Rosanna D. Thorndike, worker with blind servicemen in France.

Rosanna D. Thorndike, from her 1917 passport application

Boston-born Rosanna Duncan Thorndike (1898–1979) was the daughter of broker Albert Thorndike, who was treasurer and a trustee of Perkins School for the Blind, the first US school for the blind. At age 15, she earned a prize in a writing contest of St. Nicholas magazine alongside Bennett Cerf and Stephen Vincent Benét. At Perkins, she learned handcrafts, which was preparation for her World War I work.

In September 1917, she sailed for France, where she first served as a YMCA worker in Eleanor Butler Roosevelt‘s Hotel Richmond for US officers (a cousin of Thorndike’s father was Paul Thorndike, who was acquainted with the Roosevelt family). Thorndike also worked as a nurse’s aide with the Red Cross; as a teacher of crafts and English at the Phare de France, a training school for blind French service members involving Winifred Holt (daughter of publisher Henry Holt and founder of the New York Association for the Blind, aka Lighthouse Guild); and as a worker with US blind soldiers at Base Hospital 8 in Savenay. Thorndike wrote of her experiences in The Overseas War Record of the Winsor School, 1914–1919:

The first blind soldiers to return to America reached home in a pretty disconsolate condition. They had not been told anything of all there is left in life even after sight has been taken away, and it meant that they were utterly discouraged and disheartened, and that they had slipped so far into both mental and physical darkness, that it was very difficult to rouse them to any hope for their futures or any interest in things in the world about them. . . . .

[I]t was decided that . . . it would be eminently worth while to take a few weeks to help these men to learn a little of what others may teach them of how to be blind. . . . . Every day each one who was in condition to study learned a little Braille, a bit of typewriting, worked on a basket, modelled a few minutes in clay—made a little progress in something; and we tried to keep up their interest so they would want always to learn more. Then there were walks in the afternoons . . . . there were sometimes feasts, and always games and reading aloud. . . . .

They were full, busy, even happy days in a way, in spite of the suffering, the discouragement, the homesickness, the occasional lack of courage that just had to enter in. They were days I shall never forget . . . (93–94)

She returned to the United States in spring 1919. In that year, she was a member of the Department of Social and Physical Education for the Red Cross Institute for the Blind (known as Evergreen) in Baltimore. From 1923 to 1940, she was secretary to Hans Zinsser of Harvard’s medical school. In the May 1927 issue of Carry On, she wrote movingly of the plight of blind veterans, seeking to raise funds for an orchestra composed of these men:

I knew these boys in France, and I’ve known them since. I know the kind of things they are up against—no real home sometimes, often no occupation, no understanding from other people. I know their courage and their grit. . . . . Think of the plans these boys had for their lives; think of the suffering they’ve been through mental and physical; imagine the eternal darkness they can never get away from; or the tiny blurr of light that never increases and which may suddenly fade away entirely. (40)

She became a trustee of the Perkins School for the Blind. During World War II, Thorndike returned to relief work in France via the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and she was interned in Germany for over a year, as the AFSC documents (including a report coauthored by Thorndike about the AFSC’s wartime work in France).

Thorndike went on to work for the US embassy in Paris. In September 1950, she married Frederick Jefferson Leviseur, a Harvard graduate who had been a first lieutenant in the AEF’s Quartermaster Corps in World War I and worked in civil affairs in France during World War II.

Further reading:

• Mentions of Rosanna Thorndike in Out Here at the Front: The Letters of Nora Saltonstall (2004)
  
  
• Mentions of Rosanna Thorndike in Living with Nature’s Extremes: The Life of Gilbert Fowler White (2006; re the experience of AFSC internees in World War II)

Sarah Mildred Willmer, YMCA entertainer.

Sarah Mildred Willmer, ca. 1920

As early as 1890, Sarah Mildred Willmer (1881–1949) was delivering dramatic monologues, eventually appearing in northeastern, midwestern, and western venues and billing as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the Lyceum.” One of her frequent performances was “The Sign of the Cross” by Wilson Barrett. In 1907, she met physicians William and Lena Sadler (Lena was the niece of cornflakes co-inventor John Harvey Kellogg), and they became friends. This promotional flyer shows that they often appeared together on the Chautauqua circuit. As the 25 Aug. 1912 Chicago Tribune documented, Willmer married minister Edward V. Bond at the Sadler home in Chicago (Bond died in 1915 from a cardiac problem).

In July 1918, the Lyceum Magazine noted that Willmer would be going overseas as a YMCA entertainer, refusing a salary and cancelling a 10-week Chautauqua contract for the opportunity (31). In Aug. 1918, Willmer sailed for France. Her account in the 22 Dec. 1918 Chicago Tribune (4) describes harrowing experiences:

“Are you afraid to go to the front?” [asked the YMCA man]

“That’s where I want to go.”. . . .

I was whirled over a thin white ribbon of a road through the valley of the Meuse and we arrived at a town. There were no inhabitants except American troops. . . . An officer moved out of his room and gave it to me. . . . rats—O, plenty of them, big as cats, that would scamper all over the place and me at night, and snuggle down in my warm blankets. None ever bit me, but one morning, as I woke, eight of them jumped from my bed. . . . .

Aided by friendly officers—entirely outside regulations and unknown to the ‘Y’ man in charge of the base—I would dress in a soldier’s uniform and go up to the front, in total darkness.

I went up one night, in a darkness which was uncanny; with shells bursting about us, with machine guns and all the other death dealing agencies actively at work, with pandemonium literally let loose, to a first aid dressing station.

O, it was horrible. The boys were brought in on litters, all in darkness, and as the surgeons and attendants passed along they would flash a little light on one for a brief instant, then on another, and in this way they had to be cared for. I wondered if it was right for me to be there, and I was frightened, O so frightened, but I did not dare to let that be known, for I was supposed to be a man. I helped with the boys who were brought in, and saw vividly the horror of it all, the lads dying and suffering, and had to remain quiet.

She also related an episode of servicemen hearing about the Armistice:

An officer—a colonel—entered the place. . . . . He flashed a smile, held up his hand, and said:

“Boys, she’s signed.” . . .

Immediately a mighty cheer went up, and then those 2,000 lads sang the Doxology as I never heard it sung before—and never expect to again. And then this officer said to me: “Miss Wilmer [sic], if you have a breath left in you, will you recite the ‘Salute to the Flag’?”

I did. Every hat went off in an instant, and then the men sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” . . . One young fellow said:

“Gee, ain’t it great?”

And then, in a sorrowful tone:

“And my buddy killed only this morning and can’t be here for it.”

Willmer was gassed twice—once at Verdun and once in the Argonne forest. The latter—a dose of chlorine gas “burning in my lungs”—necessitated her return to Chicago in December 1918, where she stayed with the Sadlers. The Chicago Tribune account credits her with receiving a Croix de Guerre, but this is not listed in the YMCA’s 1918–19 Yearbook and Official Roster of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of Canada and the United States of America with the other decorations received by YMCA personnel.

By April 1919, she was back on the performance circuit and continued throughout the 1920s. Her 14 July 1949 obituary in the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY) indicates that she opened a confectionary in Rochester in 1928, which failed in the depression. She became involved in social work and worked with the deaf on lip-reading and speech.

Her obituary includes a married daughter, Elizabeth Ann Wales, with 1930 and 1940 census records indicating a 1921 or 1922 birthdate. However, as newspaper clippings show that Willmer was maintaining a busy touring schedule in the early 1920s, it is likely the child was adopted. The obituary also lists a granddaughter, Dianna Kathleen Wales.

Florence and Dorothy Child, physicians.

From left to right: Drs. Florence and Dorothy Child, May 1918. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Longtime Germantown, PA, residents Florence Chapman Child (1883–1957) and Dorothy Child (1888–1941) were the daughters of Quaker jeweler George Chapman Child. Florence earned her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1905 and her MD from Johns Hopkins in 1909. She interned at the Syracuse Hospital for Women and Children and at the Babies’ Hospital in New York. Dorothy earned her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1910, graduated from Johns Hopkins with her MD in 1914, and earned a doctorate in public hygiene from the University of Pennsylvania in 1916. In November 1916, she became associate professor of physical education of women at the University of Kansas.

In response to an urgent call from the Red Cross, the Child sisters traveled to France in September 1917 and were assigned to Evian-les-Bains (near Lausanne, Switzerland) to care for refugees and civilians. A 31 July 1919 article in the Harrisburg Telegraph provided some insight into Dorothy’s work, with poignant stories of refugees who had been trapped behind German lines arriving on trains at least twice a day and seeking news of relatives, only to learn their men had been dead since 1914. Many of the new arrivals were ill, especially the children. Cowritten by Dorothy, this 1919 report of the American Red Cross in France on infant mortality in Le Havre supplied statistics such as 164 newborns and 11 who died from causes that ranged from maternal neglect to syphilis. An interview with Florence that appeared in the 14 May 1919 Evening Public Ledger discussed serious hygiene issues and the alarmingly high mortality rate of French children. As Florence said, “It was not sufficient to save the wounded and let the babies die. Yet they were dying by the hundreds and thousands of them in all the villages and towns of France. And the American Red Cross felt that it must come in and complete its work of saving France. We did” (15). The article also noted that Florence had received two medals from the French government.

The Child sisters returned to the United States in November 1918. In 1919, Dorothy was appointed chief of the Division of Child Welfare in the Pennsylvania State Health Department. In November 1920, Florence was appointed chief of the Division of School Medical Inspection and Welfare Nursing, Bureau of Health, in Trenton, NJ, where she worked to reduce the infant mortality rate.

In September 1941, Dorothy was killed in Fredericktown, MD, when the yacht Koonyung where she had been vacationing with friends exploded due to a gas leak. Florence retired from medical practice in 1935, dividing her time between Margate City, NJ, and Deerfield Beach, FL. She died of breast cancer in 1957, attracting attention when her sizable bequest to Bryn Mawr was revealed as contingent on the college supplying a proper home for a grandfather clock built by her great-grandfather.

Further reading:

Geraldine R. Hutner, “Medical History: Health Care Crusader, Florence C. Child,” New Jersey Medicine: The Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey, 88 (1991): 823–25.

Elisabeth Lansdale DuVal, wireless operator.

Elisabeth Lansdale DuVal, from her husband’s 1922 passport application

Baltimore’s Elisabeth Lansdale DuVal (1893–1987) earned a commercial radio license, first class, in September 1917 and was assigned to the SS Howard in December 1917 (as “junior operator,” according to Marconi Service News). The Howard, a ship of the Merchants’ and Miners’ Transportation Co., was one of those requisitioned by the US government. The Howard‘s routes were listed as Baltimore to Norfolk and Savannah to Jacksonville. According to this account, DuVal’s shifts were 1:30–8 am and 1–6 pm.

Although various accounts credit DuVal as the first US female wireless operator in sea service, the May 1918 Marconi Service News (14) lists Mrs. R. H. Tucker of the Indianapolis, Mabel Kelso of the Mariposa, Mrs. Sickles of the Roanoke, and Graynella Packer of the Mohawk as her predecessors.

In February 1918, DuVal applied to serve on a US Navy ship and was told by Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels that he would take the request “under advisement” (it never occurred, although Abby P. Morrison had previously achieved the rank of first-class electrician as a wireless operator in the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation). Although US ships were under threat by German U-boats during DuVal’s service from December 1917 to December 1918, with a number attacked and even sunk not far from the US coast, and she asserted that “my patriotism can best be demonstrated . . . aboard a United States naval vessel,” she is described rather cloyingly in this account in the 20 Feb 1918 Washington Times as “young and pretty and more than one naval officer who saw her at the Navy Department when she presented her petition to Secretary Daniels [were] hoping for her appointment to his ship” (1). She praised the Navy’s daily wireless news service, “The Navy Press,” which was sent to all ships and coast radio stations:

It keeps us from feeling that we are “out of it” . . . When we can have the daily reports of what Washington officials are doing and what is happening on the French frontier it seems as though we were closer to things that are happening in the world. (Cordova [AK] Daily Times, 12 June 1918: 3)

DuVal was a great-granddaughter of Supreme Court Justice Gabriel Duvall. Her father, Edmund Brice DuVal, was a captain in the Maryland National Guard. In 1922, she married Herman Hobelman, who had served in World War I as a private in the AEF’s 303rd Tank Center, according to Maryland in the World War. He is listed in the 1930 and 1940 censuses as involved in real estate. The 1930 census lists DuVal as a saleslady and the 1940 census as a seamstress.

Further reading:

• “Elisabeth Lansdale DuVal, Ship Wireless Operator,”  OneTubeRadio.com

• Elisabeth Lansdale DuVal Hobelman Collection, Maryland Historical Society

Samantha Minerva “Minnie” Saunders Burdick, decorated Salvation Army worker.

Minnie Burdick, ca. 1917

Wisconsin-born Samantha Minerva “Minnie” Saunders (1867–1934) married Floyd O. Burdick in December 1884, and she and her husband had three children. She was the first female matron of the Harris County (TX) jail and established the first free medical dispensary in Houston (San Antonio Express, 3 May 1919, 5).

After the Burdicks worked for the Salvation Army in Oklahoma City, Lake Charles, Port Arthur, Houston, San Antonio, Waco, San Angelo, Fort Worth, and Dallas, they sailed for France in November 1917. At age 50 (although her age was constantly listed as 60 in newspapers) and an unprepossessing 5-foot-3, Minnie Burdick was called the oldest Salvation Army worker overseas but had no problem matching the stamina or grit of younger colleagues. In a letter published in the 7 Mar 1918 [North Dakota] Weekly Times Record (but was probably written in Dec 1917, as Christmas is mentioned), “Ma” or “Mother” Burdick described some of her activities:

Last night the officers of the regiment gave a Christmas dinner and presents to all of the refugee children, and all of the children of the town were in our Hut.

After that was over the soldiers had an entertainment in our Hut. We helped in both, and you would be surprised to see how glad the soldiers are to see an American woman. Some shook hands with me and said that I was the first American woman they had talked to since they had been in France. I am glad we came.

The first Hut we went to, I went to cooking pies and cakes, with the help of the ensign in charge, and we made 50 pies, 800 doughnuts, and 18 cakes, and not a piece left by 8 o’clock that night. The next morning it was the same thing over again. . . . .

You would be surprised if you could see how I can make things and cook in tin pans and baking powder cans. I have a milk can for a doughnut cutter, and a smaller one to cut out the hole in the middle. I use a bottle for a rolling pin and fry eggs on a pie plate. . . .

We have been working pretty hard but if you could only see how the boys appreciate it all, you would know that it is time and strength well spent. . . . .

We have . . . a lot of pleasure doing things for the boys, sewing on buttons and lining in the coats, and mending gloves, and then once in a while, one of them is sick, and doesn’t want to go to the doctor, so a cup of hot water and a little home remedy and sympathy helps him out. Sometimes they get homesick and like to come down to the house and tell me their story of mother and sweetheart at home, and go away feeling better. (“Mother Burdick among the Boys in France” 12)

An account in the 7 May 1919 Washington Times credited her with producing 324 pies in 12 hours, setting a new record (“Pie Baker” 8). The article “Mother Burdick Stopped an Army” in the 28 Oct 1918 Carson City [NV] Daily Appeal (1) discussed Burdick’s “all night chocolate service” that involved her informing a general, “Those boys should never go to the front without each one having a cup of hot chocolate. I want to stop them in companies just long enough to fill their cups as they go by the hut down the road.” United Press reporter Frank J. Taylor noted, “The new general was not used to being talked to that way,” but he gave the order for the troops to stop and even had a cup of hot chocolate himself. Taylor stated, “They worked all night at ‘Mother’ Burdick’s hut and two other huts nearby assisted so that more than 15,000 cups of chocolate were given to the boys that night.”

Burdick returned to the United States in May 1919, with the 3 May 1919 Syracuse Journal noting that she had been gassed during her service “but continued working in her little shack until carried to a hospital” (“Premier Pie Producer Returns from War” 8). Shortly after her return, the French government awarded her the Croix de Guerre. She was the first Salvation Army worker so honored. In January 1922, the Oak Creek [CO] Times reported her involvement in hospital relief work with disabled veterans and her service as the first national chaplain of the American Legion auxiliary (“Legion Men Know Her Well” 3). She died in 1934 and lies in an unmarked grave in Hollywood Cemetery in Houston. Her great-great nephew is the artist David Bigelow.

Minnie Burdick’s recipes for doughnuts and her invention, “Shrapnel Cake” (Pullman Herald, 12 Sept 1919: 11)

Further Reading
Doman, Robert S. “Chicago Girls Serve Coffee and Pie.” [Fort Collins, CO] Weekly Courier, 28 Jun 1918: 2. Discussion of Salvation Army workers shelled by the Germans, including Burdick.

“Ensign Burdick and Family.” Houston’s Part in the World War (1919).

Ford, Bert. The Fighting Yankees Overseas. (1919). Short quotes included from Burdick such as “If I attempted to do half as much at home, I’d be ill or dead, but over here you don’t think of time or effort” (195).

“‘Ma’ Burdick.” The Armies of Mercy (1920): 384, 385, 387. Harper’s Pictorial Library of the World War, vol. 7.

“Salvation Army Worker in France.” Charlotte [MI] Tribune 1919, repr. from Christian Science Monitor. Burdick describes aspects of her service: “. . . I didn’t work in the front line trenches, for they wouldn’t let me get that far front, but I would have been right there if I could have got there.”

 

US female scientists of WWI.

For Veterans Day:

The Caduceus of 3 Aug. 1918 notes that nurse Marie X. Long (1886–1970) of York, PA, was the first female lab assistant at the base hospital of Camp Greene (NC), after she had undergone three years of training in laboratory analysis and served at the US Army General Hospital in Lakewood, NY. The 6 Dec 1919 York Dispatch (10) reported that she had been appointed assistant pathologist of the Illinois Central Railway, working out of the railway’s hospital in Paducah, KY. She published articles such as “The Value of the Wasserman Reaction in Diagnosing and Treating Syphilis” (American Journal of Nursing Mar. 1921: 369–75).

Rachel E. Hoffstadt. From Marshall Univ’s Mirabilia 1914.

Jefferson County in the World War states that Indiana-born Rachel Emilie Hoffstadt (1886–1962) was head bacteriologist in the hospital’s laboratory at Camp Sevier (SC) for seven months and was an instructor of chemistry and bacteriology for the Army Nurses School. She earned a BS in science from Hanover College (IN) in 1908, an MS in science from the University of Chicago in 1912, a PhD in science from the University of Chicago in 1915, and a PhD in hygiene from Johns Hopkins University in 1923. She was the first female graduate of Hanover College to earn a doctorate, and the biographical note with her papers at Hanover College states that she developed an oral vaccine for typhoid while at Camp Sevier.

Hoffstadt was on the faculty of Marshall College (now Marshall University) in 1914. In 1923, she became a member of the faculty of the Department of Bacteriology at the University of Washington. In 1929, she received the Mary Pemberton Nourse Fellowship to study at the Pasteur Institute in France. This 1946 photograph shows her as the sole female faculty member of University of Washington’s Medical School.

Further reading:

“Madison’s Jewish Community: From Scholars to Politicians to the Parents of a Supreme Court Justice.” Madison [IN] Courier, 19 Aug 2017.

 

The Hello Girls: The film.

There’s a film to accompany Elizabeth Cobbs’s book on the Hello Girls, the women who served as switchboard operators in the US Signal Corps during World War I. For further details or to purchase the DVD, visit the film’s webpage.

Anna Louise Tittman, head nurse in WWI Siberia.

Nurses of Vladivostok refugees hospital and headquarters office, ca. 1919. Anna Louise Tittman is front row, second from left; Ethel Pinder (later Tuck) is third from left. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

“The dead bodies greet you at the front door.”
—Anna Louise Tittman, on the Russian hospital in Irkutsk, Russia,
Sept 1919 (oral history 129)

Anna Louise Tittman (1884–1977) earned her nursing credential from the Springfield [IL) Hospital Training School in 1906. She then did private duty nursing and worked at Johns Hopkins University, Boston Floating Hospital (originally a hospital ship in Boston Harbor and now a children’s medical facility at Tufts), and Bellevue Hospital in New York City before becoming an inspector for schools of nursing.

In May 1919, at the request of Director of American Red Cross Nursing Clara Noyes, she set off for Siberia with 29 US nurses under the auspices of the Red Cross Commission to Siberia, as some 10,000 men of the American Expeditionary Forces had been sent there by President Woodrow Wilson. At the time, Siberia was battling typhus and cholera epidemics as well as effects of the Russian Revolution. Tittman was appointed chief nurse of the Eastern Division when the previous chief nurse sustained an injury to her eye and needed to return to the United States for treatment. The History of Red Cross Nursing termed her “a nurse executive who would be particularly valuable in straightening out the organization difficulties in Siberia. She possessed a penchant for details and with it a keen and well-balanced mind” (930).

In 1974, Barbara B. Herndon conducted an oral history with Tittman, which included Tittman reading from and commenting on her diary kept during her service in Siberia. This oral history (both audio files and typed transcripts) was originally part of University of Illinois at Springfield’s Archives and Special Collections, and can be found in the Illinois Digital Archives of the Illinois State Library.

Tittman provided a sense of the colorful, mini UN that Vladivostok was at the time:

The blending of the various uniforms—the gray blue of the French and the Poles, the khaki of the United States, the Japanese with their yellowish and bright red trimmings, the Italian greenish gray, the Annamites [Vietnamese] with their flaring brimmed hats, our American sailors with white caps and blue uniforms, the Czechs with greenish khaki and violet trimming. There were also the Russians, the Chinese, the Serbians, the British and the Cossacks, the latter looking like a field of dandelions with their yellow caps and stripes shining in the sun. (111)

She continued:

I went to Second River and the Sixth Virsta Fortress with [nurses] Miss [Ethel] Pinder and Mrs. [Carrie Stallard] Cook. Large ARC barracks for refugees are located at these points. . . . . At Second River there are six large red brick buildings, built for barracks for Russian soldiers. (113)

Mary Fitch Watkins Cushing: AFFW driver, opera insider, dance critic.

Mary Fitch Watkins, ca. 1918. National Archives.

Mary Fitch Watkins (1889–1974) was the daughter of Vermont Episcopal minister Schureman Halsted Watkins (who was the chaplain for the Tombs prison and the prison on Blackwell’s Island at one time) and Helen Randolph Smith Watkins. Her book The Rainbow Bridge  (1954) discusses her seven years as assistant to diva Olive Fremstad (1871–1951), who is regarded as a model for Thea Kronborg in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915). Watkins regarded the experience as “a better education than I might have found in college and a privilege far greater than I could possibly have deserved” (Rainbow Bridge 7).

Sometimes referred to by Fremstad as “little Miss Watkins” (she was 5 foot 3), she served as a driver for the Motor Corps of the National League for Women’s Service before taking up the same role with Anne Morgan’s American Fund for French Wounded  (see Watkins, “Anne Morgan: An Intimate Portrait,” The Woman Citizen, Aug 1927). She sailed for France in April 1918, with an item in the 18 April 1918 Barre [VT] Daily Times listing her prospective duties as driving “motor trucks carrying supplies, clothing, and building materials to the devastated villages” (3). Her 20 April 1921 letter in the New York Times, supporting one by author Owen Wister that advocated for the bodies of US service members to remain buried overseas,  provides a glimpse into some of her wartime experiences:

I was one of two women sent ahead of a relief unit into the Chateau Thierry district when it was freshly evacuated by the enemy. I turned my little truck into an ambulance and drove our wounded for ten days. . . . Our unit stayed behind in this territory after the army moved forward and I had ample opportunity to observe at first hand the care which the bodies of our fallen boys received. . . . . Well I remember a shattered little garden in the village of Vaux, where three boys fell. An old man came back to the ruins of his home and found them there. With what reverent joy he considered these graves as his especial charge.  . . .[H]e hung about the middle cross his rosary, the only thing he had saved in his flight, and we found him daily kneeling beside “his honored guests,” the tears rolling down his cheeks as he prayed for the boys who had come so far to help restore to him his beloved little corner of the earth. It has broken his heart to take this charge from him. . . . .

Can nothing stop this desecration of the loveliest fruits of that most dreadful harvest? And . . . to those mothers and fathers who want their boys back in the family plot. If you had seen what I have seen, you would not breathe the wish. (11)

She added in Rainbow Bridge, “I survived all the perils and uncertainties of torpedoes, bombs, shells, incendiaries, and Ford cars . . .” (313). Although Watkins’s tone was matter-of-fact, nurse Carrie G. Ellis of Base Hospital No. 24 (aka the “Tulane Unit”) conveyed a more effusive perspective on the driver in a 5 August 1918 letter to her mother printed in the 4 Oct. 1918 Polk County [NC] News:

I met a Miss Watkins of New York, an ambulance driver . . . I know no girl I admire more. This woman is as plucky as they make men or women. She goes right up to the front and brings in the wounded. She was the first woman in Chateau Thierry after the Germans evacuated it. (1)

She returned to the United States in January 1919 and published First Aid to the Opera-Goer  (1924) and Behind the Scenes at the Opera (1925). She contributed articles and short stories to publications such as the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, and Vogue; her short story “Stolen Thunder” (1930) was the basis for the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy film Oh, for a Man (1930). As Jennifer Dunning discusses in this New York Times article, Watkins became a dance critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

In 1926, Watkins married Brooklyn Eagle music critic and magazine editor, bookstore owner, OSS operative, and mountaineering enthusiast Edward T. F. Cushing (1903–56). Their daughter, Antonia Stone (1930–2002), was a mathematics teacher who established the organization Playing to Win (now CTCnet) that seeks to provide access to computers and technology to disenfranchised populations. Their grandchildren include Nicholas D. Stone, director of Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region Operations, and Rebecca Stone, acting chair of the Brookline [MA] Commission for Women.

New edition, The Backwash of War.

“[. . . I]n a stagnant place there is much ugliness.”
— Ellen N. LaMotte, The Backwash of War

There is a new edition of The Backwash of War, the collection of accounts by Ellen Newbold LaMotte (1873–1961) of her overseas WWI nursing service alongside Mary Borden (The Forbidden Zone, etc.), which was originally and controversially published in 1916.  This edition includes little-known essays on the war by LaMotte: “An American Nurse in Paris” (1915), “Under Shell-Fire at Dunkirk” (1916), and “A Joy Ride” (1916). Yeshiva University professor Cynthia Wachtell provides invaluable biographical details on the feisty LaMotte, who was a gay, less affluent member of the DuPont family. (Wachtell writes more about LaMotte here.)