Investigations never revealed who went against orders and opened those portholes, but the general consensus seems to suggest it was a nurse. Before I started work on this novel, I had no knowledge of nursing in the First World War. I soon learned that First World War nursing was dangerous and exhausting work; remarkable women volunteered, many quite naive, yet brave beyond measure. They experienced the horror of war first hand, and thousands paid with their lives. The courageousness of these resilient young women – often scorned by men, and away from home for the first time in their lives – is still unrecognised. Thousands faced unimaginable horrors for the sake of their brothers and their country.

I had watched Testament of Youth, and read about Edith Cavell, but it was not until I read The Virago Book of Women and the Great War (a collection of letters home and diary excerpts) and The Daughters of Mars, that I realised the true horror that these women had to face.

My vision of the gentle young nurse, and the subservient VAD in her spotless, starched uniform was replaced by a much harsher reality: women struggling through the filth, discomfort, stench and lack of supplies to mend broken, dismembered and diseased bodies. Men writhed in agony in some of the most dreadful battleground clearing stations. In atrocious, dysentery-ridden conditions, these nurses and VADs attempted to ease pain and save lives.

Professional nurses were battling for recognition and proper training. Unqualified volunteers (VADs), most with total ignorance of medicine and the anatomy, found themselves pitched into military hospitals.

The nurses feared the VADs’ arrival would undermine their efforts for recognition. Poorly paid VADs were used mainly as labourers, scrubbing floors, changing beds, swilling bedpans. However, because of a chronic shortage of trained nurses, some progressed to changing dressings and administering drugs.

The war produced medical issues largely unknown in civilian life and not previously experienced by doctors or nurses. Machine guns were still relatively new and due to the poor conditions in the trenches, wound infections were common. With no antibiotics or disinfectants, any injury could mean death. Instead, they used iodide or agonising salt to try and stop infection.

Thousands perished because of tetanus and gangrene. Towards the end of the war, some fundamental medical advances emerged; one of these was blood transfusions, performed simply by linking a tube between the patient and the donor for a direct transfer of blood. An example can be seen at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.

Loggerhead Turtles – Caretta caretta

On a lighter note, we come to the beautiful turtles of the Mediterranean. The loggerhead sea turtle is the world’s largest hard-shelled turtle. Adults have an average weight of about 298 lb (135 kg) with a maximum recorded weight of 1,202 lb (545 kg). The maximum recorded length of a loggerhead is 84 in (213 cm), though in the Mediterranean, the average is half that size.