In this chapter, I continue to investigate the role of sympathy in public nursing as England moves into the Great War. To begin, I summarize several of the dominant stereotypes of hired nurses from war propaganda: nurse as mother, angel, and sweetheart. These stereotypes did not reflect reality, but attempted to root the act of nursing in the domestic and natural realm, something particularly desired during the Great War when society clung to nostalgic notions of hearth and home in the face of modernity and drastic social change.

Given that most materials published during the war could not be critical of the war effort, these texts reflect an unchallenged praise of the efficiency in the nursing and medical establishment, both in professional and volunteer capacities, even at the cost of sympathy. Memoirs written after the fact, however, especially after 1928, reveal a more complex understanding of the benefits and detriments of efficiency. Fictional novels such as The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928) and Not So Quiet by Helen Zenna Smith (1930) reveal the struggle of Red Cross ambulance drivers between efficiency and sympathy, desires that are often contradictory when faced with the overwhelming number of wounded men. Smith, in particular, criticizes the loss of “heart” in pursuit of efficiency. Nonfiction memoirs including Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929) and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) also reflect their personal struggles of conscience as they witness their own sympathy sliding away, yet are powerless to stop it. Borden explains the necessity of killing her heart in order to bear her job nursing dying men (43). Brittain presents a similar struggle, yet also laments how the “psychological shutter” that was necessary during the war, “simply refused to operate” afterwards. In other words, even though losing sympathy may have been necessary to survive and be efficient during the war, it was not something that could be easily restored afterwards.