It was a common assumption during the war that VAs and AAMWS servicewomen wanted to be nurses, and it was this desire that motivated them to join this service rather than take up one of the other available wartime opportunities. As Sheila Sibley confessed in 1943, before she began her work as an AAMWS, she was ‘dreaming dreams’ of becoming ‘an angel of mercy, the wounded man’s guide … the Rose of No-Man’s Land’. Sibley imagined that she would ‘float down the wards in my nifty blue uniform, and tender sighs would float right after this war’s Florence Nightingale’. Both Hitchcock and Sibley suggest there was some truth in the assumption that VAs and then AAMWS saw themselves as akin to, or aspired to be, nurses. Like Hitchcock, Sibley’s references show a clear association with the nurse in her understanding of the VAD and AAMWS. But Sibley admits that once she joined her first military hospital, she learnt the reality of the AAMWS’ work and conceded, ‘better leave that noble figure in my imagination.’

Writing encouragingly with the aim of providing constructive feedback in 1979 Mary Critch asked of Enid Herring, ‘Is ‘They wanted to be Nightingales’ a title for the finished book?’. Both were former members of the AAMWS working on their own separate compilations of the VAD/AAMWS in the Second World War. Critch, however, was alarmed by Herring’s choice of a title, and put the question to Herring, asking: ‘Is it not rather embarrassing to the hundreds of AAMW [sic.] who worked as General Duty and Mess Orderlies, as clerks, cooks etc and never saw the inside of a ward?’ Referencing Florence Nightingale, the woman noted for her humanitarian efforts during the Crimean War and cited by some as shaping modern nursing, Herring chose to perpetuate the stereotype of VAs and AAMWS. The First World War myth that all VAs either aspired to be nurses, or already saw themselves as nurses, was a common perception that tainted the VAD and AAMWS in the Second World War. While writing her own account of the VAD/AAMWS, Herring could have chosen to debunk this myth. However, she claimed its truth.

With a focus on Hugo Blick’s Black Earth Rising(2018), this chapter maps how a larger justicestory develops around conflicting interpersonalrelations, while at the same time attending to thelarger geopolitical story and a darkness-basedcolonial imaginary. Attentive to the cartographicand subjective repositioning made possible by KateAshby’s locus of enunciation, we illustrate howthe international criminal justice regime andhumanitarian reason is entangled with violentshadow worlds that are revealed when she confrontsthe fraught exchanges within which values areocculted, institutions created, and personalrelationships built. Ultimately, these violentshadow worlds are brought to the fore when oneattends to the violence-laundering and implicitpractices of exchange along with what we call “theburying, burrowing, and blinding” practices thatBlack Earth Rising depicts. Through aninvestigative montage, the series providesinsights into shadow worlds behind and beneath thelarge geopolitical theater as well as the maps ofjustice, atrocity, and intimacy that connectRwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, TheHague, France, London, and the U.S.