I could do this! I was twice the person that had boarded the Britannic a few weeks ago. I owed my parents, for all the love and faith and support they had sent my way, and I would show them it wasn’t wasted. I used forceps to take pieces of shrapnel out of his abdomen. I would have done this for our Arthur, if only I had been given the chance. Now, I did it for every wounded soldier who had a fretting sister or weeping mother at home. My tears dripped onto him, but apart from that, there was no sign that I wept as I worked. When I could do no more, the orderlies transported him onto the ship.

‘All finished, what’s next?’ I asked Josephine, disappointed to hear the smallness of my own voice.

‘Well done. You’ll make a nurse yet,’ she said. ‘Go four stretchers back along the row, there’s an ear missing. You’ve practised a head bandage, yes?’ I nodded. ‘Then clean the wound and do your best bandage. We have to keep the flies off it.’

The hours ran into each other with cleaning wounds, wafting away flies, and applying dressings. Six hours later, my thoughts went back to the soldier whose belly I had attended. I wondered if he would live and wished I had taken his name. We continued until the light started to fade, then we got a lift to the hospital in one of the returning ambulances. I think I learned more in that one day – when seven hundred men boarded the Athena, bound for Alexandria – than forever after. I ended the day ten times the person I’d been when I woke that morning. I would remember none of the injured, except for the first, he would stay with me forever . . . like my first kiss.

Soon, we peered from the back of the ambulance, which was little more than a covered wagon. The December landscape was lush with wild flowers. Local farmers were collecting the last of the day’s olives from laden trees. Lemon and orange groves, heavy with their bright fruit, flanked the road to the field hospital and perfumed the air with delicate citrus scents. A wide, green valley ran from the port of Mudros, up to the distant mountains. Along the centre of the dale, like a great canvas dressing on a wound in the countryside, were many dozens of tents. These made up the wards of the clearing hospital.

We were allocated beds in the dorm tent, then, in the mess tent, ate something that seemed to be mostly rice with a few herbs. However, a tin mug of strong sweet tea saved the day. The best drink of my life.