Mary Borden, War Writer and Nurse

In 1915, American expatriate Mary Borden left behind her activism as a suffragette to pour her own funds into establishing a Red Cross hospital on the road between Dunkirk and Ypres. For the medical aid her hospital provided, Borden became the first American woman to be awarded the French military honor of the Croix de Guerre. During her time at this battlefront hospital, Borden published poetry regarding her wartime experience, including “The Song of the Mud” (1917).

Published in Current Opinion in 1917, Mary Borden wrote of her experiences as a woman at war in her poem "The Song of the Mud." Throughout the poem, Borden enumerates the various qualities of mud:

This is the hymn of mud-the obscene, the filthy, the putrid, 
The vast liquid grave of our armies. It has drowned our men. 
Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead. 

As an environmental threat on the battlefield of war, mud pulls soldiers down to their final rest. For Borden, a nurse, mud threatened wounded young men, whom she had to clean and bandage and heal. Filth presented a menace to the sterile field hospital, a "slimy inveterate nuisance."