Agnes: a life

From a remote Scottish sheep farm to the battlefields of France.

At just twenty-one, Agnes Nicholson traded the quiet hills of Galloway for the chaos of the First World War. As a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Somme, she carried the wounded and dying from the front lines, serving with courage and resolve far from home.

Her story might have been lost. After the war she married, but, having survived the war and the Spanish Flu she died tragically aged just twenty-six, nine days after the birth of her second son, from puerperal fever. For decades, silence cloaked her memory. All that remained was a tiny gravestone marked with one word: Agnes.

This book uncovers her life — a tale of grit, sacrifice, and love in a world transformed by war. Agnes: A Life is both a granddaughter’s search for truth and a tribute to one of the countless women whose stories have too often been forgotten.