Sister Soldiers of the Great War

“I am on night duty ... on what is supposed to be the ‘hopeless ward’ so you can imagine, or try to, just what I am doing. I know you cannot really have the faintest idea ...”

In Sister Soldiers of the Great War, award-winning author Cynthia Toman recovers the long-lost history of Canada’s first women soldiers – nursing sisters who enlisted as officers with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. These experienced professional nurses left their friends, families, and jobs to enlist in the army. Granted relative rank and equal pay to men, they had a mandate to salvage as many sick and wounded men as possible for return to the front lines. Nothing prepared them for poor living conditions, the scale of casualties, or the type of wounds they encountered, but their letters and diaries reveal that they were determined to soldier on under all circumstances while still “living as well as possible.”

Of this cadre of women most – but not all, for some were killed in action – returned from war. Some became our leaders in nursing, hospital management, and social services. Some left nursing and became our grandmothers or great grandmothers. We are in their debt, for their work and for their legacy. In their articulation of war, framed by diligent writers and researchers like Toman and Andrea McKenzie [author of War-Torn Exchanges, UBC Press 2016] we discover anew, from Canadian nursing sisters in the First World War, just what war is. From such articulation, we have much to learn.

The result of Toman’s painstaking pursuit of sources is a rich and compelling narrative that both inspires and repulses. Toman does not attempt to conceal the horrors of war abounding in makeshift medical wards. Nor should she … Through Sister Soldiers, Toman makes a significant contribution by correcting the relative obscurity of the Canadian Army Medical Corps nursing sisters with both rigor and sensitivity.

Toman returns the Canadian Army Medical Corps nursing sisters to their rightful place at the heart of Canada’s First World War military medical system … Drawing heavily on newly available diaries, memoirs, and letters, as well as a demographic analysis of the personnel records of every single nursing sister, the book is an invaluable addition to the histories of Canadian women, medicine and nursing, and the First World War. It will be the authoritative work on its subject for years to come.

... Toman’s engaging reassessment of the supposed truths about the Canadian Army Medical Corps Nursing Sisters makes Sister Soldiers of the Great War one of the finest works on the history of Great War nursing to date.