IRENE McVITTIE (b 1920): ONE Christmas Eve, we went around the wards with lanterns. Those of us who wanted to. To sing carols, you know?

We had two wards of German wounded, as well as wards of English casualties, and we thought it was the kindest thing to do, to go singing for the German wounded as well as our own.

One of the Germans we sang for, he could speak English and he asked us, after we'd sung our carols for them: "Would you like also if we sing for you?"

We said we would like this, so one of his countrymen left his sickbed and went over to the piano -- we had pianos then on every ward -- and he began to play 'Silent Night'.

Then they all sang together in German. It was very haunting in the light of our lanterns, and some of us cried. That was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

Some of the patients we nursed, they were terrible cases. They were casualties from what was called The Second Front.

The hospitals over there couldn't cope with them, so they would send them all the way back to England -- back to us -- and it could take up to two days bringing them over on the train. We had to be on duty all the time, all of us on high alert, waiting for the wounded to arrive.

One night, the surgeon was doing his rounds on the ward, and he was telling us: "I'll operate on him tonight, I'll do him, and him, and him, and him."

The patients all had tickets tied to them to indicate what was wrong, and we would check the tickets. And when the surgeon came to this one chap -- this young boy, only 19 -- we checked his ticket and it said "fractured femur" and "Thomas's Splint" -- which was a kind of big splint which went from the thigh right down to the foot.

The surgeon took a took at him and said: "Best leave him till tomorrow. I won't do anything with that fracture tonight."

We left the boy for a while, while we attended to the others, preparing them for surgery. Their bandages had to be removed, but often the dressings would be stuck, all matted with blood, so we would soak them in bowls of warm water to loosen them.

Then we returned to the boy, and we decided to wash him and make him comfortable, as best we could. My hand was reaching to his back to lay him towards me, when my fingers sank into something soft -- I didn't know what -- but the other nurse with me she could see the boy's back, where my fingers were, and she said, "Irene, come here, look."

The boy had a hole in his back. A huge gaping hole. A bullet had torn in there and out the other side, and we could see his kidney pulsating -- and all his tattered clothing and flesh stuck to it. He was paralysed from the waist down, that poor lad.

Those are the traumas we went through every day on that ward. It has set me against wars.