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The forbidden zone

Chapter 2: THE PREFACE
By Mary Borden
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About This Book

A sequence of vivid front-line sketches, hospital scenes, short stories, and poems drawn from four years of hospital service with the French Army, presenting fragmentary impressions of life in the war zone. The pieces move between mudbound villages and shattered battlefields, describing bombardment, hospital operating rooms, the physical and psychological wounds of soldiers, and moments of civilian and medical care. Tone is unsentimental and fragmented, favoring compressed sensory detail and moral bewilderment over narrative order, with occasional short fictionalized episodes reconstructed from memory. Recurring concerns include the banality of suffering, the disorientation of modern warfare, and attempts to render chaos without falsifying it.

THE PREFACE

I have not invented anything in this book. The sketches and poems were written between 1914 and 1918, during four years of hospital work with the French Army. The five stories I have written recently from memory; they recount true episodes that I cannot forget.

I have called the collection of fragments “The Forbidden Zone” because the strip of land immediately behind the zone of fire where I was stationed went by that name in the French Army. We were moved up and down inside it; our hospital unit was shifted from Flanders to the Somme, then to Champagne, and then back again to Belgium, but we never left “La Zone Interdite.”

To those who find these impressions confused, I would say that they are fragments of a great confusion. Any attempt to reduce them to order would require artifice on my part and would falsify them. To those on the other hand who find them unbearably plain, I would say that I have blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of myself, not because I wished to do so, but because I was incapable of a nearer approach to the truth.

I have dared to dedicate these pages to the Poilus who passed through our hands during the war, because I believe they would recognise the dimmed reality reflected in these pictures. But the book is not meant for them. They know, not only everything that is contained in it, but all the rest that can never be written.

The Author.