The Forbidden Zone

In 1914, Mary Borden, a wealthy heiress from Chicago and mother of three, volunteered for the French Red Cross during World War I. She quickly rose to the position of director of the French field hospitals in la zone interdite, known to English language speakers as the ＂Forbidden Zone,＂ near the Western Front of Belgium and France. Borden was troubled by the brutality she witnessed and the irony of wartime nursing--healing soldiers only to send them back to war and possibly their death. Her remarkable memoir, The Forbidden Zone, is a collection of vignettes written from 1914 to 1918. Initially censored due to its realistic portrayal of the war, her lyrical prose captures the chaos, devastation, and raw emotions of battle through seventeen fragmented stories, revealing the complex realities faced by nurses and soldiers. Borden’s narrative articulates the alienation, confusion, and dehumanization of industrialized warfare, offering modern readers a profound understanding of the war’s atrocities--effectively putting them in the room where it happened.

Mary Borden (1886-1968) was an American-British novelist and poet whose writing drew on her experiences as a war nurse. In 1913, she moved to England and joined the Suffragette movement, where she was arrested for throwing a rock through the window of His Majesty’s Treasury. During the outbreak of the First World War, she used her own money to set up a field hospital for French soldiers close to the Western Front, where she served as a nurse until the end of the war.