Every memoir of the American Civil War provides us with another view of the catastrophe that changed the country forever. The Other Side of the War reveals the war as experienced by the thousands of women volunteered to work in hospitals and for the Sanitary Commission, the organization that advocated better practices and lobbied for increased supplies.

Katharine Prescott Wormeley was one of those volunteers, an American nurse in the Civil War, as well as author, editor, and and one of America’s best-known translators of French language literary works.

Her letters from the period of the Peninsular Campaign of 1862, collected here, provide a warm, witty, and at times heartbreaking view of the hardworking women to whom so much was owed by the soldiers and the nation.