It is hard to put down this book. I feel that the emotions of the nursing experience of Vera are written from the heart, more than the ones of her early years as a young girl. I used to work for a long time on an Intensive Care Unit, saw many unexplicable things and experienced feelings similar to what she, heart wrenching, describes.
Spoiler:
p.446. 'Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal. When patriotism ‘wore threadbare’, when suspicion and doubt began to creep in, the more ardent and frequent was the periodic re-dedication, the more deliberate the self-induced conviction that our efforts were disinterested and our cause was just. Undoubtedly this state of mind was what anti-war propagandists call it - ‘hysterical exaltation’, ‘quasi-mystical, idealistic hysteria’ - but it had concrete results in stupendous patience, in superhuman endurance, in the constant re-affirmation of incredible courage. To refuse to acknowledge this is to underrate the power of those white angels which fight so naïvely on the side of destruction.'