The heiress and the French army
MARY BORDEN stared down the line of beds—each touching the stark walls of a room that had once been a glittering casino, but was now shabby with neglect, its chandeliers and glass ceiling dusty and streaked with dirt. You couldn’t really call it a hospital ward. In each bed was a miserable lump of humanity, shivering under a dirty blanket. How had she ended up here?
When Britain entered the First World War on August 4, 1914, Borden had been living the life of a pampered millionaire. Her London residence on Park Lane had been a vibrant centre of intellectual life and her salon was frequented by the likes of Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster and Percy Wyndham Lewis. The wife of a doting missionary, she had been pregnant with her third daughter—a situation she deplored, feeling that she must break free of her comfortable London existence and do something, anything, to help the war effort.
Borden had been born in Chicago, US, into an affluent family. She had married young after a courtship of only one week and was already beginning to regret her impulse. What Bridget Maclagan. Her most popular books, however, were still to be written and, for now, all she could think about was how she might make a real contribution to what everyone was calling the ‘Great War for Civilisation’.
