of March 22nd 1918, gazing half-hypnotised at the dishevelled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy clothing, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy bloodstained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me, and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted-meat glass half full of methylated spirit. —Vera Brittain, working as a VAD sister in a field hospital in Étaples, France, recalled in Testament of Youth (1936) MY GOOD LADY, go home and sit still!” The British War Office bully who gave this insulting advice to Dr. Elsie Inglis in World War I (see Chapter 8) was clearly ignorant that women of all kinds had been vital attendants at battlefields for thousands of years. All wars everywhere have needed doctors and nurses, a reality recognized by Isabella I, the fifteenth-century warrior queen of Spain, when she set up one of the earliest known military field hospitals in the Western world (see Chapter 2).
