Teacher and Author
Privilege. I was also privileged to spend an academic year, plus another summer, abroad during my college years. The influence of that summer in France on my World War quasi-obsession cannot be overstated. Like the young ambulance drivers of the … Continued
I was in Boyds Mills, Pennsylvania, attending a nonfiction writers’ workshop on August 4, 2014, the one hundred year anniversary of the start of World War I.1 I announced the fact to my fellow attendees. Thus began a four-and-one-third-year centennial … Continued
CHARLESTON (WV), November 3, 1918 — “I’ll bet you young nurses had your hearts set on going overseas, wearing romantic Red Cross uniforms, to nurse our soldiers, didn’t you?” Major Maxwell, we might imagine, was dressed in full military uniform, … Continued
As 1918 progressed and the Allies gained new strength with the arrival of American troops, Fritz grew desperate. He dropped propaganda leaflets from the air onto American positions, hoping to sow doubt among this freshest enemy: “To the Colored Soldiers … Continued
After four years of stalemate on the Western Front, four years living underground and fighting over the same few square miles of cratered earth, the Allied armies were on the move, pushing back the German armies toward the border. The … Continued
British Volunteer Aid Nurse Vera Brittain left No. 24 General Hospital in Étaples in time to escape the bombings of May 30 [see “Etaples Hospital Air Raid;” May 30, 2018] but not so soon that she missed the arrival of … Continued
Millions of British troops passed through the French coastal town of Étaples, France, on their way to the Western Front. The training camps housed as many as 100,000 troops at a time. Many thousands of British and Empire wounded returned … Continued
Shirley Eastham’s imagination had caught fire. “Banners streamed in my blood. Drums beat in my brain. Bugles sounded in my ears,” as she wrote in her memoir twenty years after the fact. She had determined to go to France as … Continued
“To whom much is given, from him much is expected.” Or her. Much was given to Julia Stimson (born to privilege in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1881) and much was expected. (Hers was a family whose history of public service extended … Continued
The German spring offensives were picking up steam. American troops were not yet in the field (or in the trenches), but their sisters in the medical department were facing a heavy onslaught on the so-called “second battlefield.” Chief Nurse Julia … Continued