This talk focused on the testimony of the immediate experience of care at the front, as recorded by Mary Borden. Borden was also an established professional writer. The texts under consideration are the sections from Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929) that were written during the war, as she created and directed L’Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile n°1 behind the front line of Ypres. This talks delineated the ways in which, in those texts, emerges not only the singular voice of the female carer, but also a phenomenology of World War One that is distinct from that of the soldiers. This phenomenology is made palpable through the relationship to the bodies of the wounded and of the dying, at odds with traditional relationships between the sexes; but also through a reconfiguration of the geography of the war as seen from the perspective of the nurses and from the spaces of care that they occupy – these ‘forbidden zones’, or interstitial spaces between the soldiers and the civilians, between the living and the dead.