New from McFarland is Serving the Doughboy: Letters of a YMCA Worker in France, 1918–1919, which I acquired. Edited by James J. Marquardt (Lake Forest College, IL), the book features the letters of Chicago’s Mary Frances Willard (1867–1961), a Smith College alum, teacher, and principal who sailed to France in July 1918 to take up YMCA work. Often tired and cold, she operated canteens (buying, begging, borrowing, or even stealing to obtain supplies), wrote to family members who had lost relatives in the war, arranged funerals, addressed the needs of wounded servicemen in hospitals, ran a library, and coped with YMCA inefficiencies. Her moving and insightful letters include a one detailing a funeral service that she arranged for an African American soldier and the deep respect shown by French residents for the deceased. She wrote in September 1918:
The hospital work is terribly trying because it is so hard to see our men in such dirty and comfortless surroundings. I do not remember seeing any flies in Europe to speak of before the war, but they are here in hordes now, and no attempt is made to keep them out of the hospitals. … Now we have two Red Cross nurses, and they are doing yeoman’s service, trying to spread themselves over ten hospitals. I don’t attempt to do much—just take out cigarettes and chocolate and try to see the men each day and interpret for them or jolly them up a bit. (71)
Marquardt has developed a map of Willard’s locations in France. Willard returned to the United States in August 1919 and resumed her work as a principal and teacher.
American Women in World War I 