CHIEF NURSE STEVENS
SPEAKS:
UNDER THE RED CROSS BANNER
I was educated abroad. That's how I came to love France and England almost as well as my own country. I was in my teens when I returned to America. I had always wanted to be a nurse. Even while at school I longed for the days when I should be old enough to begin training. It was my calling, and, when I left school, I answered it.
I trained in France, England and America. I had practised but a short while when I married. My husband was a surgeon, and from him I learned more of nursing than I could ever hoped to have acquired from text-books. We were always together. We played and worked and traveled all over the world. When he died, it was like a great light going out. I did not know where to turn—I did not know what to do. Even to this day I cannot get used to his being away from me. It always seems as though he were on one of his professional trips and would return.
And then in 1914, just six months after his death, war came, and I knew that my place was in France, so I sailed at once and enlisted in the nursing corps.
Those were the days before the great base hospitals were established—the days when the dead and wounded were left in piles awaiting such care as could be given them by the handful of overworked doctors and nurses.