A truism of the Great War is that it turned men into numbers. In A Scottish Nurse at Work (1920), the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse Henrietta Tayler, who worked in a Belgian military hospital, explains that they received ‘ten or twenty patients every night […] and [during] any local attack many more […] we had many, many deaths’. The numbers of dead are only described indirectly, with the emphasis on mass death compounded by the lack of specificity.

The confrontation with injury and death that nurses encountered in casualty clearing stations and military hospitals during the war was unprecedented. Much has been written on the culture shock to ‘these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawing rooms into the manifest horrors of the First World War’, but very little on how nurses coped with such large numbers of dying men.

This chapter explores the ways in which women involved in hospitals, casualty clearing stations, hospital ships and ambulance trains in the war zones and on the home front witnessed and wrote about military death in contemporary and retrospective diaries and memoirs. Focusing on intensely proximate encounters between nurses and the dying, I argue that most nurse narratives turned back to older, more conservative literary tropes for depicting the war dead – deathbed scenes, burial rituals and cemetery scenes – which attempted to convert the modern wartime hospital (in literary terms, at least) into a traditional site of mourning and commemoration.