Soldiers from the front say there’ll be a big push in a few days. God knows how we’ll cope. We have fifty beds in our hut. We ease their pain, then send them to tent wards.

After work, at midnight last night, I went down to the receiving tent to see how the incoming wounded were handled. The big marquee had two feeble electric lights. Some doctors had electric torches. We’re told when a convoy is on its way. The stretchers are laid on the dirt floor, close together. The injured have a ticket on their coat assigning them to a tent where men with similar conditions also wait: shrapnel wounds, gas, blindness, limbs missing, gunshot and trench foot. I think about Arthur often, Gertie. Sometimes, a soldier will come in covered in mud . . . and for a moment I am fooled. Hope that there has been a mistake rises rapidly and leaves me breathless. Then my heart is broken all over again. At those times it’s difficult not to show affection for the poor blighters. They are all some mother’s son, aren’t they?

Volunteers hand out hot soup, usually pea with horsemeat. Unless they’re in agony, we bathe the men, put their clothes in the fumigator, then let them sleep. The doctors talk to them a little, but they don’t examine them. For those desperate darlings who will not make it through the night, there is morphine. A high dose.

The soldiers say very little. They’re exhausted, traumatised, and in terrible pain, but they’re also brave beyond measure. When I ask how they feel, torn open or limbs missing, they answer wearily, ‘Not too bad, nurse’ or ‘A bit rough, to tell the truth.’

I love them all, Gertie, although there are terrible repercussions if any nurse is found fraternising with a patient. However, I do occasionally sneak a small square of Mother’s chocolate in for a terminal case or two. God help the poor devils.

One patient was caught in an explosion and thrown onto an entanglement of barbed wire between us and the enemy. He had to stay there, exposed to gunfire, hunger, and thirst for twenty-four hours before anyone could get him away. He caught some shrapnel and several bullets, but I believe he will recover.

Another was shot in the hip and could only drag himself a few inches at a time between the trenches. He was out there, bombs and bullets passing over him, for three days. He took water from the canteens of dead soldiers until he was eventually rescued.