FINDING THEMSELVES

FINDING THEMSELVES

The Letters of an American Army
Chief Nurse in a British
Hospital in France

BY
JULIA C. STIMSON, M.A., R.N.
Chief Nurse, No. 12 (St. Louis, U. S. A.)
General Hospital, B. E. F.

“Now God be thanked who has matched us with His hour
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.”
—Rupert Brooke.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
All rights reserved

Copyright, 1918,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1918.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO ALL MY MAJORS
WHOSE KIND HELPFULNESS
WAS NEVER FAILING

NOTE

These letters were written as the daily record of the work of a Unit of Red Cross nurses who were sent to France in May, 1917, in response to the request of the British authorities. The Unit, almost immediately after its arrival in England, was sent across the Channel to take over a British Base Hospital established on a race course, where they have cared continuously for a stream of from eight hundred to two thousand wounded “Tommies” at a time.

The original sixty-five American nurses were assisted for several months by English Volunteer Aids, and when these were withdrawn, they were reënforced with some thirty American nurses.

Though written with no thought of publication, as the war lengthens out, these letters have become of especial value as the record of first impressions and experiences which for those concerned were startlingly new. Since then much has been happening of tremendous significance both to the participants and to the world, but the events recorded here have not lost their interest, nor has their graphic character been blunted, by recent occurrences. Hence, though the initial purpose of printing these letters was to furnish this group of women with a permanent story of their devoted service, it has been suggested that the letters have a much wider interest, and they have therefore been given for publication by Miss Stimson’s family.

Henry A. Stimson
Pastor emeritus, Manhattan
Congregational Church.

New York, June, 1918.

FINDING THEMSELVES

St. Louis, May 4, 1917.

Dearest Mother and Dad:—

As you have probably seen by the papers, we all are in the midst of alarms. We have had less than a week’s notice to get ready for mobilization for service in France, and so it has been a rushing week. Last Saturday afternoon we received word we were likely to be called out soon—in two or three weeks—but on Tuesday night I received word to have the nurses ready by Saturday. It is now Friday evening and most of the nurses are ready, but it is quite certain we won’t be leaving for several days as the doctors’ uniforms, for instance, won’t be ready till next Wednesday. I am glad indeed for the extra time. The nurses can take a very small steamer trunk and a suitcase. As we apparently are to be sent abroad “for the duration of the war” it is rather a puzzle to know what to take.

Of course this order for foreign service is playing havoc with the personnel of the Unit, so few expected to be called for duty abroad. In fact no one expected a call of this sort at all. I have been quite disgusted with the quitters who, for one reason or another, have begged to be excused. I have had about ten drop out, but I am finding substitutes who I think will be much more desirable than such weak-kneed individuals. But every substitution means a great deal of work and much telegraphing; for each name has to be approved at Washington, and after physical examinations are made here they also have again to be approved at Washington. I have had a number sent back for more complete details. I am to have a detachment of Kansas City nurses attached to my corps. Ten, and maybe more, for there are to be sixty-five, and I had only fifty in my original order and some of these have been dropped or have had to fall out. Two whose names I submitted I have had to drop by orders from Washington because they were born in Germany. So there is much to do, you see.

It is now Sunday, and we are going down to hear Joffre speak if we can get into the Coliseum. He and his staff are coming out to review the Unit at the [Barnes] hospital to-morrow. I do hope that by this time next Sunday we shall be on our way, for waiting around after one is ready is very trying, particularly when people of all sorts are weeping farewells over you all the time. Well, anyway, here is loads of love to you all. We know it is the biggest opportunity of our lives.

People are being wonderful and are rallying around us splendidly. We are offered more help than we can possibly use. It has been pretty fatiguing but I am beginning to realize that I can take things more slowly now. Naturally I wanted to be as nearly ready with all my force by Saturday as I possibly could be. You can imagine the number of questions I have had to make up answers for, that come to me every hour of the day and night, not to mention all the details I have to impress upon many people, those who go, and those who stay.

But it is all wonderful beyond belief. I just wish I had the words to express what I think about this opportunity. Aside from what we think about the causes and principles involved, and the tremendous satisfaction of having a chance to help work them out, to be in the front ranks in this most dramatic event that ever was staged, and to be in the first group of women ever called out for duty with the United States Army, and in the first part of the army ever sent off on an expeditionary affair of this sort, is all too much good fortune for any one person like me. The responsibility of my big job of whipping into shape a band of heterogeneously trained nurses and of competing for loyalty and spirit with groups of nurses from the East, and mostly all from one school, seems almost an overwhelming job, but naturally I am going to do my very best. I have some splendid women to help me in the executive line, and although we do not know each other’s ways at all we will do what we can. As for the men, we could not have a more splendid group to work with. I shall have every possible help from them. Personally I am feeling fine and oh, so keyed up. I cannot ever be worthy of all the honor and opportunities that have come to me, not to mention all the happiness. It seems as if my life has just overflowed with good things and that I can never live long enough to put back into the world all that has been given to me.

My little nurses[1] are being so fine. The present Senior class of thirty-two would have been my first real class, the first I have taken all through, and they are weeping around that I am not going to be here to graduate them. But to-morrow night after chapel I am to have a heart-to-heart talk with them and I believe I can make them feel better.

May 7th, Marshal Joffre presented the American colors to the St. Louis Unit (U. S. Base Hospital) No. 21 of Washington University at the Barnes Hospital.

May 16th, These colors were consecrated at the Cathedral in a special service for the Unit.

May 17th, The Unit left St. Louis and sailed from New York on Saturday the 19th.

On board ship.
May 21, Monday.

Dearest Family:—

If only all you dear people at home could know how comfortable and happy we all are, you would not worry the slightest bit about us. Of course the danger is still here even if we don’t notice it, but everything is so serene it seems as though it couldn’t possibly touch us. The only time that one can even imagine any danger is at night when on the decks not a single particle of light can be seen, except a dark purple glow at each companion-way. All the portholes are fastened shut and all the windows of the dining-saloon are shut and shaded as soon as it begins to get dark. The main hall, or whatever the place is called, in the center of the boat where the main stairways are, is also entirely dark, so that when the doors to the deck are opened no light will shine out. We are told that we are one of a group of boats going out together although out of sight of each other, and that when we get nearer the other side we are to be convoyed by battleships. We are getting wireless directions from cruisers now, but are not sending out any messages. We had lifeboat drill this morning, with lifebelts on and each person knows to exactly what boat he or she is to go. At times like those drills there is nothing but the greatest jolliness and cheerfulness. In fact, all the time there seems to be nothing but cheerfulness and eagerness to get to work. I haven’t even heard of any apprehensiveness on the part of a single person. As one of my nurses said in her slow drawly way: “There isn’t any use worrying about the submarines. If the Germans are going to kill us, worrying isn’t going to prevent it. If the Germans do kill me, I’m going to come back and haunt the whole German army.”

Everything has gone so very smoothly from the very beginning, I really don’t see how arrangements could have been improved upon. Even the one trunk that got left behind reached the steamer in time, and the two nurses who were to join us in New York turned up exactly as scheduled and all the missing documents from the War Department came before we left and as far as I could tell, everybody had everything that she ought to have. When the gangplank was pulled up and I realized that not one of my group could get lost for at least ten days, and there were no more documents to expect by mail and no more telegrams giving more instructions, it seemed as if a great load dropped off my shoulders. It was a glorious day and the sail down the harbor was wonderful. All kinds of boats tooted and blew their whistles at us and people on ferry boats waved and cheered us. Soon after lunch, the few necessary room adjustments were made and trunks were carried to the proper rooms. Nurses had been assigned to rooms alphabetically, but a few changes seemed to make everybody happy. Some of the nurses are three in a room, but quite a lot of them are only two in a room. With the portholes screwed down there is no difference between the inside and the outside rooms. The whole Pennsylvania Unit, Base Hospital No. 10, is with us, going no one knows where, any more than we do. They seem very nice people, and the Chief Nurse is the Miss Dunlop with whom I had been corresponding about work at the American Ambulance. Miss Dunlop was in charge of the nursing at the Ambulance for some time and can give me lots of pointers about foreign service.

When we reached the St. Paul that Friday evening about 6, going directly from the train to a ferry and from the ferry to the pier, we found the other Unit on board. A committee from the Red Cross was here giving out uniforms. It took not much over an hour and a half before each nurse had received all her things and was free to go. Each one was given caps and armbands, a lovely soft cape lined with bright red flannel; a soft dark blue felt hat, with hat pins, a heavy dark brown blanket, a long heavy double-breasted, dark blue military coat and a dark blue serge dress. The whole equipment is excellent and extremely good in quality and the fit was fine, considering the way measurements had to be sent. There was a box there addressed to every single nurse, each one containing a dress and a coat. The dresses are very good looking. They have high standing collars with a little edging of white at the top and an edging of white at the cuffs. Extra edging was found in an envelope attached to each dress. There is a pleat that runs from each shoulder to the waist and a row of big black buttons follows those pleats. There is also a row of buttons up the outside of each sleeve. At the waist there is a belt and a cloth-covered buckle. The skirt has a pocket on each side and has a panel back. The effect of the whole outfit is very shipshape, though a little somber. There is no distinguishing mark for Chief Nurses, but Miss Noyes, the Chairman of the Bureau of Nursing Service, who came on from Washington to see us off, said she was going to work out some sort of a method for distinguishing the Chiefs and would let us know later what it is to be. A great many of the nurses sent back to their homes the heavy coats they had brought for the steamer. I sent mine.

All the officers and the enlisted men are having regular drill every day. I asked for some drill for the nurses too, and we began yesterday, greatly to the delight of every one, the spectators as well as those participating. We have regular setting-up exercises as well as some military formations so that we can march in decency and order when we have to. On shipboard standing on one foot and raising the other knee is apt to be accompanied with some merriment. And some of our fat doctor officers have more or less difficulty lying down flat on their stomachs and getting up very fast. But by the end of the voyage we all may be very proficient. At any rate it is awfully good for the digestion. Speaking of digestion, we are having excellent food and, as is always the way on a steamer, altogether too much of it. The dining-saloon holds us all at one sitting, which is pleasant. No. 10 takes up all of one side and No. 21 the other and the few civilian passengers sit in the middle.

I was assigned to a very good stateroom all by myself. Then yesterday the purser moved me into a still larger and better room, where I have a table and a droplight, which is more luxury than I ever traveled with before. People are all so good to us. Even the stewards and the stewardesses, most of whom are English, seem to be only too glad to do what they can to make us all comfortable. There have been a few seasick nurses, which is hard to explain, as the weather has been perfect and the ocean very smooth. To-day there is a slight roll, but not enough to notice. Every day there is target practice with the guns. Empty barrels are thrown overboard and the gun crews shoot at them with the big guns that are on the forward and after decks.

Evening prayers are held every evening at 9.30, and yesterday we had church service and had all the enlisted men up. Our [Chaplain] Dean Davis is a real man. We got a choir together yesterday and last evening had some fancy singing, which an overly critical person might call bellowing. It is a mixed choir and it certainly can sing. Now it is time I studied some French.

Friday afternoon, May 25.

Since I last wrote we have had some real weather, and such a lot of sick people! Doctors as well as nurses succumbed; and great was the misery. To-day it is bright and sunny again and not so cold, and everybody is recovering. It was up along the Banks and opposite Labrador, I guess, where it was the worst. It was cold and rainy and really very rough, so much so that we had to have the racks on the tables. I have not been sick a minute myself, but there was one day when I was not much interested in eating. Still I did not miss a single meal.

It is a heavenly day to-day. We are already in or near the danger zone and extra precautions are being taken. It all seems so queer. To-night we are not to undress, and the few nurses who are on the deck below this one, where most of them are, are to sleep to-night in the doctor-officers’ rooms on the upper deck and the latter are to sleep in the sitting-rooms. There has been some special target practice when no passengers were allowed on deck, and there was an elaborate boat drill this afternoon. It is all strange business and still most incomprehensible to me. I still feel as if I were dreaming and that in a few minutes I would wake up. We are due to land Sunday afternoon at Liverpool, it seems, and are scheduled to go to London. But after that all is shrouded in mystery. My crowd of nurses are fine and have been behaving splendidly. Comparing them to the Philadelphia bunch I feel that I have no reason to be ashamed of them or to fear for what they are going to do. They have all shown a splendid spirit and seem to be full of enthusiasm and eagerness to show what Missouri can do when it tries. I feel perfectly sure they are going to be a loyal, hard-working group.

All the nice things that people sent to eat and read have been greatly appreciated. I was just swamped with nice things, but there have been lots of people to enjoy them with me. I have slept and slept and read and read and shall be in fine shape when we land. I was pretty tired when we started and was not sleeping as I should because of the multiplicity of details that were on my mind. Except for the sick nurses the responsibility has let up a lot here on the boat, but will of course begin again when we land. My Squad Leaders have proved most efficient. Miss Dunlop of No. 10 and I have had some very nice talks. I shall be sorry to lose her advice and assistance when we go our separate ways. She is considerably older than I am and much more experienced. For destinations there are rumors of Mesopotamia, Saloniki, Russia, England, and the North of France. Take your choice. It’s a great game to be traveling thousands of miles and not know where you are going, nor how long you are going to stay, nor really what you are going to do when you get there. We may even be in camp somewhere. All the camp equipment is with us. Well, I like the game anyway.

Last night all my dear little nurses [in St. Louis] were having their graduation exercises without me. I hope they got the little speech I sent them, poor as it was. We were thinking of them. One of the men at our table is keeping one of his watches at St. Louis time, so at every meal we discuss what is going on in St. Louis.

When this letter reaches you, you will know that everything is well with us. You will know that before then, come to think of it. For it will take a long time for letters to get back to the U. S. A. It is going to be ages before we shall receive letters from you, worse luck.

I have enjoyed Elsie’s ginger and her book ever so much and Mother’s wonderful Dean box is going to continue to be a delight for a long time. I am going to try to take the box along for eats, and to keep it for that. I am not sure yet just how much luggage I can manage and I seem to have accumulated a good deal more than I started with. The Ever Warm Safety Suit is awfully nice to have. I trust I shall not have to use it, but it is nice to have around anyway. There are several of them on the boat.

This letter can be kept just for the family. I am writing others to St. Louis. I do hope Philip[2] will be coming along over soon and that it won’t take long to find out where he is.

Don’t you worry about me one least little bit. I am having the time of my life and wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world.

Good-by for now. I hope all your summer plans will work out smoothly and happily for you all.

Lovingly
Julia.

Sat. May 26.—First night in danger zone safely passed and everything O.K. My bunch all went to bed and slept finely.

Liverpool, The Adelphi Hotel.
Monday, May 29, 1917.

Dearest Family:—

I do not know how I am ever going to manage to write down all the things I am learning and all the wonderful impressions that are beginning to crowd upon me. But I feel as though I could not bear to lose them; and so many new ones will come every day, I surely will lose them if I don’t write them down at once.

We arrived last evening but did not dock until this A.M. at 7.30. We were met by a Colonel B., who said he came to welcome us in the name of the Director-General and the King. He was an extremely affable old tall thin boy in a much-decorated uniform and a swagger stick. He told us we were to stay in Liverpool 24 hours, the nurses at the Adelphi and the doctors at the Northwestern, and that to-morrow at 11 we are to be conducted to London, to stay there at the Waldorf Hotel four or five days, and then to be sent to France. He said the Cleveland Unit had already been sent over, the Boston one was to go to-day, and the New York one Wednesday. The Philadelphia Unit and we are to stay together as far as London, but will be sent to separate destinations. We know where we are to go, but if I should tell you now the censor would cut it out. We can tell you later, not before. Anyway we are delighted, for we are to have lots of work, and mighty hard work too. We have been told considerable details about what we are to do, but I shall have to wait before I can tell you about it all.

We reached the hotel about 11 and were assigned to rooms with the greatest dispatch and courtesy. I have a most luxurious room and bath. After lunch I gave some directions to the squad leaders[3] about letting the nurses do what they wanted the rest of the day, in parties not larger than four, etc., in order not to be conspicuous, and then I came upstairs to sit down in quiet and read the paper and rest. I took a nice little nap and had a perfectly good bath, and a little before five was telephoned to that Miss Dunlop, the Chief Nurse of No. 10, and a Colonel J. wished me to come down to tea. I went on down and found Miss D., Colonel B., and Colonel J. in the lounge, which was filled with a gay crowd of people having tea and listening to the orchestra. There were lots of uniforms, and many limping, bandaged soldiers, and I had my first heartache over the one-legged young officers.

Pretty soon Colonel J., who is the English member of the R. A. M. C. (Royal Army Medical Corps) who is to escort us nurses to London to-morrow, went and brought over to our table a friend of his, a Major F., also R. A. M. C. This last man was a lean, hollow-eyed man of about 40, who pretty soon got talking, and for the next hour I heard such tales as I hardly ever thought could be true. He had been a German prisoner of war for eleven months. On the way to the prison camp he had been kept in a railway carriage without food or water for three days. At German towns through which the train passed and where they always stopped, he said it frequently happened that women in Red Cross uniforms came to the stations and offered the prisoners cups of tea or milk and held them to their lips, only to snatch them away again and jeer and call them “schweinhund.” He told of the treatment in the camps, where the prisoners in the dead of winter had only the rags of their uniforms to wear, their great coats had been taken away from them, and they slept on sacks of straw without even a tent or any kind of a roof over them. He said he saw men die at the rate of seven a day from starvation. He said he never in all his hospital experience has seen such emaciation from either cancer or tuberculosis as he saw among the prisoners there who were starving. He saw men kiss the shoes of their guards and beg like babies for bread. Not the British Tommies but some of the other prisoners did this. The men had no opportunity to wash and no soap. Their beards and hair hung down to their waists and were alive with lice. He was in several different prison camps. The final one was one where he was sent as a punishment for writing a letter of protest to the American Ambassador. The letter was never delivered, and he was sent to a camp where he was the only British person among thousands of Russians. He had complained because parcels sent to prisoners by their friends were not delivered to them but were allowed to rot and mildew and be eaten by rats. He was exchanged after eleven months’ torture, he called it, in January, 1916. He himself had dysentery and scurvy but not typhus. After he recovered he was put in charge of a hospital ship, which was recently torpedoed. Of the 600 sick and wounded that he had on board he lost only 27.

He told of a hospital ship crossing the Channel just behind his ship on one trip within 500 yards of his ship and of its striking a mine. There were no wounded on board at the time, but 12 nurses and officers and crew. One of the destroyers which was convoying his ship went to the rescue and got alongside the sinking hospital ship and a little French trawler also got alongside. Nine of the 12 nurses and the men all jumped and landed on the destroyer, but no sooner were they on that boat than it also struck a mine and was blown to atoms, and everybody on it and on the trawler was blown to bits. The three nurses who were in the water were picked up by Major F—’s boat. He is here in Liverpool fitting up another hospital ship and will probably be ordered East again to bring back more wounded.

He asked if Miss Dunlop and I would like to see his ship. Would we? We got our coats in a jiffy and flew off with him in a taxi to one of the docks quite a way off. His boat is a big ship that was a passenger ship between here and South America. He has taken out the cabins and made big wards and has accommodations for 800 sick or wounded men. I never saw anything so cleverly done as the way he is making over that ship. He has a splendid operating room, an X-Ray complete equipment, a steam laundry, and absolutely everything that a modern big city hospital has. It will be ready to sail, he said, in ten days, although to us there seemed to be an enormous amount yet to do. They no longer have women nurses on the hospital ships.

We came back from the dock by an “overhead” tram and got here about eight o’clock, although it was as light as four o’clock. Miss Dunlop and I then went to dinner together. Ruth Cobb and Rachel Watkins (our nice dietitian) spent the afternoon in Chester and had a wonderful time, they said. People are so wonderfully nice. The kids on the street salute us, and people come up and ask if we aren’t American nurses and if they can’t do something for us, and take nurses to tea and put them on the proper trams and show them all sorts of courtesies.

I had just come in to start to write, about nine o’clock, when Major Murphy[4] was announced, and I went down to see him. He had called to see if there was anything he could do for us and to find out if we were all right. They are so considerate and good to us. I told him of our wonderful experience this afternoon, and just then Colonel J. and Major F. hove in sight and as I wanted Dr. Murphy to hear some of Major F—’s tales I introduced him, and soon left them, to come up here and write.

It is now almost eleven and Miss Dunlop has been in to tell me the latest instructions she has received from her Majors. We always have to compare instructions and see which of us knows the most about what is going to happen. If we have the same experiences as the nurses of the two previous Units, we are to be much fêted in London, and are to be reviewed by the Queen. We have been trying desperately hard on shipboard to learn how to march and keep step and to right about face without falling over ourselves, but I fear we won’t be much on looks when it comes to being reviewed. I trust we are not expected to curtsy. And now I must hustle to bed, for to-morrow will be an exciting day. Good night and so much love to you all. If only you were all having this wonderful experience with me nothing more could be desired.

J.

Wednesday, June 6, 1917.

Dearest Family:—

I have not written since that day in Liverpool, and now we have been ten days in London. If only I had the ability to write what we have seen and what we have felt. The contrasts have been so great some of us have almost lost our mental equilibrium. We are fêted and cheered and taken from one entertainment to another and made much of by people of every class; and then between such social affairs we visit hospitals, military hospitals, because it is necessary for us to see how such hospitals are run. First we see 1700 men, young men with faces or arms or legs blown off, and then we go to a tea at a fancy club; next we see 500 blinded men fighting their way back into normal life by learning various occupations, then we are taken in a body to the silliest musical comedy that was ever staged. Again we see thousands of crippled soldiers brought out to see the King give decorations to 350 heroes and heroines, soldiers and nurses, or “the next of kin” all in black, and we nearly choke when a blinded officer is led up to the King by his orderly who directs his every move, and lame men go hobbling up to receive their medals, and we watch the King use his left hand to shake hands with one man, because the man’s right arm is gone, and then we go to St. Paul’s and see the Stars and Stripes carried up to the altar with the 64 British flags to be blessed at an “Empire day” service, while thousands and thousands of people sing “O God, our help in ages past.”

Do you wonder that our emotions are wearing us to a frazzle? It is not only feminine emotions that are affected, because there are those of our directors who said they could not go to St. Dunstan’s (the hospital school for blind soldiers) because they would not be able to sleep for nights afterwards. It is a mistake not to see such a wonderful place, however. There never was a more cheerful, hopeful place in the world. Sir Arthur Pearson, the blind man who runs the place and is its inspiration, is doing the kind of reconstructing of lives that probably has no parallel in the world. He is having the men taught not just the trades and occupations that blind men are taught in other places, but all sorts of things. We saw men learning anatomy, who after a year’s most strenuous training will be certificated masseurs. They take the regular examinations that the sighted people take and get excellent marks, and always get positions. There were men learning cobbling and carpentry, and chicken-farming and shorthand and typewriting and matmaking and weaving and basketry. The whole place was full of whistling, singing men who were going about their business as though they were like everybody else in the world instead of in total darkness forever. There were 500 of these men.

People tell me that English men and women have passed the emotional stage and have now settled down to work without the waste of riotous emotions and bursting feelings. It must be so or they would be dead, and they could not be doing the wonderful “war work” that each one of them is engaged in. From the highest to the lowest each woman has her work, her nursing, her preparing vegetables in hospitals (as Mrs. Waldorf Astor’s sister was doing), her making of supplies, her managing a hospital in a private house, her organizing “hostels” for nurses, raising funds, everything that one can conceive of as a job for women is being done, as never before. Of course the street-sweeping by women is a kind of war work, and the bus conductoring, and delivering mail and telegrams, and driving cars and ambulances. The streets are full of women in uniforms of all sorts, all smart and business-like. Women in England are coming into their own. What is to happen after the war when the men come back can well fill the minds of those who are given to prophesy changes, for a change is taking place here that can never be undone. In addition to women taking a new place in the working world, class distinctions are being broken down in a way that is making itself felt to those who a few years ago could never have dreamt that such a change was possible. A few days ago Miss Dunlop and I were lunching with a Lady H. on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St. James Park. In front of her house is the famous Crimean monument, flanked on one side by the beautiful statue of Florence Nightingale and on the other side by a statue of the father of the husband of our hostess. In the course of the talk at the luncheon, which was most informal and frugal, the conversation turned to the most-talked-of subject at meals nowadays, her “work,” and Mrs. A., who has a thousand-bed hospital on her grounds at C. and who spends almost her entire time in the wards, not nursing but talking and cheering the men up, said the men don’t know it, but they are giving us far more than we are giving them, and Lady H. replied: “Our whole outlook is changing. Take, for instance, us here to-day. A short while ago you (meaning Miss D. and me) and we (meaning Mrs. A., Sir Harry L., the other guest, an elderly man who had recently lost his only son, and herself) would have had nothing in common, and now we have everything in the world.” This was said most simply and sincerely and was what she really felt.

I can’t tell you the number of people who have given us this same impression, and I can’t begin to tell you how they all have tried to express to us what they think about our coming over to help them. Many individuals have talked to us separately with tears in their eyes and the warmest handshakes, and we have had speeches made to us in theaters by actresses and managers, who have led the whole audience in cheers. We have been stopped constantly on the streets by people who have asked us if we were not some of the “American Sisters” and wasn’t there some way in which they could express to us their appreciation of what we had come to do. Could they not take us to their homes and give us tea, and could they not come to our hotel and take us out in groups to sightsee, and could they not send us tickets to this or that, and could they not make special arrangements to have Towers of London, and the Zoölogical Gardens and Lambeth Palaces and Houses of Parliament and such little things opened for us at unusual hours? We have been literally swamped with kindnesses. One officer has made himself almost a nuisance by giving us theater tickets for every single night and has been so insistent that every single nurse should go out to see something every night that we have come to dread his daily telephone calls or visits. Mrs. Page had a reception for us and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, and the Archbishop of Canterbury asked us to tea, and we spent a wonderful afternoon at Cliveden, and Sir Thomas Lipton sent us all chocolates and invited some of us to motor out to his place. The Royal Overseas Officers Club gave a reception for us, the American Woman’s Club opened its doors to us. We have been sent choir seats at St. Paul’s for special services and special tickets to the Royal Investiture, and there have been a number of other things which lords and ladies of high degree have asked us to in greater or lesser groups.

To-morrow there is luncheon for me at Lady P.’s (a St. Louis woman whose sister I know), then a motor ride to somewhere on the Thames to see a hospital where the nursing is done by New Zealand women. In the evening there is dinner for Miss D. and me with Mrs. F., the editor of the British Journal of Nursing, and after that I hope to get out to Elizabeth M.’s to spend the night, as I am afraid that will be my last chance to see her, as we are due to leave Saturday the 9th. I spent a most beautiful Sunday with her last Sunday, going to church with her in the morning and just sitting and talking with her most of the afternoon. She has two splendid boys, Jim just four and John about 18 months. Jim, Sr., is doing three men’s work, it would seem, on the go from early morning till 10 or 11 at night. E. seems very well. She is this year most sensibly putting all her time into taking care of her men folks large and small. I had a little call this afternoon on Lady H.-H., and found her most lovely to look at and charming. We had such a nice talk and wasted no time on preliminaries. I am going to a special service with her in the morning at Westminster Abbey in St. Faith’s Chapel. My nurses are all pawing the ground, they are so eager to get to work.

Lovingly,
Julia.

Extract from letter from Lady H.-H. to Mrs.
L. in New York:—

“Thank you for sending me a letter by your most interesting and delightful niece. I wish I might have seen more of her and her wonderful contingent of nurses. I went to the Waldorf Hotel to talk to them all at 8:30 on Friday night. I can’t tell you what I said, but they seemed satisfied and I felt that it drew me nearer to you and your wonderful nation, and I wish it were possible to come to you and help you bear the heavy cross and suspense and anxiety. I know every step of the way and what it means, the long, weary march on the road of sorrow. But now God has let me see the glory and the triumph of it all, and I am no longer afraid.”

France, Monday, June 11, 1917.

Dearest Daddy and Mother
and all of you:—

We have at last arrived! I wish I could tell you where, but I can’t. This much I believe I can say, that it is on the outskirts of a large city, a beautiful old city. Our particular hospital is on a race course, which looks now like a vast circus establishment or a county fair, for it is covered with rows and rows of canvas tents, each of which holds about 14 beds. All around the edge are lovely thick trees, sycamores and locust they seem to be, under which are small conical tents, small single-room shacks of canvas and paper, and long, single-story “huts,” as they are called. These huts are made of thin wood and roofed with tarred paper and are divided into single cubicles, the whole hut accommodating about 16 or 18 people. This part that I am describing is the nurses’ corner of the paddock. It is really very beautiful, for the grass and hedges and trees are so green, and along the walks are little flower-beds, and pansies and geraniums and roses are all in bloom. If one looked only at this corner of the huge place, one might imagine oneself in some summer camp at home. But just a few hundred yards away are those scores of tents full of wounded, and every night more are brought in and others are sent away. This of course is the most beautiful time of year. The trees are full of birds, who chirp and sing all day long. And every few minutes along the road on the other side of our hedge troops go marching by. Some have bands and some whistle their marching tunes, but all march on and on. There are any number of hospital establishments like this all around here, and also thousands of troops of all sorts are in camp near. We got just a little glimpse of the situation as we were driven out here in huge motor ambulances from the station.

We have not as yet gone over the hospital proper, for our luggage has not come and we have only our street uniforms, and the “Matron” says it is not wise for us to go into the hospital tent until we have our wash clothes. For the last two nights we have not had even our hand bags. When they come, they will be welcome. The lack of tooth brushes is our only serious lack. It is surprising how quickly one can accustom oneself to get along without frills like wash cloths and night-dresses! And as for new titles, I already no longer turn a hair when I am introduced as “Matron” Stimson. My bad and disrespectful children come to me all the time and say “Matron,” may I do this or that? That is the way the English sisters address their Chief Nurse. As we all arrived before we were expected my nurses have not been assigned to their regular rooms yet. Last night they all slept in some of the large hospital tents that were empty. My place was got ready for me and is most attractive. I have two shutoff rooms at the end of one of the “huts.” The whole width of the hut is 15 ft. The depth of my rooms is 11 ft. And there is a partition about 7 ft. high which cuts off my bedroom which is 6 ft. wide, leaving 9 ft., the width of the sitting-room. I will draw a kind of plan on the other side for those who are interested in the details. It is all unpainted, but, just think, there is an electric light in each room. That is far more luxury than I ever dreamed of. The furniture is of the simplest, but quite sufficient. I think the things that are in here now are to be taken away when the English sisters go, and our own equipment is to replace it. There are two casement windows in the sitting-room, and one in the bedroom. There are plain white curtains at them all, and there are small matting rugs on the floor. So you can see I am going to be most comfortable. There is a mess “hut,” where all the nurses eat, and eat very comfortably and well, we have already discovered. All we want now is work to do, and we can see that coming, enough to satisfy the most energetic and ambitious of our number. The nurses are all off wandering around this morning. Some have gone to the city and some are taking walks along the country roads. The roads are so full of soldiers, some of whom wear turbans and carry scimitars, that they feel a little strange and out of place, but that feeling is likely to wear off soon. We hope that our things and our officers will arrive soon, but there is no telling.

Now I must go back and tell you what I can of our crossing. Our last few days in London were like the first, chock full. I was particularly busy in helping make arrangements for sending one of our nurses home. It was a very sad and hard thing to have happened to the poor thing, and it was absolutely not her fault in any way but merely a technicality. When we were getting our passports at the American Embassy in London, those born in England had to go to the British Embassy. Mrs. S. went with the others, and in answer to their question explained that many years ago she had married a German, but that ten years ago she divorced him. He married again and later died. But according to British law she is a German subject, because she married a German. So they refused to let her go to France and she had to be sent back to the States. Rather hard on her? She took it splendidly and waved us off from the Waterloo Station on Saturday in the bravest way.

Both the Philadelphia Unit and ours left together on a special train for Southampton. It is something of a trick to get 120 women into busses and on trains, and all their baggage too. But we have got it down to a pretty good system. Our eight squad leaders each pass on orders to their subleaders, then they each find the three people that belong to them and they are entirely responsible for them, and all I have to do is to ask the eight squad leaders if all of their groups are ready. The scheme has worked beautifully. Yesterday at noon on the boat we had an unexpected order to be ready to disembark at once. And the whole 64 were lined up in squads inside of three minutes. We started out from Southampton in a tender, but were transferred to a large hospital ship. We were wonderfully taken care of on board of her, as we have been on all our travels. They gave us an excellent dinner, and gave over to our use, large wards. So each nurse had a comfortable bed for the night. It was on the hospital ship that we got separated from our bags. They had been brought in “lorries” from the hotel, then put in luggage vans on the train, then transferred to the tender and then to the hold of the hospital ship. We had not known we were going to spend the night on the ship. You see we never know anything in advance for more than a few minutes. It was one of the most beautiful evenings I have ever seen. We got off in the big ship about seven, but the sunset wasn’t really over until nearly ten. We were preceded by a destroyer and followed by one, and flying all around were aëroplanes. Sometimes we could see as many as ten or twelve. We were told that during the evening our destroyer in front rammed a submarine and stove in her own bow and had to be replaced by another, but other than that there was no excitement of any sort. About ten thirty I had all of my flock tucked in, with their dresses and shoes off and life belts handy. There wasn’t an awful lot of sleeping done because at four we entered the harbor of Havre with much blowing of whistles, as it was raining and misty by that time. After breakfast we hung around on the boat, watching the unloading of the luggage and the separation of the belongings of the two Units. We also watched the taking on board of some trainloads of wounded soldiers who were being taken back to “Blighty.” That is what they call England. The Sisters here say that what they want most of all is their “Blighty tickets.” Just at 12, when we were about to go to lunch, we received word to get off the boat at once and get into motor ambulances which would take us to a station, where we were to take a train for about a three hours’ ride. So with a hasty farewell to our friends of No. 10 we went off in the rain. We were pretty hungry and tired when we arrived at our city, but before the big motor ambulances came for us we had time to go to a pleasant little café garden and have high tea. Bread and butter, cold meat, and tea set us up immediately and we all felt like new women when we set off on our four-mile drive. Captain Allison and Chaplain Davis had been ordered to accompany us in our hasty departure, so they are the only officers of our Unit who are here with us. We have just heard that our things are to arrive this afternoon.

We are all just hanging around, that is why I have so much time to write. “Matron” said she would just carry on in the usual way and later she would show me what I am to do. The first thing we have to do is to find out how to do things in the English way, particularly the records. Then later the English sisters are to be withdrawn, we understand. We have not nearly enough nurses for this hospital, so some of the “V. A. D.’s” are to be left until we receive reënforcements from America. The “V. A. D.’s” are like our Nurse’s Aids, Voluntary Aid Detachments. They have apparently done wonderful things during this war. They have no regular training, but after one or two years of active service they have many of them become very proficient. Here we find them doing all sorts of things. Some are in the tent wards, and some are detailed for mess duty and take entire care of the mess hut and the meals. In a New Zealand hospital that we visited there were five of the nicest “V. A. D.’s” doing all the cooking for 400 patients. They were women of maturity and position at home, who had come on from New Zealand at the request of the Matron in Chief and were serving entirely without pay and doing wonderful work. Their hut kitchen was the best-looking kitchen we had seen anywhere. We are told here that word has been sent back to the States that we need more help. I should like 65 more Red Cross nurses from St. Louis, or if I can’t have them, 65 of the Nurse’s Aids that we trained. They would certainly find here a sufficient outlet for their energies. They could be of the greatest help, and on the whole I do not know but that I should rather have the Aids that I know than a lot of trained nurses that I do not know. If Miss Bridge can get this word on to Miss Noyes, I hope she will. Our nurses’ aids’ blue uniforms and aprons would be excellent, but they would need some kind of a cap, I think, and certainly a traveling or outdoor uniform.

I think our equipment is going to be fine. Rubber hats and rubber boots may be needed later, but we can get them very easily, I think, by sending to London, or possibly in the city here. I got a dandy rubber hat, in London. I am not to wear my white uniforms yet a while, at the Matron’s suggestion, so that the people here can tell me from the rest of my group. There is now no way of distinguishing me from the rest except my height. My assistant matron, Miss Taylor, is the smallest in the Unit. The nurses have a good deal of fun about our appearance together.

It has been fine to have so much time to write to-day, for when we get started I do not think we shall have much free time. And at night I do not know whether I can use this precious typewriter without disturbing all the other nurses on the other side of my room wall. I think I shall have to train them to get used to it. More marching feet tramping along, and helmeted heads appearing over the hedge!

You all seem so far away. Not a scrap of mail since we left and no immediate prospect of any.

I am now due to go and have tea (the third time to-day) with “Matron” and the Senior Chaplain. So good-by for now.

P.S. I decided not to draw a picture this time. Our baggage came and we are quite happy. So to-morrow we begin work. I hope you are all well and having a good time. Good night and loads of love to you all.

J.

Rouen, France.
Sunday, June 17, 1917.

We have been told in our instructions about letter-writing that we may now state where we are. So now you can all know definitely just where we are. We got our first mail from home day before yesterday, and I can tell you there was great excitement. It is just a month to-day since we left St. Louis and it seems like a year. The latest date of any of my letters was May 27th. But now that the letters have actually begun to come we feel more hopeful that we are not entirely cut off from our friends. It has been a rather dreary feeling to know that up to now, none of you knew where we were or where we were going, but soon we ought to be in regular communication.

We have been here just a week to-night and are beginning to get over our strangeness. We have learned much of our duties and do not now feel that we can never learn them all. All the nurses have their regular places of duty and are getting to know their patients, and what to do for them. Fortunately for them we have not received any new convoys of men during the week, but we have been sending some out every day or night; but in a few days, after we are a little more accustomed to our duties, we shall begin to get in more wounded by the hundred. There are only five or six of the English nurses left here with us, and they are to go this week, we understand. The Matron, who is a most pleasant and helpful person, is to stay here another week, which gives me the shivers, for two weeks is an awfully short time in which to learn the ropes, and all this first week I have not been doing much more than attend to my nurses’ work and their quarters, equipment, etc. But to-morrow I am going to retire to the Matron’s office and stay there. One of my little jobs is to hire cooks and maids for the nurses’ mess and quarters, and I am also hunting a stenographer. Between 40 and 50 V.A.D.’s are to stay on with us here, and we are mighty glad to have them, for they are splendid. I understand that our C.O. (Commanding Officer) has cabled home, or is going to cable home as soon as he has proper British authority to do so, for more help for this hospital. I have said that I want 40 more nurses and 25 carefully picked nurses’ aids. I think Miss Bridge could pick out the ones that are the most capable and the most adaptable and the most willing to endure difficulties and do without luxuries and even some comforts. I feel quite sure that there are 25 of that kind among the large number that we trained these past months. I do hope that the Red Cross will give the authority for them to come out with the regular nurses.

If this were a summer resort, people would say the weather could not be more delightful. I have my little table and typewriter and my camp chair out on the grass under the trees in the little grove where the nurses’ quarters are. There is a delightful breeze, and the blue sky is full of fluffy white clouds. The sun is very warm, and down in the tents where the patients are it is not so ideally summer-resorty. But with the side awnings up, a nice breeze blows through and the men said they were very comfortable. The sun was so hard on some of the nurses who had to go in and out of the tents a great deal to do the dressings of the patients who are kept out of doors under big parasols or temporary awnings of some sort, that at Major Murphy’s suggestion I got large, broad-brimmed hats for the whole lot. To-day they have found them a great comfort. They certainly look a bit informal with their large farmer hats on and their white dresses, but they look sensible and comfortable. We are likely to have trouble with the laundry question as water is scarce, also starch, and there are labor problems to be reckoned with. We all have white aprons that Mrs. R. insisted on our bringing from London. We are glad she did, as we already find we need them badly, not because of the laundry question but because of the nature of the cases. We have very badly wounded men and their dressings are terrible.

Amputations are being done almost every day. Yesterday I went down to the “Theater Hut” to see how our nurses were going to handle a very bad case, for the “Theater Sister” is to be taken away soon. Our people at home would marvel to see what fine work can be done when all the water used has to be heated on top of a small oil stove and all the instruments boiled the same way. The poor boy whose leg had to be amputated was in such bad shape, he could have only the minimum of a general anæsthetic, but local anæsthesia was given. Besides having both legs badly hurt, his lower back is in terrible shape from injury; after the operation he was put on his face on his bed. Before eight o’clock one of the nurses held his head up so he could have a smoke! And this morning he says he is “in the pink,” which means feeling fine. It is perfectly wonderful, their fortitude, and it is making us all so ashamed for all the complaining we have done. Their bravery is harder to bear than anything else. The other day I nearly disgraced myself when the Matron took me with her to the large tent from which all outgoing patients are sent off in ambulances to the trains or boats. It is a large empty tent with benches around it where the “sitters” wait to have their papers and tickets looked over, and a dirt floor where the stretchers are put. Most of the men are smoking cigarettes as they wait. One man was pointed out to me as having both legs off and one arm and part of the remaining hand also, but he was smiling cheerfully and chaffing with the sisters, and although overwhelmed by the awfulness of his condition I did not grasp the full meaning of it until as I passed him he said, “Sister, will you put out my cigarette for me.” Stooping over him, I took it out of his mouth and asked him if he didn’t want any more of it as it wasn’t half burned away. And he said, pulling out his huge bandaged hand from under the blanket, “No, sister, thank you, I only want a little of it since I can’t take it out of my mouth after I once get it in.” I wonder what any of you would do under circumstances like that. It seemed as though my throat would burst, and I had to think very quickly how absurd it would be for the new Matron to weep before all those heroic, stoical men and the matter-of-fact, externally brusque but inwardly most kind, English officer, and orderlies, so I got myself together speedily while I was putting out the cigarette in the sand with my boot toe. And he was only one, and there are thousands like him.

Two of our men were buried by the explosion of a mine. The one who had his head out in the air put his hand over the face of the other so that the latter could breathe and did not suffocate, but the first was badly hurt in the chest. There are hundreds of stories like these. The nurses are always telling something new about their men. Little things that come out in the course of conversation, enough to fill a book. One of the most pitiful groups are the “shell shocks.” The other night the explosion of shells could be distinctly heard, and almost all these cases shook as though they were having convulsions all night. As one of them said, “Some poor devils are getting theirs now.” One interesting case was brought in unable to speak several days ago. The other night he fell out of bed, and sat up and said “Sister, I can talk now.” These shell-shock cases are always falling out of bed, it seems.

Yesterday I went to town for the first time since I have been here. I went for the straw hats. I went into the Cathedral, which is by far the most beautiful I have ever seen, I think, with the exception of that at Milan. It is going to be a constant joy to have that place to visit. Rouen is an interesting city and has good shops. It swarms with uniforms of all hues.

I was glad to get all your letters yesterday and day before yesterday. According to the accounts of the very cold weather they had here last year our patients and any patients in the neighborhood are going to need all the warm knitted things they can get. Nurses say that the solutions in their bottles froze in the tents and their first early morning duties were to thaw out the bottles. We hear that this hospital is to be hutted before the Autumn, which will be much better for the winter, but even then there will not be any steam heat. When I have the Matron’s office, which is the jockey-room of the grandstand of this old race course, I shall have a large table and some shelves, also a little stove for cold days. We are all so delighted and interested to hear from Elsie’s letter that more Units are being ordered out. And we are all so glad we were in the first lot.

A Colonel commanding a neighboring base has just been to call. He rode down, he said, to pay his respects to the “American Matron.” He was very charming and we had a nice talk. He says he is going to ask us up to tea. He “goes in for a garden and all that, you know.” I am meeting so very many delightful people. All the Matrons from the various hospital camps near have either been to call or invited us to concerts at their grounds. Last night there was such a pretty affair at the Australian camp,[5] a concert, a kind of variety show given by members of the camp, orderlies, cooks, and other regular army people, but really very clever. It was out of doors, of course, under some lovely trees, and there must have been 400 to 500 people there as audience, all in uniform of some sort: mostly officers and nurses and Y. M. C. A. workers, etc. It began at 8 and lasted until about 10.30. Refreshments were served from a large tent, and it was all very pretty and very English.

Ruth C—has just been in to see me a moment. She is on night duty and is working very hard. She says there never in the world were such wonderful patients, that no matter how much they are suffering they are “quite all right, thank you, Sister,” and they won’t ask for things, and when she asks them if they are in pain, they say, “Not too much, Sister.” The first night she says she went all to pieces, but nobody saw her; now she too is getting steadier. That first night she was responsible for 90 men, many of whom were in the most awful condition. It was no wonder that it got on her nerves a bit. She was so much interested in my letters from you, as she has had no word from St. Louis, in fact no letter at all as yet. I can really see very little of her since I am in charge and so much in the midst of the group all the time. In London, Miss Dunlop and I went to everything together, and here the Matron and I go in pairs, or my own assistant, Miss Taylor, and I. From a personal point of view there are lots of disadvantages in being the head. I have to be on show all the time and always have to meet people and be sociable and go to all the functions, and I hate having things better than the rest of my people. For instance, our table in the mess hall has a tablecloth instead of oilcloth, and sometimes we have little extra things like strawberries when the others don’t. By and by things won’t have to be that way. But the Matrons here are very much honored and set apart and kotowed to in a way that disturbs our democratic American spirit.

Dad’s letter was so wonderfully cheering and helpful. It is so pathetic the way one can lose sight of one’s inspirations if one’s feet are tired, or the way one can forget one is on a crusade if there is no drinking water to be had for half a day, and can be just an ordinary uninspired human female and be fretful and discouraged because you don’t like the tone of voice of a supervisor. It is my job of course to keep before my people the why of our coming and to keep their spirits up. As the director said this morning, we must never be discouraged or depressed, that our biggest job is to keep our people full of enthusiasm. Sometimes it is hard if one’s own head aches, but it really is not hard for those of us who understand the meaning of our being here. No coffee for breakfast can actually blind some people to visions, and tea offered them five times a day can make them speak in a way that will really antagonize the people we have come to help. Our minds and bodies are funny things. There is not much thrill in putting your tired, luxury-loving body to bed on a hard camp cot after washing it as well as you can in a cup of warm water. We shall probably have mattresses issued to us when we can get them, but in the meantime the canvas cot is not so bad when it has a folded blanket in it. We have no business to bring ourselves up to be so finicky. Nobody should ever always “have to have two pillows or she can’t sleep a wink” or be “terribly dependent on sugar” or “just has to have so much sleep” or “just can’t touch a thing with cheese in it.” Those of you who have kids to bring up, if you want to make them adaptable to every possible circumstance, do make them eat everything at any time, or be able to get along without anything. Make them sleep any way on anything at any time, and you are giving them something worth more than rubies. My nurses are not bad about these things. On the whole they are bricks, and I have had and am having the very minimum of trouble. I really have been proud of them, the fine way they traveled. There wasn’t a murmur, only jokes, the day they had nothing to eat from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., standing about all morning on the boat—there weren’t seats enough to go around—and in the train all afternoon.

Saturday, June 30, 1917.

Dearest Dad and Mother
and all the rest:—

It is a cold, rainy day and you’d be surprised to know how really cold it is. At night the night nurses are already wearing all their heavy underwear and their sweaters and their capes. I don’t quite see how they are going to manage when real winter comes. It is hard to realize that it is only the end of June. We had just two warm days, but when the sun is out it gets warmed up around the middle of the day, but most days coats are very comfortable. I am having a new blue serge uniform made here in town, for I can foresee that, with my office work, I shall be wearing the “stuff” uniform much more than the white ones. My office which was the jockey-room of the grandstand, in one corner of the back, is a very pleasant room. It is about as large as the central one of our Training School offices at home. The furniture is a large plain table covered with a dark blanket, shelves and cupboards made of boxes, a small folding table, some camp stools, a couple of straight chairs, and some matting. But the effect is quite cozy, and some reddish art squares on the stained boxes make the room quite cheerful.

I have not written for about two weeks, for there has been very little to write and I have not felt much like writing, since we have had no mail at all since those first few letters that reached us here just after we got here. I have kept thinking that I would put off writing until I had some letters to answer. But none have come. To-day the doctors got a whole batch, but there were only two letters for the nurses. That is the way our mail has been coming through, one or two letters at a time. It seems very probable that some of our mail has been lost or missent, for the few of us who have received letters say that reference is made in them to previous letters which have never arrived.

For a whole week now I have been entirely “on my own” here with the nursing, and the hospital has not stopped! We have been continuing to get in convoys and to send them out, not big ones but varying from 30 to 100 patients. The other night at midnight I went down to the receiving tent to see how a convoy coming in was managed, and it was one of the most interesting hours I ever spent. The big marquee has about two feeble electric lights in it; some of the doctors had electric torches, but it was all very dim and spooky. The ambulances backed up near to the door, and our stretcher bearers were all there ready to receive their patients by the time they had stopped. We get telephone messages when to expect a convoy. The stretchers are brought in and laid on the dirt floor as close together as possible. Then another group of men begin at once to examine the tickets that are fastened to the coat of each man, and assign them to particular tents where men with similar injuries or in similar condition are taken care of. Another couple of men hand out steaming hot soup, and the doctors talk to the men a little, but do not examine them there at all. Then very quickly the stretcher bearers come and carry out the men that have been assigned, out through the opposite end of the tent out into the darkness off to a bed in some comfortable tent where a nurse and an orderly are waiting to get the poor tired creature into bed. They give baths if they can; and get the infected and dirty clothes listed and off to the fumigator, and unless the patient is in very bad condition let him go right off to sleep. The doctors have found that the men are much more in need of a good sleep than of a doctor’s care right off, and, unless absolutely necessary, dressings are not changed until the morning. That night 64 men, most of them stretcher cases, were brought in, assigned, given soup, and taken off to their wards (tents) in 25 minutes, which you see is pretty speedy work.

The men have very little to say when they first come in. They are tired out and forlorn and often in pain and dazed. They some of them seem surprised to see Americans taking care of them, but they don’t say much. They answer wearily, “Not so bad, Sister” or “A bit rocky, sir,” but later some of them tell most awful stories. One of them told the other day of getting caught on a barbed wire entanglement on which he was thrown by the explosion of a shell and of hanging there all day before he was rescued. It had happened early in the morning, and the rescuing party could not get to him until after dark. Another told of lying out between two lines of trenches three days. He was hurt in the hip and could drag himself only a few inches at a time. He got water from the bottles of the dead soldiers. We get not only surgical cases but a good many medical ones, pleurisy, nephritis, trench fever, lots of them, and all sorts of heart conditions. We also get a good many not due to military life, appendicitis, injuries from kicks from horses, infections, etc., but most are “G. S. W” (gunshot wound). Some are unbelievably awful, whole parts blown away, as for instance all the flesh across the shoulders or between the thighs, where a shell tore right through from behind. I cannot see how some of them live, and live so bravely and cheerfully.

And it is not only the men that are brave but the women too. This afternoon I have been trying to arrange for one of our “B. V. D.’s,” as the doctors call them, meaning the “V. A. D.’s” to get a permit to go to a hospital in E., where her brother is. He has been wounded but not seriously enough to be sent back to England. She has had one brother killed, another is a prisoner, and now this youngest brother is wounded, and she is the cheeriest, bravest little thing you ever saw. Another has had three brothers killed, and you would never dream it to see her. A third, whose fiancé was killed about a month ago, I am a little worried about; she is driving herself into the work so hard. Oh, there are so many pitiful people over here it keeps one’s heart torn up the whole livelong time. You can’t get away from the sorrows of people ever. Not that one wants to, if there is anything that can be done, but at home there are times, thank God, when one can forget all the woe of the world, and pain and sorrow, but not here. It is before your eyes every waking minute and in your ears even in your sleep when the feet go marching, marching by.

Last evening I had a beautiful walk with doctor Veeder. The sunset was glorious, and we walked along roads that looked like Corot pictures. After quite a long time we came out from our woodsy road to an open space which seemed to extend away for a mile or so without any grass or any trees on it. It was getting dark and we could not distinguish things clearly, but Dr. Veeder said he thought this was the place where the daily practice in trench warfare went on. We walked a bit over the very rough field and heard voices, though we could not see any one. Pretty soon an officer appeared from nowhere, and when we asked him if we could look around, he said “Certainly,” and he himself conducted us. The field had been made into a regular practice battle field. It was criss-crossed with trenches and craters. But the worst was the dummy men placed all over everywhere. These dummy men the men have to learn to bayonet as they rush by, so as to learn how to use their bayonets even in the narrow trenches. Our officer and another who joined us explained things to us and told us it was a relief to have some one new, to talk to, as they have to stay out there in the trenches with their men from 10 P.M. to 9 A.M. when they are relieved by another batch. It was most wonderfully interesting; but impresses the horror of warfare on me even more than it has been impressed before. The trenches were most wonderfully and elaborately made and have dugouts and lines of communication and bayous and many other technical things which I could not grasp fully at the first hearing.

Another incident that happened to one of my nurses this past week made more very vivid impressions. I say “incident” because that is all it was in the life of the camp, but the young woman said it was the most interesting day she ever spent. She, Miss Cuppaidge, had been detailed to go with a doctor, an anæsthetist, and an orderly to a “Casualty Clearing Station.” When called for, small groups like this are sent up from the base hospital whenever there is a big drive. I received an order that Miss Cuppaidge was to go for her “gas training” at a certain time. The group is just got ready and kept at their regular jobs until an order comes for them to proceed to the “C. C. S.” At the appointed time for the training Miss Cuppaidge went to the “gas school” in the neighboring training camp. There she and four others, nurses from other hospitals, were taken in charge by an officer. They first had minute instructions about properly adjusting their gas masks. These are rather complicated, as they are regular respirators. A piece through which they breathe has to be held in the mouth, and a pair of padded clamps shut off the nose. This is inside the mask which fits around the face and is held on by straps around the head. They must learn to put on the things and fix the clamps and mouth pieces in six seconds. They then have to learn how to breathe just through the mouth without choking or what is worse, Miss Cuppaidge said, without dribbling. They also have to get used to the queer sensation in the ears when they swallow. When the masks are all right and everybody is breathing all right, they are put into a gas-filled room. This gas is just a tear gas. They are left there five minutes, then taken out and they are asked about irritated eyes. If there is irritation the masks are leaking or improperly adjusted. They are then taken into trenches where other gases are liberated to get them used to the odors, so that they can detect the presence of gas quickly. Some gases are so deadly three breaths of it will cause death, hence the hurry in quick detection and quick adjustment of masks. Some of these gases travel six and seven miles. As near as I could make out the gases are mainly of two sorts, a chlorine gas and a “phosgene” one. The officer lectured to the nurses upon the effects of these gases and about the treatment of them and in the middle of the afternoon sent them home smelling like the dickens, but, as Miss C. said, entirely unafraid of gas and quite prepared to guard against it if they meet it. Their gas outfits they have hitched to them all the time when near the place they are likely to meet it. We shall have other small groups go up to the C. C. S. after this one is called out and I mean to be detailed to go with one. These parties stay sometimes only a few days and sometimes a few weeks, but I certainly mean to go if I can persuade the authorities to let me leave Miss Taylor in charge. I have so little contact with the patients and so little of anything but office work and receiving officials and company of all sorts I believe that they would think I ought to have a little of the real war work.

The hospital end of my work is going very smoothly, because I have excellent supervisors, and the head nurses are all doing very well. For those who are interested I will mention that Miss Stebbins is the Day Surgical Supervisor, Mrs. Hausmann the Night Med. Sup., Miss Habenicht is the Day Med. Sup., and Miss Claiborne the Night Surg. Sup. The place is so big and there are so many lines of tents to be covered we have a supervisor for the medical side and a separate one for the surgical side both night and day. Some of you people at home would be amused to see our night supervisors on a rainy night. In rubber hats, coats, and rubber boots and carrying a lantern they go ducking about in and out of tents, having a beautiful time, they say, splashing about and tripping over tent ropes. Any way we all seem to be thriving under these new conditions. We all are getting very brown. All have enormous appetites and can eat with relish the tinned bully beef that we get four or five times a week and the hard dark war bread. Never again will I talk about wrapped bread. Here, as somebody said the other day, loaves of bread are used to spike the cart wheels. But we eat it just the same in huge slices.

Our food question is a problem. It does not need to be as poor as it is, and I mean to see pretty soon that it is improved. The trouble really is with the help. My domestic problems are driving me crazy, but this last week I appealed for help and Captain Veeder has been asked to assist me to clean our places and work out some kind of scheme. Our kitchen is one of the old stalls, quite open at the end as stalls are. Other stalls are used for storage, and oh the dirt. I had not been assigned enough help at first and anyway there had been such a muddle of V. A. D.’s working in the Mess, some old good-for-nothing soldiers, hangers-on, and a few Belgian girls who help take care of the nurses’ room and do odd jobs, I could not possibly see what I was going to do with the place for some time. To add to my difficulties the V. A. D.’s draw a certain ration from the British quartermaster and pay into the Mess a certain amount of money, and the American nurses’ ration was to be quite different, and the whole arrangement quite different. There are 40 V. A. D.’s and 64 nurses. Consider the problem. I got some fairly decent French women to come and clean and help cook. The American man cook could not talk to them and had a fit, for whenever his back was turned, they did things he did not mean to have done. I got the place cleaned only by getting extra fatigue men up with shovels and brooms. We are to be whitewashed to-morrow. An extra American has been put on to keep the other man company and give him somebody to talk to! The French women are to keep on cleaning and are to do the dishes that the British soldiers have been swishing around in tubs of cold water. The V. A. D.’s are gradually being put in the wards, where they won’t have a chance to have tea so many times a day. Everybody can have it five times a day if desired!

While waiting to hear from Washington about increased rations on account of the greatly increased cost of food over here we are taxing everybody a franc a day for extra green things for the Mess. The U. S. A. allows 40 cents a day per nurse for messing. The usual custom is to draw not as many rations as there are persons to provide for, then to draw the difference in money and buy extra things with the money. But over here that scheme at 40 cents a day cannot work, food is too high. So a cable has been sent to Washington. The doctors are not having this trouble because they always expect to buy most of their food out of their salaries. They draw their regular rations and buy lots of stuff, then divide the cost among the whole group. They have a much smaller group to take care of and are not complicated as I am by the servant or V. A. D. problem. They have American men looking after them. Oh well, I can begin to see light ahead now, and although no one likes the food, as it is they are not starving. A slice of ham all dried up to nothing and dark army bread and tea and possibly a little marmalade does not make a very good breakfast for Americans, but it will keep one going if enough bread and butter is eaten. We are now getting coffee, such as it is, and I mean to see about cereal very soon. Eggs have been seven cents apiece, not centimes but cents. I am not letting my perfectly good dietitian put her energies on this domestic problem of ours, for I am keeping her for the poor sick soldiers, and in a few days or weeks I mean to have a regular diet kitchen started for her. My “Home Sister” is finding the complication of four kinds of help and several languages almost too much for her, but between us all we shall plow through this mire, and now that Dr. Veeder has turned his attention upon our difficulties I am sure we shall get through them all right. You ought to hear me engage servants in French. They understand and come. When they see some of the difficulties of lack of hot water, etc., they go, and I have to begin all over again. It is a great life.

One of the greatest things about it is meeting so many different kinds of people. Two such nice Australian Sisters were here to call upon me this afternoon. And the New Zealanders are so very polite and nice, and these little V. A. D.’s are charming. Anyway I am glad I am here, only I wish you were all here too. Then things would be ideal. You’d all love this beautiful country, and this quaint old city that is nearly swamped under this enormous influx of strange foreign people. The paper to-day says (we get a little single-leaf edition of the London Daily Mail) that our troops have landed in France. I hope thousands more come along soon, so that all this beastly business can be stopped soon. People are counting on the coming of our troops so much. Everybody says France needs help badly. Surely our forces can bring an end to all this frightfulness. No mail yet. None at all except those written for my birthday. Oh well, that is war. Loads and loads of love to you all.

Sunday, July 8, 1917.
Rouen, France.

Such a nice lot of letters as we got to-day. There is very little difference between Sundays and other days here, except perhaps a little more business than usual is done on Sundays, but mail comes and goes these days just like other days. Ever since we came only one or two letters for nurses have been dribbling along through until to-day when some people got as many as 12 or 14 letters, and great was the rejoicing thereat.

Dr. Veeder can do no medical work at all just now, Phil will be interested to know, or in fact doctoring of any kind. At the present time he is spending his entire time quartermastering. He is entirely responsible for the officers’ mess and does all the buying and planning, arranging about cooks, cleaning up, etc., and he is doing it well too, and with a mighty good grace. He has been helping us up at the “Sisters’ Mess” with our problems and has been pursuing coal to its lair, and getting whitewash from nowhere, and doing all sorts of miracles that only a very persistent and determined man can do. The result is that all the doctors and nurses are able to do their work in a much better way than if a less efficient person were back of their food and comfort. But Dr. Veeder’s spirit in doing his particular job and doing it well, even though it is so absolutely different from what he was trained for, and what he would prefer, is the spirit which is found throughout the whole organization. It does one’s heart good to see the way men who are Ph.D.’s can do regular orderly work, and put a lot into it, and get a lot out of it, and the way accountants can be stretcher bearers, and other highly trained men do the rough work in laboratory and mess hall.

There is a remarkable spirit of service and glad service everywhere. Of course there have been a few grumblers who have complained that they did not come ’way out here to do this or that, but most of the men have been converted by coming into contact with the attitude of men like Dr. Murphy. All that has been necessary is a few words from him to make them pretty much ashamed. And words haven’t been necessary often. For when they realize that Dr. Murphy has not performed a single operation since he has been here, but has been putting all his ability in organizing and administering, and being up nights and days, seeing convoys out and convoys in, seeing that they are all properly ticketed and all their forms are properly made out, finding out why sufficient oil has not been left for the lanterns of the night orderlies, why only 6 eggs were delivered to one of the tents when 12 were ordered, letting the nurses know who the right person is to give the up-patients permission who wish to leave the compound to attend the Catholic Church across the road, going personally to buy a better oil stove for the night-nurses’ supper hut, finding out why the ward-master did not notify a particular nurse long enough before a convoy was to go out so that her patient could be ready, etc., etc.—when they realize all these things and a thousand more that he is doing all the time that he did not come out to do, they pretty generally shut up and put all their energies on the job that has been given them.

Last night the Director saw a convoy come in just about midnight. It was a pretty big bunch of men and it took some time. One was in such a condition that he had to go to the operating room about 3. Dr. Clopton operated. At 4.45 a convoy was sent out to catch a particular ambulance train, and Dr. M. was down at The Point, as our receiving tent is called, to see them off. At 7.30 he was at the service in our little chapel, all the morning he was down in the tents conferring with the other doctors and making plans to get the things they needed in their work. At 2 he brought a Red Cross official to talk over some things in their work with me, and I know that at 4.30 he had an appointment with a neighboring Colonel. When he sleeps I know not. In the intervals of doings like these he comes to ask me if I will make out a list of magazines I would like for the nurses, or he sends roses and vases to put them in! We are lucky to have such a man at the head of an expedition like this. His kindness and genuine goodness reach down to the most ordinary private. Late yesterday afternoon he was batting ball with a bunch of enlisted men. They of course are crazy about him, as are all the people who work with him. There is never a matter too trivial for his attention or too vital and too important for discussion with him.

This letter was not meant for a eulogy, though it seems to have turned into one. But my attention has turned to our unusual good fortune in having such a leader, by the fact that other Chief Nurses do not always get the kind of help and coöperation that I am getting. What would I do if I had forbidden my nurses to do something which I felt was wrong or inadvisable and then the director of the Unit reversed the action? It is an unbearable situation to conceive, but I am afraid some Chief Nurses may have to face just such difficulties. But here such a situation could not possibly exist. Other Units have sneered a little at what they call our religious attitude, having nightly services on the boat, regular attendance at services here, and making the whole thing a prolonged act of service. But as Dr. Murphy said when he talked to our nurses that last night in London, there is only one way of bearing the close contact with such pain and sorrow, of bearing whatever discomforts we may ourselves have to bear, of working out our own internal problems of antipathies or antagonisms, of keeping our souls serene, and that is by doing it all with the deepest religious motive and in utter devotion to service. I have heard him say many times, “We have come to serve in whatever way we can and as long as we are needed.” And so I look ahead to the future with the greatest peace of mind. I am not afraid of any difficulties with my women or with the men.

My women are splendid. A few, of course, have periods of rearing, but they all have steadied down most beautifully. And I think now that it was emotions strained almost beyond endurance at first that caused the rearing. We are all happy, contented, and well, and I am so proud of the spirit of coöperation I find among them I can hardly express it. I certainly have some wonderfully splendid women with me. Some of them have queer exteriors and some queer ways, but they are fine within. Every now and then I put on the bulletin board some little poem about the meaning of the war and the ideals we are fighting for, or a paragraph from some newspaper about America’s quick response to the call for help to defend these ideals, and you ought to see their heads go up and their eyes brighten. They don’t care that they have had bully beef twice in one day or that the knives and forks are sticky, and they have no tablecloths or butter dishes. It would be so hopeless if one did not get a response. My bulletin board is the side of a packing box put on a standard just outside the mess door.

I seem to write such queer things. I was going to tell you about our Fourth of July party. We invited the other American Unit (from Cleveland) down to a baseball game and tea. It was a great success, as the day was fine and we could have our refreshments on the grass under some trees. Miss Watkins, our dear dietitian, and some of the others worked all the afternoon getting sandwiches, and strawberries, and tea, and little cakes, and lemonade ready, which the doctors paid for. It was a great success. Then after dinner we went up to No. 9 General, where the Clevelanders hold forth, and had a little dance in their nurses’ mess hall. We stopped at 11, as we all had a half hour’s walk home. It was a wonderful night. Dr. Allison and I brought up the rear of the procession and discussed the affairs of the universe.

July 10. Ruth and I have been to town this lovely afternoon to do a few errands and wander around the quaint little back streets and visit the wonderful churches. I am having an extra serge uniform made. It has already been a month in the making, but it will probably be finished soon now. It looks as if it were going to be very satisfactory. Before we came back to our camp we had supper at a very French place and enjoyed our omelette aux champignons, sole frite, petits pois au beurre, salade aux fines herbes and café and pêches to the very limit, although we had to pay the very limit for it, and all felt very extravagant when we saw the bill. Food is very expensive, but the French are not losing anything from the English and American trade. They tack on all sorts of prices to everything they can get away with. It is very restful and relieving to the mind to get away from the hospital, and I try to do it at least once every week for the best part of an afternoon.

We are not working too hard here, any of us, but I find that I am pretty tired most of the time because I cannot escape from my responsibilities at any time, even when I am off duty, which is not much except in the evenings because I am right in the middle of things all the time, and each one of the sixty-four has some question to ask almost every time they see me. You see everything over here is different, the details are hard to learn, or rather they are hard to get over to each one of the sixty-four. I have not been sleeping very well for the same reason. I hear every one that goes by my room and I hear all the women in my hut get to bed and all they have to say as they get ready for the night, and I hear them all get up in the morning etc. But I keep thinking that I shall get used to all of this and not be so noticing. I am better than I was in London or on the boat. I have my room fixed up so that it looks quite comfortable. I probably shall spend most of my spare time down here in the office in the grandstand, for down here I am more isolated from my responsibilities. Just outside are the doctors’ tents, but when they perform their ablutions out here in front of my door, it does not disturb me in the least, because it is not up to me whether they are as comfortably taken care of as possible. Their quarters are even more primitive than ours. Many of them are two in a tent in which they can hardly stand upright, and their toilet articles are laid on a box and their clothes they have to hang on the tent pole. We all have a little washstand, and an enamel basin and pitcher and pail, which were furnished us since we arrived here. With that and a small table and a little shelf and some hooks in the corner we can be very civilized.

Hot water is a very great problem, for all our water for cooking, washing dishes, and bathing 104 women is heated in two small tanks over little coal fires, and the supply is very inadequate. But little by little things get made more practical and sensible. So many things were unnecessarily uncomfortable. My next domestic job is to find out how to get dishes for one hundred people washed when hot water is entirely insufficient, so that they are not always sticky and smelly. I presume it can be done, but at present I acknowledge I am baffled. I am taking it for granted that you are interested in these sordid details. They really seem very important over here, although to you in America they probably do not rank as highly as stopping hemorrhages and writing letters for dying soldiers. They truly don’t to us all the time. But this is a trivial letter meant for only a few who want to know details.

To-day our Major Fife, the U. S. Army man who joined us in St. Louis, with two other regular army men, took over the command of the hospital, and Col. J. left. Col. J., the English O. C. (Officer Commanding), has been perfectly charming, and we are all very sorry to see him go. He has been transferred to a neighboring hospital camp, not very far away, so we still may see something of him. Yesterday afternoon, late, I had a little tea party here in my office, which was very delightful. A few days ago I had met the two Colonels of the Australian hospital camp, which is on the other side of the race course, and as the one who is the M. O. (Medical Officer) said he wanted to meet Major Murphy, I invited him and the other O. C. and had Major Murphy and Col. J. and Miss Taylor, and we had a very nice party, with tea, bread and butter, and jam. Then afterwards we took the visiting Colonels down to see some of the American apparatus that we are using on some of our cases. Our Surgical Hut looks like a carpenter shop. We have about ten beds under a wooden canopy frame, to which the poor shattered legs of our blown-to-pieces men are fastened. When a leg is broken in half a dozen places and there are several gaping infected wounds besides, it is something of a trick of carpentry and mechanics to make the poor fellows comfortable, put on extensions so the legs won’t contract, and yet make it possible to irrigate the wounds. We have some wonderful arrangements. It is remarkable the way pulleys and ropes can be arranged so that the men can pull themselves up with their hands to let the nurses rub their backs and change their beds. So many men come to us with terrific bedsores to add to the distress of their shattered legs it takes much ingenuity to take care of them. We have one man who is practically slung in hammocks which are attached with counter weights to the frame over the bed. These small hammocks, or slings, go, one under his shoulders, one under his lower back, and then his leg is in a frame with weights attached to the foot. Rubber tubes are run in and out of his thigh, and knee, and his wounds are irrigated through these tubes which are perforated. This method of irrigating is the Carrel Method. The men in this hut are getting to feel they are such an interesting show, so many people come to see them, that they have begun to make fun by rattling a coin in a tin box and taking up a collection when people ask what they are doing that for.

It’s about time I went up to my room now, as it is after nine and the doctors are beginning to go to their tents and I must sit here ticking away on the machine with the door open. Some nurses came in to talk to me so I was disturbed, even when I thought I had got away from them. They meant well and only came to inquire if I was not well, because they thought I did not look well and were worried. Wasn’t that dear of them. It’s only a lack of proper sleep that makes me look a bit queer. I am not a bit sick, just a bit “groggy.” I really am quite brown, and my hair is quite curly! from all this dampness. It rains part of every day almost.

Good-night for now. It is always fun to think at night, maybe I will get a letter to-morrow. You just cannot imagine how much letters count. I never had them count so much before.

Much love to you all.

J.

Rouen, France. July 16, 1917.

I am inclosing a copy of a letter Miss Taylor received to-day, in reply to the letter she wrote to Private Murphy’s mother, the day after her boy died here. He was here of a gunshot wound in the chest, one of those treacherous injuries that seem to be getting along all right and then knock a man out with a sudden hemorrhage. The boy was not even on the Seriously Ill or the Dangerously Ill list, and the worst part was that he died before we could get the priest to him. We have a Catholic priest as well as C. of E. and Nonconformist padres always in attendance. They live on the grounds. Of course a formal notice of the man’s death was sent to his mother through the War Casualty Office, but Miss Taylor wrote to tell his mother the details, and to explain why the priest was not with him when he died. Her reply is so typical of the bravery of English women I want you to see it.

“To Assistant Matron:—

“I thank you for so kindly answering my letter for my dear lad Pte. W. Murphy. I am quite sure you all concerned did what possibly could be done for him. I thank you from the very bottom of my heart. I’ve felt it very keenly, more than I can ever say, but I have the satisfaction of knowing he was cared for by a woman at the last and given a decent grave. Perhaps God took him then because he was then fit, he was a good boy at home to us and I know the last three years of his life he honestly tried his level best. I think God understands us each one best. I should like you to thank the nurse personally for me who was with him at the last, and every night you brave women are remembered in our prayers. My wee daughter aged three years prays, ‘God bless our nurses at the front.’ I have not received his treasure bag and am sorry as my little son aged 15 yrs., who was passionately attached to our dear lad, hoped to have his rosary, but perhaps I shall get it—only you asked me to let you know if I did not receive it. I must now conclude, thanking you once again, believe me

“Yrs. sincerely
“Bell Brown.”

All day yesterday and in the night we heard the booming of guns, and the night nurses say the windows in our surgical hut rattled. It was the loudest I have heard since we have been here. And every time I hear them those words of one of our patients come to my mind: “Some poor devils are getting theirs.” The men recently sent down from the front tell us that rumor has it that there is going to be a big drive in a few days. We wonder if it has begun and if we shall be getting more convoys in. Our hospital is not half full now, we have been sending out so many convoys over to “Blighty.” We need to be a little busier for our best good. The weather is lovely, very cool at night, we always sleep under blankets, warm in the sun. Almost every day it rains at least a part of the day, but the ground here is so sandy there is very little mud. It is a drizzling evening, but it is cozy and pleasant here in my office. It is getting on toward ten and outside in their tents I can hear the voices of some of our officers talking together, and from time to time across the road come bugle calls, and there is that faint bustling sound of large numbers of people getting ready to be quiet for the night. We are in the midst of such thousands and thousands of people, mostly soldiers, and all day long there are myriads of soldier sounds, bugle calls, tramping of feet, motor cycles, lorries, bands playing, men’s voices, sharp commands, the slap of the hand on the musket in salute, the popping of small bombs or guns all day long from the practice trenches near here. On the fourth of July we thought how like a home Fourth it was, but here the popping and the shots sound every day. And it is not fireworks that are being shot off. At neighboring camps there are experts in bayoneting, experts in gassing, experts in Hate Talk. There are actually special men who sometimes talk to as many as three thousand men to make them feel that their chief business is to kill. It is incomprehensible. Whenever will this toppling world right itself? It will be a long time before we come home. The more we know the more sure we are that it is going to be a long business. And the man who wrote “The picture, That I saw that day, Of home folks bidding home good-by, For traitor seas, And ‘somewhere,’ Out beyond the seas, And after that, Just God, And what He wills,” was right. That is the situation.

July 19. Such nice letters to-day. It is such fun to get the home news and to learn the details of your doings. We are not working hard and we find it embarrassing to have people take it for granted that we are overdoing all the time and suffering real hardships. We are comfortable and well fed and have interesting work and many very interesting diversions.

There is a lot of very simple entertainment back and forth among the camps. Once or twice every week there is a tea party or a tennis party with tea or a concert with refreshments somewhere here. To-morrow we are going to return some of the many courtesies that have been shown us and be “at home” to our neighbors here on the Race Course: No. 10 General Hospital and No. 1 Australian General. The party will be out of doors and there will be tennis and a baseball game between nurses and officers. The officers are having baseball suits made for them by the nurses. These suits are to be very gay skirts, so that they will be as much hampered as the women. We have started our V. A. D.’s on baseball against the American nurses. They take to it like small boys and find it “ripping.” It has been the best mixing process I ever invented. It is a great sight these lovely evenings between eight and nine to see the crowd of hilarious nurses careering over the grass between the hedge and the fenced-off center of the course where all the tents are, and hanging on the fence a couple of hundred “blue boys” or convalescent patients in their blue hospital suits. Then the officers come straggling out after their dinner, peacefully smoking their pipes, and they line up and root and laugh too and coach. It does not look much like war. It does everybody the best possible good, for it has them all roaring with laughter, and sends them off to bed in the best of humor, like a bunch of kids.

The English tea parties are charming, and I think myself in a storybook every time I go to one. The uniforms of the English Sisters are so gay and bright with their flowing caps and red-bordered little capes, and all the men are in uniform, and the little tables set out on the grass are under large sunshades, or there are special marquees set up for the occasion, and it’s all very gay. Last week around at No. 10 General after the tea party, they had games, tennis for some, hunting for hidden treasure in the grass and hedge (I found a souvenir spoon in a mole hole), and a potato and spoon race, and also a tug of war that was so fiercely strenuous that it left many of us with cricks in our necks ever since. The tug of war seems to be a favorite sport. Our white-dressed nurses with their scarlet-lined blue capes look mighty pretty on these occasions. Of course different groups of nurses and doctors get off for different parties. They are usually from 5 to 7 or after 8.

Then in the Y. M. C. A. huts there are frequent forms of entertainment, not only for the convalescent patients but for the staff. A “concert” usually means a kind of variety show. All kinds of pretty good troupes are sent out to go the rounds of the various hospitals, and then, too, each hospital has its own band, which is trained or run by the Y. M. C. A. people. We here have some very unusual Y. M. C. A. people. A Prof. B., his wife, and son are living here and giving their whole time to this work. They are from Cambridge, both father and son. I am told that the father is a professor of theology, and the son of archæology. They are very talented people, quite eccentric geniuses, all of them, I should judge. The father leads the band, the son plays the little organ in our chapel, the mother hovers around, and all the time some one of them is in attendance at the Y. M. C. A. hut to help the boys play and to manage the many concerts and lectures that take place there all the time. The first time I met Mrs. B. was the first night I arrived. The first thing she said to me was, “Good gracious, how funereal you look!” I was in my dark uniform and it was after dark in the evening and I did look like a crow, but then! She was very cordial afterward and has been very charming to us all. She gave a big tea for us in the hut one Sunday afternoon and had many officers, Y. M. C. A. workers, and nurses there to meet us. Everybody here is devoted to the B.’s and they add much to the community life. Both father and son are tall, thin, stooped, spectacled souls. The son is more or less of an invalid, it seems.

We have just heard a piece of news that delights us very much and that is that Miss G. is to come over to be “Matron-in-chief for France” as the corresponding official is called for the other nursing forces. I had already written, as had the Chief Nurses of some of the other Units, asking Miss N. to send us some one to advise us, and make uniform regulations for us all and standardize our actions and customs. Now, each Chief Nurse is entirely responsible, under her Commanding Officer, who leaves all the details to her, for every little thing. And the consequence is that there are as many ideas about discipline, uniforms, hours of duty, social usages, etc. as there are Chief Nurses. Miss G. will be ideal for this position. Dr. Alexander Lambert was here last evening and he told us that she was coming. It may be that she has only been sent for, but I hope it means that she is to come. We have received word that five American nurses are to be added to our force here soon. We don’t know where they are to come from or anything about them. It was an official notice that we had yesterday that 33 were to arrive at Havre, five of whom are to be sent to us. We shall be glad to see them whoever they are. Five of our V. A. D.’s are to be taken when the Americans come.

Two of my people heard me say the other day that I wished I had my violin here, so yesterday they went down to Rouen and bought me one. I wish you could hear the accounts of how they did it, for neither of them has any French or knows anything about violins. But it was a violin all right that they brought out to me wrapped up in a newspaper, and last night it played perfectly good tunes in the mess hall. One of the V. A. D.’s plays the piano very well, so we had a fine time trying out the instrument. To-day I have some bad blisters on the ends of the fingers of my left hand, which makes it almost impossible to write on the typewriter. We have not much music here, but a few popular dance airs.

Loads of love.

Julia.

July 25, 1917.

I do not know how to write about our doings of the past few days, for I cannot write numbers, and it is only numbers that would give you any idea at all of what we have been doing. I wrote in my last letter, I think it was, that we were not working hard, well, we have begun our hard work, and for our own sakes we are glad of it. In the past 24 hours we have admitted more patients than the total capacity of the Barnes and Children’s Hospital, not the average number of patients, but the total capacity. And all these patients have been bathed, fed, and had their wounds dressed. Some of course were able to walk and could go to the bath house and the mess tents, but most of them to-day are stretcher cases, and oh, so dirty, hungry, and miserable. The mere (I say mere, but it is really the most important part of the whole thing) proper recording of the names, numbers, ranks, nearest relatives etc., is in itself a huge task. Of course the nurses don’t have all that to do, but they have a lot of it. The boys who are stretcher bearers must be so lame, they can hardly move, for just consider what it means to lift down out of ambulances as many patients as that, and then afterwards carry them as far sometimes as a city block, for we filled our farthest tents to-day. It is most remarkable how things have gone. There are many aching backs to-night, for all the beds are very low and the stooping is terrific, but every one has been a brick. Many of the nurses have worked 14 straight hours to-day, and many of the doctors had only two or three hours’ sleep last night, and were working all day. The difficulty to-day was, that we had to put patients into rows of tents that have not been used for some time and were not equipped, and our warning was not long enough to prepare. We had the beds ready, but little else. To-night things have straightened out a lot, but it is going to be a busy night as we are to send out a convoy, and get another in. Three additional night nurses are on to-night, taken from the day force that has to stretch itself a little thinner.

Our nurses don’t need any “Hate Lecture” after what we have seen in the past few days. We have been receiving patients that have been gassed, and burned in a most mysterious way. Their clothing is not burned at all, but they have bad burns on their bodies, on parts that are covered by clothing. The doctors think it has been done by some chemical that gets its full action on the skin after it is moist, and when the men sweat, it is in these places that are the most moist that the burns are the worst. The Germans have been using a kind of oil in bombs, the men say it is oil of mustard. These bombs explode and the men’s eyes, noses, and throats are so irritated they do not detect the poison gas fumes that come from the bombs that follow these oil ones, and so they either inhale it and die like flies, or have a delayed action and are affected by it terribly several hours later. We have had a lot of these delayed-action gassed men, who cough and cough continuously, like children with whooping cough. We had a very bad case the other night who had not slept one hour for four nights or days, and whose coughing paroxysms came every minute and a half by the clock. When finally the nurses got him to sleep, after rigging up a croup tent over him so that he could breathe steam from a croupkettle over a little stove that literally had to be held in the hands to make it burn properly, they said they were ready to get down on their knees in gratitude, his anguish had been so terrible to watch. They said they could not wish the Germans any greater unhappiness than to have them have to witness the sufferings of a man like that and know that they had been the cause of it. It is diabolical the things they do, simply fiendish, and like the things that would be expected from precocious degenerates.

I cannot imagine what kind of change is going to take place in our minds before we get home. There are so many changes coming over our ideas every day. They are not new ideas, for many people have had them before, since the beginning of this war, but they are new to us. Human life seems so insignificant, and individuals are so unimportant. No one over here thinks in any numbers less than 50 or 100, and what can the serious condition of Private John Brown of something or other, Something Street, Birmingham, matter? One’s mind is torn between the extremes of such feelings, for when a nurse takes the pulse of a wounded sleeping man and he wakes just enough to say “Mother,” she goes to pieces in her heart, just as though he weren’t only one of the hundreds of wounded men in just this one hospital.

This morning when the big rush was on, I was in the receiving tent when the last three men were unloaded: One had his head and eyes all bandaged up and seemed in very bad condition, so I went with the stretcher bearers to see if I could help get him into bed. The eye specialist was sent for at once, and got there in a few minutes. We untied the big triangular bandage that was keeping the wads of cotton on his head and eyes, and found his eyes in a terrible condition from being bandaged for over 24 hours without attention. We soaked off the dressings with some boric solution that I had procured from the Operating Hut. There was not even a single basin in the tent to which the man had been brought, not to mention a nurse or medicines. After a while we got the eyes open a tiny bit so that they could be examined and washed out a little, and then the doctor blew out: “It’s a perfect crime to send a man down here in this condition, look at this puncture wound of this eye, and see what a terrible condition his eyes are in. A whole lifetime of blindness will probably be the result.” The patient was delirious and quite incapable of understanding. Just then an older officer came along and heard the remark and said: “Crime! my dear boy, you’ve got absolutely the wrong point of view. How could they keep a man like this up there at the front, from which they have sent him? Don’t you realize that at a place like that every wounded man is simply a hindrance and must be gotten out of the way? Just stop and think how well they are doing to get so many of them to us in any decent shape at all.” Then the other one said: “Oh, I suppose so. War’s the thing now, all right.” After he was dressed, and things had been straightened out a bit, this patient was transferred to one of the lines that is better equipped to take care of such serious cases. He was put on the “Dangerously Ill,” and word was sent to his mother! His head injury is bad, so maybe he wont live to be blind. (Later. He is much better now and will get well and probably have the sight of one eye.)

No man leaves here in his own clothes. It couldn’t be done. All the things have to be sent to be disinfected and then they go to the clothes tent, and then are just drawn, as clothes for so many men, when the convoys go out. That is unless they are going to the Convalescent Camp or back to a base, then they are fitted as nearly as possible and given a full equipment, but the men going to England are fixed up just so that they can travel. They are lucky if they can stick to their little comfort bags in which are their little treasures. Just so many pins that must have so many moves is all they are. And they are so good and patient. They are so grateful, it just makes everybody wish she were a dozen people and could do twelve times as much as she can possibly do with her one set of arms and legs.

But what will we think when we get through with it all? How are we going to stand the mental strain? Yet others do, and go on being normal, cheerful human beings, teaching bayoneting one hour, and playing tennis the next, or having tea with pretty nurses. Oh, it’s a queer world! as the orderly said who came to tell me of a few more hundred wounded expected in soon. “Isn’t it a cruel world?”

July 30, 1917.

Dearest Family:—

This is just a letter to you, not a general epistle to the United States. Major Murphy has just cabled to-day that we are all well, and the reason that there has been such a long delay in your getting our letters from France is that they were held up in London. We do not know why. A number of friends have cabled, and that is how we know that our letters have not been received. I spoke to the Major about it this morning, as so many nurses have said they thought they had better cable, and he said he would cable Miss Hudson at once, which he proceeded to do. I began this last evening, but was interrupted by having an orderly bring me a huge bunch of sweet-peas, mignonette, etc. from a nice Colonel commanding a neighboring Infantry Base Depot. Of course I had to stop and put them in such vases as we have. I brought some down to the officers’ mess, where they were just finishing dinner, and where I had to stay and chat a bit.

This afternoon we have had distinguished guests! Mrs. Christie, the Chief Nurse of the Presbyterian Unit from N. Y. and three of her nurses motored down from E. to call on me and more especially Miss Allison of the Cleveland Unit. It was pleasant to see them and to compare notes.

My, but you all seem far away in another world. But it is fun to think about you. We feel now as though we had been here forever. If you have not read Lord Northcliffe’s new book, “At the War” do get hold of it, for it describes just what we are in the midst of, and everything about us and our surroundings etc., not really us—of course, but hospital people out here in general. One of our men lent me his copy. We are going to be very short of reading matter here very soon. We had a small library from our steamer books, but in Rouen, it seems, there are not many English books. (I’m reading some French, of course.) We have subscribed for a good many magazines, but none have come yet, nor papers. If you should mail a good novel once in so often, I believe it would reach us easily and it certainly would be appreciated. Another thing we would love to have is some music. Popular new dance music, or songs, and a hymn-book. We have rented a piano, but no one brought any music. We have some good singers, and we need some good popular airs. I believe I told you about the 12-franc violin some of my girls bought me. You’d be surprised what sweet tunes it can play! The three or four old torn pieces that were hanging around are almost worn out and I can see that if we enjoy playing and singing now, we will much more when the little sitting-room end of our mess hall is the only warm place to go to on a rainy, cold, winter night. So there are two things you can do for me. The Parcel Post is bringing things over from the States already, and I guess that is the best way to send things.

Everybody over here talks about the cold of the winter, and we shall have no heat except in occasional small oil stoves, or a coal stove, for each hut. Our tented Hospital is not to be hutted this year, as we have been told. But if the English could stand it last year, I am sure we can. Mrs. Whitelaw Reid has written to ask if we want sleeping bags, and I have replied “Yes.” We have rubber boots, rubber hats, and rubber coats, which we shall have to wear constantly. Washington is trying to work out some suitable uniform for us. It will take considerable imagination to design a costume that will be warm enough, short enough, washable, and suitable for use in tents where you must dress very infected wounds. Our white caps are absurd for popping in and out of low-entranced tents.

Elsie asks how the responsibility of taking care of all my people is burdening me. For a while it was a pretty big burden, but now it does not weigh nearly as much as it did. I have such splendid people here with me. Just a few have been a little troublesome, but nothing to mention. And the rest are loyal, affectionate, and entirely to be depended upon. The ten that came from Kansas City have been bricks. The two from Hannibal have turned out to be good nurses and fine women, and the rest, almost all of them, developed fine qualities that I really did not know they had in them. We have had so little trouble I cannot help wondering what it is, when I hear of difficulties the other Units are having. “Oh yes,” Matron X. said, “I have forbidden my nurses to go out with officers, but they are doing it.” We allow ours to go out with doctors, but have made the only restriction that they go in groups of at least three. They have been fine about it and go off half a dozen at a time, and have splendid walks, etc. “Yes, I’ve forbidden mine to smoke or drink wine in public, but they do it in private, and I don’t think it’s any of my business to meddle with their private lives,” said she. Our nurses talked the matter over at a meeting after I had presented the whole thing to them, and voted to go on the water-wagon and not to smoke while they were over here, and they are doing it too! I don’t ask, or pry, but tell them how proud I am of them when I can tell other people of the stand my people took by themselves. Miss E. of the American Ambulance, who was down here, was so much impressed by the attitude of my nurses on these matters, she went back to Paris and told her nurses there about it, and said it made a big impression on them. It is hard not to drink wine where so much wine abounds, but we are not out in public places much, and one can always get water or their horrid cider. And the point is, my people are proud of themselves, and are proud to tell the English officers, who offer wine at parties, that we American nurses don’t drink wine. The officers say: “Aren’t you allowed to? your Matron won’t know.” Then they answer with pride, “It isn’t our Matron that won’t let us, we decided not to ourselves.” By that time the officers quit fooling, and say “Well, it’s a mighty good resolution, too.”

You can’t begin to guess how welcome your letters are. Some seem to come through so very quickly now. One of Mother’s dated July 12 reached me July 28th and Elsie’s of the 13th came just as fast. I wish Elsie’s kiddies could make jigsaw puzzles for our men. They are just crazy about them, and we arrange tables so they can get at them, and they spend hours working on them. It is so much easier for the one-armed ones than reading. Couldn’t Billy make and send me one, or some knitted things. I’d give it myself to one of our boys and have the boy write Billy a letter. I wish I could send you pictures, but we can’t send a single thing. All the kodaks were taken, and we each had to sign a paper that we had none in our possession. I wish I could draw, there are so many wonderfully interesting and picturesque things about here, and right in our camp.

August 8, 1917.

We have just finished our weekly inspection by the “D. D. M. S.,” which means the Deputy Divisional Medical Supervisor, who is a very pleasant Colonel. Every Wednesday at 3.30 we all line up at the entrance to our camp and wait to meet him after he gets through inspecting No. 10 General Hospital. By “we” I mean our “C. O.” Major Fife, our “M. O.” Major Murphy, our Liaison Officer, a British Colonel, the Quartermaster, and the “Matron,” me. It really is a very pleasant occasion. We sit out there in the sun, if there is any, on a park bench and gossip until we see the D. D. M. S. aide appear from out of the last tent of No. 10, then we stand up and walk over a bit to greet him. He always shakes hands with me first and asks me how I am getting along, then salutes the others and has a word or two with them, then turns to me and asks what I want him to see. I usually turn to Major Murphy and ask him if he has anything special to show the Colonel, and Major Murphy says: “Let’s show the Colonel line so and so.” I have accidentally mentioned before what lines I would like to have visited. It is usually tea time when he comes, and, unless we tell the nurses to hold off with the tea until after the inspection is over, the tents are in a mussy state. So every Wednesday I usually warn two or three different lines that I may have them inspected. To-day as a matter of fact we went to three different lines that had not been warned, as Major Murphy wanted to show the Colonel some special cases. After inspection is over, the officers take him and his aide to tea in the Officers’ Mess, or I take him up to the Sisters’ Mess. While we were making rounds to-day, it began to pour, but one of my nice aides brought me an umbrella and Captain Schwab lent me his rain coat to save my clean white dress. When I went down to the point to wait for his Elegance, the sun was shining beautifully, but it was about the second peep of the sun we have had in over a week. And now it is pouring.—I had to stop then and put on my rain hat and coat and go up to the Sisters’ Quarters with a Lieutenant from the Royal Engineers, who came to inspect the leaks in the roofs of the nurses’ huts. He saw them all right and will have them fixed.

We are wondering so much whether you are getting our letters. Letters coming to us have told of a long stretch of time without word from us; in fact no letters had been received from any of us since we landed in France. Major Murphy cabled Miss Hudson a week ago that we were quite all right, so I hope none of you are worrying. We heard to-day that some postcards I sent on June 24th had been received, so it seems that cards go through safely anyway. I hope that by this time you are getting our letters. Wasn’t that account of my interview with the London reporter absurd? Of course I did not say all that bosh, but I did say that I could not make any comparisons between the American and the English hospitals. That is what she wanted me to do. I saw copies of that interview from San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia, and St. Louis papers, which shows how far a little bit of “swank” can go.

It is ten days since I have written at all to any one. We have been very busy, and have all had long hours of work and I have not felt much like writing when I have had the time to do so. The pressure has now let up a bit, but I think it will be only a temporary let-up. Our hospital is very full and we have many very bad cases. My nurses are beginning to show the effect of the emotional strain. Their nerves are a bit on edge, and I find that when they lose for a few days time-off-duty, as they all have been doing, they are not standing the strain and loss as well as they did the last time we were so busy. I have had about a dozen of them weeping, so I am hunting about for more forms of diversion. The continuous rainy, damp weather, the accumulating emotional strain, and the real hard work are having an effect upon them all that is bothering me. There is a convalescent hospital for Sisters at E., to which I can send one or two at a time for a short rest as soon as I can spare them. But I do not want to have to begin to do that yet. So we are having a little dance in our Mess to-morrow night and perhaps I can get up some bridge parties or some other games. Our sitting-room space is so small we are very much handicapped but if it will only clear up, we could play some outdoor games. You see my real problems are beginning. I would have given a good deal myself to have had some one like Mother to weep on, last Sunday. You can imagine how I miss my older women friends. Naturally I cannot do any weeping here, since I have to be wept on; but there are times when it would be such a comfort to be braced myself.

There was nothing really wrong on Sunday, but that day we had so many sick men to look after, and things got a bit complicated and several nurses got hysterical and I felt things were just too much. Any one would have thought so if they had seen our poor gassed men who are so terribly burnt. One of my most stolid nurses came to me that day and said “I just don’t know how I am going to stand it, taking care of so and so.” I said “Why not?” and she replied, “When he was brought in to us he was so badly burned we could hardly see any part of him that we could touch except the back of his neck; but that isn’t the worst part, instead of cursing or moaning he was singing, and I just can’t stand that.” It isn’t only women that are affected by these things, the men don’t weep often, but they come near it. And they get just as edgey and worn to a frazzle. They lose more sleep than the nurses do, for they have to get up in the night all the time, to operate, or attend to patients, or look after convoys, in or out.

I want to tell you about the most unique day I ever had in my life. It was last Monday when I and five other nurses went out for our gas training. All soldiers receive gas training, as you know, and are fitted with gas helmets, which they take with them to the front. Recently all doctors and nurses who go up to the Casualty Clearing Stations have been given gas training too. Only about ten nurses so far have had this training. We have already sent one surgical team to the front, including one nurse, and I have been quite determined that I shall go as soon as possible. Major M. hasn’t been altogether willing that I should, thinking that I ought to stay here with my children, but I have pointed out to him that Miss T. and the Supervisors could take care of them perfectly well, and he has consented to let me go. I want some real manual work with the patients and I can’t get it here, for I have to do so much office work. I have been going down to the operating room as much as I could to help a little and get my hand in, but I cannot get there often. Major M. says I can’t go with him, for I must not be gone while he is away, so I am to wait and go with Major C. Now about gas training. There is a regular school here where thousands of soldiers are given their training daily. It takes the greater part of the day. I cannot describe it. You will have to wait till I get home. But we had our masks tested first in a room filled with lachrymating gas; we were drilled in putting them on any number of times, for speed is a very important element, so each motion is counted and timed. We were lectured for an hour, the most interesting and barbarous lecture I ever heard in my life. It is at one and the same time the refinement of science and civilization, and of hideous barbarism. We had lunch in a dugout with the officers of the school, for the school is in the middle of a huge plain, and then we were taken into a trench filled with lachrymating gas so that we would know what it is like. This without helmets. Then with three officers, one before, one in the middle, and one behind our string of six nurses, and a medical officer standing outside, we were taken into a closed, tunnel-like affair into which chlorine gas was being poured in clouds from special pipes. We of course had our masks on and were all carefully inspected before we went in. This gas would not hurt us, they say, but we get the smell and get used to wearing the masks and are ready afterwards to get our certificate.

August 20, 1917.

The last letter I wrote was August 8th and here it is the 20th. The time goes so very rapidly I forget when I last wrote and am surprised to find that it is over a week. We have not been so very busy these past two weeks, I mean not as we were before then. It has not been raining as much these past few days, to our great relief, and we are beginning to get dried out a bit. When mattresses begin to get moldy inside of huts, it has been pretty damp. The spirits of my people are improving under the let-up of strain, but they are showing a few physical signs of the over-fatigue. We have been having a number of infected fingers and other little things and have really broken our good health record. I have one nurse, Miss S., away at E. for a ten days’ change at a lovely Convalescent Home for Sisters, and another is to go soon,—Miss M. who had a bad attack of bronchitis. Miss S. had a lot of little infections which showed she was below par. Then yesterday we had our most serious trouble, for we had to send Miss S. to the Hospital for Sick Sisters here in Rouen to have an operation due to an old injury. The British officials could not have been more courteous to us. They made it possible for our men to perform the operation and let one of my nurses go and stay with Miss S. The operation was a very long, serious one. Major M. and Major C. operated and Miss S. assisted while I held the arm. The operation was performed in the Operating Room of No. 8 General Hospital, which is five minutes’ ride from the “Sick Sisters” where there is no Operating Room. She was taken back in an ambulance before she was out of ether. The “Sick Sisters” is a lovely place on the other side of Rouen, about 8 miles from here. We go and come in a little Ford Ambulance. Major M. and I have been over to-day, and everything is getting along beautifully. We took our second patient over with us to-day,—Miss P., with a bad infected thumb. We are not supposed to keep a sick sister in Quarters more than 24 hours. We have been very lucky up to now in not having to send any one away. But this hospital is ideal. It is taken care of by British doctors and Sisters and is in a lovely location, higher than the spire of Rouen Cathedral. It is worrying to have my children sick, but it is good to know what excellent care they will get when they are sick enough to be sent away from us.

We have been having some lovely walks these past few days, since the rains have let up. There are loads of beautiful places to go to all around. One can take a little excursion boat from Rouen, down the river a bit, then get off and walk back here through the woods. Several times I have gone with some good walker into town, late in the afternoon, had supper in a most interesting little French café, and walked out here afterwards, making a nice walk of about 7 or 8 miles. The evenings are light and the sunsets wonderful and the crowds going home across the big bridges and out in our direction are most interesting. Ruth has walked one way with me but not the two. She is on day duty now, but I do not get a chance to go out with her very much as I cannot plan my free times much beforehand.

Yesterday we had two very interesting callers: Miss Draper and Miss Hoyt from New York. They looked very smart in neat gray and blue uniform suits with A. R. C. on the shoulder straps. They said they were sent to make inquiries about hospital needs for the American Red Cross. They were very charming and pleasant and I liked very much talking with them. They came just as we were starting to leave to attend to our operation, so we asked them to come back to supper, which they did. They had driven down from Paris in Major (Dr.) Alex. Lambert’s car, a humble Ford, they called it. It looked pretty beautiful to us.

On the 13th I got a telegram from Philip saying he had landed at Liverpool on the 11th. I wonder where he is and hope I shall be able to communicate with him soon. I had to stop there to take a patient’s mother down to see him. The boy is very badly hurt in several places, two legs and one arm. A nice Y. M. C. A. person just turned her over to me. It is a wonderful system that brings a relative out here, almost personally conducted the whole way. This Y. M. C. A. person also brought the brother of another of our patients, but he got here too late and I had to tell him that his brother died last evening. He can be here for the funeral to-morrow anyway, and he can talk to the nurses who looked after the boy in his last hours. The Y. M. C. A. lady took him away for the night, but will bring him back to-morrow.

There is not very much of special interest to chronicle just at present. I am very well myself and trust I am going to stay so. Our food is quite good and sufficient. We all have huge appetites from being out of doors so much.

We are longing for letters very badly. It must be about three weeks now since I have had a line from the States. I get some letters every day, but they are mostly from England about patients or from people in the locality, on business. There goes the third aëroplane that has flown over us in the past half hour. They are such pretty things. I should like to have a ride in one.

With loads of love to you all. This is a stupid letter, I know, but they can’t all be thrilling, for naturally there have to be many unthrilling days.

Julia.

August 28, 1917.

For almost 24 hours we have been having one of the severest wind storms I have ever seen. It has been beautiful. It has been pouring for two days, then last evening it began to blow, and such a whistling and shrieking and rattling as there was. Up in our grove our little huts were pretty well protected, but the trees lashed themselves with fury, and branches broke, and doors and windows slammed and smashed. Several small tents were blown down, but no serious damage was done. All day it has been blowing great guns and it has been gray and cold, like a late Fall day. I have been in the office all day doing accounts and other tiresome things, with one or two trips to the lines for various purposes. Miss Taylor had been off all the afternoon. I had tea in the Officers’ Mess, which made a diversion of a few minutes. One of my Colonel friends sent over some sweet peas and dahlias, and I took some down for the officers’ tables, and got invited to tea, so stayed a few minutes. Their mess is a bare, barracky kind of room under the grand stand.

Yesterday I had a little different kind of day. All the morning I was in and out of the office, down on the lines, and all over in the pour. Then at 12:30 the Major and I went over in the ambulance to the Sick Sisters’ Hospital to see our invalids and take out the final stitches. Our lady with the serious operation has been doing wonderfully well from the very beginning. She has been up and about for several days, though she was operated upon only nine days ago. She will be back on duty before very long, if everything continues as it has been going. We shall probably send her to the Sisters’ Convalescent Home for ten days after she is well enough to go. It is such a blessing to have such splendid places to have our sick nurses taken care of. I have one nurse now, at E., recovering from bronchitis, and just this operation case, and the nurse with the badly infected finger, so I feel we are doing mighty well. Well, after our visit to the hospital, we rode back to town in the pour, and had lunch at Rouen’s best hotel, the Hotel de la Poste. It is a regulation Continental hotel, full of staff officers, and has excellent food. We in uniform were the only Americans there, but we saw a number of our English friends. Afterwards we separated to do various errands. I had a long séance at the Base Cashier’s, where I received 18,000 francs from the British Government for my nurse mess, laundry, and field allowance for July, and had to sign my name 138 times. Then I went to the bank and deposited the money and straightened out some difficulties there. That bank is so stupid, and makes so many mistakes; one has to watch them very carefully. Then I paid a rations bill of £91, was picked up by the ambulance, went to buy a sewing machine for the nurses, and drove back to the hospital.

It poured all the time, but I enjoyed being out in the rain, for I was properly dressed. I had on my heavy army boots, leather gaiters, blue serge uniform under my nice belted tan raincoat, and my blue uniform hat. My feet were not exactly dainty and ladylike, but they were so comfortable and dry. All of us who have large enough feet are getting our shoes from the quartermaster, and those with small feet are bewailing their fate. Our paths are all mud and sharp stones, and the ordinary sole of a woman’s regular shoe lasts about two weeks, and even when new does not prevent the stones from hurting one’s feet. The shoe question is going to be a problem this winter. I started the fashion of wearing these very heavy army shoes, then many clamored for them; since I wore leather gaiters yesterday, Major Murphy says he thinks I had better have all the nurses get them.

Sept. 2, 1917—Sunday: We all have rubber boots. Some had bought them for themselves and some were sent by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid. She is being a regular fairy godmother to us. She has sent me, as a personal present from her, the most wonderful Jaeger sleeping bag. It’s a perfect beauty, and so soft and warm. She is sending sleeping bags for all the nurses, but I imagine not fancy ones like mine. She sent us sheets and pillowcases, which we were so glad to have, as we had been using stained old things that had been issued to us from the hospital supplies. She also has sent extra hot-water bottles, instrument kits, rubber aprons, rubber coats, and hats, and she has just written that she is going to attend to getting gray uniforms for us. She is Chairman of the London Chapter of the American Red Cross, and is apparently much interested in the American nurses that are with the British forces. She has just written that she will send us woolen spencer waists to wear under our uniforms, if I want them. I think I shall let her send them. She has also written that she would like me to run over to London to talk things over with her. I should like to go, but I am afraid I cannot, as Dr. Murphy is just about to go up to the front with a surgical team.

I made my final trip over to the Hospital for Sick Sisters yesterday to see Miss S. before she goes to the Convalescent Home at E. She has entirely recovered, and has made a most remarkable record for herself and our surgeons. We shall have her back on duty in a very few days, probably about ten.

Sept. 3d: This letter has been written at several different sittings, and the result is going to be pretty poor. Now that I have not such interesting descriptions to give you or accounts of adventures, I am almost ashamed to send on these dull commonplace letters. It is a glorious, cool, sunny day to-day, and the hospital is not very heavy. I have been off duty a while, sitting under the trees up in our compound, reading an Atlantic Monthly story aloud to Ruth as she lay on a blanket on the ground. Her mother has just sent her some Centurys and the August Atlantic. We are getting the Scribner, and Dr. Clopton brought me his August Harper’s Monthly, so we feel very rich. But for 69 American nurses these few copies won’t go very far. In a little while the band from a neighboring base depot is coming to play for our patients. I have been trying to manage this for some time, and at last the day has come. And to-night there is to be another little dance in our mess. All our tables have to be taken out, but we keep our guests after the ball is over, and make them bring the tables back and help set them for breakfast. To-night our officers are giving the party, and we are the guests, but in our mess, as that is the only possible place for dancing. We have had word from Washington that 30 more nurses are coming to us. We shall then lose our V. A. D.’s, for which I shall be sorry, for though they are more or less of a problem, the advantage of having an interesting group like them in such close contact outweighs any difficulties I may have with them.

We are all wonderfully well, and everything is well with us. In spite of all that I say about bands and dances and the sun shining, there is always the other side. Almost every day we have a death, if not more than one. Night before last a poor boy died of tetanus, and just a few days ago we had the sad experience of helping a poor mother watch her son die, oh so hard. We had sent for her from England, and she was so glad to be here. She came every day from the Y. M. C. A. hostel, and sat by his side. He knew her when she first came. He had such terrible wounds, and he could not stand the awful infection of them all. She was here with him all that last night, and when he stopped breathing about three o’clock, Miss Claiborne, the Surgical Night Supervisor, took her away to the night nurses’ hut, a tiny place where they have their suppers at midnight. She made her some coffee and wrapped her in blankets and fixed her comfortably in chairs. The poor soul did not weep a tear. She slept till morning, then went back to her hostel, and slept all day, the Y. M. C. A. worker told us. The next day she came to get his little belongings. I took her down to the mortuary, and it was not until she saw the flowers Miss Watkins had put down there on him that she went to pieces. She went to the funeral that afternoon, then left, so full of gratitude to us, as though we had done anything.

Sept. 3.

Dearest Family:—

Such a wonderful lot of letters as I’ve had recently. I am sending Mother’s letter on to Phil. I have had two notes from him. He is so lucky in having the splendid chance he has, so near the front. Our men envy him. I will try to keep close track of him, and write him often, so he won’t feel so far away; and if he should get sick or hurt, he is to have my address on him all the time, and I could get to him at once. I am sure I have sufficient pull with officials, and I should work it hard. He is, of course, in much more danger than we are here. You must realize that. But there are not so many dressing stations and field ambulances shelled or bombed. And he will be all right. He is lucky to be there, and I wish I were too. I suppose he will write you that there is no danger, but I want you to know the truth. A Clearing Station was bombed the other day, and people killed and an American nurse injured, and he is nearer the front than that Clearing Station, we understand. I’ll let you know everything I know, so don’t worry; and if he gets hurt, I’ll look after him all I can.

Loads and loads of love to you all. You must not think I am doing anything but exactly what I wanted most to do, and there is no heroism in that. I am very happy at being so much better.

3d Canadian b. b. s.
4th Sept., 1917.

Dear Miss Stimson:—

This note is on behalf of your brother, who was admitted to-day into this hospital, slightly wounded in the muscles of the back by shrapnel.

There is no cause for alarm. He will be sent on to the Base after a short treatment here, and will let you know from there how he is getting along.

Yours sincerely,
T. M.
Chaplain.

B. E. F.
4-9 17

Dear Miss Stimson:—

I very much regret to have to inform you that your brother was wounded this morning, he was hit in the back, and I don’t think it is serious; the piece of shell entered his back just below the right scapula in a slanting direction. I sent him on immediately to C. C. S., and I am advising him to try to get down to your hospital. The Boche began shelling our Dressing Station and we thought they had finished and went back to our tents, when he sent a parting shot—so to speak, which nearly got the lot of us. I think he will be able to write to you himself to-morrow, so there is no need to worry. He has proved himself a very good officer whilst with me, and I am very sorry to have to lose him, as we very rarely get them back, once they go to the Base. I greatly regret that this has happened.

Believe me,

Very sincerely yours,
G. H. L. H.,
Lieut. Col.

Sept. 8, 1917.

Dearest Mother:—

By the time this reaches you you will have received my cable about Phil. I will repeat what I said just in case it may not have arrived safely. I sent it this noon. “Phil slight shrapnel wound right shoulder. To be brought here. Don’t worry. Will cable often.” The news came in the mail that came in this morning. The two inclosed notes were in the bunch of letters that I received. I read the Chaplain’s first and afterwards found the one from the Colonel. I shall write to thank both these people who were so kind as to write me. I have been able to get a little more information about Phil from Major C. of the Cleveland Unit. Last evening Major C. telephoned me but I was undressed and could not go to the telephone. Miss Taylor took the message and said that Major C. just wanted to know if I knew where my brother was. She has told him that I did not know exactly, but that he was at some Field dressing station with a B. E. F. unit. That was all. This morning, wondering why Major C. was asking about Phil, I called him up and had just the same conversation with the Major. He said he had himself just come down from the front and that there were a number of Americans up there and wasn’t it pleasant for me to have my brother over here? I still wondered why this conversation, until the mail came. Then I called up Major C. again and asked him if he knew that Phil was wounded, and he said Yes; he had seen him but had not wanted to tell me until I had been notified some other way. He said that Phil had been stationed not very far from where he was, and when he heard that he was hurt, he had gone over to see him. This was the morning after the accident. He said he saw Phil soon after the operation. I said operation? and he said, “Yes, the usual operation removing the shrapnel pieces and opening up for drainage.” He said Phil had been in a good deal of pain at the time but was sitting up in bed. He could not write himself as it was his right shoulder. He said, “I talked over with him about where he wanted to go and he said he wanted to be brought to No. 12 General.” I broke in, “Will they allow that since this is not an officers’ hospital?” He said, “Oh yes, if that is what the officer wants. They have the opportunity to choose where they want to be sent, and Phil had chosen here.” “Of course,” Major C. said, “this may not be final that he is to come to you, but I personally saw all the authorities I could and I think he will be brought to you very soon.” Then he went on to say, “You may take it from me you need not worry about your brother’s condition, for it is not a serious wound. It probably will take a long time to heal as it is a deep muscle wound, but there is no occasion for anxiety.” I thanked him profusely for his kindness and hung up.

Then I went to Col. Fife, who was terribly nice and said he would make inquiries at once about having Phil brought here. He told me afterwards that he communicated with the D. D. M. S. (Deputy Divisional Medical Supervisor), who is responsible for all the hospitals in this area, and now all I can do is to wait. It must be that the boy will be brought down on the next convoy. He was hurt the 4th and this is the 8th, so I may expect him any time. But of course he has to be sent on a regular ambulance train. Col. Fife and I talked the matter over and I told him I knew Phil would rather be put in one of our hospital tents and be taken care of here among his friends than be sent to any fancy officers’ hospital. Major Murphy left this morning with our second Surgical team to go to the front, as luck would have it, but Major Clopton will give him every possible care when the boy gets here. There is much interest and solicitude here in the camp about Phil, for his is the first real casualty that has happened to a relative or friend of any of us. When Phil gets here, if he does not feel too badly, he will be just spoiled to death. Major Clopton says that there are excellent doctors up at the 3d Canadian C. C. S. where he was taken. And Dr. Schwab spoke up and said that they have a good neurologist there too, and it’s sure to be a good hospital if there’s a good neurologist there. The other men laughed and said, “That is why this is such a good hospital, isn’t it?” (Dr. Schwab is our neurologist and is a splendid one too.)

I have just been notified that a convoy is to be prepared for at 1 A.M. and I shall be on hand to meet it on the chance that Phil may come in it. I shall leave this letter open until after the convoy is in.

I cabled because I was so afraid the English authorities might send a message to you, and any way I was sure you had rather know the exact facts always just as soon as possible. I shall be so relieved when the boy gets here and I can look after him. For when he is once here, he will get as good care as he could get in any place in the world. I’m so glad I’m a nurse and am here. Isn’t it wonderful for me to be here?

P.S. Phil did not come on the convoy last night. I saw Major C., who said that Phil was to receive every care, because he had spoken to the officers in charge of him and had identified him and told them who he was.

Sept. 10, 1917.
Monday.

Dearest Mother:—

Another day has gone and I have not made much progress about getting Philip here. After much telephoning and pulling wires we have found out that Phil has been sent to No. 20 General Hospital at E. and is likely to be transferred to England. I am going to raise the roof to-day—to see if I can’t go there to see the D. D. M. S. of that area and see why the boy can’t be brought here. I am going to do everything possible before I give up, and anyway I shall see him, for if he gets sent to England, I shall go over. I was going anyway next week, as Mrs. Whitelaw Reid had written for me to come over about uniforms, etc. and Major Murphy and Col. Fife had said they thought I ought to go, so I’ll go anyway if Phil gets sent over there, but probably not if I can get him here. All reports are that his condition is good.

It just occurred to me that you may not have received my letter of the 8th—telling all I know about his injury. The inclosed notes were my original information. I will cable just as soon as I know anything more definite. You poor old dears—you’ll be so shocked by my cable just as I was by these notes Saturday. I felt sick at my stomach all day after getting them. But don’t you worry, Phil is strong and he will get well fast.

Lovingly,
Julia.

Sept. 19, 1917.

You cannot imagine how much my mind is at rest, for I have Phil here with me and everything is all right. After waiting and waiting for some word as to the chances of bringing him down from C., on Saturday last, the 15th, I called the Aide of the D. D. M. S., and asked him to see what he could do for me. On Sunday he telephoned that he had learned that Phil was not able to travel, but that I could have an ambulance and go up Monday morning, the 17th, and see the boy. It was necessary to send an ambulance up to N. to bring a Chinaman up to the British hospital for Chinese that is there. I was told I could take an officer with me if I wanted to and if we found Phil well enough to travel, we could bring him down. So I asked Capt. Veeder to go with me, and Col. Fife gave us both two days’ leave of absence. It is about 130 miles to C. We left at 10 A.M., and I took with me all the things that we might possibly need if we were to bring Philip back, extra pillows, a feeding cup, thermos, hypodermic set, etc., etc.

We had a beautiful trip up. The country for two thirds of the way is most lovely and the day was beautiful. Both Capt. Veeder and I sat on the front seat with the driver. The car was a great big regular ambulance that can be used to carry four stretcher cases. The shelves for the two upper cases can be hooked up. We made very good time. Had dinner at a little hotel in E., stopped twenty minutes to say hello to our friends of the Philadelphia Unit, had our tea en route from the lunch box we brought from here, dropped our Chinaman at N., and dashed on along the coast and reached C. about 6:30.

We went to the Chicago Unit’s hospital and were taken in most cordially by Miss Urch, the chief nurse, and Capt. Veeder by Col. Collins, the Commanding Officer. They told us that 20 General was just next door, and that Phil was getting along finely. Col. Collins had seen him. He said he thought we could take him back with us and that we would go down to see him right after dinner. Meanwhile he would send word that I was coming.

After dinner he escorted us through the pitch-black darkness to the hospital. On account of recent air raids they have no outside light at night and no unshaded inside. The result is very spooky. Ten days or so ago the Boche had flown over and dropped some bombs on those hospitals, killing a doctor from Boston, attached to the Peter Bent Brigham Unit which is at C. also, and right next door to the Chicago Unit and their officers’ hospital where Phil was. Several other people had been hurt, some doctors and enlisted men. I saw a crater made by one of the shells. Phil was sitting propped up in bed and he seemed mighty glad to see me. He had no temperature and the M. O. said I could take him the next day: so we told them to have him ready at 10 A.M., and left. He did not look very badly, and, although his back is very painful when he moves and he finds it difficult to stay in one position very long, we could tell that the trip down would really not do him any greater harm than to tire him very much. There was no danger of hemorrhage.

Then we went back to No. 12 Unit and were each of us given the greatest hospitality. I had my first tub bath since I left London, though I took it by the light of my electric torch. The quarters up there are better than ours, but our location is much better than any of the others that we saw. We came back even more satisfied with our station than we were when we left. We got a good start in the morning, having the personal attention of Col. Patterson of the Boston Unit and Col. Collins of the Chicago Unit and the M. O. of the 20 General and several other people. The pillows that we fitted around Phil’s back made it quite bearable for him, and frequent turnings and readjustments and feedings and pleasant converse made the hours go pretty rapidly. Capt. Veeder spelled me on sitting inside on the little hard seat between the two stretcher places. It was fearfully dusty, but I had plenty of nice cloths and could keep the boy fairly comfortable. We stopped for lunch coming back at E. Capt. Veeder and I went inside to see about ordering and to let Phil rest quietly a few minutes while we had our lunch. We were near the window of the dining-room, when suddenly I saw the wife of the inn-keeper climbing into the ambulance with a large loaf of bread in one hand and a plate of something in the other. I rushed out to stop her and pulled her out looking quite horrified and saying “beaucoup malade.” Phil had wakened up from a little nap and was convulsed to see her standing there holding out the loaf of bread to him. I took the food back inside and in a few minutes the Captain and I fed him comfortably with a nice little audience standing around with much curiosity. Then we went on our way, stopping once more about 4 to get some hot tea and to have a little lunch.

We reached here at 6:45 and really I don’t think Phil was much the worse for wear except very dirty and pretty tired. Col. Fife and Major Clopton met us and made arrangements to have him put in an empty tent, so the stretcher bearers pulled him out of the ambulance and carried him in and we got him into a nice, clean, comfortable bed, and you can imagine he was pretty glad to get there. His dinner was soon sent down to him from the officers’ mess and he was cleaned up just enough to make him comfortable. Major Clopton decided not to do his dressing until the next morning, but to let him rest. He had a fairly comfortable night, he said, sleeping at intervals, but he had not been sleeping well before he left C. The next morning his temperature was only 99.6, so you see the trip really did not do him any harm. When Major Clopton dressed him at 10, I went down to watch. He has what to you would appear to be a pretty nasty wound, but what compared to so many of the things we see here is really a very small matter. A jagged piece of shell about an inch long entered just below the lower angle of his right shoulder blade and tore right down through the muscles to the sacroiliac joint, which is where the pelvic bones join the spine. It did not injure his spine at all, for he can move very well except that he has pain. The doctors at the Clearing Station opened up the whole tract almost, which was of course necessary for free drainage.

Phil said that after the dressing the wound felt very much more comfortable. He eats finely and is now having the time of his life, having all his old friends visit him and make much of him. I have not had much time to talk with him since I have been back, for of course there was accumulated work for me to attend to, but I am so relieved to have him here it does not matter whether I have time to spend with him or not. I have seen that he has plenty of magazines and picture puzzles to do, and he has been reading to-day all the letters from the various members of the family that I have received in the past month, and also the copies of all my letters to you all. I shall see him to-night probably. We shall have him up in a chair out in the sun to-morrow; in fact he may have been out to-day. He is occupying a tent alone although there are 13 other beds in the tent where he is. I have said that he does not need to stay alone, but while we are light it can easily be managed. He has a convalescent patient as his personal servant, a “blue boy,” as we call them, a “light duty patient” who is so proud because he has an officer to wait on. There are American orderlies in his division of course, but the blue boy fetches his meals and putters over him, etc. Of course my nurses are in charge.

I brought all his kit and belongings down with him in the ambulance. I have his metal helmet hanging here in my office. You can’t really imagine what a narrow escape he had until you see the dent in the edge of the thick steel hat that was made by the piece of shell. It broke the edge and made a curved dent about an inch wide. It is a perfect miracle he was not killed. It was the helmet that saved his life. He is so marvelously fortunate, for no permanent damage has been done, and Major Clopton does not think he will have any permanent disability, and he might so easily have been killed or paralyzed by that little piece of shell.

Friday, Sept. 28, 1917.

Yesterday afternoon I was writing a little note here in my office when I heard the bugles sound for calling the convoy party and I finished my note saying, there comes the convoy we have been expecting and I must get busy. I must tell you how busy we got. It is now a little more than 24 hours later. On my way to the receiving tents I met a sergeant, who said to me that the men coming in were in very bad shape. They were being carried out from the receiving tents as fast as possible, after their cards had been made out and their throats examined for diphtheria suspects. We have had a lot of diphtheria brought to us and a number of our own people have caught it. We now have four nurses away in the contagious hospital near here, one has diphtheria and the other three had positive throats without any clinical symptoms, so they just have to be kept away from everybody until they are negative. So all suspected throats are isolated in a special line until cultures can be made and examined.

Capt. Rainey, who is Acting Chief of the Surgical Service in the absence of Major Murphy, and Major Clopton, spoke to me in the tents and said we have a big night’s work ahead of us, for many of these men will have to be operated on at once. They have had nothing done to them but their first-aid dressings and they are in pretty bad shape. He then asked me to go with a special case that was in very bad condition and see that he got a saline stimulation at once. This boy, a head case, was scheduled for Line B, tent 2, and as I went into the tent with the stretcher bearers, another patient was being brought in by two more bearers. The nurse spoke up and said that she had only one empty bed. It was apparent then that the assigner had made a mistake. I told the bearers to put their patients down on the floor, and giving a hurried glance at the other patient and a hasty feel of his pulse, I decided that my patient was in the poorer condition, so I got the bearers to put him into the empty bed and sent one of the other carriers back to the receiving tent for instructions about the other man. Meanwhile I got things started for the saline subcutaneous infusion. In a couple of minutes, the bearer came back and said he had been told to put his patient in the nearest vacant bed and report later where he had put him. We had a vacant bed in B 2, so we carried him in there and got him into bed. We asked the man if he could help himself at all as he was huge, and there is always great difficulty lifting patients off of the stretchers because there is so little space between the beds and the two carriers can’t do much more than hold the stretcher at the bed level. Mrs. Hausmann, the Supervisor, came along just that moment, and an up-patient; when the patient said it was his back that was hurt and he could not help himself, we knew then how to proceed and between us we lifted him on his blanket and got him on the bed until the bearers could put down their stretcher and then help us get the blanket out and make him comfortable. While doing this I noticed that one of his legs was crossed over the other and I straightened it out and saw big purple spots where they had been in contact. Realizing from this that they had been crossed a long time, we discovered that he was totally paralyzed from his waist down. On his card it said “Penetrating wound of spine, not operated on.”

The poor fellow immediately went off into heavy sleep, as they almost always do, they are so glad to stop being jiggled, and I went to report to Capt. Rainey and to get extra operating-room nurses ready. We had taken in 130 patients from that convoy, but every one is immediately examined by the staff men who make their report to Capt. Rainey, who in no time had a list of 15 needing immediate operation.

A steady stream of patients is carried into the X-ray room and from there either directly to the operating room or back to their tents. The plates are developed almost immediately and are examined while wet and stuck up in improvised holders on the windows of the operating room. They all showed foreign bodies and often bubbles, indicating the dreaded infection by the “gas bacillus,” which causes such dreadful gas gangrene. All these cases have to be opened up and the necrotic tissue cleaned out. Then we began in the operating room. Miss Taylor was on duty in the office, so I was free to help in the operating room. The supervisors were each on their side of the hospital, and the nurses were all getting the poor creatures as comfortable as possible. One patient who was too far gone from bloodlessness to stand operation was made as comfortable as possible and the minister sent for; they were all given tea and partially bathed. This was about 4:30 P.M. Then we began in the operating room, taking out foreign bodies and incising and draining. I scrubbed up and helped, not so much because they needed me but because I wanted to be in it. We kept three tables going all the time. The medical students gave ether and even some of the medical men were helping. Out in the little hall there were always three or four patients on stretchers on the floor. My friend, Dr. (Sgt.) Voorsanger, the Rabbi, was in charge of the records and stretcher bearers and worked like a Trojan. We took pieces of shell out of necks, hips, knees, skulls, ankles, shoulders, and out of the spine of my poor paralyzed man. Some of the men took the ether badly and screamed and fought and cursed; some thought they were in the battle and called out to their comrades “There go the 61st, after them, after them.” But most of them took it pretty quietly and just went off to sleep.

About 7 o’clock a message came in from the connecting “Theatre Hut,” a ward at the other end of the hut, where the operating room is, that a man who had had a fearful hemorrhage from the wound in his shoulder that morning was very much worse. It was decided to transfuse him, a complicated job under the very best of circumstances. An up-patient was sought to volunteer to be the donor of the blood, and promised as a reward that he would be sent to England and not back to the Base (how good a promise I do not know, but at least he might get a glimpse of Blighty for a few days if our men send him there, but of course if found fit there, he would be sent back to the front). He was brought, wide-eyed and wondering, into the brilliant, messy operating room filled with strangely garbed and bustling people and put on a table and his arm prepared. Some doctors got busy with him and I went with another doctor to get ready the vein in the patient’s arm. In a few minutes we were ready and the other doctors came to insert the tiny point of their glass tube into the hole in the vein we had ready. A nurse was holding a droplight over the bed, another nurse was holding the arm, a doctor was adjusting the tourniquet so that the vein would show up well, then the two men who were working were bending over the arm, I was handing them instruments, for I was scrubbed up, since everything must be sterile. The patient was just gasping, rapidly growing worse, but the point went in successfully and the blood began to flow into his vein, when all the lights went out and the patient stopped breathing!

I knew where a whole batch of candles had been put for use at the next air raid alarm, so I dashed for them, knowing I could get them more quickly than by sending any one. They were not far away. In about two minutes we had candles stuck on every available spot, and the operating teams who had to stop dead and wait, began to go on. The orderly who was working over a miserable acetylene lamp which is supposed to be all right for emergencies, finally got it going. It is quite all right for emergencies if you have about ten minutes in which to start it. A couple of oil lanterns were brought and given to the patients who were on the floor in the hall to hold, so that they would not be stepped on. The ether bottles were moved as far away from the candles as possible so that we would not have an explosion to add to our difficulties, the doctors came in from working over the dead man, and we all “carried on.” It was now near eight, and Capt. Rainey said when these cases are finished that are on the tables, we will stop for dinner. A couple of nurses who had had their dinner reported just about then and we set them to cleaning instruments and boiling and fixing up. The others of us went up to a belated supper by candle light. The night nurse and orderly for the theatre hut came on duty just in time to help with the gruesome duty to be done there, and supper was kept for the day nurses from there when they should be able to get off.

By 8:30 we were back again refreshed by scrambled eggs and coffee. The operations continued till 3 A.M. I sent one day nurse off about 10, because I knew she would have to have a full day to-day and would need to be at her preparations early. Another nurse and I left at 1:30 after getting some of the night nurses’ supper which I had ordered heavily reënforced. Another nurse left at 3 and one stayed all night. In these last 24 hours there must have been 34 operations. I haven’t the exact list here. I was on duty here in the office at 9:15 A.M. Two nurses did not come on until noon, and the one who was up all night (as well as being up all day yesterday too, though not working, as she was just coming off night duty and had expected to sleep that night) has been sleeping all day. I have just been notified that 160 more are to be brought to us at 6 A.M. to-morrow. That 6 A.M. will mean some time during the morning, for the convoys are almost always several hours after they are scheduled.

One of the night Supervisors has just been telling me that last night, after that patient died, before he had been taken out, he was of course behind the screens, the patient in the next bed said to her, “Sister, is my pal all right? I haven’t heard him speak for some time,” and she had to tell him what had happened. But only this one and that very bad one have died so far.

It is now Sunday afternoon, Sept. 30. We are having a little respite from our busyness and no convoys have been received since yesterday morning when we received 140. The doctors are getting a little well-earned rest, and the nurses, who have not lost so much sleep as the doctors, are catching up with their work on the wards. Operations were going on in the operating room till 1:30 again last night, but to-day there have been none, but there has been much sterilizing, glove mending, and preparing of supplies.

It is a beautiful sunny afternoon, and we would hardly believe that this morning, up to almost noon, it was so cold that everybody was complaining of the cold.

I have just had orders to have my next nurse ready to go up to the front with a surgical team. They will probably go in a couple of days, three men and one woman. It was my turn to go with this team, but a few days ago Col. Fife told me he would not let me go. I am tremendously disappointed because I wanted above all things to go. I want the great interest and excitement of the work, which is hard but thrilling; operating 16 hours on end, then off for 8 hours. These are the hours while the rush is on. Then I wanted to find out how I would react to real danger. I can’t ever remember being frightened, and everybody who goes to a C. C. S. admits that he or she is frightened most of the time, and especially when there are raids, and bombs and shells are dropping about. Of course these are just selfish reasons, but there were others too. I think Miss Taylor could run my affairs perfectly satisfactorily in my absence for a month. But now I must wait. We learn to do that with considerable success in the army. I hate to let the nurse I have appointed for this team go. When the first one went up, we did not know much about what it meant, but since she has come back to us, we know more. Also Phil’s accounts have been enlightening. But it is her turn to go. She is ready, has had all the preparations, and she is most eager to go, so I must not make any change in the schedule, but we shall all miss her and be worried about her until she gets back to us. All the teams have a two days’ ambulance ride to begin with, then when they get there, they have to pretty much rough it. They take their cots and blankets and sleep in bell tents. When they have air-raid signals, they all have to lie down flat on their stomachs wherever they may be. One of our teams had a special hole in a cemetery they had to hop into all the time. Phil’s fellow officers had a little drainage ditch full of mud that was their hiding-place.

I suppose that long before this you have learned that our Unit was not bombed. There seems to have been an official confusion between ours and the Chicago names. Officially, until it can be changed, we are the “No. 12 (St. Louis U. S. A.) General Hospital.” You see Chicago was American Base Hospital No. 12 to begin with, and it is easy to see how the confusion arose. They are 18 General Hospital, B. E. F.

I have been sitting with Phil out in the sunshine beside his tent. He has not had much attention paid him lately, neither from me nor the surgeons, but he has not needed it. He is getting along slowly but well. I saw his dressing yesterday, the first time for ten days, and I could see a great improvement. He is not being allowed to walk more than the few steps to his chair, and I find he has not much desire to. He is anxious to get back to work, but he won’t be able to do much for a long time. He is now finding out how closely his legs are hitched to his back.

I meant to tell you about a curious little incident that happened on our trip to C. I told you we escorted a sick Chinaman up to the British Hospital for Chinese at N. Dr. Veeder had been given the envelope he was to turn over to the authorities of the hospital. When we arrived just outside the hospital compound and stopped, a British sergeant came out to help the patient out of the ambulance and a lot of blue-hospital-garbed Chinesers gathered around to see what was doing. Capt. Veeder and I had gotten out to stretch our legs and were standing by the tail of the ambulance. Dr. Veeder handed the papers to the sergeant, who opened the envelope, read the paper twice with a puzzled look, then burst into roars of laughter. He handed the paper back to Capt. Veeder, and this is what we read: “6 cups, enamel, spitting.” It was an “indent” for some necessary supplies that had been put in the envelope and addressed to the C. O. of the hospital instead of the transfer papers of the poor Chink. Fortunately we did not have to take him on with us, as he was properly tagged himself. It’s a comfort to me to know that even the British Army can sometimes make mistakes.

Next week, not this week, Thursday, I am expecting to go up to Paris to attend the first conference of American Chief Nurses in France. There are about sixteen of us, and Miss Russell, the representative of the American Red Cross Nursing Service, has asked us to meet with her in Paris. It ought to be good fun to get together and compare notes after four months of this life, and we ought to get some really definitely useful suggestions from our getting together.

There are to be various festivities of a heavy and enlightening sort. I think the little change will do me good, as I find I am a bit tired. The London trip is off, since Philip is here with me, and this Paris one is on. I am asking for five days’ leave, but if things here continue to be as heavy as they are now, I shall not stay the five days.

When a page stops abruptly at the bottom of the sheet and there is no proper ending, don’t be worried that something has been taken out by the censor. It often happens that when I have finished a sheet I have to stop and don’t try to wind things up properly, though I usually try to put in a few personal remarks at the end on a separate piece of paper, and answer questions from letters, etc.

Now I must close, so good-by for now.

With loads and loads of love from us both.

Jule.

Rouen, October 9, 1917.

It is so good to be back at work and with my own people again. I could not lay down my responsibilities for that short time I was in Paris, and I could not help thinking about everything here all the time and wondering about everybody, so it wasn’t so very restful, and then when I got back last night, I found it so restful to be back, and all day with all the many things to do I have been peaceful and contented and so very glad to be back. I just wish you could have seen this place last night when I arrived in the pouring rain and pitch blackness. Our train got in about 8. My telegram had not been received and there was no ambulance to meet us and there are never any taxis to be had at the station. The station was full of poilus going out, and as the R. T. O. (Royal Transport Officer) had his hands full, I didn’t have the heart to ask him to telephone for our ambulance for us. I could not. So we decided to try a tram to the quay and there hoped for a taxi. It was still pouring but finally we got on to a tram with all our bags and bundles and at the quay we had the very good luck of catching the only taxi which just tore us out here to the camps. At the gate of our quarters I got out in the mud and waded through the darkness to the door of my own room, and how good the old place looked. To an outsider I imagine it would have looked like the abomination of desolation, the camp and our quarters. For it was so dark, and the rain was pouring down and there were such pools of water everywhere, and only such weak glimmerings of light here and there. As Miss Taylor had not come up from the office, I stopped just long enough to get my rubber boots, rubber hat, and coat. My big great coat was soaked through. Then I paddled happily off to talk things over with Miss Taylor. The hospital had been very, very busy all the time I was away, but everything had gone smoothly. We have over 1200 patients. Then afterwards I went down to see Philip. He was no longer in a tent alone, as the hospital had become so busy it had been necessary to fill up the beds in his tent. As he was on the shell shock line the cases with him were not bad surgical cases. We had a nice talk over in his corner and read the letters that had come for both him and me in my absence.

It has been raining here every day for the past ten days and is very cold. We all are wearing sweaters and all our heavy things. The dampness is so penetrating. The sweater Mother and Bab made arrived safely and is exactly right. I have it on this moment and shall probably not take it off until it falls apart. The bloomers are very nice too and I think will be useful with the serge uniform in rainy weather when I pin my skirt up. We are soon to have gray wash uniforms, which will be much more suitable than these white ones, but they won’t be so very much warmer. We are to have “spencers” or “woollies” to wear under them.

Phil has now been moved into a bell tent which was an office of Dr. Schwab’s. It is a tiny little affair, but looked most cozy last night when I was down to say goodnight to Phil. The rain was pouring down on the canvas with a pleasant sound and coming through the opening on the wood floor, but Phil was as warm and comfortable as can be. He has no electric light, but my candle lantern held on his lap not only makes sufficient light to read by but warms his hands. This cold is no joke. I suppose we shall get used to it, but these first days of it are very trying.

My children at the front are having such wonderful times. They are working terribly hard, sleeping with helmets over their faces and enamel basins on their stomachs, washing in the water they had in their hot-water bags because water is so scarce, operating fourteen hours at a stretch, drinking quantities of tea because there is no coffee and nothing else to drink, wearing men’s ordnance socks under their stockings, trying to keep their feet warm in the frosty operating rooms at night, and both seeing and doing such surgical work as they never in their wildest days dreamed of, but all the time unafraid and unconcerned with the whistling, banging shells exploding around them. Oh, they are fine! One need never tell me that women can’t do as much, stand as much, and be as brave as men. And to-morrow another of my finest goes up, keen as keen to do her bit and only hoping she will be equal to it. It’s Miss Claiborne to-morrow. She is packing her things to-night after a hard day in the operating room here. First, she has a long, difficult trip, then plunges into the maelstrom up there. Five more went for the gas training to-day to be ready to substitute if any of the nurses at the front have to be relieved for sickness or accident. And all these five are just pawing the air for a chance to be sent up, even after knowing all they do about what it is like up there, and in all this cold. And oh, how I want to go myself.

Our meeting in Paris was very pleasant, and worth while too. There were thirteen of us Chief Nurses there. Six are with the B. E. F. and the others with the American Forces. They, the latter, have not had any real work yet. Some of us Britishers could not help laughing when some of the others said they were beginning to be right busy as they had about a hundred patients! The night before I left here we admitted over 200. To-night on several lines one nurse and one orderly are taking care of over 100 patients (not the sickest). We have so many awfully sick patients now. But to go back to the meetings, we had lots of things to discuss. We sent back to Washington suggestions about uniforms and equipment. We decided on what we wanted for distinguishing marks for Chief Nurses, black bands on the white caps and red bands on the cuffs of the uniforms. We had to take up the matter of the Army Efficiency Records, which were open to many interpretations. Then matters of social life, dancing, going out with officers, leaves, a hotel in Paris, etc., were talked over. The question of dancing is a very warm one. The English nurses in military hospitals are not allowed to dance. Some of us think our nurses should be allowed to do it for their good and the good of our own officers. The question was left over unsettled until our next meeting in February. It will now go on according to the ideas of the heads of each Unit.

Mrs. Sharp, the wife of the American Ambassador, entertained us at dinner elaborately. The Lyceum Club gave us a reception, after an open meeting when we heard of the Red Cross baby work, tuberculosis schemes, surgical dressings, division, etc. I saw several very nice people that I know, and had various meals and doings with them, so the time we were not at meetings went very pleasantly. It is surprising how one can enjoy fancy food when one gets it, even though all along you have been thinking that food is very unimportant. I noticed that lobster and sweetbreads and soufflés and oysters, and once, really, corn on the cob, made a pretty big hit with me. But all the same I was so awfully glad to get back to my job. The day to-day has been pretty full of problems and I am a bit tired, so I guess I’d better turn in.

Phil had a nice little walk to-day in his clothes, but he is pretty well used up to-night after a long, mean dressing done in the operating room, from which he walked back alone, which he should not have done, but insisted to his nurses that he wished to do. I am furious that I was not on hand to prevent it. But he was warm and cozy and comfortably reading in bed awhile ago when I went to say good night. This is not much of a letter, but it must go as it is, I think, without waiting for additions.

Thanks so much for the book and for your dear letters. “Carry On” is wonderful, and we love to read such things over here. I’m lending it around now. Bab’s music came to-day; it was dear of her to send it. It has been played already with much success. The violin is such a comfort. I played last evening right straight through the book. I’ve never enjoyed playing so much before.

Oceans of love,

Julie.

Sunday evening, October 14.

Dearest Dad and Mother:—

Miss Taylor and I are in our cozy office waiting for the time for the evening report, which won’t be for about half an hour yet. We have both been to first supper and will now rest ourselves a little for this half hour. She has decided to do a picture puzzle. I wish you all could see how nice our office is. We have the tiniest coal stove that ever existed, and yet it is just the right size for this place. We have been having a fire in it for the past few days, for it has been very cold and raining almost every day. An orderly with a lantern has just come in out of the darkness to tell us that sixty cases are on the way to the hospital now and sixty more are coming at midnight. We are just about full to capacity, but every day we send out some, so every day we can take more in. I have been off duty a couple of hours late this afternoon, the first time off since I got back from Paris last Tuesday.

Phil, who is walking a little with me every day, came up to our mess for tea this afternoon and afterwards I walked with him around the race track. He was pretty glad to get back to bed after this rather lengthy expedition. His wound is very nearly closed. It has done remarkably well. After I left him being put to bed by the nice convalescent patient who looks after him, I went down to the evening service in the Y. M. C. A. hut, the Sunday evening Episcopal service that comes just before the Non-conformist service.

Dean Davis conducted the service, and how I wished that some of his St. Louis parishioners could have seen him. His audience in that rough hut was about 200 convalescent patients in their blue suits, with heads or arms bandaged, or coughing, coughing the way so many of our poor gassed men cough. There were a few English Sisters and V. A. D.’s there, but I was the only American, this evening. I wish you could hear these men sing. There is nothing like the singing that I’ve heard the Tommies do. Their deep voices singing in unison, and with great earnestness such words as “Plenteous grace with thee is found, Grace to cleanse from every sin, Let the healing streams abound, Make and keep me pure within,” can never be forgotten. The Dean spoke briefly, but right out from the shoulder to them from that chapter in the letter to the Ephesians about, “Lie not, for ye are members one of another, and let him that stole, steal no more but rather let him work, that he may have wherewith to give to him that hath need,” etc. There was more about tenderness, and growing in grace.

Speaking of tenderness, I have never in all my life seen such tenderness as these men show to each other. If you could see, as we so often see, men with horrible leg injuries reaching way over to feed the man in the bed next to them, who may have arm injuries and be helpless. And always the up-patients are so good to the bedridden ones. Our hospital simply could not run without the help of the patients themselves. They fetch and carry and bathe and scrub and hold legs and arms for dressings, and joke and jolly each other along till it would break your heart, for they themselves are sick men. For our up-patients here have been mighty sick or they would have been sent on to England, unless they are some of the few that are going back to the Convalescent Camp and from there back into the lines. So often, too, we see a man reach way over from his bed to give his neighbor a puff at his cigarette.

I have felt so rich recently, for I got such a wonderful lot of letters, all in one batch. How I did enjoy them. All the family ones I took right down to read with Phil in his little tent. We had a regular orgy.

It’s now Friday, the 18th, and such a lovely day as it has been, clear and sunny and cold. I had a little walk with Ruth just after lunch and it reminded us of November days at home, except for what we saw. For all we saw was camps, camps, camps and soldiers of every sort. We did not have time to go beyond the area of camps, but off in the distance we could see the lovely ridges that make the edge of this little basin that Rouen is in. When we came back, I walked a few minutes with Phil. It takes a long time for his strength to come back, poor boy. He is awfully good and patient and as little trouble as a person could be. I think he is a little depressed to-day by his feeling of mimsiness, and the being out of things. He finds it harder to be up a little every day, for, as he says, when he is dressed he looks like every one else, and then he can’t do like them at all. When he was in bed all the time, he did not mind his incapacitation so much. Now is the time that he needs petting and amusing and fussing over. His injury was no little thing and he is being a marvel of goodness about it all, but it is beastly hard for him, to have to hang around and wait to get strong. After a little while I am going to see what can be done about convalescence in some better place. It is hard to know whether a convalescent home for officers in the south of France, alone without his friends and me, would do him more good than these plain doings and all of us. When he can get about a bit more, he will find it more interesting; for then I can go down town to meals with him and take walks, and he can do those things with other people too. He has had a hard experience, but it is doing big things for him, I can see that plainly. I am so glad he is here with me. I can never be grateful enough.

Our great busyness has continued all week though we have not been quite full to the limit. On Monday last, Major Murphy and his team, and Capt. Post and his team, returned from their Clearing Stations. Each team had one nurse. I wish so much you could know what those people have been doing and going through. You really would hardly believe their tales. They are all absolutely tired out. Major Murphy seems to be in the best condition, but he said he was dreadfully tired. The nurses are almost all in. We made them stay in bed 36 hours and have started them off on the easiest places we could find for them. But it will take a good many weeks, I am afraid, before they will sleep properly and not dream about stopping hemorrhages, and stop smelling the smells they smelled up there. What with the steam, the ether, and the filthy clothes of the men, which they had to cut off before they could begin to start, the odor in the operating room was so terrible that it was all that any of them could do to keep from being sick. One of my nurses was sick at her stomach all night long the first night she worked there, and just ran in and out all night, but kept right on with her work, though she says that if she lives to be a hundred and fifty years old, she will never forget that night. One doctor and one nurse work at each table and you can imagine what surgical work the nurse has to do, no mere handing of instruments and sponges, but sewing and tying up and putting in drains while the doctor takes the next piece of shell out of another place. Then after fourteen hours of this, with freezing feet, to a meal of tea and bread and jam, and off to rest if you can in a wet bell tent in a damp bed without sheets, after a wash with a cupful of water.

The trip down from the front was very hard. They all came by train this time. One team after a long train trip arrived at a fair-sized coast town at 2 P.M. The doctor tried to get a room at the hotel for the nurse, who was dead with cold and fatigue, but all the rooms had been taken by officers going through on their way to posts. Their train was to go out at one A.M., so the doctor only wanted the room for the evening for this nurse. Finally the proprietor said he would let the nurse have the room of an officer who had gone out for the evening but he was expected in at twelve. But that seemed fine, so the nurse had a little rest in this man’s room, but at twelve was called, for the officer had come back and was waiting outside the door. The rest of the night she sat up in a freezing French railway carriage, the only woman with her doctor, her two orderlies, and two Tommies. The Tommies and the orderlies piled up on each other and went sound to sleep, but she and the doctor waggled and jolted through the miserable, damp, cold night. They reached here at one o’clock the next afternoon, and really had come so few miles as the crow flies. How I wished for a warm bathroom and a quiet cozy sleeping place for these weary, dirty, splendid women of mine. But willing, eager hands brought pitchers of hot water and put hot-water bags in little beds that are clean if small, and brought trays of food, and now after two days both of the nurses are looking a little less green and black around the eyes. And how glad and grateful we are to have them back. There are two more away, and another is probably to go soon, and she is none the less eager after hearing the tales of the others. Major Murphy says the experience is, of course, very wonderful, but it is brutal. He means brutal on the teams. But English men and women have been doing this for months and months. This was a very big push that these two teams have been through. It is a marvel to me that human beings can stand it all.

October 30, 1917.

Dearest Dad and Mother:—

It is quite a long time since I last wrote anything more than just short handwritten notes. It was the 14th that my last letter was dated, I find. Since that time we have been pretty hard at work. We had very little let-up at all for about six weeks. Our numbers have kept over the thousand mark all along, which means for us very little time for play.

I guess I will tell you about to-day which was rather typical. It was bright and shiny when I went over to the Mess hall for breakfast. I can tell you it is good preparation for an Arctic exploration expedition to be living as we are. I sleep every night in woolen stockings and knitted bed socks, woolen pajamas, that lovely light blue sweater mother made for me, my Jaeger sleeping bag, which has two layers over and one under, and then three folds of blanket on top of all that, topped off by my heavy bathrobe, all this on me, the regular old hotbox that I always used to be. Well, after a nice warm night in all that, with a hot-water bag inside, it is not the nicest thing in the world to get up into an utterly unheated room. The water from my hot-water bag makes very comfortable bathing water (for all the bathing that I do then). But a few vigorous arm exercises start up my blood enough to make me fairly comfortable by the time I have on all my woollies. Over in the Mess hut there are two nice little coal stoves, which make the place very cheerful. There is a big coal stove in all our sleeping huts, but none of the heat from the one in my hut can get as far as my end room. I hope to get some kind of an oil stove that will heat things up a bit. I now have a little single-burner coal-oil lamp on which I can heat a small kettle of water, but it doesn’t do anything in the way of heating.

By the time we had finished breakfast (bread and butter, coffee, scrambled eggs, and marmalade this morning) it was pouring, so we all ran for our raincoats and hats, and then the six of us, Miss Taylor and I and the two day and two night supervisors, walked down to my office in the grand stand. There the batman had already started my tiny stove and a cheerful little heat was beginning to make itself felt. It takes about half an hour or more to read about the admissions, discharges, operations, the condition of all the “S. I.’s” (Seriously Ill) and “D. I.’s” (Dangerously Ill), and to hear that there did not seem to be enough blankets for the outgoing convoy, many of whom were stretcher patients, that there is difficulty about coal for some of the tents at night, about this or that nurse’s good work when so and so had such a terrific hemorrhage, and that an incoming convoy is just being unloaded, apparently very badly wounded cases, but no report on them as yet. Then the day supervisors go off to their lines to see about the new admissions, see if the head nurses have everything they need, tell this head nurse to send one of her assistants, who has such bad chilblains on her hands that she can’t do the surgical dressings that she has been doing, to report to a head nurse on one of the medical lines, where she won’t have to be doing quite so many wet things, etc. At nine Capt. Rainey, the acting head of the surgical side, comes for the written report that the Night Surgical Supervisor has made out for him of the most important cases. Then Major Fischel comes to ask about sick nurses. We had told one nurse, who had reported a sore throat, to be here at nine, and she was and was examined and advised. We had heard of another nurse who had lost her voice, so she was sent for. Miss Taylor got her figures of number of nurses on duty, number of yesterday’s operations, etc., ready and took that and our big Night Report to the C. O.’s office and came back to check up her list of the new S. I.’s and D. I.’s, to all of whose families it is her job to write a personal letter. One day she wrote as many as 25 of these letters. She had been out for “last hours” yesterday, so there were a number for her to add to her list. The official telegram is sent to all families, but it is one of the regular jobs of this office to do all the personal corresponding with families. Miss Taylor has learned to use a typewriter since she has been over here and can write very fast on it. She does not like to have the little secretary write these letters, for she often sends messages from the boys to their families and likes to do them all herself. I begin by writing my regular army form about nurses off duty. Then I made out several formal communications to the Colonel, about the need of a sink in the Nurses’ Mess, the need of a special new hut for sitting-room purposes for my 104 women. We now have just the 12 feet at the end of the Mess Hall which is quite inadequate. All the other hospitals in this vicinity have special sitting-rooms, and I am going to keep at the R. E.’s (Royal Engineers) until they give us one.

At 9:30 the nurses and V. A. D.’s begin to come up from the lines for Red Cross supplies, which are handled through this office and a little supply room we have next door. Pajamas, socks, mittens, old linen for handkerchiefs for the patients, oilcloth, treasure bags, writing paper, gramophone needles and records, razors, shaving soap, tobacco, record books, magazines, cologne for rubbing backs, chewing-gum, back rests, picture puzzles, cards, draughts, pipes, toasting forks, metal polish, brad boards, sweets, irrigator cans, etc. All these things are actually handled by us, not all the time, but some at one time and some at another. The British Red Cross sends us these supplies on our requisition every week. This morning we had very little to give out, for our supplies for this week had not come. We keep store only from 9:30 to 10:30, but this morning there were a number of other things than supplies that various nurses wanted to see me about. A V. A. D. wanted to see me about special leave to England because her aunt is dying. Another V. A. D., who knows better and should have reported at 9 A.M., came to tell us of another bad boil on her arm and had to be sent to the operating room and Capt. Rainey looked up. Several wanted to know if they could go to a special concert to be given in a neighboring camp to-night. The general invitation to all had come, but had not been posted, or these need not have asked for permission. Then it was time for the mail, which was huge this morning, and always has to be sorted in this office, because no one else knows just what to do with a number of letters each day that have to be specially looked after. This of course is just nurses’ mail. We still get a lot of mail for the English Sisters who were here before us. We often get many letters intended for other American Units. I have the lists of nurses of all of the Units that are with the B. E. F. and can readily send on straying letters. We have nurses away at C. C. S. and some in the Contagious Hospital and we must see to their forwarding. The mail this morning took a long time. As soon as it is sorted it is sent up to the Mess, where the nurses will get it at lunch time. My own six or seven personal letters I could not look at till near one.

The Red Cross Supplies came along about 11:50 and had to be put away. Miss Taylor had gone down to the lines to see the supervisors, see how we needed to man the operating room for the afternoon, etc. Simone, the little secretary, had been helping all morning with supplies, letters, etc., and very quickly we got the things put away. Then a sergeant from the O. C.’s office came to ask about a missing package of “knickers” which should have arrived from London. He had found it and had that too dumped in my office. As it contained some instruments that I wanted right away, I wanted it unpacked here. Then Phil came along to share some mail with us, but I told him he would have to come back later, for it was just time for the O. C. to come for this morning’s interview, so just as he and Ruth C., who had also dropped by to tell me about her wonderful birthday mail, cleared out, along came Major Murphy. There were several matters to take up with him, such as the possible removal of a bed or two from several too-crowded tents, the matter of the insufficient blankets, a little misunderstanding that some of our American boys had had with the British Y. M. C. A. people, about which the latter had come to see me yesterday afternoon. When the Major left, I had to see about some notices for the nurses that I wanted them to read at their lunch. Miss Taylor came back, Simone went off for her lunch, and we sat a moment or two and looked at the headlines of the two-sheet Daily Mail and Paris N. Y. Herald and read our home letters.

At one we went up in a pouring rain to our lunch. We had baked beans, cold bully beef, which is canned corn beef and not half bad, lettuce salad, tea, bread and butter, and cheese, and stewed prunes. Miss Taylor was to be off from 1:30 to 4:30 to go down town to do some errands, so I came on back to the office and started some accounts, writing of checks, etc. They were to have a big afternoon in the operating room, but all was working out smoothly. For the next two hours I worked steadily at my desk, acknowledging supplies, doing accounts, and writing business letters. Simone was doing all sorts of routine things for us on her typewriter. She is very useful and saves many steps as well as many minutes. Miss Taylor and I have been trying to be very punctilious about going off duty these days. She has been after me most severely, and the only way to keep her quiet is to do as she says, so off I go every day, alternating her.

Nov. 1, 1917.

I had to stop on my account of day before yesterday before I had finished the day. At five I went off in the rain with the Ford with one of the nurses I like very much—to bring some mail and things to our isolated nurses in the Contagious Hospital up the road. (They are diphtheria carriers—three of them.) On the way up the road we met an ambulance convoy bringing in wounded men. There must have been over a hundred of them from the long line of ambulances. And passing them, marching out, were companies of men walking along in the mud and wet and thinking of course that that was the way many, many of these would be coming back, as those mangled things were in the ambulances. One can’t get used to these sights. It chokes me every time I see the men march away. We can always tell when they are going to the front, for on top of all that they carry on their backs is a little white bag—containing limited rations.

After we had left our things at No. 25, we went on down town, did our errands, left a gramophone to be repaired for one of the wards—then went into the Cathedral for the evening service at 6. It is most wonderful, for only a few low lights are lighted, and the shadowy arches, the several hundred kneeling black figures, the clear tenor voice of the priest, who sings most of the service, the hundred responses, make it all seem like something unreal—till one realizes that the unreal part is that it seems so strange and unusual to us, for there have been going on just such services as that in that Cathedral since before America was discovered! Many of us go there often to the six o’clock services, the only trouble is that one gets frozen stiff after a few minutes. After leaving the Cathedral we wandered about the little narrow, wet streets, looking into windows,—clattering along in our nailed boots, so that we sound like soldiers (but our feet are dry, though the streets are very wet). Then came a nice supper of hot, thick soup, steak, crisp fried potatoes and a salad,—then back to the camp in time to hear the evening report and see the night supervisors before they went on duty. That evening I wrote in the office.

To-day is Nov. 1st, and Phil’s birthday. I can imagine how you all are thinking about him. I am going to play somewhere with him this afternoon and do whatever he wants to do. Yesterday I could hardly speak to him at all, I was so busy all day. At 5.30 I went with him for three fourths of an hour to hear a lecture in the Y. M. C. A. tent—It was by that fine Dr. Kelman—the Edinburgh Presbyterian minister, who has been talking in the U. S. He spoke on “Why America Is in the War”—spoke most wonderfully—to the British the evening before when I was in town, and Phil could not go because he wanted to attend a medical meeting here—But to-night we will have dinner down town.

Loads and loads of love,

Julia.

Nov. 2, 1917.

Dearest Mother:—

You are all so good about writing—I cannot thank you enough and if only there were more free hours I’d write everybody, but I just can’t.

Our hospital again is almost full to capacity, and such badly hurt men,—amputations, two or three of them, every day out of sixteen or seventeen operations every afternoon. Day before yesterday they had a man on the operating table before they decided which of his legs they had better take off! Such a price as is being paid for the new world—but it is not too big to make the new world and liberty and peace and brotherhood and democracy mean something. And how small a share we are having in that price and how we’d give more if we could. I wish E. wouldn’t think that anything we are doing is worthy of admiration—it isn’t—we are doing so little. We love being here and would not leave our jobs for anything that could be offered us. I am writing in bed; it is very late but I don’t feel like sleeping yet. It is very comfortable here in my little bed with my good light hanging beside me. The light is such a comfort. I have bought an oil stove to try and heat this room. I think it will make things more comfortable.

Please tell B. the music she sent me was dandy—the Kreisler piece is a beauty. I cannot play the double stops well yet, but I’ll do better with them after a bit. It’s a stunning thing and stays in the mind. One of our nurses made a hit at a concert for the privates singing “Over There,” which was new to us all here. We’d like to have all the patriotic new things you can send like “Goodby Broadway, Hello France”—we haven’t that yet. Tell B. I love the College news and want to know all she is doing.

Now I guess I’d better try to sleep a bit. I’ve had a lovely time talking to you. God keep you all, my dear ones.

Julia.

November 16, 1917.

It has been a pretty long time since I last wrote a regular letter. It has not been because we were so terribly busy, for in the last ten days our census has come down a little and things stopped being quite as strenuous as they had been since the first of October. Sometimes, however, I find it hard to write and I put it off, thinking that I’ll be feeling more like doing it the next day. I usually love to write. These last few days, however, we have been most busy, for on the 13th at noon we had notice that our long-expected 31 nurses would arrive that afternoon. Capt. Johnston and I went down to meet them, leaving the people here scurrying around trying to get enough food to feed all those extra people and to work out the plans we made long ago, as to how we would house them until the V. A. D.’s were taken away.

The next day most of the V. A. D.’s were taken away to the different hospitals in this neighborhood, and to-day we are beginning to settle down. The details of the records that are necessary, both for the outgoing people as well as for the new-comers, have been very numerous and complicated, but Miss Taylor and I and the little stenographer have put things through in fairly rapid shape. I have yet many payrolls and traveling expense vouchers and pay allotments and lists galore to attend to, but the most immediate and important ones are finished.

We have started the new ladies all off on the wards and they seem very much interested and thrilled and glad to be here. Since it is almost three months since they left St. Louis, they are mighty glad to arrive somewhere and get started to work. Poor things, they have to go through the adjusting that we all had. They never will get used to some things, such as the awful wounds, the appalling cheeriness of the men, and the sight of the troops marching off to the front.

There is a perfect hubbub outside now, for the new enlisted men who arrived to-day with the officers are celebrating with a couple of drums. I have been so occupied all day I have not had a chance to see the new officers, but I have seen Dr. Thomas for half a second. So E. may know that her package will doubtless be forthcoming pretty soon.

One of my children has just been in here. A little while ago she received a cable that her father is not expected to live, which she can’t help interpreting to mean that he is dead, as she does not think her family would have cabled otherwise. She is a night nurse and is, of course, going right on with her work to-night. She is the first of our group to whom a big sorrow has come. Of course, we all know they must come, but when they do, we feel so far away.

I have been making many speeches this week. Just a little while ago I had a long talk with all my American nurses; then of course I had to have a farewell talk with the V. A. D.’s; and then all the poor new nurses had to have me tell them, not rules and regulations, for they can read those on the bulletin board, but a little about the way we all feel after six months and some of the processes we have been through, which they are pretty sure to have to go through too. It is very curious with a group of people such as I have here, how they light up and are moved when they are interpreted to themselves. It is the greatest delight to me to try to make them see themselves and what they are doing, in large terms. I try to fit the daily trials and depressions and difficulties, and the way they take them, into their right place in their sense of patriotism. I tell them how they felt when they were at the wonderful service at the Cathedral at home, and at places where the bands played and the flags waved, as in London, and such places, and then I try to show them how their daily work can be a part of such feelings. And when I told them of the change that had come over most of us in the six months we have been here, I surprised them so much. I told them we had come glad to pay that part of the price that was convenient. We had been quite willing to give say six months’ service, and give up our big pay for a while, and to stay as long as our future plans were not interfered with, and as long as our health did not suffer, and so long as it really was not a hardship to any one. But I had seen the change coming to us all, that a bigger price than that was expected of us. I told them how proud I was to see them all coming to the conclusion that no price would be too big to pay for what we were working for. I told them of the peace that I knew had come to them because individually they had decided that their future plans did not count, their hopes deferred were of no importance, or their health, so long as their efficiency was not impaired, or their families, or their salaries, or their whole lives.

The change has really come. It has been most noticeable. I felt it in myself of course, and no longer am restless and questioning. And the questions of so many that came to me for the first few months about the possible length of time, etc., have entirely ceased. About two weeks ago I had to tell two nurses, for whom I had applied for discharge after six months, that it was refused. One was to go home to be married and the other to join her husband whom she married one hour before we left St. Louis. Both were so splendid about the matter, and acted as though this was the decision that they themselves would have made; I was most impressed. And that is the spirit of the whole group. Nurses say all the time, “I couldn’t be hired to go home now, knowing what I know now.” Oh, they are so fine. The new group seem so surprised to find us so happy. They also seem much surprised to find us so well off for food and general conditions. We all look more husky and rosy-cheeked and fat than they do.

I am going to send this much along with Phil’s, as there is no telling when I can continue. The Gerard book and “The Chosen People” we are glad to have. Thank you so much.

With loads and loads of love,

Julia.

Nov. 25, 1917.

We had our first military funeral on the 23d, for our little boy Sergeant who died of pneumonia. It was most impressive. At two o’clock all who could be spared from the wards assembled in front of the grand stand. The procession started there, first the group of sergeants who were honorary pallbearers, then all the Officers, then American enlisted men, then British enlisted men, then about fifty blue-coated nurses. We marched in twos down to the mortuary and lined up along the road; then the quaint French hearse, driven by a man in a three-cornered hat, was driven through the long line of his friends. His brother, a little private from the Canadian Army, accompanied by one of our men, walked just behind, and the six active pallbearers, his best friends, walked on the two sides. Then we all fell in and marched the mile through the mud to the military cemetery. It is just a big field, nearly filled with small wooden crosses, each bearing the name of a soldier. Ours was the first American laid there. The two padres were waiting for us in their surplices, the dearly loved British clergyman, Dr. Page, and our new young American, Mr. Taylor, who came to relieve Dean Davis. This special place has been set apart for Americans.

It is a lovely, quiet place outside the wall of an old French burying-place. Far off to the West were the blue, blue hills that are on the other side of Rouen, and nearer a long double row of bare, black poplars. And near were the rows and rows of others who had given their all and gone on before. One could almost feel a welcoming stir as we laid our first American among them. A little group of French people had gathered to see what had brought so large a cortège to a place where there are daily interments and where every day the firing squad gives the last salute for the brave boys from our hospitals. The beautiful words of the service had new meaning to them. Then the salute from the firing squad, and “Taps” from the bugler. While the officers and most of the nurses marched away, his Masonic “brothers,” led by our Rabbi, held their symbolic ceremony. There were many flowers, weird French wreaths, which were hung all over the outside of the hearse when it left the mortuary. If only Evart’s mother could have been here, it would have comforted her to feel the love and respect of all his friends and to see the quiet, lovely place where he is laid to rest.

We know that both the American groups have been most fortunate to have had no deaths before this. In the natural course of events they are bound to come, and to have our first not till after six months have passed since we left home, was not to be expected. We will have others, but oh, if I could only bring all my nurses back home safe to their families! Of course, it can’t be, some will have to be sent back because of ill health; there is a question about the lungs of one now, and some we shall have to leave behind. It is a fearful thing to have the responsibility of one hundred women so far away from home. Sometimes it all seems so much, too much for me,—their health, their happiness, their reputation and morals, their general safety and welfare. I try to remember that the responsibility is not all mine. There are strong men helping me, but they only have the important things to attend to about them; I have the accumulation of all the little things as well.

All our recently received patients have been so tremendously elated and excited about the advances made towards Cambrai. It has been wonderful to see their enthusiasm. We have been quite busy taking care of the poor things, 71 operations in 48 hours, a couple of days ago. It has been raining again, and such a wind and rain storm as we had all last night and this morning, but this afternoon it cleared up beautifully and is very cold.

A few days ago an interesting little incident occurred. There was a knock at my office door. When I opened it, there was a patient in his clumsy blue suit, steadying himself against the wall. “Can you tell me where I can find the Matron?” he said. “Yes, right here,” I answered. “I am the Matron. What can I do for you?” He was so wobbly he almost had to lean up against the wall. “Somebody told me,” he said, “that you had a violin. I am a professional violinist and I have not touched a violin for five months, and to-day I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I got up out of bed to come and find you.” I made him come in and sit down. As it happened I had a new violin and bow, which had been bought for our embryo orchestra, here in my office. The violin was not tuned up, but that didn’t matter. The man had it in shape in no time and then he began to play, and how he could play! We let him take the violin down to his tent, and later I sent him some of my music. He was a shell shock, and all the evening and the next few days until he was sent to England he played to wrapt audiences of fellow patients. In our wards we have lots of kinds of music, from gramophones to comb-and-tissue-paper bands. The men are keen about anything that makes a tune. A lot of harmonicas would be a great blessing.

We had such a wonderful lot of letters this morning. I got 12 and Phil 9. I had four from Mother—October 29, November 1, and November 8, and I forget the other date, as Phil has it with him. We had a wonderful time reading each other’s mail. I could not finish until way into the afternoon, I had so many things to do. Letters do make such a difference. I was so glad all these came this A.M., for it is very cold and we admitted 250 patients at noon, but letters will counteract most anything. Somebody wrote in the only copy of the Survey I have seen since I left home that the two things that did troops the most good were letters and singing, and it is true about nurses too. Speaking of singing, can you send me some copies of the new Army and Navy Song Book—say 2 or 3 dozen, if they are not too expensive, or more if possible? I have 100 women, but of course we never can all get together at one time. The October 6th Survey mentioned that book as excellent. I’ll answer the letters soon. They were wonderful and full of juicy bits. You are all so very, very dear to write so much and your letters make such a difference.

Phil has his “Board” to-morrow and will soon know what is to happen to him.