Personal Narrative: All Quiet On The Western Front

The battlegrounds of the war were as repulsive as my hands, stained and cracked with dried blood that had turned into a murky brown. The acrid stench of gunpowder burned my nostrils along with the smell of blood. I rubbed my hands in cold water but the filth just wouldn’t go away. It clung to me like ivy, and I wondered if the poison would mar me forever.

“Nurse Mabel Earp! A group of injured soldiers will be coming in soon, we need your help!” The sound of my name snapped me back into reality as I began gathering the necessary supplies to treat the wounded. The tent was already packed with injured men and I tried to calculate if any more would fit. When I worked, I would often ask my patients to tell me stories of the field as I tended to their injuries. It helped to keep their minds off the pain. The men described hours of waiting and crawling along trenches. When the firing began, one can only pray that nobody got hit.

This was the only time of the day where I could settle down and enjoy some time alone. In my diaries, I would write down all the stories that my patients told me, letters to my friends and family, and drawings of the scenes I’d witnessed. Additional to my nursing skills, I was also an exceptional artist. That’s because I was an art student before I volunteered as a nurse in the war. I cannot deny that these notebooks kept me sensible and offered a consolidation from the death that surrounded