REPRESENTATIONS OF DOBRUJAN TOWNS IN THE DIARIES OF THE SCOTTISH NURSES FROM THE GREAT WAR
REPRESENTATIONS OF DOBRUJAN TOWNS IN THE DIARIES OF THE SCOTTISH NURSES FROM THE GREAT WAR

Summary/Abstract: This article is intended to present an outline of the Scottish Women's Hospitals' (SWH) sojourn to Romania before turning to its full purpose, an analysis of the instances in which Romanian towns are mentioned in the diaries and letters of the SWH during their stay on the Eastern Front. The hypothesis is that most of the nurses' representations of towns were written in a tragic tone. This was owing, on the one hand, to the fact that the destruction of important urban centres as elements of European civilization was part of the general devastation caused by the Great War and, on the other hand, to the immediate feelings of sorrow, disappointment and hopelessness of the Scottish women who travelled and worked in a country ravaged by war. The Tragic mode of emplotment, as one of Hayden White's archetypes which the scholar opposes to Comedy, lays emphasis on a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the fall of the protagonist (White 1973, 9). The spectators, in the case of the present research, are the nurses who visited Romania in the First World War, while the protagonist whose fall they tragically witness is the country for whose engagement in the war they were initially enthusiastic.

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