"Mary Borden's Forbidden Zone, I have the temerity to claim, is a work with a touch of genius. A multum in parvo masterpiece." --Malcolm Brown (1930-2017), author, BBC documentary producer, and director. In 1914, Chicago heiress Mary Borden volunteered for the French Red Cross during World War I. She quickly became director of French field hospitals in la zone interdite, known as the "Forbidden Zone," near the Western Front of Belgium and France. Disturbed by the brutality she witnessed, Borden captured the alienation, chaos, and dehumanization of industrialized warfare in a memoir of 17 fragmented vignettes, revealing the complex realities faced by nurses and soldiers. Initially censored due to its realistic portrayal of the war, the stories, laden with raw emotion, offer modern readers a profound understanding of the war's atrocities and trauma--effectively putting them in the room where it happened.
