The operating theatre was the place where soldiers were repaired, often broken first in order to be remade. If Borden powerfully recast the hospital as the ‘second battlefield’, the operating room was the actual venue of this battle: ‘The battle now is going on over the helpless bodies of these men. It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real enemies.’ My subject in this chapter is the ‘helpless bodies’ of both men and women in the operating room, as depicted in the nursing memoirs, in this battle between medical science and the ravages of industrial and chemical weaponry. If the female body was habitually a site of dissection and curiosity for men in late nineteenth-century culture and literature from the operations of Sir Thomas Spencer Well to their depiction in Hasselhorst's J. C. G. Lucae and His Assistants, there might seem to be a reversal of gender roles and structures of power in the First World War operating theatre. The mysteries and the workings of the male anatomy were finally disclosed to women who now had the ultimate control over them – except perhaps death. Yet in a world where morphine and anaesthesia were forever in short supply, the ‘real’ enemy was not death but pain, a ‘monster bedfellow’ which, as seen in the last chapter, often rendered the nurse ‘helpless’. The operating theatre could potentially be a place of excitement, achievement, even power: it was here that women participated most fully in the advance of medical science.