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 Americans, recent arrivals, joined the movement.
That included U. S. Army nurses.
“…all you need to do if you want to tour the world is join the army and you will have [a] chance to travel in every kind of thing imaginable from a truck to a parlor car. Ha! Ha!” wrote American nurse Elizabeth Lewis on September 18, 1918, from a location she was not allowed to reveal even if she had been able to identify it.
She went on to describe the events of the day before. She and her surgical team of two doctors, two nurses and an anesthetist, had received orders to depart at once on a new assignment. They threw their belongings into bags and boarded a motor ambulance for the trip. After forty-five-minutes on the road, they reached Base Hospital No. 45, only to be redirected to a different hospital. Arriving late in the evening, Lewis and her partner nurse went right to work and continued through the night. They retired to their quarters at dawn. Lewis’s roommate chose to unpack, but Lewis, exhausted, went straight to bed. Anyway, she joked, they might be moving again before she woke up–which was exactly what happened!
A few hours into her sleep, Lewis was wakened by a loud commotion outside their quarters. “I’ll be darned if orders hadn’t come to move this evacuation hospital somewhere else.” From then on, the two nurses rarely unpacked. “The army consists in continual moving.” Lewis decided. “It’s a regular tramp’s life.”
Sources:
Luciano, Lorraine and Jewell, Casandra. Army Nurses of World War One: Service Beyond Expectations. Carlisle, PA: Army Heritage Center Foundation, 2006.
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Watched 
In the movie’s final scene, Powell’s Ziegfeld sits in his lounge chair, dressed in silk robe and slippers. His friendly competitor, Billings (played by 
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”
Vicente Blasco Ibañez published The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a novel of the Great War, even before the armistice had been signed. It was quickly translated and printed in the United States–and it made a sensation. Burton Rascoe of the Chicago Daily Tribune declared it “the greatest novel the war has produced.” (At least to that time.) So great was its popularity that Ibañez received adoring press in a four month tour of the United States a year later. And Will Rogers, Broadway’s homespun interpreter of American politics and culture, made comic hay from it on the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre.
The book made such a splash that Hollywood produced a thirteen-reel feature film based on it two years later. “Everybody knows the story,” wrote a reviewer. But on the silver screen, he continued, “Ibañez’s words are here become actions, emotions, the visible earth, air, and sky, life itself. The story lives.” The four horsemen of the Apocalypse had entered the popular imagination.
“In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.”
This book documented the Wilder’s near-catastrophic first year in Dakota Territory. The title was to be The Hard Winter but Depression-era editors softened the initial adjective for a population already weary of hard times. “Hard” or “long,” the book was difficult to pull off. The man-vs.-nature conflict was prolonged and repetitive: walls of dark clouds roaring in from the north, shrieking winds rattling the wall boards, ceiling nails turning white with frost, snow sweeping in under the doorway, the food supply dwindling and unvarying. Realism had to be supplemented by narrative device.
What a difference a year makes! Tar paper shanties and rough-hewn boards give way to curtains and lace (and hoop skirts!). Shriveled potatoes and meager brown bread are augmented (at least on Thanksgiving) by roast pork, chicken pie, mashed turnips dripping with butter, creamed corn, cornbread, white bread, pickles, preserves, and baked apples. Poverty-level barter is replaced by a healthy cash economy. (Laura is given ten cents for admission to a “sociable” and twenty-five cents to purchase personalized name cards, the latest school-girl fad. Such extravagance!) This book presents its own challenge for the author. The civilizing of a frontier town is even less dramatic than a “long winter.” Relations among the girls at school and with their teacher provide the tension in the first half of the book. Overarching the entire book–indeed all three books discussed here–is the problem of paying for Mary’s education at a school for the blind in Iowa.
Laura has grown up. She is only fifteen but has been hired to teach school twelve miles away. She will live away from home for the first time. The reader follows this development with trepidation. Can it be a Little House book without Ma and Pa? Without Carrie and Grace? (Mary has already left for college in the previous book.) When Pa leaves Laura to live at Brewsters’ unkempt shanty, the reader trembles along with Laura. A squalling child, a sullen Mrs. Brewster, a cowed Mr. Brewster: these are to be her “family” now. A home without love. There is nothing “happy” or “golden” about it.
In the end, Laura’s understanding of her own literary project was more credible than Rose’s statements. In the only public appearance she ever gave, a speech at a Detroit book fair in 1937, the author who would become the most influential interpreter of America’s pioneer experience said simply, “All I have said is true but it is not the whole truth.”