Book excerpt: Laura Holland and Mildred Forbes, an inseparable duo, set off from Montreal in June 1915 to serve as nursing sisters in the Great War. Over the next four years, the two cared for each other through sickness and health, air raids and bombings, unrelenting work and adventurous leaves. War-Torn Exchanges offers unprecedented insight into the daily lives of Canada’s First World War nurses – from the privations of Gallipoli to the heavy casualties of Passchendaele and beyond. This carefully curated and contextualized collection of letters challenges the popular myth of nurses as wartime angels. Instead, Mildred and Laura’s letters are filled with the nurses’ fears and frustrations, humour and keen observations – revealing how they relied on friendship, wry wit, and professional ethics to carry on in the face of mismanagement, discrimination, illness, deprivation, and trauma.