This is an archived article. For the latest news, go to the Advance Homepage . You can get there - it's just across the channel in France. Women go to nurse in the hospitals.
People come home on leave, letters and packages get through very quickly.
A war that involved a much larger percentage of the British population in one way or another than any previous conflict, it provides a rich panoply of collective memory and cultural identity, as well as a case study in how retrospective accounts change to serve intervening history. Watson's interest was first sparked after reading Vera Brittain's 1933 best seller, Testament of Youth. A memoir of the author's wartime service as a volunteer nurse, it describes her experiences in London, Malta and France, from the summer of 1915 until after the Armistice. What intrigued Watson was the ongoing antagonism between the volunteers and the professional nurses who were also part of the war effort. Alhough both did fundamentally the same work of caring for the wounded in hospitals, they had decidedly different views about how the job should be done.