Days were filled with reminders of war's futility

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Thursday, September 24, 1998

Days were filled with reminders of war's futility

By CAROL SMITH
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Witness to War
The lighter moments helped them keep their fear in check. They relocated the tent hospitals frequently, often on 24 hours notice, so they could go where casualties were heaviest. They would pack 12 nurses to an ambulance and space their vehicles miles apart, so planes wouldn't detect their moves.

"The devastation along our route was unbelievable," she wrote. "Houses just a pile of rubble, dead cows in the fields, bloated bodies of horses along the muddy roads where rats were scurrying out of the way."

Although they were several miles from the front, they were still at risk.

"We soon learned the sound of a German Fokker plane," she wrote. "It didn't have the same droning sound of the Allied ones and we hardly waited for the sound of the alarm to take cover. . . . It seemed cruel to leave the bed patients, but (it was) reasonable that someone should be left to take care of them in case the hospital was bombed."

On the troop ship over, she had written her parents: ". . . Now mother, imagine us having such good times and everyone at home worrying their heads off about us. You know, Uncle Sam is pretty clever and I am sure I have never been safer in my life."

Four months later, any romantic illusions she'd harbored about the war had disappeared, replaced by an appreciation for the paradox and futility of battle.

"No one at home has the faintest idea how they are getting killed (here)," she wrote home. ". . . I'm sure no one realizes the suffering of the boys. It's their spirit that affects me. I can watch them amputate a leg and dress a wound that is open from the hip down, but when a boy tells you he is sorry he lost (his leg) because it puts him out and he can't go back, well I have to walk away."

Daily, the medical teams fixed up men to be shot to pieces again. At the same time, in the same tents, they worked to save enemy prisoners -- the same men Allied soldiers were trying desperately to kill.

"At the end of my ward there were several wounded German prisoners, young towheaded, blue-eyed boys," she wrote. "A guard stood over them with a .45. Having American and German patients together brought home the fact of how stupid any war is."

There were other absurdities.

"In 1918, blacks and whites were kept separate even when sick in the hospital," she wrote in her memoir. "White orderlies were supposed to give the personal care to the men, but when one refused to give an enema to a black man, I was so angry I put up a screen and took care of the patient myself. He was very grateful and that was the only time I was ever thanked for giving an enema."

The woman who had signed her early letters home "From your soldier girl," and gaily referred to being "in the Army now," had hardened into a pragmatic realist and passionate pacifist. She would become a lifelong believer in equal rights.

Next: Women who went to war came home to vast changes

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