The courage and the compassion: A remarkable new book reveals the gruelling work faced by nurses during World War Two

From the brutal conditions of army field hospitals to the bombed-out wards of the Blitz, the courage and the compassion shown by nurses during World War II has always received the highest respect.

Now, a collection of their remarkable stories are told in 'Sisters' by Barbara Mortimer which features 150 previously unpublished interviews.

"Many of these nurses had worked through the war and their stories were gripping,' Barbara, whose mother trained as a nurse during the war, told Yahoo! News. 'It was a real privilege to listen to the tales they had to tell.

"Many were modest but they were all very proud of what they had done. They were not sentimental about the problems they encountered - in fact one nurse Betty Boyce commented 'the longer I was in the army, the more startled I was that we won the war'."

Monica Baly, a staff nurse, Middlesex Hospital, London later joined the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service in 1942. She describes the moment she decided to join the war effort.

"At that stage I had decided, I had seen the light, like Paul on the Damascus road, about the whole point of the war. I don't quite know what triggered me off, I think it was something on the concentration camps. Not much of that was getting through to us, of course; very little of that was getting through. But I met some Poles, and my feeling about Germany was changing. I decided, walking down Oxford Street one day, that I was going to offer my services to the armed forces, so I applied first of all to the navy, but the navy lists were closed, so I applied to the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service, which was an easy bet for the Middlesex because Dorothy Madge [the matron, Miss Smith] was on the interviewing panel, so I was in."

Barbara Greenwood a student nurse, Middlesex Hospital from 1939-43 recalls treating the wounded men evacuated from Dunkirk.

It was the end of my first year, the beginning of my second year and I was sent down to Northwood [sector hospital] for the last month of my night duty. My name was called out to go to a ward where there was one army sister, one third-year Middlesex nurse and myself. And we took twenty-five to thirty, a batch of the worst of the [wounded] ... when they evacuated Dunkirk. Some of them had lost two limbs, some two legs and one arm. It was horrific. Really, it was terrible. There were only the three of us. But goodness we didn't stop all night. We really didn't stop all night.

These poor men were marvellously brave and wonderful in every way. I remember one night, one chappie called me over and said, 'Oh nurse, I have got such an irritation in my arm.' He had had an amputation and I said, 'Well let me have a quick look at your dressing'. And I looked at this dressing and it was crawling with maggots, and my hair, I thought my hair had actually stood on end. But I said, 'Don't worry, it's perfectly all right', put his dressing back and went as fast as I could, without running, to the sister, and I said 'oh Sister, he is covered in maggots', and she said, 'That's absolutely fine.' Apparently they wanted the maggots to eat the dead tissue and the maggots were left, incredible.

People round about were so good ... there was a great table in the middle of the ward and it was literally covered with biscuits and cakes and champagne and everything that people could get. They were all so sorry for these chaps who were absolutely marvellous."

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Lisbeth Hockey was a Jewish refugee from Austria. She arrived in England in 1939.

Everybody in Austria at that time thought that Hitler wouldn't last very long, so the idea was to send me to safety for a little time and it would all be over. But of course it was never over and I never saw my parents again, they were both killed by Nazis. Although somewhere in my ancestry there is Judaism, I never practised and I didn't even know about the Jewish component in my family.

The Quakers brought me over to this country. They were very, very helpful. I was met in London ... and they put me on the train to Devon. And this big tall man met me in Seaton and I became governess to their children. I was supposed to teach them German but ... it wasn't easy, obviously.

They were lovely people and took great care of me. They realised that I had wanted to be a doctor and tried to get [me] in medicine in this country. There was no way, because I was a woman, and in those days it was very rare for women to get into medicine. And secondly I wasn't a British subject at that time and thirdly I had no money. So there were three conditions which just made it totally impossible for me to go into medicine. So meaning well, but probably not terribly sensibly, they thought nursing would be a good thing for me to do.

'Poppy' Bocock was a sister tutor at Botley's Park sector hospital, 1939-45. She found the hospitals were ill-equipped to deal with the horror of war.

All we had when we got there were a number of splints from World War I, and a lot of babies' potties, sandbags and sand, and canvas palliasses and straw.

[They were] the big sandbags, that had to be filled to be put outside windows and things were glass was not to be broken. so our first job was to try and fill all these bally things! I can't remember the exact detail of how we did it, but we did it.

And then our second thing was that there was nothing in the wards to nurse the patients with. There were beds, but there were no mattresses so we had to fill these straw mattresses. We used orange boxes to make lockers...We spent the first two or three weeks scouring the countryside, every chemist's shop we raided and got anything we could buy from them in the way of bowls, and porringers, and instruments, and syringes and needles and things. After about, I think a fortnight, supplies began to come in, gradually. Not very organisedly, but they came in.