The intrepid
Mansel sisters
Part 1

Juliet and Marcia Mansel, two sisters from an upper class British family, were just over the age of 20 when war broke out in the summer of 1914. Along with thousands of fellow Britons, they soon joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) to serve the Allied cause by caring for wounded soldiers. The VAD system had been set up a decade earlier under the auspices of the Red Cross and the Order of St. John. It provided the British government with civilian aid in time of war and enabled women aged between 23 and 38 to learn nursing and other skills. After a few months of training (including first aid, hygiene practices and cooking), some were allowed to serve overseas in hospitals run by the British Red Cross in Allied countries.

The retreat of Allied forces in the early stages of the Great War left France’s Military Health Service in disarray and grappling with a shortage of qualified nurses. In May 1915 it formally asked its British ally for reinforcements.

| A regimented life

Born in 1893, Juliet, the youngest of the Mansel sisters, was the first to cross the Channel. Her brother Rhys had been mobilised at the start of the war and may have inspired her to volunteer. Encountering many injured soldiers during her training in England, Juliet was deeply stirred by the plight of the Tommies, as British servicemen were known. In February 1915, she wrote that she would never forget "the absolutely exhausted look on all their faces". As the war escalated, her letters provided a grim record of the many relatives and acquaintances slain or injured during combat.

By May 1915, Juliet had finished her training and was on her way to Dieppe, in northern France, for her first mission abroad. She was stationed at the Royal, a seafront hotel that had been converted into a hospital for the British Expeditionary Force. Like other VAD volunteers, Juliet wore a uniform – blue dress, white cap, white collar and removable sleeves, and white apron bearing the red cross – and led a regimented life. A month after her arrival, she wrote to her mother: “I thought of you and what you would think of me in my huge white cap, which we wear indoors and out here like nuns, taking out the French army.”

After a few months in Dieppe, Juliet asked to be transferred to Malta. But at 23 she was still too young and VAD authorities would make no exception to the rules. Pondering her limited options, she wondered whether to return to England to work at London’s Endell Street Military Hospital, the only unit entirely run and staffed by women. Perhaps she should join the cohorts of women enrolled at British ammunition factories to replace male workers who had gone to war? She turned down an offer of working with refugees in Corfu, and agreed instead to move to Limoges, in central France, where she joined a hospital housed in the local fine arts school, before taking up a string of assignments that took her ever closer to the frontline.

| Marcia follows her younger sister

Juliet’s older sister Marcia, three years her senior, was initially puzzled by her sibling’s move to France. “I am so interested about Ju and the French Red Cross, though rather anxious whether it would be wise to go to their hospitals. Things are so differently done,” she wrote on February 20, 1915.

The eldest of the Mansel sisters, known as Minch, had been widowed at the start of the war. Her husband and father of her two young girls, Captain Oswald Walker, had gone missing during the Battle of Mons in August 1914, the BEF’s very first engagement of the war. "If I stayed a fortnight at Bayford with the children and without work I know at the end of that time I should feel desperate. I must do something and nursing is something I can do.”

Six months later, Marcia decided to leave her daughters with their grandmother and cross the English Channel, following in her sister’s footsteps. Before her departure she wrote: “Not gone yet as you see! No Military Pass yet come, which is too maddening because they tell me at the French Red X again this morning that they are clamouring for nurses from Dieppe and the nurses are ready to start, but cannot move until the Military Passes come because Dieppe is now in the War Zone.”

The following four years saw the Mansel sisters move from one medical facility to another, returning to England only when they were granted temporary leave and security in the Channel allowed them to do so. The two young ladies shared one obsession: getting ever closer to the frontline, where the fate of their world was being decided, if necessary by leaving British quarters to join France’s Military Health Service.

While their paths often crossed in Dieppe and Zuydcoote, near Dunkirk, Juliet and Marcia followed separate courses, sometimes missing each other by just a few hours.

| 'How could we have stuck it here without each other?'

The Mansel sisters kept up a regular correspondence with their mother throughout the war. Their writing testifies to their mutual admiration, praising each other’s courage and determination. At no point is there the slightest hint of rivalry. Instead, the letters are infused with affection. “We both often wonder how we could have stuck it here without each other, though we see each other so little, still it makes all the difference,” Juliet wrote in September 1917.

The sisters’ reciprocal esteem was heightened by their distinctive characters and convictions. The more combative of the two, Marcia would stop at nothing to ensure the Allies prevailed. War is ”about the real only passion of one’s life”, she confessed in a letter dated August 1917. ”Funny I should feel it for the war and yet never feel like this for a man.” In her mind, the fight against Germany was tantamount to a struggle between good and evil, between "ethics" and the "brute force" of Germany. "I personally thought there was something so much more alarming than death and more desirable than life and that was the complete victory of the ethics of the world," she wrote in August 1917. "War is more than a religion to Minch," noted her younger sibling, with more than a hint of admiration.

Despite her resolve, Marcia’s commitment to the war effort was seriously tested by the absence of her children. In the summer of 1917, she wrote about her longing for her daughters: "I have the most awful heartache about them and dream about them a great deal, which makes it worse, but I always think if I were a man I should be away like this, and I like to think I am a man!".

Juliet, a fervent humanist, had a very different take on the war, one steeped in horror. "Ju is oppressed by the war, darling thing, the horrors, the length, the sorrow, and is what we call ‘cafardé!’ She works too splendidly and conscientiously and with her whole soul, but her heart is not in it,” wrote her older sister on August 27, 1917, using the French slang for feeling blue.

Postcards 1914-1918

| 'It all seems so purposeless'

Juliet’s letters betray the horror, fear and loneliness she felt during the long nights in Dieppe when the pounding sound of artillery fire made her windows rattle. They also reveal her qualms over the treatment of German prisoners who were taken to the hospital in Zuydcoote.

”I know one ought not to be sorry for the Boches, – but I simply can't help it. With no books to read, no cigarettes and so horribly wounded, several of them completely paralysed," Juliet wrote. Marcia, on the other hand, complained about having to look after them.

Letter from Juliet, Christmas 1917

Writing in June 1918, Juliet expressed her exhaustion and distress after three years of active service: “I have never lived through such an awful time as this last month. – I can't for a single moment pretend there was one moment of it I haven’t hated, – or that a single illusion is left to me over the war. It is intolerable that the suffering should go on for another year or two years, Mummy. I know you will say my morale is bad because I am tired, but I do believe you would feel what I do if you were here. It all seems so purposeless."

The summer of 1918 marked a decisive turning point in the war. Allied forces resumed their offensive and pushed back the Germans until the armistice, signed on November 11. Juliet and Marcia crossed the Rhine in the wake of the French army and remained mobilised until the winter of 1919.

Aiming for the frontline
Part 2

Juliet and Marcia Mansel arrived in France in 1915 with the assurance and arrogance typical of their class. Their first letters sent from France betray a certain sense of superiority vis-à-vis local women. Both had a very clear idea of their values and status in society, resulting from their upbringing in a well-to-do family and their education from their suffragette mother.

”Of course French women haven’t got the brains or go that English women have. They just sit at home and grieve but they don’t read the papers much and they don’t do a thing or give money if they can help it!” wrote the youngest of the Mansel sisters. While British women were already massively mobilised behind the war effort in 1915, France was still struggling to provide wounded soldiers with adequate medical assistance.

Between 1914 and 1918, women in the French and British military were confined to subsidiary tasks. Complying with its role as an auxiliary to the army, the Red Cross recruited thousands of voluntary civilian nurses and assigned them to medical and sanitary missions. But none were considered full members of the army.

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| Feeling useful ‘for the very first time’

These young women soon had to adapt to the grim and unfamiliar world of war, a task Juliet tackled eagerly and without fuss. For the first time in her life she felt useful, she liked to say in her letters to her mother. ”Imagine your treasured daughter yesterday cleaning out the men’s WC and at the same time holding an animated conversation with the interpreter, such a nice little Frenchman who held the door open while I scrubbed the seat and poured disinfectant down the drain. I suddenly saw how funny it was and so did he and we laughed and laughed,” she wrote, with more than a hint of self-derision.

As the sisters settled into their new roles as nurses, old habits and whims gave way to sobering reflections on the bare necessities of wartime life. "D'you know the most wonderful sensation in the world? It's getting into bed after 36 hours work! ! It simply beats everything. It's extraordinary what a lot one thinks of one's bed here and how immensely we all talk about it. In old days one used to talk about going to a dance, or a hunt or something now - it's ‘when are you going to bed?’" Juliet wrote.

Medical facilities were divided into various categories depending on their proximity to the battlefield. These included base hospitals set up in requisitioned buildings and lighter, field hospitals that were closer to the frontline and could be moved around as required. As soon as they set foot on French soil, both Juliet and Marcia were desperate to get as close as possible to the battlefield. According to the French Red Cross, some 3,000 nurses were mobilised in military hospitals close to the front.

Juliet's Passport

In December 1916, Juliet wrote to her mother from Dieppe: ”Well, now I must tell you my big bit of news, dear Mummy. At least ask for your permission if I may go and do it. No, not get married. No it's: Please may I go to Compiègne in an ambulance militaire? I don't want to go if you can't bear to have me so near the front. On the other hand, knowing you I know you will be proud to let me go.” The town of Compiègne was a mere 15 kilometres from the frontline.

| 'It is a tremendous honour being taken on by the French Army'

Juliet had to wait another five months for a chance to move close to the battlefield. In April 1917 she was sent to the Marne department, east of Paris, to work at the priory of Binson. The monastery had been converted into a hospital and entrusted by the Red Cross to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), an all-female charity. French soldiers described Binson as “a tiny commune of some 50 homes, not far from the front”. Juliet was delighted by her new assignment: “It will be very funny to be plunged so far away from English 'Sodjers' and bases and DADRs and APMs and CGCs and all the other jargon one's got so used to know!”

The contrast with Dieppe was brutal. Juliet was reprimanded for her dress and forbidden to leave the hospital without her carnet d’étranger (foreigner’s identity card). There was no hot water and nurses got the same food rations as soldiers. She could hear the bellow of artillery fire all day and all night long.

The young Briton seldom got a chance to leave the hospital grounds. When she did, the grim reality of war was all too obvious, as she witnessed one day in May 1917, after hitchhiking her way to within five kilometres of the frontline, shortly after a bombing: “Deadly disappointment on our side, of course, but we saw some of the shell holes and they certainly made you think a bit! (…) For once in my life I felt rather like a real Tommy in very dusty khaki, drinking lukewarm tea out of a glass and loving it. Sitting on a bench with men who have just come out of the fighting in that dirty little canteen (…)”

Juliet’s first stint near the front came to an abrupt end just four months after her arrival. She missed the curfew one day, leading to her immediate dismissal and leaving her frustrated and bitter.

Her sister Marcia was just as eager to reach the front. In May 1917 she was sent to Fismes in the Champagne region, an area under French command some 15 kilometres from the battleground. "I must tell you my Mum it is a tremendous honour being taken on by the French Army. It is the first time since the beginning that nurses (English) have been allowed to belong to the French army as the stories about some most undesirable ones were so awful at first, Joffre refused to allow any more. Well now they are starting again and it is a great honour so we mean to do very well for the honour of our nation!”

The area was soon evacuated amid fears of an impending German offensive and the French Red Cross sent Marcia to the Zuydcoote sanatorium near Dunkirk. The young nurse was just a few kilometres from the murderous fields of Ypres, where British and Canadian troops engaged German forces in the Battle of Passchendaele between July and November 1917. From the sanatorium, she could see the cannons firing and the German Taube planes dropping bombs during night raids over Dunkirk. "It would have been a wonderful sight if it hadn’t been so terrible," she wrote [original quote in French].

| 'We will lead soldiers’ lives'

During the last year of the war, both Mansel sisters worked on innovative ambulance convoys known as “auto-chirs”. These motorized units featured an operating section (five trucks stacked with surgical, sterilizing and radiological material), a hospital section (another five trucks carrying a hundred beds), and all the equipment required to house and feed a staff of one hundred.

Once in the combat zone, Juliet and Marcia met with spartan conditions, gruelling shifts and little to cheer about. The closer they came to the battlefield, the harder it got, as Marcia wrote in a letter after a brief reunion with her sister: “We agreed yesterday that every time we get harder and harder places. Dieppe was perfectly delightful; Zuydcoote more severe but delightful too. But these places - deserts. No possibility of outside thoughts of any kind, and no possibility of a friend or of ever seeing any. So one feels rather lost. However of course the main thing is the blesses [wounded]! and it is too marvelously lucky being able to be so far up and so very busy with the blessés first-hand.”

Despite the harsh conditions, both sisters expressed their delight – and surprise – at being finally treated like soldiers.

As part of the “auto-chirs”, Juliet and Marcia followed the French army as it pushed towards victory in the summer and autumn of 1918. The armistice signed on November 11 did not spell the end of their mission. As one chaplain told Juliet, “we will need you to clear out the Bolsheviks” [original in French].

Following General Charles Mangin’s 10th Army, Juliet witnessed the liberation of Metz and Strasbourg, both of which had been under German control since 1870. She crossed the devastated land of the Chemin des Dames, the site of horrific fighting, and entered the town of Laon a mere 36 hours after German troops pulled out.

Letter from Juliet, October 15, 1918

She boasted of being one of the very first nurses to cross the Rhine in December 1918 and celebrate Christmas in the Wiesbaden barracks, under portraits of German leaders Bismarck and Emperor Wilhelm II.

Marcia also crossed France’s war-torn northeast, in the wake of General George-Louis Humbert’s 7th Army. She filed through Compiègne, Noyon, Ham, Péronne, Albert, Guise and Mons, witnessing a desolate landscape of scorched earth, smouldering ruins and long lines of famished prisoners and refugees returning home. As she finally crossed the Rhine in early 1919, the sight of French and British flags floating above the mighty river caused her “soul to stir”, she wrote in French on February 9. "What a reward after 4 years to see that.”

They are all my children
Part 3

When war broke out in 1914, nurses did not yet have a clearly defined status. In the areas administered by the military, legions of voluntary nurses with varying degrees of training crossed paths with a smaller number of professional nurses recruited by the army. The latter included members of religious institutes, who enjoyed a virtual monopoly over nursing in France prior to the 1905 secular law separating church and state.

The Mansel sisters were part of the first group. As VADs, they received only a few months’ training, enough to provide patients with first aid. Throughout the war, they continually acquired new skills and expertise. One wrote about her need for “a more detailed book” than the Red Cross guide, the other about her desire "to get a little anatomy into my dull brain". Their experience on the ground did the rest.

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| A catalogue of pain

Upon her arrival in Dieppe in 1915, Juliet discovered the daily routine of wartime nurses, punctuated by the steady flow of soldiers injured in battle. She saw injuries from shells that reduced arms to crumbs and legs to shreds, wounds so deep "that you could really put both your fists into". In July 1915 she witnessed her first surgical operation and admitted she "felt just horribly sick".

As the war escalated, so did the workload. Sick and wounded soldiers arrived by the hundreds and night shifts lasted long into the day. Incoming patients were identified by civil status, prior conditions and a summary description of their injury or ailment. In time, the young nurses’ observations became more clinical, the patients’ identities giving way to impersonal diagnoses.

Frontline traumas

The Mansel sisters’ writing underscores their distress and feeling of powerlessness in the face of death. Marcia dreaded injuries to the chest and abdomen, knowing they would often prove fatal. “When the description on the cards comes with the stretcher marked shot through chest, lungs or stomach, one's heart aches and one’s spirits fall, knowing that it means endless suffering for the men, tremendous work, and yet so often they die,” she wrote in 1918.

In May 1917, her younger sister described her anguish at seeing one of her patients die in her arms in a poignant letter. "It all seemed so dreadful and made me very unhappy, also it was the first time anyone has died who was in my sole charge, and it was extraordinary how I longed to save him - German or no German."

The next year, while grappling with the steady flow of agonising casualties in the Villers-Cotterêts area northeast of Paris, Juliet reflected on the sobering lessons of war: "One has just done what one could – but you can imagine how little that is. I smile now when I thought I knew what nursing ‘at the front’ meant.”

| ‘It’s glorious to be allowed to nurse these petits poilus’

As well as providing medical care, the young nurses would soothe and comfort the wounded soldiers. Their mastery of French meant they could entertain patients, read out their letters, and lend a sympathetic ear. When all hope was lost, they kept watch over the dying. One patient with a fractured neck, whom Juliet likened to "a crusader in an old Norman church", asked her: "Little Aunt Mansel, I have dark thoughts tonight, tell me a story" [original quote in French].

The only female presences in a world of men, the young nurses harboured maternal feelings towards their patients. “They are all my children,” Juliet was fond of saying. “It’s so glorious to be allowed to nurse them and to do ‘tout son possible’ [all one can] for these petits poilus [informal term for French infantrymen], these little heroes of nowadays. One of them looked at me the other night when I was doing something for him and said ‘Puis-je vous appeler petite maman adorée?’ [‘May I call you dear mother?’] and you may imagine how I felt after that," wrote the youngest of the Mansel sisters, who was known to fellow workers in Dieppe as “Baby Pro”.

During her first two years in France, Juliet’s letters were strewn with observations and anecdotes about the men she looked after. These included Esau, "my favorite Zouave" [member of France’s North African regiments]; Peter Pan, whose bravery in battle earned him the Russian Cross of St. George; Arfif de Casa, a tall, skinny, bearded man who looked "exactly like a picture in the Child’s Bible"; and Old Billy, "the most appalling old drunkard", whom she couldn’t help liking when he was sober.

Some of Juliet’s patients sang the Marseillaise or a clumsy "God saf de Keeng" upon leaving the hospital. Others sent her little presents from the frontline: rings made of aluminium debris, an inkpot carved out of a grenade, or a cartridge-turned-penholder. One soldier named François made the 48-hour journey from Nice just to bring her a basket of roses, mimosas and carnations before heading back to the front.

| Thank-you letter sent to Marcia by a soldier called Pierre Beauvais

(original in French)

| No room for romance

While the Mansel sisters provided comforting and often compassionate care, their correspondence reveals no hint of romance with either patients or colleagues. Their experience is a far cry from the love affair between nurse Catherine Barkley and the narrator in Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”. At most Juliet betrays a girlish fascination for the smile, square jaw and emerald gaze of General Mangin, who decorated her with the Croix de Guerre in 1919. “You know his photographs, but they can’t give you an idea of the strength of his face and his extraordinary eyes”, she wrote.

Throughout their years of service with the army, nothing in the sisters’ writing suggested they ever bended the rules of propriety imposed by their rank and education. After she was finally demobilized in January 1919, Juliet even asked her mother for permission to accept General Gassouin’s offer to escort her back to Calais. ”In case you should think it not quite ‘convenable’ [appropriate] this plan, all the staff is coming, too and the General is quite old and B d’A (Juliet's supervisor) sees nothing shocking in it at all – and she is a tigress over these things!”

| Sense of duty

No love affairs, few distractions… The only thing that mattered for Marcia and Juliet was their patients’ wellbeing. The young ladies pleaded with friends and relatives to donate items to wounded soldiers, including socks, pyjamas, linen, cigarettes and even a gramophone. Marcia was especially proud to have provided a doctor in Dieppe with an electric vibrator designed by Bergognié and purchased with her own money. In a letter dated 1916, the same doctor asked whether she could fetch him a pioneering kind of metal detector that was used to extract bullets and other fragments from wounded soldiers. “It would be of immense help for the extraction of bullets”, he wrote, apologising for the request. “If my inquiry is indiscreet, do ignore it and please do not hold it against me.”

Two years later, Marcia called on her London connections to help the newly liberated Aisne region in France, which had been ravaged by war. A fundraising concert was organized at 16 Mansfield Street on February 11, 1919, under the patronage of Queen Alexandra.

The two sisters often felt helpless in dealing with the unprecedented scale of brutality and suffering witnessed during the war. As a result, they looked on their own work with profound humility, at times wondering whether it was not all in vain. Yet their efforts and dedication did not go unnoticed. Their mother kept the many letters of praise they received from their superiors. In Surgeon Laurence’s words, Marcia was “an incomparable nurse, the precious collaborator who through care, patience and dedication rescued numerous critical patients I had deemed irremediably lost” (letter dated January 7, 1919). In 1917 Marcia was awarded France’s Médaille des Epidémies, rewarding her efforts against the spread of disease. Two years later she received the Croix de Guerre.

Juliet was also decorated with the Croix de Guerre in 1919 for her “dedication to the wounded and her composure during the bombing of Zuydcoote and Ognon”. “The only excuse I have got, which is precious small, is the last 3 months of the war at Villers-Hélon and Vorges. I never told you all the things that happened to us there. [...] We all of us had some pretty extraordinary escapes. I will tell you all about them when I get home,” was her version of events.

The end of horror and the start of a new world
Part 4

Marcia and Juliet weren’t flighty socialites when war broke out. Their first letters testify to their awareness and curiosity. Both regularly read the newspapers and had minds of their own.

The young ladies inherited their political awareness from their mother Mildred ‘Mully’ Mansel, a militant suffragette who was briefly jailed at north London’s Holloway prison for women in November 1911 after she smashed two windows at the War Office during a rally in support of women’s right to vote.

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Marcia was particularly devoted to the suffragettes’ cause. In a letter dated July 1917 she hailed the progress made in passing the “Representation of the People Act”. The bill, which was finally approved in 1918, granted women the vote, but under certain conditions. In order to be eligible, women had to be over 30, be property owners (or pay rent above a certain level), or be graduates of a British university. Marcia applauded the bill’s passage but slammed its restrictions, noting that men could vote by the age of 21.

The Mansel sisters felt they had aged prematurely as a result of the war. Writing in May 1917, aged 27, Marcia bemoaned the lost energy and optimism of youth. As fatigue built up, she struggled to conceal her bouts of despair. Marcia felt like she was 100 years old, her younger sister observed in December 18. Having turned 25 that year, Juliet lamented: "Isn’t it so awful to be so old? I am simply overwhelmed by the idea of being 25. It is such a stage to have come to and I don’t feel my première jeunesse [early youth] has lasted nearly long enough."

| A growing estrangement

Between 1915 and 1917, Juliet and Marcia still found time for their peacetime pursuits, particularly in Dieppe. They went horse riding, played golf and bridge, put on theatre productions and helped organise concerts. But the escalating conflict steadily ate away at the sisters’ free time until their world was reduced to ghastly wounds, muddy trenches and the relentless pounding of cannon balls. As Juliet put it, "One has got into the habit of talking as if the war was everlasting now. Isn’t it extraordinary? One doesn’t feel life could go on without the war now!"

The Mansel sisters’ exhaustion increased even as their leaves became few and far between. Juliet waited impatiently for her next break. When it came, she often struggled to adjust to life away from the front. "It is rather glorious to get right away from all the ‘militaires’ and, though I shouldn’t say it, from the war," she wrote in March 1918 during a stay in Pau, in the Pyrenees, where she had holidayed before the war.

But relief soon gave way to resentment of her entourage’s frivolous preoccupations. "Anyhow you can quite see it’s not her war!", she hissed after hearing a woman ramble on about her dresses, her daughters’ outfits, her servants and her future son-in-law. Juliet complained about the dearth of news from the front, when everyone around her was busy discussing tea parties. "I know you would feel just like me about staying down here,” she wrote to her mother. “Now more than ever before is the moment to put one’s hand to the wheel."

Juliet and her sister were shocked at how little people knew about the horrors of trench warfare. But they also knew that words alone could not depict the sheer barbarity of it all. Besides, many people simply preferred not to know what was going on. The young women’s frustration at this lack of understanding is best captured in a poignant letter Marcia sent to her mother in August 1917.

Letter from Marcia, August 7, 1917

When a close acquaintance submitted the letter to the “Daily Mail” for publication, the newspaper tersely replied: "It is very vivid but very depressed. The result of overstrain. Publication would only help the Pacifists."

| Life after war

The discrepancy between life at the front and life in the rear paled in comparison with the shock that followed the armistice on November 11, 1918. After four years of stalemate and attrition, French forces finally reclaimed Alsace and Lorraine, before marching on into the Rhineland. As prisoners from both sides flocked home, the victors and the vanquished gathered in Versailles to redraw the borders of Europe, vowing “Never Again” to lead the continent into war.

Juliet, who had lost hope in victory, met news of the armistice with disbelief. "Last night we found ourselves carefully pinning up the usual blankets over the windows till we got to the last one and we realised that there would be no more avions [airplanes]! Almost dull, really!"

The shock soon gave way to a sense of euphoria as Juliet finally contemplated getting on with her life, far from the tumult of war. “I have a feeling that I didn’t exist at all during those days I felt absolutely lifted out of my mortal self, nothing seemed real, possible. There will never be days like that again in one’s life. It is marvelous to have lived through such times,” she wrote a few months later.

Like her sister, Marcia was well aware of witnessing a historic moment in November 1918. But she too struggled to believe the war had really ended. Watching troops file before her, she marvelled at the thought that they would no longer face death in battle.

As the Allies pushed German forces back in the last weeks of the war, medical convoys were finally allowed into combat zones. Marcia discovered the battlefields of Guise, part of the final Allied offensive, just 10 days before the armistice and "before everything is cleaned and tidied, even bodies". "Once peace is signed everyone will be able to come, but for the time being no one can except us," she noted.

| Marcia: 'Joy is frightening'

Marcia wrote about her “extraordinary feeling” at the prospect of peace, though it seemed tempered in her letters by a certain apprehension. Perhaps she projected her own disquiet when she wrote about a French soldier’s angst as he prepared to go home after four-and-a-half years at the front without a word from his wife. “La joie fait peur [joy is frightening] and my heart ached for him,” she confessed.

For Marcia, the end of the war also meant seeking a form of closure more than four years after her husband’s death. She could finally go to Mons, "that sacred place of which I have thought for four-and-a-half years!". Her sister Juliet observed: “M has realized what the loss of Oswald was to her – […] it’s most unlikely she will find any trace of Oswald [among the] 1000s of graves with “un anglais” or “unbekannter Englander” [unknown Englishman] - one’s heart does ache when one thinks of the future for her.”

Captain Walker, Marcia’s husband, is among the 3,888 soldiers with no known grave whose name is inscribed on the La Ferté-sous-Jouarre Memorial to the Missing, east of Paris.

The lack of proper burial made Marcia’s mourning all the more painful. But time, and the reunion with her two daughters, helped heal the pain of loss. After spending a few months with occupying forces in the German Rhineland, she settled down in Dieppe with her two daughters, the prelude to a new life in France. In 1920 she married François de Jude-Montespieu, a French cavalry officer and horse racing champion (a steeplechase race is still named after him). "I always thought I would end up marrying a Frenchman," she wrote in August 1917. [original quote in French]

After the wedding, Marcia - now Madame de Juge-Montespieu - moved into her in-laws’ château in Séran, in the southwestern Tarn region. She led the life of a provincial landowner, giving birth to four more children, whom she raised with her eldest daughters. When war broke out again in 1939, she resumed her service as nurse until the French army’s capitulation the following year. She died in 1973 having never shared with her children or her grandchildren the story of “her” war.

| Juliet: 'No desire for a civilian life'

The end of fighting left Juliet hesitant about what to do next. Writing in August 1918, with the war still raging, she said she had no desire to return to civilian life. But after four years of nomadic existence, she confessed to being a little tired of her role as “Wandering Ju”, a pun on the fictional figure of the “Wandering Jew”.

In December 1918, while stationed in the German town of Homburg, she wrote about her difficulty in adjusting to peacetime preoccupations. “One feels a sort of reaction after the war and one can’t get used to present conditions. All one talks about with people now is what happened during the war. All these things are always present with one and always will be. It’s simply awful to think of beginning reconstruction work now.”

After the trial of war, returning to ordinary life was no easy task. In March 1918, Juliet said she dreamt of studying singing in Paris. In the end she turned to drama. Unlike her sister, she chose to return to England. She enjoyed modest success as a stage actor and landed a teaching job at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She remained very close to her sister Marcia and visited her in the Tarn region every summer. Juliet died in 1982, without her nephews, whom FRANCE 24 spoke to, ever knowing her to have a partner. Her war memorabilia is kept at Smedmore House in Dorset, the Mansel family home.

"One can never be the same again now having seen these things. How is it that Ju and I are allowed to see them? All the unhappiness and sadness in my life is recompensed by being here now and being able to deeply drink the wonderful feelings that come over me now.” Marcia, December 14, 1918