"A Diary without Dates," her first book, is, like Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a running illness narrative cum dissection of ideas emanating from the lives of institutionalized sufferers of disease as viewed through the lenses of death and time. Although Diary is a much shorter book, it is one equally unburdened by specific dates or identifying details. The result is a timeless prose poem about young men ravished by war and a verbal anatomy of these conditions as limned by a young woman with a burgeoning ability to depict such scenes and thoughts with force and beauty.

The young woman was Enid Bagnold, an author who was at the beginning of a very accomplished career as novelist (National Velvet, 1935), playwright (Chalk Garden, 1955) and autobiographer (Autobiography, 1969) when she wrote her WWI memoir. Already an accomplished stylist at age 28, confident of her lyrical powers, Bagnold created a vivid, simple, yet moving account of the quotidian lives of men facing pain, mutilation, disability and death. At her best, she reminds one of William Carlos Williams in his The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, e.g.,

"Let them pile on the rules, invent and insist; yet behind them, beneath them, I have that strong, secret liberty of an institution that runs like a wind in me and lifts my mind like a leaf." (page 17)

Time and again, Bagnold wonders about the makeup of the nurses and nuns, characterized as "so strange, so tricky, uncertain as collies." (page 29) She is contemptuous when, on several occasions, they show less compassion for a patient in pain than the lay writer observing them. Or when they seem to look upon the V.A.D.s' raison d'être as service to them and not to their patients in common. The voyeuristic women visitors who visit the hospital to aggrandize their self-esteem, give superficial gifts, and see the wounded are deftly dispatched in so many words by the young writer.

For users of this database, this book will prove richly useful for its descriptions of early 20th century British soldiers suffering disease; experiencing deformity (amputations, useless limbs that would probably be amputated sooner these days, a horribly mutilated midface injury); and facing death with the denial of Mr. Wicks, lingering with (probably syphilitic) locomotor ataxia, who needs to be told to look at a beautiful moon outside the window of his death-in-life tomb of a bed. Nor is it only the injured patients who dread death. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Bagnold writes that