Introduction

A PATRIOTIC CANADIAN, a dutiful daughter, a devout Anglican, a loving sister, a dear friend, an adventurer, a romantic, -and a nurse.Indeed, only as a nurse could she, a woman, go to war at all.Two thousand other women preceded, accompanied, or followed her overseas between 1914 and 1918, nursing sisters with the rank of lieutenant in the Canadian Army Medical Corps (CAMC).A varying number, between four hundred and eight hundred -Clare Gass among them -saw service in France, and an even smaller number -Gass there too -served close to the line of fire.All expected to be home soon, and home alive.The war belied the first expectation: in Clare Gass' case her time in Europe stretched to almost four years.The second expectation she and most of her colleagues did achieve.Thirty-nine did not.The experience of the military nurses and the aura surrounding them contributed in large part to the quadrupling of the number of nurses in Canada between 1911 and 1921.l Nothing in Clare Gass's background or upbringing suggested a career at all, much less one in military nursing.Born in Nova Scotia in 1887 to small-town, middle-class parents of Scottish origin, Clare was the oldest living child and only girl in a family of ten, three of whom did not survive infancy or childhood.Her father, Robert, owned a general store and lumber mill in Shubenacadie; her mother, Nerissa, came from the Miller brickmaking family just across the river.Clare and her father were kindred spirits -quiet, c Clare reached adolescence and outgrew the local school, her parents chose Edgehill, a private Church of England school for girls in Windsor, Nova Scotia, for her secondary schooling.In 1901, when she went as a boarder, Edgehill was only ten years old but was already Gass family, Shubenacadie, late nineteenth century.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.