Violetta Thurstan

Field Hospital and Flying Column (Dodo Press) Violetta Thurstan

Violetta Thurstan (1879-1978) was a nurse during the First World War. In 1914 she was appointed matron of a British ambulance stationed in Brussels. When the German authorities asked for volunteers to nurse in Marcelline, she offered to go, and took two nurses with her, leaving the remainder of her contingent in Brussels. She was in charge of a hospital under the German military command, where she nursed Belgian, French, and German wounded. She was granted leave of absence from the Marcelline hospital in order to look after the nurses she had left in and near Brussels but was later expelled by the Germans and ended up in Denmark. She then volunteered to serve with the Russian Red Cross, helped with the millions of refugees displaced by the German offensive, and later served in Macedonia. Her experiences are recorded in her book Field Hospital and Flying Column (1915).