Mary Ann Brown, who served wounded Turkish soldiers in a hospital ship, recorded in her diary on 4 February 1917:

Written under the exacting compulsion of the moment, Brown's account reads like a relentless catalogue of facts without any emotional outlet. Individuals become a series of body parts on the operation table, jumbled as much into abbreviated syntax as into abbreviated time. The mention of the ‘happy’ Turk is like the intrusion of macabre humour into the narrative. The emotionless tone is perhaps because of the pressures of time and extreme physical exhaustion; it is also the voice of one who is inside the moment of horror, as if efficient nursing service – the amputation of body parts in this case – had resulted in, or even demanded, the amputation of one's own intimate nerves.

Brown's account is characteristic of the experience of thousands of young women who left home to serve the war-wounded. Brown's more articulate and illustrious colleague Vera Brittain would write about the ‘self-protective callousness’ required by the young female nurse to cope with the ‘general atmosphere of inhumanness’ prevailing in the war hospitals.