Mudros, 1915

In 1915, the island of Lemnos was the principal staging base for the Allied campaign at the Dardanelles. Thousands of sick and wounded soldiers evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula were landed at the port of Mudros, where French, British and Dominion hospitals struggled to cope with the sheer scale of casualties.

Among those who served there were two French women whose written accounts have survived: Jeanne Antelme, a volunteer nurse with the French Red Cross, and Elisabeth Jardin (later Fabre), a medical student who would present her experiences as a doctoral thesis at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris.

Antelme was already a published author when war broke out. Her account, written with a novelist’s eye, records the daily reality of nursing under canvas – the heat, the dust, the flies, the chronic shortage of supplies – and the stories of the soldiers and sailors who passed through her wards. She was one of the few women from the Allied side to set foot on the Gallipoli Peninsula during the war, and the only one to record her impressions. Her memoir was published in France in 1916.

Jardin’s account is of a different character entirely. Writing as a clinician, she documents the organisation and operations of Evacuation Hospital No. 1 at Mudros from April 1915 to February 1916. Her thesis covers the diseases, wounds and surgical procedures that defined the hospital’s work across three successive phases of the campaign. It was submitted to the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1920.

Together, the two accounts offer something rare: the Dardanelles campaign as seen and recorded by women who were there – one through the lens of literature, the other through the lens of medicine. Neither has previously been available in English.

The book is illustrated throughout with photographs, many previously unpublished. Most valuable are those of Jardin’s own collection.

An appendix documents French field hospitals on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and on the islands of Lemnos, Tenedos (Bozcaada) and Mitylene (Lesvos).