Another girl, tiny and energetic, a sister for Marcella and Adele. What do the parents think as they greet this latest addition to their household? That God has indeed blessed them? It would be an appropriate thought for devout Scots Catholics - they are members of the Bailey’s Brook mission from Arisaig and close friends of Bishop John Cameron of the diocese of Antigonish. The father, forty-six-year-old Donald St Daniel Macdonald, is doubtless pleased that his long-delayed desire for a family is taking form and that his wife is coming through the birthing well. Still, girls are a costly investment...

During the Second World War, when it was acceptable to be enthusiastic about warfare, Margaret Macdonald confided her “yen for wars” to a group of nursing graduates. Whether she was recruiting for the army or merely reminiscing, she was clearly longing to be back in the thick of things. She claimed to have “followed” as many wars as she could over her lifetime and only regretted having been considered too young for the Boxer Rebellion in China, and now too old for the present conflict.¹ Without the age restrictions she would happily have added those two to the three she...

The First World War marked a major change in Margaret Macdonald’s military career. She stopped nursing and began working principally for and with women. From being one of five nursing sisters in Canada’s Permanent Army Medical Corps in 1914 and often the sole nurse at military hospitals in Quebec City and Kingston in the prewar years, she became the matron-in-chief of a cadre of nurses that by 1918 numbered close to three thousand.¹ Along with the new title - a first for Canada - went the military rank of major, the first such designation for a woman in the British...

For five years Margaret Macdonald graced the London scene in the name of Canada’s military nurses. Her army rank and her nursing profession gave her a public persona which she enjoyed and used to good effect in the overseeing of her nurses. As a woman she stood out among the thousands of male military officers who flocked to London for work or play. And as a military officer herself, she stood out among the thousands of society ladies who were doing volunteer work in the city, to say nothing of the even more numerous female clerks who “manned” the war’s...

Margaret Macdonald’s “wondrous peace” was not kind to her. She came home to a place of forgetting and a place of memory,¹ and both left her on the margins of the military, the margins of nursing, and the margins of society. For someone who had so enjoyed being a first, exercising power, doing things and being recognized, she burrowed into an existence that was as private as the other had been public. Like a war widow she emerged for ceremonial recollections of a previous life - tributes as much to a way of being as to the specific dead. For...

For twenty-five years, Vie Macdonald carefully guarded her sister’s correspondence in the family home at Bailey’s Brook. On visits to their sister Kate in Montreal, she would take packets of letters for the two of them to enjoy. They reread the letters and shared their recollections of all those years, all those wars, all that travel and fun. And then, shortly before she died in 1974, Vie Macdonald, who had kept the home fires burning in war and peace, tossed her sister’s letters into the flames. a a a a a a a a a a a a a a...