... Mary Morris, who was a volunteer Irish nurse during the second World War, understood something of the paradoxical joys and miseries attendant on Hitler’s defeat. “The awful thing is that the after-effects of war go on for years after the war is ended,” she wrote in her diary, in December 1945. She added that the aftermath can be “excruciating” for Jews and others whose “minds have been wounded” in the conflict. Her insight into the disturbance was all the more remarkable as the effect on the psyche of those who had survived the Hitlerite terror was little known about in 1945. Yet this young Irishwoman seems to have intuited something: that the liberation of Europe was not always a heroic prelude to healing and suffering...

 ... The diaries start in May 1940 and finish in 1947 and cover her time in London during the blitz and as a volunteer for military service with the QA's,  following her over to France soon after D-day as part of one of the first field hospitals to be set up there. This is not only Mary's story, it is the recounting of stories that the young soldiers told her as she tended their wounds and perhaps more importantly, let them talk out their nightmares... (http://marymorrisauthor.blogspot.co.uk/)