ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how women as civilians voice the experiences of the soldiers who fought in World War I. One of premises is that a woman's voice in the war zone of 1914 is a priori represented as subaltern. An overview of several sets of nursing war sketches suggests that they draw on three types of narrative voice, all in service to the man's voice: of a scribe, a poetess who mistakes the true art of fiction, and a self-contradictory and self-doubting nurse-philosopher. The chapter considers a few women's texts about nurses that staked claims of authenticity due to their own proximity to the front and to soldiers themselves who had just come from the front. While the nurse outside military medicine was typically understood to be feminine, when nurses served close to the front lines, the conventional spatial and documentary contrast between soldiers' accounts from the battle front and women's accounts from the home front became blurred.
