‘Inflicting Wounds, Healing Wounds: the Solution for our Time’

Immediately after the start of the war, the Red Cross handed over its team of trained nurses to the military. Given the anticipated lack of available nursing personnel, as early as August 1914, the Red Cross called for all women to apply to work as war nurses. In the period until the end of the war, it is estimated that over 25,000 nurses, auxiliary nurses and care assistants were deployed. They worked either unpaid or for a pittance in field hospitals near the front, often in life-threatening conditions.

Initially, women from all walks of life signed up to become war nurses, but with the progress of the war and given the supply shortages at home, many women found themselves no longer able to work as war nurses because of the terrible wages. Voluntary work was, then, left to the financially better-off women from the nobility and bourgeois circles.

The main duties of the nurses included caring for wounded soldiers, as well as looking after the sick in the epidemic control hospitals and psychiatric wards. Responsibility for managing the surgical dressing materials and running the military hospital also fell to them. The nurses were officially attached to the army health service and thus assigned their own field of duty in the military.

The willingness of the war nurses to volunteer was seen a feminine complement to compulsory military service for men. Care work, according to the conservative argument of the Red Cross, gave ‘the female soul, the driving force in a woman’s life, what [...] it needs: the opportunity to care, love and give.’ The nurse became an ideal of self-sacrifice and care. She embodied the selfless and loving mother, as well as the religious, asexual nursing sister. Aware of her duty, she served the Fatherland alongside the soldiers and was rewarded with great recognition.

Though she worked directly in the military and had therefore entered a domain classified as genuinely male, unlike the women auxiliaries, she did not challenge the notion of the ‘feminine motherland’ and ‘masculine front’. Ultimately, she was doing what was supposedly ‘women’s work’, caring for and treating wounded soldiers so that they could return to battle.

Rumours of affairs between nurses and soldiers threatened the image of the self-sacrificing and caring nurse. They confirmed the accusations of some critics that the nurses had not taken up their role out of a sense of duty or selflessness, but in order to find a lover or potential husband.

Yet while female soldiers or female auxiliaries working in the army were largely forgotten after the end of the war, the war nurses became an integral part of the collective memory of the First World War.

Translation: Aimee Linekar