The forbidden zone

"The forbidden zone" by Mary Borden is a collection of wartime sketches, short stories, and poems written in the early 20th century. It offers a stark, lyrical record of World War I as seen from the “forbidden zone” behind the front, especially in field hospitals with the French Army. Instead of a single protagonist, it presents impressionistic scenes of soldiers, nurses, civilians, and machinery at war, blending eyewitness detail with poetic intensity. The opening of this collection frames the pieces as unvarnished impressions from wartime nursing, fragmentary by design. It moves from a mud-choked, truncated Belgium and a dawn bombardment guided by a lone aircraft to vignettes of static surveillance (a tethered balloon), bustling staff cars and market women in a town square, and numbed sentries stopping endless traffic at roadside boxes. A powerful portrait of an elderly French territorial regiment contrasts their patience and resignation with the staged ceremony of decorations, briefly steadied by a commanding general before they trudge on. A scene at a deserted seaside resort shows a bitter, wounded amputee and the young woman beside him straining to love amid distant gunfire and hospitals filling a casino. Night then falls in a field hospital, where a nurse personifies Pain, Life, and Death while the guns provide a lullaby and a man’s spirit is about to slip away. A longer story follows an Apache convict-soldier, terrified of damnation, whom a tireless priest-orderly counsels through the night until confession brings peace at dawn.

The forbidden zone, by Mary Borden. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #77655.