Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

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You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Lucy Burns.

As part of our week-long series to commemorate a hundred years since the end of the First World War,

I'm bringing you a story from our archive about two women who joined the war effort.

Women from all sides served as munitions workers and ambulance drivers.

They took on jobs left by men had gone to fight.

But two of the most famous were a pair of British nurses who ran a field hospital among the trenches

of the Western Front in Belgium.

Elsie Nocker and Marry Chisholm volunteered as soon as war broke out.

Mari spoke to the BBC in 1977.

My mother said, of course, quite out of the question.

She's not going.

Anyway, I will not give her a box or anything to put me clothes in, you see.

And I went straight up to my bedroom and I got a large band on a handkerchief.

And I packed up, spare underclothes, tied it all up in his hatchet and went out surreptitiously and quietly

the Seables got out I motor back and rode to Fordenbridge.

Intrepid friends Mari and Elsie joined the Women's Emergency Corps and then they met a doctor

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