2 weeks+ in the footsteps of the A.E.F. front lines!

Climbing up out of jet lag, I begin a series of articles here about the heart-rending, exciting, endearing and oh so informative 18 day trip my husband and I took to France to imbibe details of the American Expeditionary Forces' routes in 1917-1918.

My husband Steve was my right arm and hand, my interpreter, my expert photographer and my chauffeur for this marvelous event. (To add also, that he is my wine expert and...yes, arbiter of all things funny is quite essential to the telling of this tale—and to the completion of this trip.) He was and is invaluable to me in finishing the research for this novel. In fact, I would not have undertaken writing it again had he not insisted that the time was right, that the Centenary of the war was the appropriate moment to ensure that HEROIC MEASURES found the readership that it deserves. Next to him was my dear cousin Kathleen who also read the book decades ago and who loved it then and who is delighted it will see air now.

As a trained historian who has written 18 novels, I know the value of proper research. I also value the essence of truth it imparts to the finished work. And as one who has also written mysteries where the importance of forensic and police procedure is imperative to the veracity of the story, I know that the smallest details are the ones that make a novel live.

What a person wears, how she feels as she boards a ship, or even what she eats helps to set a scene and give the reader the ever valued verisimilitude vital to the plot and characterization.

Here in HEROIC MEASURES, what I will give you are these facts, among others:

• Not just what my heroine wears, but why and how it feels, how she acquired it and yes, paid for it herself!
• What kind of ship she boards when she sails out in the dead of night from an American port—and why she cannot even learn the name of the ship!
• What she will sleep in on that ship. Hint: It is not a plush cabin bunk.
• Where she will get off that ship and how she will travel from the French port to the site where she first nurses the wounded who fought on the hills near Cantigny.
• What Cantigny looks like
• Why she is there with A.E.F. and the British troops in the Somme Sector
• How she is trained to nurse the wounded
• What materials she has at her disposal. Hint: Penicillin was not yet invented.
• How she must have felt to go on leave to Paris through Gare de l'est and see thousands of refugees fleeing the north with only the goods they could carry in their arms.

And yes, there is more, much more to this story, so I will lure you in to read more about precisely where we went. For brevity and for those who follow here who are vitally interested in World War One and our devotion to the wounded American Doughboy and Marines, I will tell you here we went to:

• Paris
• Compiegne
• Cantigny
• Montdidier
• Belleau Wood
• Chateau Thierry
• Ouise-Aisne
• St. Mihiel, Montsec, Thiacourt
• Verdun, Fort Douamont and the Citadel
• Meuse-Argonne, including Montfaucon, Varennes and many other hamlets where our men fought and died and prevailed.

Please return for photos, videos and insights. I will do my best to relate to you the sights, the smells, the environment where more than 1 million Americans, men and women, devoted their lives and their honor to accomplishing the goal of winning the war.

Today, when we Americans think of that war, we owe these men and women the same respect and honor we give to our other men and women in uniform, past and present. After all, these Americans won that war. It was not they who lost the peace.

If this Centennial teaches any moral, I hope the first one, the strongest one we claim is that these men and women fought and did themselves and their cause proud. If the Great War has been branded as sad or senseless, then it was not these men and women who made it so. We owe them the remembrance of what was a heroic measure to go when called, to serve when asked, to devote all to accomplish that goal and to contribute mightily to end a conflict which began too easily, endured too long and ended in a peace which should have been more just, less vengeful.

Invalides, Museum of Army of France, marvelous WWI exhibits

Advertisement for the 1871/1945 Chambers
http://www.musee-armee.fr/en/collections/museum-treasures.html

For those of you pondering visiting the Invalides in Paris, run, do not walk to one of the most marvelous exhibits on World War One.  While most of the parlors devoted to the 1914-1918 conflict center on French Army efforts, the chambers are filled with so many valuable items that I can list only a few.

Before you immerse yourself in the three chambers devoted to three phases of French WWI efforts, do see the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. One of the most breath-taking memorial sights in the world (next to the American Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington, Virginia and the Cenotaph in London, IMHO), the crypt of the man who was the first emperor of the French is truly awe-inspiring.

For a fine and brief introduction to the rest of the Invalides, do watch this film: http://youtu.be/elnbfmDi0T0.

This picture does no justice to the majesty of the crypt.
Official photo of Musee-Armee,
http://www.musee-armee.fr/en/collections/

For the memorial to Marshal Foch, the third and last French commander during the war, I will do that more justice with a separate post. But here it is in the Dome of the Invalides.

Copyright, 2011, A. Power.

Gas attacks, Belleau Wood, effects, treatment and recovery, June 1918

Gas victims, walking out of battlefield,
Public Domain,

National Archives photo, courtesy of the Indiana War Memorial

     Belleau Wood is one of the most famous of the American Marine Corps' battles (June 1-28 1918).
    Remembered for the victory that was theirs, the Marines also mark this battle for the German use of mustard gas on them.
     With more than 2,000 Marines inhaling the poisonous mustard gas that blinded as it burned the skin and lungs, the Marines who survived the attack came out of the woods only by standing one man in back of the other, one hand to the man in front of them, and walking out of the danger zone.


     Various types of chemical gas compounds were used by both sides during the war. Some were more damaging than others. The worst, the mustard gas of the latter years, blistered the skin and the eyes. Worse, the gas inflamed the lungs making breathing impossible. But the gas also permeated clothing.
     The American Marine Corps fighting at Belleau Wood in June 1918 suffered heavy casualties from gas warfare. Here in the next picture, we see a nurse at a clearing station administering drops to the eyes of a Marine affected with gas. The sooner the wounded received these drops, the more likely he was to regain his sight.

American nurse administering eye drops to a Marine.

U.S. public domain, recruiting poster

This engagement at Belleau Wood was one of the most difficult for the U.S. Marine Corps during the war. Still named as one of the Corps' greatest victories, the men fought so fiercely that the Germans called them, Teufel Hunden, or Devil Dogs. Inspiring a recruiting poster in the United States, the Marines commemorated the bravery of their corpsmen by maintaining a museum at Belleau Wood which they have appropriately named, The Devil Dog Museum.

Here we see one Canadian solider affected by mustard gas. Chances of total recovery depended on concentration of gas the soldier was exposed to and the speed with which he was treated.

Canadian government photo, in public domain.

Fighting with British at Cantigny, with French near Soissons, video, too!

   

American amputee and nurse, Walter Reed Army Hospital,
U.S. Government, public domain

 For a marvelous movie reel created by the American Signal Corps, please do click on the link to go to YouTube. This marvelous set of stills and reels, done in sepia tones of the period, shows you the American doughboys in the field.
     If you stick with the movie to its conclusion, you will see not only action by artillery and in trenches, but evacuation teams of stretcher bearers, as well as caissons drawn by horses and invasion into a small town, presumably Chateau Thierry.
Go here:
http://youtu.be/PusFK9U51LY

First aid to American wounded soldiers, where, when, how

     A wounded soldier passed through many posts as he was removed from the front. Some of these travels took, sadly, days. Stories abound of men left on the ground in rain, snow and sleet as medical teams walked among them to analyze the severity of their injuries and determine how quickly and where they might be evacuated for treatment. Many men waited close behind the front lines, hearing the sound of the guns, bombs and airplane strikes that hurt them and their fellow soldiers even as they lay wounded. In fact, many doctors and nurses lamented that had they been able to treat their patients sooner, the men would have had a higher rate of survival and faster recovery. (In fact, improving the immediacy of treatment for a wounded soldier was the foremost goal of medical response teams throughout the war by all combatants and was implemented and improved on in each succeeding war.)

     When a soldier was wounded, he was assisted to the first aid station, dressing station or casualty clearing station by his pals or by stretcher bearers. (These first stops along the route backward from a front lines had many names and saw many variations, depending on numbers of medical teams, type of equipment and surgical and nursing specialists available. Triage was a function at each stage back of the line.) But before he got to such a station, the solider had in his possession a field dressing. (I have not yet found a U.S. field dressing picture. If anyone knows of one, I would heartily appreciate the url.)
    Here, courtesy of the British site, The Warwicks 1914-1918 (http://thewarwicks1418.com), I show you their First Field Dressing, FFD and their description:

Courtesy of and Copyright to  http://thewarwicks1418.com

"First Field Dressing (FFD) and Iodine ampoule carried on Active Service inside the lower right of the jacket."

Applied by the soldier himself or by those near him (if capable), this dressing consisted of iodine, the only easily packaged and affordable antiseptic/cleansing agent at the time. Penicillin was not yet used as a means to kill bacteria. Morphine was not readily available at the front lines, only backward of the line.

French church opened as ward used by Field Hospital #1, 2nd Division, June 16, 1918

   The next receiving station was a more intensive care unit. This post was a Mobile Hospital unit, literally moving by truck to one to four miles in back of an active front. This included a surgical team of doctors, nurses, and nurses assistants (what we would call orderlies) and/or stretcher bearers who were generally able-bodied types to carry wounded men. This mobile unit team, in the case of American facilities, assessed soldiers and divided them according to type of wound or disability. A team of doctors and nurses assessed each soldier and sent him either to surgery (in order of severity of wounds and operability), to a mental health receiving station or to a hospital treating only those with diseases. (These divisions were not rigorously applied because not all facilities were available in each sector. And at the end of the war, as fighting and casualties increased especially during the last Big Push from September 1918 through November 1918, dividing became nigh unto impossible.)

Nurse cleansing U.S. Marine's eyes of mustard gas during battle of Belleau Wood, June 1918

This mobile unit moved by truck, motorized or horse drawn, lived in tents and operated in tents. Their patients recuperated in tents, as well. Those who recovered to a stage where they could be transported farther back of the line were taken by ambulance. At this point, they went to a larger recuperative facility far back of the line in what the Americans called a Base Hospital.

Mobile Hospital #2, loaded and prepared for change of location. Carries sterilizers.

At the Base Hospital, the wounded were reassessed for fitness for duty. Some were returned to the front. Many received physical therapy by rehabilitation aides, or re-aids as they became known. Most were sent on down the line toward ports and ships home.

PHOTO, J. Power. Copyright of Illustration: 
Fort Sam Houston Medical Museum, San Antonio, TX

Father Louis Pelletier, serving as Army Chaplain in WWI as Major Pelletier

Father Louis Pelletier, S.M., serving as
Major Pelletier, U.S.Army, 1917-1919

    With only one family member among both sides of my husband's and my family to serve (what we know to date) in World War One, here is our great uncle Louis. 
     Born in Van Buren, Maine of a large family of French Canadians who moved to the United States decades before, Father Louis Pelletier was a Marist priest who served in the U.S. Army in France during World War I. Valuable (we are most certain) to many soldiers and commanders at the front because he was an American who spoke fluent French, he became Major Louis Pelletier. After the war, he returned home. With two doctorates in physics and theology, he taught at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. By his students, he was remembered as especially tough!

     Here we see him in his Army uniform, his rank of "Major" written faintly at the top.

     This family group, with Father Louis on front row right, was with his parents, grandparents and his brother, my husband's grandfather, July 12, 1919. Father Louis was then 33 years old. He died of pancreatic cancer at age 33 in Washington, D.C.

     For these heart-warming pictures, I am grateful to our Aunt Annette Pelletier Cronin and her daughters Jane and Liz who saved them. They remembered Uncle Louis and sent these photos to me to use here when my husband and I sent out a family call for anyone's recollections of anyone who served in World War One. To have found Father Louis was a special godsend. We are certain he was precisely that to many soldiers in their hours of need at the front lines.

     “Before World War I, chaplains were appointed to individual regiments. During World War I, the Chaplain of the American Expeditionary Forces coordinated chaplains' activities in the army.”  (Re: Office of the Chief of Chaplains, US. Army, Library of Congress)

     As a rule it was duty of chaplain to go out into no man’s land at night and collect dog tags from those who were fallen. For those still alive, a chaplain administered last rites or tried to bring in stretcher bearers to remove wounded to a clearing station.

Wounded warriors of WWI, home front knowledge of, and new interest in prosthetics

      The US Archives are filled with hundreds of photographs of American wounded soldiers who had amputations and were maimed in battle.
     Yet, during the war and much afterward, almost all pictures (like most personal letters) were censored, i.e., redacted, meaning they were never published at home in newspapers or magazines. This was by order of the War Department, lest morale at home and among the troops suffer. (Yes, this is very similar to the recent contemporary regulations forbidding media coverage of reception of wounded and deceased soldiers from front lines in the Iraqi war or Afghanistan conflicts.)
     Here first is one rare photo of a nurse with two wounded soldiers, one of few pictures to survive the thick black mark of the censor's slanted on the bias across the center.

http://www.amputee-coalition.org/military-instep/rich-history.html

     Another is of a trio of soldiers in a hospital in Vaucaire, France, and the third of two men recuperating at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/hec.11308/

     "During World War I, there were 2,635 major amputations among American soldiers." 
(Reference:  http://www.amputee-coalition.org/military-instep/rich-history.html) 
     After they returned home form the front, many wounded required protheses for arms, hands and legs lost in the fighting. Prosthetics became a new interest among doctors and medical technicians. World War One, known for massive destruction by shrapnel, chlorine gas and bombs, was the first war in which men survived wounds which heretofore had been lethal.  Prosthetics were vital to these soldiers in their attempt to return home and adapt to their physical conditions.
    Here is an American prosthetic arm of wooden fingers and metal joints. From the American History Museum, website beneath the photo, is this description: "Arm is a Carnes model from the late teens, William Carnes being an amputee who fashioned the first workable shoulder harness design around 1915."

http://amhistory.si.edu/militaryhistory/exhibition/flash.html

Historical fiction demands historical fact!

Postcard front, post-Battle of Chateau Thierry,
Postcard published by E.B.Remenson, Chicago, 1919
Copyright expired 

   As an author of 18 novels, historical and contemporary, plus a journalism career (and one non-fiction book soon to appear), I know first hand the value of fact. In fiction, it is even more vital, lest the entire book fail to convince the readership of the verisimilitude of the story.
   A writer can attempt to recreate a scene, for example, a dinner party, and cannot even begin without knowing the time of night, the place it's served, or the ordinary menu for that home, that family and their social class. A miner's family in Wales in 1890 will eat a much different meal at night than a banker's family in New York City or an English diplomat's in Shanghai.
   Historical novels demand just as much research, and perhaps more, than their non-fiction counterparts. Why?
   Because novels demand a suspension of disbelief and because they must be a parallel of the period, plus a microcosm of the mores and atmosphere, these books require minute attention to detail. And while many of the details an author collects in her research never show up in her pages, nonetheless, her research or lack of it will soon begin to speak for her. (Having written a few mysteries myself, I can also tell you that mystery readers absolutely demand correct police procedures and up-to-date forensics and analysis techniques in their novels. Failure to use them can mean readers send wild and crazy letters to the author and even the publisher!)
   Back to my topic of proper research for historical novels.
   To illustrate how vital fact is to the recreation of a period in fiction, I list for you a few popular entertainments. Here, I will show how the authors/producers did their homework and among other facts, used one to mightily increase the realism and value of the piece.
   What would popular DOWNTON ABBEY be without the fabulously rendered period clothing? The actresses have even discussed in interviews how the corsets felt so restrictive. Then when they were attired in garments of the 1920s and the corsets were withdrawn, how freeing they felt.
   What would WAR HORSE have meant had not the latter scenes shown the horror of the main character pulling the huge cannon through the muck of the battlefields? His perseverance, to say nothing of his strength of character and body, would have not been as meaningful when he gained his reward and was sent home to be with his original master.
   What would BAND OF BROTHERS have meant if Spielberg had not shown the landing on the French beaches and the struggle to gain every inch of sand? SAVING PRIVATE RYAN would have missed its tragic mark to show total devastation had it not shown the ruins of French villages and German, as well.
   In future weeks, I will bring you a few of my own hard-won facts about life along the American-French lines during World War One. From my years of research, I'll include my own photos along with the text.
   I hope you will return to relish them! Better yet, sign up to receive the posts in your email. You can do this by filling in your email addy at top right.

   Thank you!

Female doctors, Ambulance drivers, Canteen workers and more!

American female doctors volunteered to serve during World War One but, unlike their male colleagues, received no officer rank or pay. The women became "contract surgeons." They did wear a uniform, seen at left.

 http://blog.americanhistory.si.edu/osaycanyousee/womens-history/ 

From the blog of the American History Museum in Washington D.C. comes this description:

"The Colonial Dames Collection includes this uniform worn by an army contract surgeon. Women doctors were not allowed to join the Army Medical Corps. Only the Army Nurse Corps accepted women. But the army did issue contracts to a small number of female physicians, who remained civilians even though they worked in uniform."

Other women served driving ambulances, working in canteens, and as cooks and laundresses. They joined the Red Cross, YMCA, Salvation Army or other organizations many of which sent them abroad. As I stated in my earlier post, others came abroad to fill General Pershing's explicit need for bi-lingual French-English telephone operators. These women became known as the "Hello Girls!"

http://blog.americanhistory.si.edu/osaycanyousee/womens-history/

Here from the same blog entry comes this description of many women's uniforms:

These uniforms are in "...the Arts and Industries Building of the U.S. National Museum during the early 1920s. This case held four Red Cross uniforms, left to right: Motor Corps driver’s skirt and tunic; Motor Corps driver’s uniform; Motor Corps driver’s overcoat; Foreign Service uniform."

http://www.thesalvationarmytucson.org/HISTORY.html

    

Among those who increased their ranks specifically to cater to American troops going abroad was The Salvation Army. Making bread and coffee, these volunteers also began making a now famous recipe for "Doughnuts!"
From their site, here is one woman whipping up those goodies!

http://www.museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=62020

And here are a few of the women of the Red Cross at a canteen station. This picture comes from US National Museum of Medicine. 

Nurses' uniforms: dress, street, ward and surgical!

http://history.amedd.army.mil/
ancwebsite/uniformpres_files/ClassAWWI-70s.html

     Nurses going to the front needed multiple uniforms.
Each Army Nurse going abroad received different types of uniforms, each with a different use. These outfits came complete with hats, insignia and shoes/boots. Each woman was to wash and take care of her own clothes.
Street wear, seen to the left and below, was of dark navy wool. (This brown uniform has faded from its original dark navy.)

United States Army Center of Military History http://www.history.army.mil/html/museums/aom/2009-03.html

The ward uniform, all white and seen next, was donned by those working in the recovery wards.

http://history.amedd.army.mil/
ancwebsite/uniformpres_files/ClassAWWI-70s.html

For dressing wounds, preparing men for surgery and in operating rooms, nurses wore this grey dress with white butcher's apron.

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/prs-tpic/nurses/nrs-e8d.htm

And here is her linen ward cap, banded with the small red cross (and not to be confused with the fact that she is an Army nurse, not Red Cross nurse.)

http://www.history.army.mil/html/museums/aom/2009-03.html