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Katherine Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts, in addition to focusing on the violence and trauma of the World War I trenches, is also about the female nurses who treated wounded soldiers.
Protagonist Laura's point-of-view sections devote ample description to the sordid day-to-day of serving as a hospital nurse in WWI. Already sent away from the front once for a bomb that nearly took her leg, she is steely and cynical and, like the other nurses, adopts several coping mechanisms: alcohol, smoking, ducking for cover at the first sign of a bombing, and sleeping without dreaming.
During WWI, as many as 3,000 Canadian nurses in the Canadian Army Medical Corps served with 600,000 men in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. These women — of whom Laura is a fictionalized depiction — were called nursing sisters. In her novel, Arden includes the details of Laura, without her parents' support, having to pay her way through a nursing degree. Official nursing training (which ...
