In the Second World War, the Queen Alexandra nurses were young women who shared the harsh conditions of the fighting services and confronted horrific casualties. The corps numbered twelve thousand women. Many of them wrote down their reactions then and there, in the thick of the action. The tale of how they coped with these trials is profoundly moving and uplifting. QAs were in the rout at Dunkirk, tending the horrific burns of the Battle of Britain pilots. They were in Hong Kong when it fell. QAs were the first women to enter the liberated Nazi death camps. They were in India, where they nursed the emaciated men who had built the Burma railway. Meanwhile on the home front they tended the victims of the Blitz.