Mudros, 1915: Two French nurses with the Army of the East

Two French women who served as nurses on the island of Lemnos during the Dardanelles campaign of 1915 left written accounts of their experience. One was a published author who volunteered with the Red Cross. The other was a medical student who would submit her wartime experiences as a doctoral thesis. Neither account has previously been available in English.

Jeanne Antelme arrived at the port of Mudros in August 1915. Assigned to a hospital caring for soldiers evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula, she recorded what she saw with the eye of a novelist: the heat, the dust, the flies, the wounded arriving in their thousands, and the stories the soldiers brought with them from the front. She was one of the few women from the Allied side to visit the peninsula itself and the only one to leave a written record of her impressions. Her memoir was published in France in 1916.

Elisabeth Jardin (later Fabre) wrote as a clinician. Her thesis documents the organisation and daily operations of Evacuation Hospital No. 1 at Mudros across the full span of the campaign, from April 1915 to February 1916 - the diseases, the wounds, the surgical procedures, the mortality. It is a detailed medical record of a hospital under extreme pressure, submitted to the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1920.

Together, the two works offer the Dardanelles campaign as seen and recorded by women who were there. Both have been translated and edited by Bernard de Broglio, with footnotes and appendices. Illustrated throughout with photographs, many previously unpublished.