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The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War by Mary Borden
This memoir of a nurse during WWI is often almost too painful to read. Still, in her preface, she says she has softened the edges of some realities in that, even after decades, they would cause her too much anguish to write or to inflict upon readers. The title refers to an area in France deemed “the forbidden Zone” because of its closeness to the line of fire. Yet, Ms. Borden persevered from 1914 until 1918, travelling to whatever section she was assigned, always within this zone.First published in 1929, it was rediscovered and re-published in 2008. Perhaps interest has been reawakened due to current wars with their rising death tolls, and veterans returning with physical and emotional scars. Part of the sadness and horror contained in this book results from the awareness that, at this very moment, young men and women are being wheeled into military hospital wards, having lost arms, legs or at times, even faces.
Despite a century’s accumulation of knowledge regarding drugs and procedures, doctors and nurses are all too often powerless to do more than palliate suffering. Indeed, many of Ms. Borden’s experiences may be shared by her modern counterparts. Frequently, war nurses were the last human beings a soldier was likely to see before dying. Thus, one nurse was asked to come to a bedside, only to be told by a gravely injured young man that he never before had killed a woman. This sentence, unexplained, touched her as a plea for absolution for one or more acts which shamed this young man to the depths of his being.
A slightly longer encounter occurred with a man who was frantic and desperate to die. The greatest irony of such wars is the permission, indeed encouragement to kill anyone, despite gender or age, whose life proves in any way inconvenient. This endorsement, however, ends at one’s self; a failed suicide attempt resulted in being shot after having been court martialed.
Here a middle aged man, doubtless joining the army after younger draftees had been killed, having shot himself in the mouth, survived and was brought to the hospital. There, though well aware of his fate, the doctors struggled to save his life, lest his death caused a flurry of similar efforts. Finally, Ms. Borden and her fellow nurses agreed to “forget” to force him to wear those bandages he continued to rip away from his wounds. A moment came when, though no word dared be spoken by either side, his eyes voiced his gratitude. Two days later he died.
Parts of this book are given an added immediacy by being written as poems, addressing the reader as if he or she were a friend. One of the most evocative states: “Listen; you can hear how well it works: there is the sound of cannon and of the ambulances bringing the wounded, and the sounds of the tramp of strong men going along to fill the empty places. Do you hear? DO you understand? It is all as it should be.
