The Forbidden Zone

Are there any more ways in which we can read about war and still be jolted by its visceral horrors? The answer, surprisingly, is yes; perhaps more surprisingly, it is to be found in this remarkable little book, first published in 1929 and now reissued in a beautiful edition by Hesperus Press.

Its author, Mary Borden, was born in 1886, the daughter of an American millionaire. She married a British missionary, moved to London and started a family. When the First World War broke out, she volunteered to serve with the French Red Cross. Disgusted with the typhoid-ridden conditions of the Dunkirk hospital in which she found herself, she offered to fund and manage her own field station. It is her experiences as a nurse in this unit - including a stint on the Somme in 1916 - that make up this slim but very moving volume.

Borden's vignettes have an almost fairy-tale, repetitive quality to them, but these are fairy tales in the Grimm mode, and a far cry from their sanitised Ladybird cousins. Her description of life as a bored sentry guard is startling in its precise summation of the futility of war : 'All these motors and all these scornful men that stop to show impatient papers will disappear up the road for ever. Even those who come down the road will go up again and will be destroyed and will never come back.'

Borden writes beautifully about 'splendid, ordinary, normal men' who now 'mew like kittens' in the hospital. She likens the wounded and the dead to a harvest on the battlefields: 'Crops of men were cut down in the fields of France where they were growing. They were mown down with a scythe, were gathered into bundles, tossed about with pitchforks … and flung into ditches … and at last brought here - what was left of them.' This elegant description of death on the front is heartbreaking in its simplicity.

The Forbidden Zone pays homage to the quiet bravery and dignity of the wounded and those who cared for them in extremis. She describes old orderlies 'peeling the stiff uniform from a man whose hip or shoulder was fractured … Their big peasant hands were gentle - very, very gentle and careful. They handled the wounded men as if they were children.' And she describes the almost bovine calm of the injured - and their good manners: ' "I am sorry, madame, my bandage is leaking. I would not trouble you, but I think I am bleeding." "Do not trouble, sister. Do not give yourself so much trouble, I beg of you." ' These French peasants, Borden says, had perfect manners even as they lay there for hours getting weaker, dying.

But what of Mary herself? How did she cope with the suffering all around her? Well, for much of the time she remained practical. 'It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the operating rooms.' She also knew that she shouldn't think about the former lives of the boys who died on her breast.

At times, hysterical euphoria enveloped her: 'I was happy. It seemed to me that the crazy crowded bright hot shelter was a beautiful place.' And at others, a surreal humour born of horror surrounding her took over: an orderly explains that a man's brain has come off in a bandage, but ' "it's only one half of his brain," he said, looking into the man's skull. "The rest is here."' Surgeons discuss oysters as they plug a lung; a man's amputated knee is mistaken for a lamb's and almost added to a stew.

Borden would have been inhuman if she hadn't broken down at times, and her descriptions of these moments rip through her serene prose like livid scar tissue. She pleads with a General  'by some hysterical impulse' for the life of a failed suicide who is to be saved only so that he can be shot by a firing squad. At the end of a particularly long day, the trepidation in the voice of a blinded soldier causes her body to rattle and jerk: 'I fled from him. I ran down the long, dreadful hut and hid behind my screen and cowered, sobbing, in a corner, hiding my face.'

This, then, was daily life on the Western Front: boredom, routine, fear, shock, death. It was Mary Borden's supreme achievement not only to save as many men as she did - and nurse the others gently to the end - but to put down on paper some of what it felt like to be there, living and dying in the mud.