Laura Holland and Mildred Forbes, an inseparable duo, set off from Montreal in June 1915 to serve as nursing sisters in the Great War. Over the next four years, the two cared for each other through sickness and health, air raids and bombings, unrelenting work and adventurous leaves.

War-Torn Exchanges offers unprecedented insight into the daily lives of Canada’s First World War nurses – from the privations of Gallipoli to the heavy casualties of Passchendaele and beyond.

This carefully curated and contextualized collection of letters challenges the popular myth of nurses as wartime angels. Instead, Mildred and Laura’s letters are filled with the nurses’ fears and frustrations, humour and keen observations – revealing how they relied on friendship, wry wit, and professional ethics to carry on in the face of mismanagement, discrimination, illness, deprivation, and trauma.

Andrea McKenzie has studied poetry with Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier. She graduated from the University of Victoria. A Mother’s String is her first book. She lives in Victoria, B.C.

Andrea McKenzie's profile page

Andrea McKenzie provides as indispensable a service to contemporary readers as the women no doubt did for their friends and family during the war. As Mildred exclaimed, in the absence of such accounts, “the people at home have no idea what the soldiers [and nurses, we might now add] … went through for them.”

BC Studies

Of this cadre of women most – but not all, for some were killed in action – returned from war. Some became our leaders in nursing, hospital management, and social services. Some left nursing and became our grandmothers or great grandmothers. We are in their debt, for their work and for their legacy. In their articulation of war, framed by diligent writers and researchers like Cynthia Toman [author of Sister Soldiers, UBC Press 2016] and McKenzie, we discover anew, from Canadian nursing sisters in the First World War, just what war is. From such articulation, we have much to learn.

The Ormsby Review

The letters [of Holland and Forbes] document close links between Canada's home and war fronts. Ties taught lessons about the atrocities of combat and, no doubt, helped inspire subsequent anti-war activity and support for refugees … In short, War-Torn Exchanges provides inspiration in plenty for both friendship and engagement.

Herizons

Laura’s letters to her mother and Mildred’s to her friend Cairine Wilson document a side of the war not found in more formal accounts … [and] close the artificial divide between battle front and home front … McKenzie’s narratives, annotations and deft editing … [make] War-Torn Exchanges an insightful contribution to understanding another aspect of the war.

Great War 100 Reads