Suffragette, socialite, novelist, nurse, Mary Borden wrote some of the most remarkable poems of the First World War. Still in her twenties, the wealthy Borden used her own money to set up and run a field hospital for French soldiers ‘as close to the fighting as possible.’ At the Battle of the Somme she was determined ‘to create a counter-wave of life’ against an overwhelming tide of suffering and death. Her hospital treated 25,000 soldiers in its first six weeks and went on to have one of the best recovery records on the Western Front. Mary Borden engaged in a heroic struggle to save men’s lives and give comfort to the dying. Her poems are spontaneous, passionate reactions to what she saw and did.
Although married with three children, Borden fell in love with a young British officer she met at the Front. The intimate and private poems she wrote to Louis Spears (later General Spears) while they were both at the war have an urgent and reckless intensity.