Agnes Greg was born into a wealthy Lancashire cotton family. In 1912 a middle-aged Edwardian lady at a loose end, she decided to try her hand at nursing. Providentially, after many years of peace, Europe just then became engulfed in war and opportunities arose. Barred from nursing for the British, for seven years she worked behind the front lines of friendly or allied armies in the Balkans, Poland, Persia and Russia often in improvised field hospitals and dressing stations in difficult conditions and she journeyed long distances between them, often by primitive means. She had a traveller’s eye for landscapes and places of interest and mixed easily with local and expatriate populations. She nursed Turkish prisoners of war in Bulgaria, local peasants, Russian soldiers fighting Austrians and Germans in Poland and fighting Turks in Persia. At times she was seriously ill herself and she was trapped in the Caucasus for nearly two years during the Russian revolution and civil war.

This book uses Agnes’s extensive correspondence with family and friends so that the reader hears her adventures described in her own vivid and amusing words and all intermingled with private and domestic concerns illustrative of her epoch and circumstances. Additional background material provides the political, military and family contexts.