When Lucy Steeds was researching her debut novel, The Artist, she realised that writing about art in the 1920s was impossible without an understanding of how the First World War had left its mark — physical or mental — on everyone who lived through it. One powerful source was nurses’ testimonies. Here she writes about the hidden stories of suffering — and excitement — she found.
A message, written on somebody’s skin: “lesion to upper thigh, wound infected”. The message would have been read by a volunteer nurse who stood in the vaulted room of what had once been a hotel, or perhaps a convent, or a chateau, but which was now a hospital.
At the outbreak of World War One, makeshift hospitals were set up across France and Belgium to care for the new influx of wounded soldiers. Volunteers — some with medical backgrounds, others with nothing — were given nurses’ uniforms.
Medical centres were cobbled together out of schools, inns, and churches. “The building in which we worked was a large Roman Catholic College; the principal and professors were still living in it,” records one nurse; blood and chloroform amongst the Latin primers.
Just as these hastily-assembled medical institutions were improvised, so were their processes: “Using the patient as his own medical record pathological findings, treatment details, and diagnoses were often written on his skin in indelible ink.” Each new arrival was a puzzle to decipher, his skin the record of his pain.
To find these stories — and many other perplexing, surprising ones like it — I dug deep into the archives of nurses’ testimonies from WWI.
Women travelled to every country where soldiers were fighting, many of them travelling abroad for the first time, and began lives that were previously unimaginable to them. The world itself was unimaginable, and a new one was taking shape around them in the form of brutality and bloodshed and some of the most viscerally traumatic injuries seen in warfare.
One nurse stationed in Belgium records how “the old-world market square was filled with every sort of war vehicle; officers occupied the inns and soldiers swarmed everywhere, sleeping at night in the Cathedral and another great church where straw was spread on the floor for them.” There is something incongruous yet numinous about recovering soldiers bedding down on straw in a gilded church.
As I read more of these testimonies, I often found the sublime jostling with the ridiculous. Men lay injured and dying in the confines of a school-turned-hospital, and one nurse records how “shells began to fall — Christmas cards from the Huns… we were just having a game round the courtyard of hide-and-seek among the ambulances, the Munro chauffeurs chasing us with pieces of mistletoe. It seems a very incongruous pastime when a town is being bombarded!”
Life and death existed so closely together for these men and women. I was often struck by the unexpected jolliness in their tone, however. “Our dining-room was great! [The chef] was the sunniest fellow I ever met. He came in with the first batch of Furnes wounded, shot through the throat.”
This juxtaposition between the wondrous and the traumatic recurs throughout the years and across each country split apart by the war.
One nurse, Alice Ross-King, travelled from Australia to Egypt as a volunteer. Her diaries record visiting the pyramids, meeting soldiers on rooftops at sundown, and driving through Cairo at night, motoring “through a City of tombs in the dead white moonlight.”
But then there are moments of emotional whiplash: one day she is buying a feather boa in the bazaar, the next she simply records: “Very tired tonight. Ward heavy — had a death today.”
Similarly, a few days after the hide-and-seek around the ambulances mentioned above, the nurse’s diary records: “This is the nearest to Hell I have yet been.” More than anything, it was this contrast which interested me. Amongst all the death there was life: surrounded by desolation, there were still weddings and games of hide-and-seek and midnight drives through the pyramids. Creation and destruction lay side by side.
I was also fascinated by the ways in which war could be freeing for many women. Amongst the horror, they were able to snatch glimmers of life which were hitherto unavailable to them. For many of these women it was the first time they had travelled abroad, explored with independence, or felt their lives brush against those of men and women from such a wide variety of different places. Life near the front lines of the war was, in a strange way, a form of freedom.
I never set out to write a war novel. I thought I was writing about art in 1920. But the longer I immersed myself in the literature and art of the period, the more I realised that the scars left by the war were vividly detectable on the landscape, on people’s bodies, and on their minds.
The shadow of WWI was very long indeed, and its reach was vast. I often thought of how Alicia Foster described the art scene in the years after WWI: “wrecked and traumatised on one hand, hungry for pleasure and freedom on the other.”
This was the dichotomy I wanted to write about. The twin threads of trauma and pleasure, creation and destruction, life and death.
You only have to look at the art of the 1920s (the explosive, fractured work of Liubov Popova, or any of the Dadaists’ art which declared rationality dead) to see the throbbing pulse of the war beating behind the paint.
The nurses’ testimonies captured that dichotomy of lightness and darkness; chiaroscuro, an element so important in art. The Artist is about finding those glimmers of light in a world which has been destroyed, and the alchemy of creating beauty from the rubble.
The Artist by Lucy Steeds was published on 30 January, 2025.
Find out more about this book.
Lucy Steeds is a novelist and a graduate of the Faber Academy and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. She has a BA in English Literature and a Masters in World Literatures from the University of Oxford. The Artist is her first novel.
Have a look at our features on similar topics:
War and medicine, the First World War, and the 1920s:
The Guinea Pig Club – a WWII RAF pilot elite by LP Fergusson, about serious injuries in WWII
Licensed brothels in France during the First World War by Alec Marsh
The General Who Wept by Chris Moore
Paris, 1919: a fragile peace by Flora Johnston
The long legacy of the First World War by Alan Bardos
The fight for our battlefields by Tim Lynch
The Twenties, then and now by Gill Paul
20th-century art and artists:
Honouring Adele, Egon Schiele’s muse by Sophie Haydock
Dora Maar: much more than a muse by Louisa Treger
Images:
- The Scottish Women’s Hospital in the Cloister of the Abbaye at Royaumont. Dr Frances Ivens inspecting a French patient by Norah Neilson-Gray, 1920: © IWM (Art.IWM ART 3090) (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Field hospital ward on a French canal barge: Wellcome Images via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
- American Army field hospital inside ruins of church, France, 1918: Library of Congress via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Wounded soldiers in the grounds of the 4th London General Hospital: © IWM (Q 27816) (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Spatial Force Construction by Liubov Popova, 1920–21: itoldya420 (public domain)
