Silence For the Dead

by Simone St. James

Selfishness is pre-eminently a defect which disqualifies a woman from the nursing profession. —Eva Luckes, Matron of London Hospital, 1880–1919

But these men had been there. They had experienced something so otherworldly, so catastrophically horrible, that I would never know what they saw when they closed their eyes at night. Or what they heard when a plate banged on a table. They’d washed off the mud and the blood and been sent home, unlike Syd, and it had been so bad they couldn’t cope with it.