1. Sandy Cash
Mailbox 108
The nurse's diary shows how World War I was like. She explains the horrors of the war, and how
it affects the nurses. She talks about how they run out of supplies, to the point where they had to
pick who should get surgery. Also, she talks about how these men have been wounded and have
been in the mud for a long time before they actually get to the hospital.
The nurse says that by the fourth week that all the nurses were used to “the constant influx of
mangled and bleeding forms.” She goes on to say that their water supply is becoming less and
less: to the point that they could only use the taps for half an hour each day. This makes it hard
for the nurses to care for the wounded soldiers, of whom there were one hundred and seventy,
who needed water a lot.
The second main thing the nurse talks about is how when the men come in, they are hard to take
care of because they did not receive any first-aid. She describes how hard it was to treat the men
saying, “...treating wounds in a home-hospital under surgically clean conditions is a very different
thing from dealing with mangled and shattered flesh where the wounds are filled with much torn
clothing and shrapnel.” She also talks about begging surgeons to operate on a soldier, even
though the surgeons thought it better to operate on someone else, because the soldier did not look
like he’d live. It turns out that the soldier did recover from the surgery; in fact, since he could not
have any food or drink by the mouth, he grabbed his neighbor’s bread and ate it.
The nurse, in her diary, does a good job at showing the horrors of World War I. It is hard to
imagine trying to pick who should get the medical attention and who should not. Also, she
explains how it was hard to take care of these men with little water supply. Even though she is
not actually fighting in World War I, she does a good job at describing what these men go
through, by how they come in covered in mud.