Check out May Bradford, a Red Cross volunteer during WWI who wrote over 25,000 letters and notes, an average of 12 a day, for wounded soldiers who were too ill or too uneducated to write to their family. She also sat with the injured and dying and considered herself to be a surrogate mother to them.

A History of the First World War in 100 Moments: The soldier and the letter-writer – a lady with a notepad who gave comfort to the dying

For several days early in 1917, May Bradford sat beside Corporal George Pendlebury in a British field hospital in France, comforting him and writing to his family as he edged towards death. By the time he succumbed to pneumonia, the young soldier believed she was not his nurse, but his mother.

Unlike her colleagues, she rarely dispensed drugs to relieve the agony of injuries inflicted on the Western Front. Instead, her medication was administering the written word and empathy in the gruelling surroundings of No 26 General Hospital, near Etaples.

A volunteer nurse for the British Red Cross, she followed her surgeon husband, Sir John Bradford, to northern France at the outbreak of the war and spent the duration of the conflict perform… Continue Reading

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/history-of-the-first-world-war-in-100-moments/a-history-of-the-first-world-war-in-100-moments-the-soldier-and-the-letter-writer-a-lady-with-a-9474683.html