Innocent illusions about war quickly dashed

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Thursday, September 24, 1998

Innocent illusions about war quickly dashed

By CAROL SMITH
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Witness to War
Like the rest of the country, my grandmother entered the war with high spirits and a certain innocence.

"Do you know I have never had such a good time in my life as I have had this last two weeks," she wrote from training camp on March 4, 1918. "One thing I have learned already -- and had to if I was to live at all -- that is to dance. Can you imagine fox-trotting and waltzing with majors and captains?"

With their mobile hospital unit on the move, Laura Frost, second from right, and the other nurses found a dining spot on the ground.

She was soon swept up in her first real romance -- a love affair with a dashing first lieutenant. Pete Herzog wooed her with dinners, dancing and shows -- heady experiences for a tomboy whose social life had centered mostly on the annual clambake at her tiny church or the occasional ride in a horse-drawn sleigh.

In letters home, she referred often to her lieutenant. He taught her military maneuvers and stood at attention as she marched by in her first parade. Before they left for Europe, he gave her a diamond service pin as a pledge of love, and she promised to write him through the war.

Though the romance thrilled her, she never lost sight of her mission.

Assigned to the psychiatric ward at training camp, she encountered a shellshocked patient sent home from battle: "The first day I went into the ward after lunch, I found everyone cringing into corners or under their beds. A young fellow was brandishing a straight razor. I didn't know what was happening but went right up to him and yelled: 'Give me that!' He smiled and handed me the open razor."

The danger of battle, however, still felt a long way off, and in some ways the war seemed like a game.

"I am so happy to think that we are at last on the way," she wrote from training camp.

". . . We'll soon have the Huns on the run and be home in no time."

But there were signs that fantasies of war were about to end.

One day a friend asked her to go horseback riding. She accepted, but at the last minute changed her plans and asked a fellow nurse to take her place.

"She was so pleased to think that she was going for a ride, and in five minutes she was thrown and died three hours later," my grandmother wrote home.

Sobered by the death, the nurses marched behind her hearse in a military funeral. "I never realized what taps meant before, until they sounded for her at the station," she wrote. "None of us have very much pep since it happened."

On June 17, 1918, the base hospital moved by train from Georgia to New York to prepare for the trip to France.

The timing meant the nurses would get to march 60 blocks in New York City's Fourth of July parade. It would be one of the first times American military women had ever marched alongside men. It would also provide her first glimpse of how the rest of the country viewed women in the Army.

On July 6, 1918, she wrote: "It really was a wonderful parade. . . . They didn't say much about the nurses in it. We thought we were the whole show. They just said 400 (women) marched and there were at least 1,400. It is funny, because a paper usually exaggerates so much."

It made her feel important to march then, she said during my recent visit. The irony is not lost on her, even all these years later.

When she came home after the war, people would barely notice.

Next: 'Over there,' reality set in amidst the mud and blood

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