SOURCE: Higonnet, Margaret R. Introduction to Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet, pp. vii. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Higonnet asserts that the fiction of Ellen Newbold La Motte and Mary Borden, two American nurses who volunteered for service during World War I, provides a valuable contribution to the canon of war literature.

It was the war that had taken me to France,” recollected the novelist and poet Mary Borden.¹ At the very moment when advancing armies were driving refugee women and children away from their homes in the battle zones of Belgium and Poland, the Great War was drawing other women toward the line of fire. In the early days of the war, a desire to serve where the need was greatest rallied women of all ages and from many countries who were “as...