Emotional Containment: Nurses and Resilience

The psychic impact of the First World War has been a subject of debate since the late 1920s. After a period of silence lasting over ten years, former combatants began to write of their experiences. It became a truism that the war had damaged men’s minds – sometimes irreparably. Autobiographical accounts such as Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, and Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War brought the impact of trench warfare to the attention of modern societies.¹ Hard-hitting semi-fictional accounts such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front went further, deliberately traumatising the reader by using a language and an imagery that forced a confrontation, not so much with the physical realities of war, as with it psychic truths: that war was horrific, painful and destructive (and not heroic) and that surviving it was the most impressive feat a man could achieve.² In among these publications – and largely unnoticed – were the works of nurses such as Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone and Ellen La Motte’s The Backwash of War, offering eyewitness accounts of suffering and moral degradation.³