FINDING THEMSELVES (continued 3)

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.

Lovingly, Julia.

December 8, 1917.

Dearest Dad and Mother:—

I wonder if this will reach you before Christmas, if so it brings you all my love. It is just beastly not being able to send presents, but we found so few things that were not dutiable and worth the trouble you’d have to take, so hardly any one in the Unit is sending gifts. I have been writing notes and letters as much as I could, but I have not sent half on my list, for I have been feeling quite badly the past week and for the past three days have been in bed. It’s just an inflammation or infection in my trachea,—not really bronchitis but quite an acute affair which has made me very sick. I have been having wonderful care here in my own room and people are just spoiling me. Steam and benzoin inhalations have done me the most good. Major Fischel and Lieut. Praetz, the throat specialist, have been seeing me every day and I am about to be well, and hope to be up to-morrow. It began with terrific hoarseness and the trouble has stayed below my throat, and also there has been a bad cold in my head,—but with chills and a little fever; it might have been much worse if I had not had such good care. It has been very cold and damp and many of my poor children have had very bad colds and coughs. I was awfully embarrassed to have to go and do likewise. My cough is much better, and I really don’t feel as sick to-day as I did yesterday and before.

Ruth has been doing so much for me and looking after me and lots of others too. Phil is here beside me now, reading. E.’s eiderdown jacket came just in the nick of time, and I’ve looked very smart in it, my Jaeger bag and darker brown blanket. My little oil stove has made the room quite comfortable (for me in bed); not so much so for my callers, as the floor is quite cold. Everything was frozen solid yesterday morning,—I mean fire-buckets, etc., but to-day is milder and I’m not needing the stove at all this afternoon. I have been showered with flowers and books and all sorts of things, but I am keen to get up.

To-day Miss Taylor brought a lot of mail, a few letters, and packages of all sorts. It’s being very hard to keep track of all the things that are being sent to us. I am trying to keep a list. It is down in the office now. But lots of strangers are sending things. Some day I’ll write you a story about missionary barrels! But I’ll surely send you a list of things that have been sent. We do appreciate gifts here, but, oh Mother, some have been so funny, and never in the whole of our lives have we seen so much candy and chocolate.

This is not a good preamble to say thanks for your dear things which have been so thoughtful. The white cap and wristlets came to-day and are wonderful, so soft and nice. I shall very probably wear the cap nights. I have been using one of the khaki crocheted caps you sent Phil as a sample and model for some dark blue ones for my nurses. I am having them made in town. They must be dark blue to be uniform and to go with the dark blue sweaters. My night nurses’ heads nearly freeze. Phil let me have two of the brown caps right away till I can get blue ones made. I am having my two night supervisors wear them. Just think, they are out of doors these freezing nights practically the whole twelve hours. You see they go from tent to tent and all over the place, looking after the sickest and the dying patients and helping the nurses any way they can. Often it is just comforting the nurses that is their main job. Night before last on one line two men died suddenly almost at the same moment and the poor little nurse could hardly stand it, but the supervisor just had to comfort and brace, as well as help physically. These supervisors have a hut to go into where all the night nurses have suppers and where there is a little stove. They write their reports there, but it is almost twelve solid hours out of doors every night for a month. We have them all bundled up with gaiters and knickers and two or three sweaters and caps and coats and mittens, but they do get chilled through. If you want to knit us some regulation wristlets with a hole for the thumb, please do. We need lots of them. They can be either gray or dark blue. Our nurses are not wearing anything on duty that isn’t gray or dark blue. The sweaters were too awful until this rule went out, lavender, old rose, yellow, green, dirty white, etc.

Well, so much for caps,—you could send us more of those too, if you want to, or mufflers, all gray or dark blue, preferably dark blue. The wristlets with thumb holes can be worn working and the fingers are left free. I’ve knitted several pairs here myself.

Well, to return to presents. The Cross handkerchief case with the beauty handkerchiefs also came and I just love them. They are so dainty and wonderful and so unsuitable for active service that I know that is the reason you sent them and I’m so glad. I shall use them too, and not let them get lost and they’ll be so inappropriate held in a gray-mittened hand mopping a frozen nose, but so nice! I have a weenty bottle of rose perfume that L. put in my medicine case,—I’m sure for just such a contingency!

We love your letters so much. The Nov. 1st one with all its inclosures was fine.

We are so glad people are sending us things for our men for Christmas. Oh, they need them so badly, the poor, poor things, and we want them to have a wonderful Christmas, and they are sure to. For many of our friends are sending us things or money for them. The underwear I have heard from, from Paris, and it ought to arrive soon. The Outlook has begun to come and is fine. We shall enjoy that tremendously, for it condenses things for us in a way we need. I could use some more bed-socks, high ones. We have to wear them in bed, and I find that by putting the pajama leg inside the sock, my legs and feet are very comfortable. I’d like them to come nearly to the knees; any color will do.

We were so glad to know about your service flag. I wish we could have a picture of it, as we don’t know what it is like. The cold cream you sent I wanted very much. I have to use quantities of it to keep from chapping, and we can’t get any glycerine over here. Some of my nurses have such dreadfully chilblained hands and feet, and they are so painful.

D.’s letters are very interesting. Please thank her for them. I just can’t write and answer them all. You’ve no idea how many strangers I have to write to,—in the States, I mean,—answering questions and acknowledging gifts; but I just love to get the letters from the girls; I can’t write them often. I’m snowed under now with letters that need to be answered.

You must think of us over here as having one of the happiest Christmases possible. Our work is pitiful, but we are at peace in our hearts and very happy to be here. I never felt so at peace and quiet in my mind. We have a very big and vital work to do right here and that is enough, and we are blessed beyond all words to be here and able to do it.

I believe there is more real peace on earth in men’s and women’s hearts now in the midst of this world turmoil than has ever been known before. No one should be sorry for us, for any of us who are here in connection with the army. You can’t be sorry enough for the wounded and sick, but most of them too are very peaceful, undisturbed, and unafraid. Oh I wish I could tell you what all this is meaning, as I see it. Maybe some day I can, for every day I am seeing things more clearly, but as yet I can’t write it all down,—after a while perhaps. We talk about it, from time to time, some of us, every once in a while, and oh, dear people, no greater thing can ever come into any one’s life than this chance of ours,—to get away from little things and self and to know what the things of the Spirit are, and what true values really are.

A happy Christmas to you all and oh, so much love. I can’t bear to stop writing when I think that this will reach you at Christmas time. (Phil is going to Paris to-morrow and may not be back by Christmas.) But together or apart, we’ll be thinking of you all and praying to God to spare you till we can see you again. But if it can’t be that way, it won’t matter so much, for if any one of you goes on before, you will be just so much nearer to us, for you will understand the end from the beginning and be content as you watch how we fight our fight, and we’ll feel your nearness and get strength and comfort from it, and there won’t be anything but complete love and understanding between us. It is going to be a long time before we come home, but it doesn’t matter, miles make no difference. You are wonderful, and we, of course, must be wonderful too.

I believe this will be one of your happiest Christmases, as it is ours.

Good-night, good-night, dear ones,

Julia.

Dec. 15, 1917.

My little Corona has come back from London where it went to be cleaned and I feel as though an old and dear friend had come back. It’s a cold Saturday night. Up in the Mess nurses are making Christmas stockings, one thousand of them, so that they can be filled with all kinds of nice little things that we are receiving from all over the country, and be given, one to each man on Christmas morning. It really is quite a job for each nurse to make ten stockings, but they are getting done. The hospital is not quite so heavy as it has been very steadily all autumn, and temporarily, at least, the pressure has let up a bit. I have sent five nurses away on leave. After six months’ service each nurse is entitled to 15 days’ leave with pay, but up to now we have not been able to spare the nurses, for we have always a few who are sick. I have six sick ones over in the Sick Sisters’ Hospital now, but if things stay as they are now, I won’t have to send for the ones who are on leave. My sick ladies are not very sick. One has an infected finger, another an infected big toe, and the others have slight fevers, or very bad colds which are really the grippe. It is such a blessing that we have such a splendid place to send our sick nurses.

To-night I want to tell you a bit about gifts and givers. All the mail for the nurses has to be brought to my office to be sorted again: some to be forwarded to English sisters or V. A. D.’s who have left, some to be taken out to be brought up to the Sick Sisters, some to be put away until those on leave return, and some to be hunted up on lists and forwarded if possible. A man brings the papers and packages in large sacks. Sometimes there have been three or four sacks full on the same day. He empties them on the floor and Miss Taylor and I sort it out. I wish you could see what we have had here on the floor. There have been jam, coffee beans, and pounds of ground coffee, lump sugar and granulated sugar, cocoa and chocolate by the pound, hard candies and soft candies, cookies, and fruit cake, chewing-gum, cigarettes, woolen underwear, shoes, knitted things, magazines without wrappings or covers, bits of glass bottles, letters without envelopes, talcum powder, Christmas cards “with love from Aunt Mary,” “Merry Christmas and don’t forget me,” from John H. Jones, Jr., Kansas City, or Roanoke, Va., and toothpaste. You just ought to see what a tube of pink toothpaste can do to a bag of mail, but the worst of all were the jam and the talcum powder. You would not believe that a large can of Colgate’s talcum powder could break right in two, but I have seen two of them broken clean through the middle. And as for the comfort bags for soldiers, you ought to see the way some of those have arrived, sans paper, sans string, together just because the things were in a bag and the address was tied to the bag string. Cardboard boxes never arrive intact. Tin containers get stove in. (I don’t know the past participle of that word, maybe it’s stiven.) If a tin box with sharp edges is nicely wrapped in paper, it is apt to arrive without the paper, which the sharp edges have worn through. Even wooden boxes are frequently broken. Everything is crushed and then of course the strings come off and the contents begin to shake out. The long, long journey is what does the damage, the many weeks of rubbing and shaking. A five-pound box of Maillard’s candy packed in a round tin box, arrived for me the other day without the cover of the tin box and with the cover of the inside box broken, the candy just protected by the tinfoil inside. But not a piece was missing. There really have been very few instances where we have not been able to identify the person for whom the package was meant, but sometimes, I can assure you it has taken considerable ingenuity.

The British and the Australians have discovered that the best way to insure the arrival intact of any article is to put it in a box and then sew it up in cloth. If it gets mashed or jammed or “stove in,” the contents are very likely to remain inside the cloth covering. Just ordinary heavy unbleached muslin does beautifully. I’d hate to have Dad know how his lovely electric pad arrived, or E. her pretty brown bed-jacket. Magazines and papers should be rolled and wrapped and tied around and through. The parcel post is the quickest and safest and entirely the most convenient way for us to receive things. For express packages we have to go to town and usually pay charges, even if they have been paid before. And express is very slow.

People are sending us wonderful things. We really are being too awfully spoiled and are getting so much more than we deserve. Fortunately lots of people are sending us things for our patients’ Christmas, which is what we like best of all. But oh the acknowledging! I really am so swamped with the list I have already made of strangers to whom I must write, I have decided to use a regular form letter and have Simone write this for me on the typewriter. I am sure people will forgive me; they would if they knew what a lot I have to write and how little free time I really have. Here in the office daytimes there are things to be done every minute. I have been trying for a week to get my accounts ready to be audited, just merely to put the receipts by months, and I have not had a chance till late this afternoon, and then I was interrupted a dozen times, once to take a sister of a very sick patient down to the lines to see him. She had just come from England. On the way down she said, “My, but this is different to London, but give me London.” Other times I had to stop to give knitted caps to nurses. I have just had some made here in Rouen. Another time it was to help a Y. M. C. A. worker look up a patient’s record, another time to let a little night nurse tell me about a patient who had died on her line last night, and how he had said to her, “Sister, stay with me,” and she had sat beside him and held his hand, and how she wouldn’t have missed this opportunity of working with the English for anything in the world, and although she has a cough which hangs on pretty long she is feeling fine and well and just loves night duty here, the nights are so wonderful, and last night the searchlights on the clouds were most beautiful and gave one such a feeling of protection. She’s a little, slender, 25-year old Virginian with such a pretty speech. Such are the constant interruptions, but they are of course what I am here for, just such interruptions.

And now I want to tell you a little about givers. To begin with, there was an old lady in an Old Ladies’ Home in St. Louis who wrote to ask if she might make for me and my patients some bookmarks with verses on them. Of course I wrote back that she could. After a while along came a box of about a dozen long ribbon bookmarks, all the colors of the rainbow, with cross-stitched verses on them like “God is love,” “Be of good cheer.” I got a wounded soldier that I knew pretty well to write her the best note of thanks he knew how, and I have since heard from her that she received his letter and felt fully rewarded for her pains. The padre said he would help distribute some of them. I saw the soldier’s letter. It was quite typical and was full of such expressions as “fed up with,” “carry on,” “stick it,” “Blighty,” etc., and I am sure would be a real object of interest and curiosity at the Old Ladies’ Home!

Then there was the King’s Daughters of Pilgrim Church, dear kind people, who sent 40 lbs. of sweet chocolate to Ruth and me, also I don’t know how many pounds of coffee. The chocolate was in four ten-pound cakes: delicious chocolate about two feet long, a foot wide, and two inches thick, Hershey’s. We’ve given it away in hunks. Nobody in all the world ever saw such cakes of chocolate. We pounded it up, or rather cracked it up with a hammer, and many people enjoyed it. R. never can have too much. I have another 5 lbs. of sweet chocolate unopened as yet (Maillard’s), put away for the time when rations fail us. There is also a three-pound box of Chicago candy in storage on my shelf. We’ll eat it all after a while, you may be sure. Then the fruit cakes, such wonders. Mr. C. sent some simply perfect ones to both R. and me, and I have another from Scruggs in St. Louis being saved. People are so dear. Mrs. H.’s box of salted nuts, dates, and raisins struck a most popular chord, they were such good things. A dear Jewish lady in St. Louis who hardly knew me at all sent a box of cookies and little cakes, which didn’t arrive in very good condition, as they were all in crumbs, but wasn’t it kind of her? We feel like missionaries getting barrels. The Sorosis Carol Club’s comfort bags have been coming and coming. They are now stacked up in my sitting-room waiting till Christmas, when they are going to give lots of pleasure to sick boys, who are so much like little children. Think of a whole tent-full of men howling to have some powder put on their backs because a nurse had just put some on a very sick man’s back when she was rubbing his back for him. I have a letter to-day that the St. Louis Comforts Committee of the U. S. Navy League is sending us 100 wristlets. Well, we can use them.

It is snowing to-day (Sunday the 16th) and you can’t imagine how lovely the camp looks. It is very cold. But I think all my people are warmly enough dressed. They are funny-looking nurses and not much like the fancy pictures of nurses, as they paddle around to-day. They have on round, blue, tight-fitting knitted caps, sweaters, and wristlets, gray dresses and aprons. Some have on their rain-coats and rubber boots, and some have on leather gaiters and heavy boots. They all have knickerbockers under their uniforms, and some, I know, have knitted sleeveless Jimmy shirts on top of two sets of underwear. But they are as happy as can be and make all sorts of fun about being sewed up for the winter and not needing to brush their hair if they keep their little caps on both night and day, as many do.

Getting up in the mornings is great. The fires have just been started and have not heated things up a bit and frost is all over everything, and it is a real stunt to get dressed. Over in the Mess at breakfast sometimes the nurses eat with gloves on. But soon the two little stoves warm things up, and groups gather around each fire to make toast, “just to get the frost out of the bread,” as one said this morning. Then they bundle up and go chattering down to the lines to look after their boys. The tents are really quite cozy when they are shut up tight, but the air in them gets very bad. The night nurses have the hardest time because they can’t move around so much and they find it hard to keep warm, but the Night Supervisors make hot cocoa and toast for them in the Night Duty Hut over their little stove there, and give each nurse a chance to get warmed up about four o’clock in the morning. They have a hot supper in the Hut at midnight. We have a big basket of food sent down from the Mess each evening and one nurse who is “Jane” for a week at a time prepares it and makes coffee. It is no end primitive, for they have no running water and just a tiny stove and an oil lamp, but I bought some pretty dishes for them and they seem to enjoy their night suppers very much. When the doctors operate late, they drop in for a bite too. Many, many nights the nurses have scarcely a moment in which to eat. They can’t always be relieved by a supervisor or another nurse, and may have to leave their lines in charge of the orderly while they go to eat. But almost every nurse likes night duty, the nights are so beautiful and so varying and the experiences are so vivid.

But to go back to gifts and givers. The packages for soldiers are waiting to go into stockings. The Washington University nurses sent such nice boxes to all of us W. U. people,—sleeveless sweaters, bed socks, nuts, candies, and nut cake, with coffee and chocolate. A stranger who had heard some of my letters is sending a gramophone. Magazines and notes and cards galore come all the time. People are so good. And we are just being spoiled. We have heard of lots of other things on the way. I am just worried that I will neglect to make a note of some of these things that come and the kind giver won’t know how much pleasure and happiness the gift has brought.

I suppose most of you have read Donald Hankey’s book “A Student in Arms.” We have had a lot of discussion about the chapter called “Discipline and Leadership.” The Major says he has changed his point of view entirely since he has been in the army, and now he agrees with the book entirely. I have not reached that point as yet. I am sure that I must be wrong, but I can’t get away from the feeling that you can do the most with people when you appeal to the best in them, and don’t insist on discipline for discipline’s sake. Army life is altogether different from civilian life, and what held there does not hold here. But in my dealings with the nurses I am probably on the wrong tack, and will undoubtedly come a cropper before we get back because my discipline has not been rigid enough, and I’ve been getting results because of my “personality” rather than because of my “orders.” It is an interesting matter for discussion.

This letter has grown to be very long because it has rambled all over the field. It must call a halt now, for soon it will be time to have supper, then practise hymns for Christmas Eve.

J.

Dec. 28, 1917.

The wind is swirling and howling outside and it is very cold, about the coldest day we’ve had, I think. I have put a little table over nearer the stove than my big desk-table is and here a couple of feet away from the fire, the heat is quite noticeable. It’s an amusing sight to see Miss Taylor and me doing our work down here mornings with mittens on. With those nice fingerless ones, we can typewrite or write most comfortably. It’s the wind that is making things so cold this evening. Not that it has been warm on the days when there was no wind, for it has been for over two weeks that some fire buckets in my sitting-room have been solid ice. Useful in case of fire, I can hear some one say. Yes, but to-day some chemical fire extinguishers, that I have been making a big howl for, have arrived upon the scene and I shall sleep more peacefully, for our huts are like match-boxes. Every morning the water in our pitchers is frozen and the ink in fountain pens. We have to jerk our tooth-brushes out of the glasses and pry the soap off of the soap-dishes. In the Mess, our drinking-water bottles have ice in them, like the Waldorf. There is one story that some believe and some don’t, but the nurse swears it is true, and that is—that her hot-water bottle was frozen solid in the morning in her bed. I asked about it and learned that it had been placed outside her sleeping bag and had slipped down to the foot of the bed where the blankets were loose, but it was frozen. It is most amusing the howls one hears in the mornings; it is so hard to get up. The fires don’t get things warmed up a bit, for a long time, and it is like getting up out of doors. We all have schemes about how to dress at night so that dressing in the morning will necessitate the least exposure and the least changing. It is awfully funny and doesn’t hurt us a bit. The chilblains hurt and are awful, but heroic treatment helps. There are parades of barefoot ladies who go and walk in the snow nights, then come in and rub and roar; then there are the cold-water foot baths, which are said to be worse than the snow treatment. Occasionally a day or two off duty is necessary for very bad hands or feet. Almost everybody wears two pairs of woolen stockings and monstrous shoes, and oh! the money that is being spent on having shoes made to order—very high ones with extra thick soles. But on the whole a stranger would think our group looks mighty fat and well. There are a lot of coughs that hang on. To-day, for instance, out of my 99 women, I have just three off duty sick,—one has an infected thumb; another an infected toe; and the third, poor dear, has been having a painful attack. But at home in steam-heated apartments, we could not do better than that. Some dear lambs walk with a good deal of a limp when they first go on duty in the mornings, but as the days progress their feet feel better. I have been awfully lucky, though I came near getting some trouble started. I walked downtown with Major Veeder last Sunday, when we were going down to dinner, and that night the balls of my feet and the heels got very burning and swollen, but vigorous treatment stopped the trouble.

This is a very quiet Sunday—Dec. 30th, 1917,—and every nurse is having a full half day off duty. We have over eight hundred patients, but there are not so very many that are desperately sick. I want to tell you all about our wonderful Christmas and I hope I won’t be much disturbed, for I am in the office, as Miss Taylor is off duty. The nurses and doctors, helped by a few home gifts, raised about $600 to be spent for Christmas. About $200 of that, it was decided, was to go to some Rouen charity for children. So one cold day, Major Murphy, Major Veeder, and I went to look up the names of some philanthropic organizations that had been given us by the Mayor. I forgot to say that the first move was a call that Major Veeder and I made on the Mayor to get a list of the accredited charities. You would have been amused and proud (?) to hear me explain in slow and careful French who we were and what we wanted. But I got it over, and the list was sent us with many respectful salutations. When we visited some of the societies on the list, we had a most interesting time. We three would take turns in speaking the French and explaining what we wanted. We’d rehearse on the front door steps like so many kids. We visited a refuge for little boys—such a poor, bare place, managed by a priest and some sisters; then a sort of industrial school; then the office of the Society for the care of war orphans. Here we got the names of ten families to which we could send special New Year’s baskets. We decided to give something to each of these societies, and, in all, spend about $200. There has been lots of fun about the baskets, for the doctors auctioned off the privilege of having a family, and with each family there went the name of a nurse who was to help. Many of the families got visited yesterday, and baskets of clothes and toys and food were purchased, and on New Year’s morning, they are going to be delivered.

Then for our patients, we bought pork, extra, for their dinner, and beer. The English Government sent them plum puddings. We wanted turkey or chicken, but found we could not afford it for so many. But they loved the pork. We had been making fancy Christmas stockings for days, and a committee, of which Ruth Cobb was chairman, had been having a very bad time trying to buy and get delivered enough supplies to fill them. There had been great fun filling them. We had requisitioned all the candy and cigarettes we could from the officers, and we got them to help fill, so by Christmas Eve, when we had about 750 filled, we thought we were quite safe, as a great many patients had been sent out, but that evening we were notified to be prepared to receive two convoys of a hundred each, during the night. The Committee almost wept, but they got very busy and by 10 o’clock on Christmas morning every patient in the hospital had received a stocking with fruit, tobacco, candies, nuts, and some kind of a present in it. Only one of the convoys had arrived by noon—the other one got delayed somewhere. The patients were just like little boys with their stockings, and the nurses had just as much fun with them as though they had been. The one-armed men could not untie the necks of their stockings, which had to be tied up tight, and so their shouts all through those tents: “Oh, Sister, come and snip mine next.” The Sisters dashed around, snipping and untying and pulling snappers and fitting on paper caps. The British Red Cross sent us a lot of decorations and things we could use for the stockings, and the Australian Red Cross gave some money as did the American Red Cross. The boxes the St. Louis Chapter of the American Red Cross sent for the Unit have not arrived yet.

Now about the singing on Christmas Eve, which was the loveliest part of the whole Christmas to me. At 8:15 about 50 bundled-up nurses left the quarters and walked down across the snow, each carrying her candle lantern. It was the loveliest sight, for the night was perfect. It was not too cold and the snow made everything so bright. I had my violin to start them with and keep them on the key. We began at one corner of the camp and just as soon as we had started we were joined by all the officers and a number of the enlisted men, and soon up-patients gathered around too, so as we went from place to place between the lines of tents we must have been a crowd of over 200 people. I wish you could have seen what I saw. I knew the tunes so well I could watch the others as I played. Officers and nurses, and patients and nurses looking together over one sheet of words (we had had the words mimeographed, for we have only two hymn books of the same kind), while one of them held the lantern so that the light fell on the paper. And all were singing so intently and so happily. One group of patients, who said they wanted to learn those “Yankee tunes,” pushed and shoved to be by me every time because they said they wanted to be near the “band.” We sang—“Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful.” That everybody knew; and “Hark, the Herald Angels,” and “It Came upon the Midnight Clear,” and “Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “Holy Night, Silent Night.” We sang in eight places. It is something I shall never forget if I live to be a hundred, and I imagine a good many felt the same way. If there only were some other way we could have community singing. There is nothing like it. I was worn to a frazzle afterwards, but it was worth any amount of effort. The night nurses said the patients loved it, only there was not enough of it, though we sang for an hour and a half all together.

After the singing we in our hut had a little hut party. We had a little Christmas tree, with fool presents on it for each one of us with a rhyme. You don’t know what lovely tree decorations can be made out of the silver-foil out of candy boxes; a bit of gilt fringe which was carefully raveled was a great find. We had a nice little family party, ending with cocoa and little cookies; then parted for the night. At midnight Ruth and I went with a group of the Catholic nurses over across the road to the midnight service in their chapel.

Christmas night we had a party in our Mess for just our American officers and nurses. The Mess had been beautifully decorated with holly and greens and we had our dinner early (4 and 5), so that all the tables could be taken out and a stage set. Three or four of the doctors and a couple of nurses acted a little burlesque which they adapted from something they saw in Punch. It was full of local hits and was very amusing and clever. Then we had a monologue by another of the doctors, which was very good; then some songs by another doctor. Do you know “Joan of Arc, They are Calling You”? That was one of them. Then came the “Army Alphabet” written by two of the nurses and read by me. It wound up with a scene about “U is us as we used to be” and gave a chance for a bunch of pretty girls to dress up in mufti, and how pretty they did look after all this somber uniform stuff. They had a little business about going to say good-by to a friend of theirs who was just off for France as a nurse, then when I got to—