WWI left its enduring mark

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Thursday, September 24, 1998

WWI left its enduring mark

By CAROL SMITH
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Witness to War

"Do I look bad?" the soldier pleads.
Half his face is gone.
Laura Frost hurriedly dresses the raw shreds that remain. There are still men moaning on gurneys in the rain outside the operating tent.
Her hands shake from the chilling damp that seeps through the canvas walls. Her thin leather boots are coated with mud. Blood is smeared across her nurse's uniform.
She tries to block out the sound of limbs dropping into enamel pails as surgeons saw through mangled flesh and bones.
For a moment she presses her hand against her eyes. Sometimes the men in their misery make her cry.

Eighty years later her hand still goes to her eyes when she recalls that scene.

Laura Frost Smith's peaceful surroundings at a California retirement center give no hint of the horrors she saw in World War I.
Barry Gutierrez

At 105, Laura Frost Smith travels easily in her mind to 1918 and the Western Front, a war zone that separated her from her youth.

Today she is the oldest known living American veteran of World War I, a war that marked the first time women officially served in the U.S. military.

She is also my grandmother.

I had mixed emotions on learning of this latest milestone in my grandmother's life.

Her other accomplishments are more dear to me -- the lemon cake she baked when I was a child, the parade of hand-knit socks and mittens for Christmas, her skilled watercolors, prized garden and the stories she told of growing up on a farm near Boston.

The war was almost never mentioned.

Her military service was such a small sliver of her life. Like a single tree ring lost in the dense coil that holds a life together, it hardly seemed significant as I was growing up.

I could barely remember the contours of the war drawn in history classes, let alone picture my grandmother serving at five of its bloodiest fronts. To me they were just names printed on tiny brass bars and clasped to the ribbon of the Victory Medal in a glass box on her wall.

Almost all the women who served in the Great War are gone now. Ignored when they came home and forgotten by subsequent generations, most never had a chance to tell their stories.

So I went in search of this part of my grandmother's life. I visited her at the care center in Los Gatos, Calif., where she lives now. For three days we sat together in the sun beside a lemon tree, while I looked for pathways through her memory that would take me with her to that place and time.

She is still beautiful, and though her eyesight and hearing are failing, there are still flashes of her keen mind and wicked sense of humor. She remembers.

But that wasn't where I found the pieces I was looking for.

I went back, instead, to the letters she sent home from the war, and to a family memoir she wrote in her 90s.

There, in her own words, I found a young woman I never knew, a woman who went off to see the world, and in the process helped change it.

Her year at war not only shaped her life in ways I had never understood, it had also helped shape mine.

Next: A woman's place was not on the battlefield

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