Heroes of World War One: Females with front

On a late autumn evening, the watery sun low in a greying sky, Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery is beautiful, bleak and completely overwhelming.

It might be nearly a century since the last earth was scattered on the last grave, and you might have read the history books, studied the poetry of Wilfred Owen and watched the grainy BBC documentaries, but nothing can ever prepare you for the jolting sadness of actually standing here, in a war cemetery, just 12km from the infamously bloody Ypres Salient.

What's perhaps even harder to absorb is that Lijssenthoek was a hospital cemetery, serving the biggest evacuation hospital in the Ypres Salient.

So the 10,784 men lying here would not have died in some romantic glory on the battlefield, but in slow lonely agony with wounds modern medicine would baulk at, let alone the meagrely equipped tents of World War 1.

There are the obligatory unnamed graves too — 24 in total. That’s actually relatively few for a war cemetery, and yet that’s still 24 families who never knew where their sons, fathers and brothers lay.

On the southern tip of the cemetery, you come to 223 German graves. They are all neatly kept, as every grave in every war cemetery across the world always is, but they lie — unsurprisingly — a little apart. You can understand it, of course, and yet, whatever the rights and wrongs of Germany’s part in the Great War, there’s no escaping the loneliness of men buried apart from comrades, unwelcome outsiders even in death.

In what seems like endless sadness though, one headstone in Lijssenthoek gives out a strange ray of hope.

“That one is Nellie Spindler’s,” our guide smiles, pointing to a cross at the cemetery’s front edge.

Nellie, a staff nurse with Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, was just 26 when she died while she was sleeping, bombed by a German shell at 11.15am on August 21, 1917.

At first her story seems an unlikely one to lift the mood. But her role in the war effort was admirable. In 1917 — a year before UK women over 30 got the vote and 11 years before Nellie, being under 30, would have got the vote — women undoubtedly had less rights than men. And yet there was Nellie, fighting — and dying — with an equal honour to men.

She wasn’t the only one either.

Throughout the war, thousands of selfless women like Nellie were ‘doing their bit’ in hospitals across Europe.

And although traditional history lessons might not have told us much about them, in 2014, the centenary of The Great War, it’s perhaps about time that changed.

All over Flanders, you don’t have to search hard to find similar stories of female heroism. Most local guides can tell you how legendary scientist Marie Curie drove her early radiology vans for miles, training other nurses and helping X-ray otherwise helpless wounds.

Flanders Field Museum, just off the enormous town square in Ypres, has video reels with actresses reciting nurses’ letters. Some words are reflective, some humorous, some desperate — but all courageous. There are new interactive display pods too, so you can ‘be’ famous names from the war, such as Edith Cavell, the nurse executed by German soldiers in 1915 after helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium.

A few years ago, a book by Diane Atkinson entitled Elsie And Mairi Go To War: Two Extraordinary Women On The Western Front, celebrated the lives of two irrepressible young nurses, Elsie Knocker and Mairi Chisolm.

The pair joined the war effort as part of a small band of female nurses on motorbikes called Munro’s Ambulance Corps, but gradually, frustrated by how many men were dying before they could reach a hospital, they decided to set up their own first aid post on the front line in Pervyse, just a few miles from Ypres.

Driving round the now pretty village of Pervyse, you can see the bumpy roads they rattled their ambulances down, you pass the tiny cottage that became their hospital and home for nearly four years, and — a little further afield — the small damp dugouts on the front line, where they ignored any risk and ferried cups of tea to desperate, weary men.

Throughout 2014, crowds of tourists will visit Flanders. There are amazing museums, all well balanced with modern interactive displays and tear-jerking photos, letters home and school reports of slaughtered soldiers. The vast, flat, green countryside is undeniably beautiful. And Ypres itself is a buzzing, pretty town with an endless array of Belgian chocolate shops, ice-cream cafes, and trendy restaurants.

But behind it all, Flanders is a place forever be scarred by its history, and by the still incomprehensible sacrifices made in the name of democracy.

But while it is always — and especially in 2014 — good to celebrate what so many other men and women gave in the ‘war to end all wars’, a visit to Flanders makes you remember and appreciate what they lost. It is perhaps summed up most simply on a headstone, at the back of Lijssenthoek, about 100 metres from the bright flowers of Nellie Spindler’s grave, which reads: ‘With the angels now, rest in peace, my dear, dear husband.’