ABSTRACT Helen Gansevoort Mackay, a little-known writer from New York, spent much of her life in France, where she became Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. During the Great War she published a book of poetry and two books of sketches based on her work as a nurse. Like Ellen N. La Motte and Mary Borden, two other Americans now canonized for sketches composed while they worked together at a hospital in Belgium, Mackay was a modernist whose voice is self-mocking and ironic; her depictions of medical staff and soldiers are often satiric or starkly disillusioned. All three women had until 1917 somewhat greater freedom of expression than writers from nations at war. Intensely Francophile, Mackay focused on the destruction of bodies, homes, and the fabric of social life. She was highly praised by Richard Burton and several anonymous reviewers for her ‘emotional intensity’ and ‘tragic effect’. Unlike La Motte and Borden, however, Mackay has been forgotten, in part because of her diffidence as an untrained nurse, and in part because her vignettes were read for the lyricism of their descriptions rather than the crisp critical assessments of behaviour. This essay addresses the relationship between London, One November (1916), Mackay’s volume of poetry, and the prose sketches in Journal of Small Things (1917). The free verse of London, One November enabled a narrative mode in short lyrics, while it also exploited rhetorical structures beyond traditional metrical form. Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime. In London, apostrophe and invocation use the metonymic power of lyric to bring to life places and objects as figures for those who in wartime are absent or dead. Description accumulates around roads or homes, conveying sensory perceptions to shape traces of a war narrative. Time may be frozen as lives are brought to a halt by a paralysing war wound, while individual moments point towards a history in process. Mackay’s experiments in prose correspond to those in her poetry, yet often invert her rhetorical strategies. In Journal of Small Things her prose poems and the progressive structure of a diary trace the curve of the war experience, plotted across fragmentary observations. At the same time, a lyric side of narrative emerges in the condensation to a momentary encounter or snapshot. The brevity of a sketch rhymes with curt observations about the age at which a soldier will die. Everyday observations are invested with contradictory structures that reverse the movement of a sentence in order to capture the emotions of a couple torn apart. The paradoxes of human behaviour expose the importance of pretence to sustaining war and drowning out doubts. Whereas the war was understood to unite a nation, Mackay addresses the separation between her privileged position and the rough poverty of those lower-class staff with whom she works at the Hôpital St Louis.