Most Army Corps nurses who died in World War I were victims of the epidemic of influenza commonly called the Spanish flu. Almost all of the 102 nurses the surgeon general reported as dying overseas during the war were killed by the flu. One hundred twenty-seven Army Corps nurses died of the Spanish flu while serving in home-front military hospitals.
More American servicemen also were killed by the flu than by the enemy in World War I. The disease killed more than 500,000 American civilians and servicemen, more Americans than died in all the wars of the twentieth century.
Following the war, home-front military hospitals centered their efforts on helping wounded servicemen rebuild their lives. When a Red Cross nurse joined the Army Nurse Corps, she was technically no longer a Red Cross nurse but a member of the military. In many people’s minds, the Red Cross was so interwoven with the Army Nurse Corps that they were one organization. Captain C. Arthur McLeod praised the work of nurses in World War I with these words: “We breathe a prayer of thankfulness for her presence among us—bend down in fullest veneration of her marvelous work and challenge the race to find her equal. ATTENTION!!! The world! Salute the noblest creation of the boundless love of God for His creatures, perfect and imperfect—the Red Cross Nurse.”
JoAnn
Prologue
October 14, 1918, early morning Fort Snelling, Minnesota
Pray.”
Glorie Cunningham’s eyelids flew open. She stared into the dark of the nurses’ quarters and held her breath, listening. There was no sound but the even breathing of the nurse in the next bed and the clock on the bedside table.
Had the voice been part of her dream? Unlikely. In the dream she and her brother Fred were playing together as children.
Fred. The fog of sleep evaporated from her mind. Fear gripped her, squeezing her heart. Fred was in France, on the western front. She shut her eyes tight against images of inhumane conditions on the battlefields and the terror of attack.
I should be there, not serving on the home front. From the time America joined the war it had been her desire to nurse at the front, as her Grandmother Lucy Cunningham had done in the War between the States.
Pray. Glorie prayed—prayed for Fred and the men who fought with him, and the doctors and nurses who cared for the wounded. She prayed until she fell again into a restless sleep, exhausted from her twenty-hour shift caring for soldiers on the home front who were battling the Spanish flu.
October 14, 1918
France
“Busy evening, huh?”
“I’ll say,” Johan Baker yelled in response to the soldier beside him.
The enemy had kept a steady barrage of fire directed at the artillery. The cold and rain and mud and worn-out horses didn’t help the Americans, who were trying to get shells to the large-gun positions. On top of that, today the division experienced some of the heaviest fighting since its arrival in France, and that was saying a lot for the tough Rainbow Division.
A screeching shell sent the two soldiers heading pell-mell toward a trench, slipping and sliding in the mud. Johan dove into the hole headfirst. He rolled over. Where was the soldier he’d just spoken to? Johan popped his head up over the edge of the trench. Twenty yards away, on the edge of the makeshift road, the shell burst. P–bl–uup. The typical silly little sound didn’t do justice to the toxic cloud of gas that rolled out.
He shoved off his tin helmet, forced his gas mask over his face, and slammed his helmet back on, all the time scanning the slope. Where was that man? A shell bursting in the distance outlined the soldier, stuck in mud up to his knees and not wearing his mask.
Johan slithered out of the trench and over to the man. He grabbed the soldier’s gas mask. The soldier pointed to a puncture. Johan’s chest deflated. The mask was useless. The cloud would reach them any second. There wasn’t time to get his companion out of the mud and find another mask.
Frustration ripped through him. He tore off his own mask and started pulling it over the man’s head. “No!” The man struggled against it.
Johan let go, grabbed the soldier’s damaged mask, and rolled away from him. He stuck a handkerchief in the puncture. It wouldn’t help much, but it might give him a minute or two. The cloud was on them. Too late. The words blazed through his mind as he tugged the mask over his face. He slid into the trench and looked back. Thank God, the soldier had put on the good mask.
Chapter 1
The whistle warned him.
Johan dove into a nearby shell hole. He pressed his body against the mud wall, making himself as small a target as possible. Little good it’ll do if that bomb has my name on it. He grabbed the gas mask attached to his belt. The hose was torn. Despair washed over him. He shoved his face between his arms until he felt the cold earth against his cheek, could almost taste the mud.
Someone shook him. He shoved the hand away from his shoulder.
“It’s all right. Nothing can hurt you anymore.” The soft voice filtered through the explosions and screams of battle. The gory scene disintegrated. Johan opened his eyes. His mind registered the fact that he’d been dreaming, but his heart still thumped hard and fast against his ribs. That battle was a dream, but the battle that landed him here at Fort Snelling had been real. The knowledge prevented relief on wakening.
Two identical women in their early twenties stood beside his bed. Identical red hair swept neatly back from identical freckled faces. Two pair of identical green eyes stared at him in concern and sympathy. Either the dream continued or he was seeing double.
He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger, then looked again. The women were still there, both dressed in white, one wearing a small nurse’s hat.
The woman beneath the hat smiled. “Your vision is fine, Lieutenant Baker. There are two of us. I’m Nurse Gloria Cunningham. This is my twin sister, Grace Holt.”
He recognized the gentle voice that had drawn him from the dream.
Grace held up her left hand and wiggled her red-tipped fingers. A diamond flashed, reflecting the sudden amusement in her eyes. “Mrs. Daniel Holt.”
Johan grinned. “For a moment I thought the war left me with double vision. Seeing two of every beautiful woman wouldn’t be a bad way to go through life.” As usual, his voice, the legacy of mustard gas, came out as though he was a frog with laryngitis.
Grace smiled and shook a finger at his not-so-subtle flattery.
The edges of Nurse Cunningham’s lips hinted at a smile. She held up a white pitcher. “Would some ice water taste good, Lieutenant?”
He nodded. Clear, cold water still seemed a luxury. In France there’d never been enough to drink, or bathe in, or for the field hospitals’ needs. Filthy water, on the other hand, was everywhere, especially in the trenches.
Johan’s fingers met the nurse’s lightly when he took the glass. The simple touch sent a jolt of awareness through him. He’d been too ill from the gassing to pay the nurses in France much attention. Why, I haven’t held a woman’s hand since leaving for France, he realized.
That was not the place to allow his thoughts to travel. Half the hospitalized doughboys fell for their nurses. He wasn’t going to be one of them.
The water felt good on his throat. His voice had returned only a few days ago, and he’d talked too much today. When he indulged in speaking, he paid for it with searing pain. But who could refrain from cheering a mite when the Allies were finally victorious?
His gaze followed Nurse Cunningham as she turned her attention to the soldier in the next bed. He glanced up at Grace. “Twin nurses; that’s unusual.”
“I’m not a nurse.” Grace waved her hand toward her sister’s back. “Glorie’s the Florence Nightingale. I’m but a humble Red Cross volunteer.” She lowered her lashes.
Her feigned modesty brought a chuckle from Johan. A Red Cross girl. He should have recognized the high-buttoned white dress, but she wasn’t hiding that fabulous red hair she shared with her sister beneath the traditional Red Cross headpiece.
; The captain in the next bed peered around the nurse. “A Red Cross girl brought us lemonade in the middle of a battle. You’d have thought we were on the beach at Cape Cod, for all the notice she gave the bombs and bullets. Red Cross girls are okay in my book.”
The patients who overheard him agreed, giving Grace a “hip-hip-hooray!” She flushed with obvious pleasure.
Johan observed the captain with reservations. He wondered how Captain Smith had ended up in the next bed. Johan avoided Smith whenever possible. He was an intelligent, loyal officer, but his hatred of Germans extended way beyond German soldiers. Still, Johan agreed with the captain’s appreciation of Red Cross girls.
“Why aren’t you out celebrating Armistice today with the rest of the city?” the captain asked.
Grace propped her fists on her hips and gave him a saucy look. “What better place to celebrate than among the men who won the peace and took the curl out of Crazy Bill’s mustache?”
Her implied praise of the doughboys and belittling reference to the kaiser brought huzzahs and cheers from the patients.
A moment later, a thin soldier with brown hair parted in the middle and a black patch over one eye, broke into song. “Johnny is marching home again, he’s finished another fight.” Before the end of the second line, most of the soldiers had joined him.
Singing was beyond Johan’s capability. To try it would be to tear open the lesions in his throat, which were finally beginning to heal.
Listening to Joe’s patriotic enthusiasm brought a lump to that throat. Joe would never again see with the eye beneath that patch, but that fact didn’t lessen his love for his country.
A doctor walked into the room, wearing a typical olive green army medical officer’s jacket. Johan’s gaze immediately sought his shoulders and standing collar for brass; a lieutenant colonel, likely the top medical officer on the post. Johan’s back stiffened and he started to sit up, then remembered he didn’t need to snap to attention in a hospital bed.
A toddler in a yellow dress entered hand in hand with the doctor. Her hair was hidden by an oversized Red Cross headpiece. She tugged her hand from the doctor’s and marched down the aisle separating the two rows of white metal beds. Her arms and knees pumped as she sang the popular song with the soldiers.
Patients continued to sing, their eyes dancing with laughter.
Johan’s gaze immediately sought the quiet Nurse Cunningham, to see her reaction. She was speaking to another patient, her lips close to his ear because of the din. The patient’s eyes were bandaged. Johan couldn’t hear what she said, but when the patient laughed, Johan was sure she’d described the little girl’s march.
He liked the nurse’s thoughtfulness. There were two other nurses in the ward, but something about Nurse Cunningham’s sweet reserve caught his interest.
The little girl stopped beside Grace and grasped the blanket at the bed’s edge. Her blue eyes looked right into his. “Hewwo.”
“Hello yourself, Miss.” It was easy to see from the girl’s round face that she belonged to Mrs. Holt or Nurse Cunningham. His heart skipped a beat. Why hadn’t he thought to look for a wedding band on the nurse’s hand? You’re out of practice, Soldier, he scolded himself, then remembered he’d pledged not to fall for her.
“I’m ’Lisbeth. Who’re you?”
“Elisabeth.” Grace spoke in that warning voice mothers use to gently let their children know their behavior isn’t proper.
The mother, he thought before answering. “Johan.”
“Lieutenant Baker,” Grace corrected.
He held out a hand to Elisabeth. “You can call me Johan.”
She shook his hand gravely. “You talk funny. Do you have a cold?”
“Elisabeth.” This time Grace’s warning was louder.
Johan ignored Grace and smiled at Elisabeth. “Something like that.” He caught Grace’s glance and nodded at the doctor the girl had walked in with. “Is that the honorable Daniel Holt?”
Grace shook her head. “No. The military wouldn’t take Daniel. He had scarlet fever as a child. It left his heart too weak for fighting.”
“Are you wearing your mother’s Red Cross hat, Elisabeth?”
She nodded and stroked the white cloth as though it were silky hair. “Isn’t it pwetty?”
“Very pretty.” Wisps of short red hair curled out from beneath the white cap, framing the cherub’s face. The symbolic red cross was slightly askew in the middle of her forehead above curious eyes. The folds of the hat hung down her back like a veil.
“When I don’ feel good, Mommy weads me stowies. Would you like me to wead you a stowy?”
It brought a lump to his throat, which made talking even more difficult than usual. He nodded.
“I’ll bwing my stowies.”
Grace indicated the notebook she carried. “I’m making a list of soldiers’ requests. I visit the hospital regularly as part of my Red Cross duties. Is there anything I can bring you?”
A hunger ate at his insides, just looking at her pad of paper. “A sketch pad, please, and some charcoal pencils if you can find them.”
“I’ll find them.” Her pencil scratched across her pad. “I’m quite the detective when it comes to searching out things for our men.”
Nurse Cunningham stepped quietly up beside Grace. He liked the graceful way the nurse moved. She laid a hand gently on his shoulder and smiled into his eyes. His insides turned to mush. A hint of spring flowers lightened the hospital’s disinfectant odor.
“You need to stop talking for awhile, Lieutenant, and rest your throat.”
He nodded. At least he didn’t need to communicate with sign language and paper and pencil the way he had for awhile. The first two weeks, he’d been blind as well as mute and couldn’t communicate at all.
She lifted her hand. He held back the absurd desire to grasp it and ask her to stay, to simply talk to him awhile, talk about anything at all. He just wanted to look in those sweet eyes and hear that reassuring soft voice.
Instead, he watched her leave the ward with Grace and Elisabeth.
What was the nurse’s first name? It started with “G” like Grace—Gloria, that was it. Gloria reminded him of a sky filled with angels singing praises to God. A nice image but too noisy for someone as quiet as this nurse. Glorie, the name Grace called her, suited her better. The two looked alike, but talk about opposite personalities!
Johan laid back on the bed, suddenly exhausted, amazed at how it tired a body to fight for health. His gaze drifted over the white-walled room. The sense of light and cleanliness rested him after the year of mud and filth. Everything here was white: walls, ceiling, floor, metal beds, bedside tables, nurses’ uniforms, sheets. Clean sheets were a luxury barely known in the field hospitals in France.
The quiet was heavenly. No bombs, no machine guns, no rifles, no train or ship engines. The usual hospital odors had already dispelled the fragrance of flowers Nurse Cunningham carried with her, but even the smells of the hospital were preferable to the sweet, sickening smell of gas.
He’d gone to war with the attitude expressed in the popular song: “We won’t be back ’til it’s over Over There.” He’d hated coming back before it was over. But today is Armistice Day. The buddies I left behind are done fighting, too.
A peace came over him. His muscles relaxed against the mattress as he drifted toward sleep. He was home. The war was truly over.
Chapter 2
Once out of the ward, Elisabeth spotted another nurse she knew and sped down the hall to say hello.
Glorie moved quickly to the wall and sagged against it. She wrapped her arms over her chest, trying to hold in the pain that threatened to burst through.
“Are you all right?” Grace’s voice mirrored the worry in her eyes.
“Yes.” Glorie didn’t feel “all right.” Waves of sympathy and horror washed over her, threatening to knock her off her emotional feet. But she had to be “all right” for those brave men. “It’s just … so much at once. These
men—our first overseas men arriving, 150 of them, men who went away strong and healthy, and now …”
Grace rested a comforting hand on Glorie’s arm. “You’re exhausted, that’s all. You were up before dawn helping prepare the celebration for the wounded, whose train arrived with them at eight, and you’ve been working with them all day since then.”
“The wounded.” Glorie repeated the words softly. “Before this, patients were the ill or accident victims, never ‘the wounded.’”
“You’re just tired,” Grace repeated. “Things will get better.”
Things wouldn’t get better, of course. Glorie knew it, and she knew Grace did, too. More wounded would arrive every week until the hospital was filled with them, twelve hundred or so.
It was true she was tired. The influenza epidemic had worn out all the staff, not only here, but in civilian and military hospitals around the world. The first person to die of the flu in St. Paul was a lieutenant here at Fort Snelling. The hospital had overflowed with patients. St. Paul was closed down because of the flu. Restaurants, churches, schools, pool halls, saloons—all were closed in an effort to keep people from gathering in places where the deadly disease could easily spread.
At least the places were ordered closed. Today people flooded the streets, celebrating Armistice.
The first overseas men had been scheduled to arrive at the fort back in September. The flu changed the plans. Finally the flu here at the fort had abated to the point that it was believed safe to allow the wounded to be brought in. The few remaining flu patients were in a separate building, the fort’s contagious-disease ward.
“We nurses encouraged our flu patients to get better so they could go overseas to fight, Grace. Did you know that?” A shiver ran along Glorie’s spine at the memory. “We’d stand in the middle of the ward and call out, ‘Where do you go from here, boys?’ and they’d answer in a batch, ‘Over There.’ None of them made it over there, of course. The war ended too soon for that.”
The Valiant Hearts Romance Collection Page 52
