Angels of Mercy

They may have been angels of mercy. But they were also angels with attitude – real women, with real guts. This is the little-known story of the gritty and free-spirited women who, in 1914, put aside their fight for the vote to set up a hospital in an abandoned French abbey to treat the appalling injuries sustained on the Western Front. Uniquely in that theatre, the hospital was staffed entirely by women – doctors, surgeons, nurses, bateriologists, radiographers, orderlies and ambulance drivers.

In the face of opposition from the military and medical establishments, and in the teeth of many hardships, they succeeded in establishing one of the most effective and longest-serving frontline military hospitals of the First World War.