Working amidst shattered bodies and shattered minds

Nothing in their training had prepared them for the kind of nursing they would have to do.

"Margaret and I became very fond of one of our patients and kept him several days, trying to get him to talk," she wrote. "He was only about 18 years old and had a bullet hole right in the middle of his forehead. All he could say was 'glass,' but he wasn't paralyzed.

"When he wanted something, we would keep asking him until we hit the right thing and he would nod his head. One day Margaret sang 'Over There' to him, and he followed along saying all the words. That was a great day for us. When he was evacuated, we went to the train with him and sat by his litter until the train pulled out."

"He says, 'Good night' for everything he wants," she wrote. "They were singing to him yesterday and he joined in and said 'long, long trail' quite plainly. I couldn't stay to hear any more, for it is going to be a long, long trail for him. We had quite a time tonight trying to find out what he wanted and would you believe it was a cigarette?"

Shattered brains, bullet holes and severed limbs weren't the only wounds they saw. The use of poisonous gases -- mustard gas, chlorine, phosgene and other toxic aerosols -- increased toward the war's end.

"The Germans were getting desperate now and used more and more mustard gas," she wrote. "Our casualties were 20 and 30 percent gassed. It made huge blisters on them and they suffered painfully. Even though they were cleaned, I sometimes got a whiff of the miserable stuff."

For nurses, flu was even more deadly. More than 400 died in the line of duty, most from Spanish influenza, a virulent strain that swept the world in 1918 and 1919, killing 21 million.

My grandmother fell sick with the flu immediately after the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, one of the war's decisive battles.

She spent several days in a coma. "I came to one day and found myself in a regular hospital bed in a little tent all by myself," she wrote. "I hadn't seen a bed before, as all our patients were put on army cots when they came in and that's what we slept on, too. The head nurse took care of me and I'm sure she saved my life."

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