasarjat alkoivat kulkea hänen ohitseen.

*****

Keväinen lauantai-ilta.
 Koivuissa on lehti hiirenkorvalla ja hakametsässä laulaa rastas.
Poika kävelee karjapolkua mietteisiin vaipuneena. Takaapäin kuuluu
askeleita. Mökin Anna on lähtenyt vispilänvarpoja taittamaan. Poika
kääntyy katsomaan ja jää odottamaan. Tytöllä on kimppu
koivunvarpoja kainalossa, joista hän yhtä kuorii huomaamatta
poikaa, joka odottaa hymy suupielissä.

— Hyvää iltaa, sanoo poika.

— Hui, kun minä säikähdin!

Ja tyttö nauraa niin, että valkoiset hampaat välkkyvät.

— Mitä sinä täällä teet?

— Tulin vain huvikseni kävelemään ja etsimään variksenpesiä,

sanoo poika.

— Näytänkö minä sinun mielestäsi nyt niin variksenpesältä? kysyy

tyttö suupielessä veitikka värähdellen.

Poika hämmästyy.

— Enhän minä sinua… enkä minä luullut sinua täällä

tapaavanikaan.

Molemmat nauravat. Hakametsä tuoksuu, rastas katkonaisia

säveleitään kaiuttaa.

Poika kävelee tytön rinnalla, joka vikkelästi kuorii varpujaan ja

silmää joskus salaa poikaan. Tiesiköhän tuo minun tulevan? Mitähän
tuo aikoo?
 — Tuossapa olisi hyvä torpan paikka, sanoo poika ajatuksissaan
katsellen sileää rinnettä, jossa kasvaa muutamia nuoria koivuja.
Antaisikohan Isotalo rakentaa tuohon torpan?

— Rakentaisitko?

— Kyllä, jos vain…

Ja poika katsoo naurahtaen tyttöön.

— Jos mitä?

— Eipä mitään. Ajattelin vain, että kukapa siihen sitten emännäksi

tulisi.

Tyttö saa uuden lämpimän silmäyksen pojalta.

— Hui hai, eihän sinulla ole mökkiäkään vielä, sanoo tyttö

helähtäen nauramaan ja lähtien juoksemaan karjapolkua lehtoon.

Poika juoksee jälessä, koppaa tytön syliinsä ja sanoo läähättäen.

— Tulisitko…? sinä…

— Tulisin, sanoo tyttö ja karkaa metsään.

*****

Toinen kuva.

Juhannus-yö. Kyläkeinulta ovat kokkotulien viimeiset liekit

sammuneet ja nuoriso parvittain hajaantunut kyläteille. Tanssiin on jo
kyllästytty ja soittajan hanurin sävelet kaikuvat kastepisaraisessa
metsässä.
 Muuan pojista on istunut syrjässä tanssia katsellen, palannut yksin
hämärään pirttiin ja painunut penkille pää käsien varaan. Hän on
saanut istua koko illan yksin. Mökin Anna on lentänyt käsivarrelta
käsivarrelle tanssin pyörteessä. Tuskin yhtään sanaa on häneltä
riittänyt pojalle koko iltana. Joku pojista on osoittanut häntä
sormellaan: "Kas, mikä körri tuo Takalan Tuomas, kun ei puhu eikä
pukahda".

Pojan sydäntä raastaa pakahduttava tunne ja kurkkua kuristaa

pidätetty nyyhkytys. Toinen käsi on nyrkkiin puristettuna ja toisella
tukee hän päätään, jossa suonet takovat niin hurjasti.

— Kurja nainen!

Kello tuvan mustuneella seinällä lyö rämisten. Montako? Poika ei

sitä huomaa. Hänen päänsä painuu yhä alemma ikkunalautaa
vasten ja kuumat pisarat putoilevat penkille.

Tuvan ovi aukeaa hiljaa ja tyttö astuu sisään hiljaisin askelin.

— Tuomas… täälläkö sinä oletkin?

Poika ei vastaa mitään. Hänen povessaan värähtää oudosti ja käsi

pusertuu nyrkiksi.

Tyttö tulee lähemmäksi ja istuu penkille. Raollaan olevasta

ikkunasta kuuluvat hanurin mollisävelet jostakin hyvin kaukaa, yli
hiljaisien vesien.

— Oletko sinä minulle vihainen? kysyy tyttö hiljaa koettaen olla

vakava, vaikka toisessa suupielessä nytkähtelee pidätetty nauru.
 — En minä sinulle voi vihainen olla, sanoo poika nostaen kostean
katseensa tyttöön, joka siirtyy lähemmäksi istumaan ja tapailee
pojan kättä omaansa.

— Kyllä sinä olet suuttunut minuun, minä näen sen. Mutta enhän
minä voinut olla tanssimatta, kun minua aina vain pyydettiin.

— Eikö sinulla siellä olisi ollut yhtään ystävällistä sanaa minulle?

— Elä viitsi nyt enää… Voinhan minä olla vasta tanssimattakin.

— Mitäpä nyt siitäkään…

Aurinko nousi ja värähteli tuvan ikkunassa ja kukkaan puhjenneen

verenpisaran lehdillä. Poika painoi päänsä tytön syliin ja puhkesi
rajuun nyyhkytykseen.

— No mitä nyt…?

Painava, hiljainen äänettömyys.

Hetken kuluttua kohotti poika kirkastuneen katseensa tyttöön ja

virkkoi.

— Minä olen antanut sinulle kaikki parhaimpani. Unelmani ja mitä

kauniita ajatuksia minulla on ollut. Ja tämä kaikki on minulla ensi
kertaa niinkuin tuolla kukkasella tuossa ikkunalla, mutta sinä leikit
vain minun kanssani ja lennät milloin minkin käsivarrella. Minä näin
nytkin, kenen kanssa sinä läksit kokoilta ja nyt… nyt sinä jo istut
tuossa. Voinko minä enää koskaan sinuun luottaa?

— Voit. En minä enää koskaan…

 Aurinko hymyili yhä kultaisemmin. Tyttö koetti hänkin hymyillä ja
kurotti punaisen suunsa suudeltavaksi.

Poika ei voinut enää vastustaa, vaan nosti tytön syliinsä.

— Oletko sinä sitten yksin minun?

— Olen, virkkoi tyttö miettien äskeistä saattajataan.

— Kun minä sen vain oikein varmasti tietäisin, niin minun onneni
olisi niin suuri ja kokonainen. Mutta sano minulle, onko sinulla
koskaan ennen ollut tällaista? Onko tämä sinulla ensimäistä kertaa?

— On, virkkoi tyttö miettien kyläsoittajaa, joka oli ollut hänen

luhdissaan viime yönä. Voiko sitä tällaista olla muuta kuin yhden
kerran vain, jatkoi hän.

Poika puristi tytön lujasti syliinsä.

— Nyt minä aloitan jo huomisen päivän perästä tupani veistoksen

ja laulaen käyn työhöni ja pian nousee yhteisen pesän seinät.
Kuulehan, virkkoi poika hetken kuluttua, nyt minä vasta käsitän,
miten suuri onni on antaa koskemattoman suoruutensa
koskemattomalle, niinkuin sinä nyt olet.

Tyttö katseli ulos eikä puhunut mitään.

— Syksyn tullen minä sitten vien sinut omaan tupaani, niinhän?

— Ehtiihän siitä nyt vielä…

— Etkö sinä tahtoisikaan vielä niin pian?

— Kyllä, mutta…
 — Mitä?

— Puhutaan sitten toiste siitä. Sinun täytyy nyt jo mennä. Isäntä

voi pian nousta.

*****

Muutamia kuukausia myöhemmin.

Tuomas on saattanut häätaloon morsiamensa. Viulut vingahtelevat

ja lattia notkuu tanssivien parien alla. Anna on kiitänyt koko illan
Isontalon nuoren isännän Topiaan käsivarrella. Kun Tuomas pyytää
häntä jo lopettamaan tanssin, vastaa Anna niskojaan nakaten.

— Minä tahdon nyt tanssia vielä tämän kerran etkä sinä saa nyt
minua kiusata. Mene yksin kotiin, jos et jaksa, minua odottaa.

— Mutta enhän minä nyt hääyönä yksin…

— Istu sitten nurkassa ja odota.

Topias vie Annan uudelleen tanssiin ja väläyttää ilkeästi silmää

Tuomaalle.

Tuomaan kädet puristuvat nyrkeiksi ja uhkaava tuli pajaa hänen

poskipäillään.

*****

Ruuna kuopi maata ja hirnahteli. Tuomas heräsi ajatuksistaan.

Kuinka kauan hän siinä lienee istunutkaan. Kädet olivat tiukasti
nyrkeissä ja hengitys kulki raskaasti. Mitäs jos Anna ei pitäisikään
hänestä enää? Jos ei olisi pitänyt ennenkään? Mitä varten Isotalo
kävi heillä niin usein? Ja aina sillä oli vielä se ilkeä katseensa, josta
ei saanut selvää, mitä se oli. Eihän se nyt sentään Annaa katselle,
toisen vaimoa? Eihän toki. Mutta miksi Anna on yhtämittaa
nyreissään, eikä salli itseään hyväillä niinkuin ennen. Ja
mietteissään kulkee kesken askareittensa ja seisahtelee
tuijottamaan. Mitäs jos Anna ja Isotalo…?

Veri nousi Tuomaan päähän, niin että silmät säkenöivät, kun sitä
ajatteli. Uskaltaisiko se nyt semmoista? Olihan kyllä tapahtunut
ennenkin samanlaista.

Tuomas nousi, riisui ruunan, laski sen veräjästä hakaan ja läksi

miettien kävelemään pihaan.

— Minkä tähden sinä et tullut aamiaiselle, kysyi Anna Tuomaan

tupaan tultua.

— En muistanut. Ruuna viimein rupesi tahtomaan…

— Et muistanut… On siinä mies, kun ei muista syömään tulla…

Kun nyt ruunan piti ihan muistuttaa.

Ja Anna nauroi hytkähdellen.

— Mitä siinä nyt on virnuamista, virkkoi Tuomas kärsimättömästi.

— No eikö sinulle saisi yhtään nauraa?

— No jos niin haluttaa. Onko sinulla voita?

Ei jaksaisi paloa kyntää suolavesileivällä.

— Eipä sitä kannattaisi.

— Syöthän sinä itsekin. Miks'en minä saisi?

 — Ei sinun tarvitse minun syönnistäni sanoa. Saanhan minä olla
syömättäkin, jos se niin on.

— Enhän minä ole kieltänyt.

— Vai et. Kun sanoit, että syöthän sinä itsekin.

— Niin niin. Ei se nyt kieltämistä…

Anna toi voilautasen ja heitti sen kolisten menemään pöydälle.

— Siin' on!

— Elähän nyt noin vihassa…

— Mitäs sinä aina…

Tuomas söi vaieten ja Anna pesi karsinapuolella astioita. Pikku

Matti, ensimäisen vuotensa täyttänyt poika, leikki lattialla. Tuomas
katseli pojan piirteitä. Sillähän olikin melkein mustat silmät, nyt hän
sen vasta tuli oikein huomanneeksi. Heidän suvussaan ei ollut
kellään mustia silmiä. Annalla oli tosin tummat, mutta…

Poika jokelsi ja katsoi tuottavasti isäänsä. Mitä hän oli

ajatellutkaan. Tuomas tunsi häpeävänsä. Kaikkeakin sitä… Oma
poika…

Anna liikkui askareissaan mitään miehelleen virkkamatta.

Yhtämittaa se on vain äkeissään, mistä lienee. Onhan se kaunis

ihminen, kun vain olisi hyväluontoisempi. Tulleekohan tuo minun
aittaani ensi yöksi nukkumaan, vai menneekö omaan aittaansa.