Lyn Macdonald > Quotes

“If the ghost that haunts the towns of Ypres and Arras and Albert is the staturory British Tommy, slogging with rifle and pack through its ruined streets to this well-documented destiny ‘up the line’, then the ghost of Boulogne and Etaples and Rouen ought to be a girl. She’s called Elsie or Gladys or Dorothy, her ankles are swollen, her feet are aching, her hands reddened and rough. She has little money, no vote, and has almost forgotten what it feels like to be really warm. She sleeps in a tent. Unless she has told a diplomatic lie about her age, she is twenty-three. She is the daughter of a clergyman, a lawyer or a prosperous businessman, and has been privately educated and groomed to be a ‘lady’. She wears the unbecoming outdoor uniform of a VAD or an army nurse. She is on active service, and as much a part of the war as Tommy Atkins.”
― Lyn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man's Land

“On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.”
― Lyn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man's Land

“Epidemics of childish ailments spread like a powder trail through the uprooted recruits, and many a village lad who had swaggered into the ranks with heroic ideas of fighting the Germans spent his first weeks as a soldier fighting a fever, scratching his spots or nursing a painful case of mumps.”
― Lyn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man's Land