A Page from Her Book

Anyone who goes to Jasper National Park can gaze up at a 3,300-metre peak called Mount Edith Cavell, named in 1916 after a British nurse who was executed by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium. Cavell never set foot in Alberta, let alone saw the mountain that now bears her name, but the memorialization reminds park visitors of both her bravery and the colonial connections between Canada and Britain, fondly referred to as the “old country” by many of the women who worked alongside her.

Ross Hebb turns to one such woman in A Canadian Nurse in the Great War. The pages of Ruth Loggie’s diaries “grant us a unique peek into a little-known moment of our hist­ory,” the Maritime historian writes. “While 420,000 men served overseas during the Great War, only 2,100 Canadian women served as army nurses.” Hebb details the relative silence of these women in the postwar period, when researchers started requesting information about the experiences...