NURSE AT THE RUSSIAN FRONT. A Diary 1914-1918. Florence Farmborough

1974. Hard cover with dust cover. 421 pages. Very good condition. Name of former owner (pen) and address (koki) written in front. Under 1kg.

Florence Farmborough, an English governess, spent WWI in Russia as a Red Cross nurse, and served at the front under constant bombardment, taking photographs with a plate camera and keeping a diary in her spare time. She witnessed the appalling slaughter and suffering of ill trained and often illiterate recruits thrown into a war with insufficient ammunition and supplies. Some regiments of 25,000 men were reduced to a couple of thousand within days or weeks. After the revolution, foreigners were advised to leave and having witnessed the treatment of former army officers she saw that her Red Cross service would not protect her. She left Russia with great difficulty on a goods train via Siberia, the only way out at that time, and after a month long train journey arrived in Vladivostok where she was able to get passage on an American ship sent to evacuate foreign nationals. After the war she became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, writer, broadcaster, Times correspondent and university lecturer, later serving in WW2 with the WVS. Her photographs and diary were preserved by her sister Margaret until they were eventually published in 1974 when she was in her late 80's. The manuscript was written by the author without the help of a ghost writer, and is outstanding not only for the fly-on-the-wall account of daily life in the most turbulent period of Russia's history by someone who lived it, but for its beautifully written page-turning readability.