She was brave. She was motherly yet girlish. She was sensitive and dutiful. She was adventurous yet maintained her femininity. She was a Red Cross Volunteer Nurse.
Christmas Poster
"Have you answered the Red Cross Christmas Roll Call?" Picturing a soft and caring female volunteer
The Spirit of America
A youthful woman whose purity shines as much as her patriotism
The Greatest Mother
Volunteers were often portrayed as motherly and affectionate. Here, a matronly woman poses similarly to the Virgin Mary
Motherless, Fatherless, Starving
Many posters tugged at the heartstrings of American citizens. Here a ARC volunteers looks down upon French children with affection and also pity
A Page from Alma Clarke’s English Scrapbook Courtesy of Bryn Mawr Library
The American Red Cross (ARC) was largely untested as an organization on the eve of World War I. While the charitable group was founded several decades earlier in 1881, the massive scale and need of WWI challenged volunteers and their finances. An estimated one fifth of American households volunteered or were members of the ARC.[1] Many woman who traveled abroad, typically to France, wrote about their experiences in diaries, letters, and books. Some collected pictures, postcards, and mementos in scrapbooks. Comparing the two scrapbooks of Alma Clarke, a ARC Auxiliary Nurse stationed in France, to propaganda posters specifically from the Red Cross, one can begin to see similarities in how nurses positioned themselves to mimic vastly circulated Red Cross posters and vice versa. Clarke’s scrapbooks can be used to see the influences of propaganda and these can in turn be viewed as pieces of propaganda itself. Several pages even integrate propaganda posters alongside photographs as if to say they were the same thing. Clarke tailored her experience and memories of her time in France into digestible and familiar images for herself and her audience, therefore upholding the popular views and accepted experiences of the Great War.
[1] Lettie Gavin, American Women in World War I (Niwot: University of Colorado Press, 1997), 180.
From her photographs and information available about Alma Clarke, her experience in France is representative of the average nurse. She includes pictures of where she worked, the wards for different groups, nurse class photos, and letters from home and patients in her scrapbooks. Choosing to analyze her scrapbooks and life allows us as historians to take a single case and see where wartime sentiments influence her choices and experience. Clarke’s work as an ARC nurse was critically important to the lives of many soldiers and now her work serves as a foundational point for wider views on the presentation of memories concerning World War I. When we compare her scrapbook to propaganda images circulated by the Red Cross found on ww1propaganda.com we begin to see parallels between the images collected by Clarke and these popular pictures. Going throughout this page, you will see sliders to compare these images side-by-side to illustrate how Clarke arranged her scrapbook to draw on popular themes and her work can be seen as a form of propaganda within itself.
One of the first pages from Clarke’s English Scrapbook
Clarke’s inclusion of a print artfully featured at the beginning of her scrapbook already tells the reader that this book is not about the war but is about her humanitarian work. Here, the work of the nurses is presented as angelic and unassuming in their defense of life and mankind. Already Clarke’s scrapbooks follow a common pattern where nurses are not instructed to talk about and interact with the war, only the side effects and their work alongside the fighting.[2] The image of the nurse-heroine was an extremely popular trait and many nurses attempted to portray themselves as one, “even though they realized that it too distorted the reality of their professional contribution to the war.”[3] Clarke’s inclusion of images of nurses as “heroines of humanity” indicates that she saw her work in a similar light.
[2] Christine Hallett, Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3.
[3] Hallett, Veiled Warriors, 4.
Approaching propaganda is unique and can be analyzed in several different ways including using psychological, artistic, and historical methodologies. When we narrow down the scope to just Red Cross nursing images, several themes are commonly underlined. The courageous yet mistreated volunteer, the romantic nurse, and the nurse heroine are the main there kinds of nurses seen in prints and fiction.[4] Famous magazine illustrators and artists drew propaganda posters and Red Cross posters were often visually appealing.[5] The women depicted were familiar, naturally pretty, and could be anyone you knew. Posters were commissioned to recruit, raise funds, and change behaviors; they were meant to integrate themselves into all aspects of American life.[6]
[4] Hallett, Veiled Warriors, 2.
[5] Celia Kingsbury, For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 8.
[6] Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 8.
Women were both targets and subjects of these posters but their work was centrally focused around morality.[7] The housewife was meant to protect and support her family and husband—who should be out fighting because she made it possible for him to do so. Propaganda made it so that women could be supporting the men in her life by supporting her country.[8] While the war and nursing allowed women more opportunities within the public sphere, she never left her domestic role as caregiver and supporter. Throughout Clarke’s scrapbooks, we see images of the domestically focused nurse.
[7] Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 10.
[8] Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 65.
A group photo of Clarke’s nursing coworkers from her scrapbook
Stories were also a major aspect of propaganda. Again, popular patterns of nurses as “Angels of the Battlefield” continue to position women as supporters of men and country instead of part of the fighting. War was not meant to turn women into men, quite the contrary. Nursing uniforms were meant to be neat and attractive to maintain the femininity of volunteers.[9] The ARC uniforms of pure white with a smart cap were noted for being “pretty.”[10] Women were involved in the war effort but they weren’t to become masculine; “if women die in their roles as nurses, ambulance drivers, or canteen workers, they must do so in a well-cut blouse.”[11] We can see the effects of the desire to remain pretty in Clarke’s scrapbooks as nurses appear neat and attractive while on duty. Snapshots and group photographs capture the feminine but modest uniform these women wore with pride. Their tidy and put together appearance helps to wash over any trauma they may have witnessed and gives the viewer an appearance of a world where harmony is achieved.
[9] Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 104-5.
[10] Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 104.
[11] Kingsbury, For Home and Country, 103.
One has to remember that propaganda is never neutral; its point is to make individuals do or change something in their lives for a certain purpose. The Red Cross was and is a technically neutral organization. However, the American Red Cross ceased their neutrality when the United States entered the war. Wilson formed a special arm of the war council to take over and efficiently run the ARC. Positions that women previously held on the board of the organization were “relegated to an advisory committee” to make room for an all male board.[12] Women across the ARC struggled to gain professional recognition for their nursing, yet there is no record of dissent from female officials on their removal from leadership positions. Many likely felt upset at being brushed aside, but causing problems was not part of Red Cross role; they were meant to fix things with a smile.
Help
Here a single nurse is responsible for the life/death of a soldier in the trenches
If I Fail He Dies
The contribution of the individual means survival for the masses
The Comforter
Alone, this nurse is responsible for comforting all victims of war
We Need You
A heavenly specter instructs a young woman that it is her efforts that will mean life for the injured
Hold Up Your End!
Here it takes a team of nurses to relief war victims, but the actions of the viewer are presented at vital to success
A Red Cross Poster emphasizing the humanitarian nature of nursing
The most common “kind” of nurse we see in Clarke’s scrapbooks is the nurse heroine. This is a woman who selflessly serves and fulfills her duty to humanity and her country with a face of compassion. It is understandable why anyone would be drawn to emulate this character; she is the embodiment of goodness. Both professional and volunteer nursing presented an opportunity for women to “prove their worth—to have their work recognized and their professionalism valued.”[13] The women shown in Clarke’s photographs and mementos certainly present themselves as professionals and a necessity for the war effort. Nurses fought for the lives of their patients and the safe environments that were necessary for care.[14] We see the clean rooms and comfort of patients throughout Clarke’s scrapbooks, indicating to the viewer that she took pride in her fight for the soldier’s survival.
[12] Gavin, American Women in World War I, 181.
[13] Hallett, Veiled Warriors, 255.
[14] Christine Hallett, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (New York: Manchester University Press, 2009), 119.
There are an alarming number of similarities between Clarke’s creation of her scrapbooks and the creation of this digital project. One can imagine Clarke just copying and pasting pictures in her book as they developed and arranging pictures aesthetically, not even thinking about how the overall page and book will be interpreted. It is easy to just pick photographs at random and put them together because they look nice together. However, when dealing with propaganda posters and the personal scrapbooks of an ARC nurse, intention is necessary.
In this project, choosing the images had to be done with intention and decisions had to be firmly made. The images were chosen because of their similarities and because they spoke about Clarke’s presented experience in the war–what she though was important to preserve. Finding the slider tool to compare these images was essential and the tool from Juxtapose JS proved simple and easy to use. It helped to perfectly illustrate the parallels between national propaganda sentiments and an individual’s feelings towards what should be presented.
Clarke’s scrapbooks are a unique preservation of memory and one woman’s presentation of her wartime work. Placing it within its historical context showed the overlaps between nationally circulated images and the ones Clarke chose to preserve. Bringing this project to its digital form was a long experience as I was reminded that digital projects always—always—take longer than you think they will. I feel like the trainee nurses, ready to don my cap and white uniform, and feel that for a moment my individual contributions can be worth sometime.
Gavin, Lettie. American Women in the World War. Niwot: University of Colorado Press, 1997.
Hallett, Christine E. Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War. New York: Manchester University Press, 2009.
Hallett, Christine E. Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Kingsbury, Celia Malone. For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
Todd, Lisa M. “The Hun and the Home: Gender, Sexuality and Propaganda in First World War Europe.” In World War I and Propaganda, edited by Troy R.E. Paddock, 137-154. Boston: Brill Publishers, 2014.
Auxiliary nurse Alma Clarke began her service at the American Red Cross Military Hospital No. 1, located just outside of Paris, at Neuilly-sur-Seine, on November 4, 1918. Alma’s work was in Ward 319 of Military Hospital No. 1, which was one of eight hospitals in and near Paris during the Great War, and among the 24 hospitals the Red Cross operated in France. Begin a tour of her memories by seeking the six highlighted areas in the following photograph of the hospital, formerly a school, the Lycée Pasteur…
A page from Alma’s scrapbook
In a scrapbook Alma collected artifacts for remembering her work. Photographs of the hospital’s exterior grandeur, its interior wards occupied by wounded French and American soldiers, and group portraits of nursing staff convey a sense of her pride at the accomplishments of this crucial and complex organization — simultaneously connected to the western front by ambulance drivers, and connected to the home front by its staff of medical volunteers and financial donations. Explore Alma’s memories of the hospital’s interior wardsby seeking eight highlighted areas in the photograph of the hospital’s courtyard…
A sketch of Alma Clarke
Alma Clarke preserved her memories of Hospital No. 1 while she cared for her patients. She shared blank pages of her scrapbook with those wounded soldiers, several of whom added poems, sketches, and notes about themselves. Sometimes humorous, sometimes chilling, these contributions add to her own collected memories, and through them, we might “see Alma.”
Explore what Alma intended never to forgetby seeking the five highlighted areas of the image below.
About Touring Memory at the American Red Cross Military Hospital No. 1
This interactive digital project incorporates several forms of historical evidence (photographs, handwritten notes, memoir, songs) to “tour memory” at an American Red Cross military hospital located in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, France, and during the Great War’s years. Today’s visitors to the hospital (via this project) can explore the work of the hospital, enter its interior wards, and perhaps meet a volunteer nurse, Alma Clarke, who compiled in a scrapbook these memories we are touring.
Alma Clarke was an auxiliary nurse for the American Red Cross during WWI and arrived at Military Hospital No. 1 seven days before Armistice. During her service and care to the patients at the hospital she kept a scrapbook and from which all photographs, sketches, and handwritten notes in this digital project come. In it, she included few images of herself. We might guess that she choose to collect memories of her role in the hospital as but one of many more volunteers – medical and enlisted personnel – and as part of a complex organization in the war effort, and certainly to heal. We might also guess that she wanted to remember as many details of the hospital as she could (as seen in her scrapbook’s multiple photographs captioned in her own hand), about her service among the nursing staff and surgeons, and about those many soldiers she met as patients. Visitors to “Touring Memory” can find in three large images (image maps) many more memories. By selecting the highlighted areas in each, we can progressively dive deeper into how Alma Clarke represented her memories (how she choose to remember) and with them, remember the work at Military Hospital No. 1.
The first image map, “Tour and Explore Alma’s Collected Memories,” suggests how a visitor might be impressed by the site of the hospital, the Lycée Pasteur, and its grand exterior (perhaps just as Clarke herself was impressed in 1918.) In the photograph are six highlighted areas, the hospital’s designated entrances, to begin an exploration of the medical work of war. Supplementing the photographs taken from the scrapbook are other visitors’ contemporaneous accounts: from a surgeon, visiting nurses, an observer who wrote about Red Cross activities in France, at Hospital No. 1 and its ambulance service. It is doubtful Alma knew these people (their time at the hospital preceded hers), however their accounts help to narrate, through memory, the hospital’s organization and its care for the wounded.
Next, the image map, “Explore the Interior of Military Hospital No. 1,” pictures the hospital’s inner courtyard (in it are eight images), so that we may enter several interior wards and see the daily functioning of the hospital, its order and cleanliness, recuperating soldiers, and the corridors and rooms that volunteers like Alma walked in and worked in. Placement of the highlighted areas, such as the “Boston Ward” or the “Jaw Ward,” does not always designate the historically accurate locations of the interior views. Instead, locations were approximated based on Alma’s handwritten captions (“second floor corridor” – but which wing of the hospital?), by using the size of the windows, or other visual information contained in the photograph, e.g., what can be seen through the windows or the interior structure of the room. The “evacuation ward” and the locations of the courtyard and where the ambulances were parked are accurately located in the image maps.
The final image map, “Seeing Alma,” attempts to create a reflection of her through the handwritten notes of others – particularly those patients she cared for. She asked patients at the hospital to record in her scrapbook their name and rank, where they were wounded, and how. A sampling of these notes can be found in the final large image, an illustration from Clarke’s scrapbook of a Red Cross nurse protecting a wounded soldier from death. “Touring Memory” includes only two images of Alma – a blurry photograph and a sketch – to encourage exploration of what Alma wished to remember in her scrapbook, and to encourage a “visitor” to Alma’s memories to “see” her, as did her patients in 1918.
Taken as a whole, “Touring Memory” reveals layers of memories to investigate space, place, and the act of remembering. The first layer reveals a social history of the medical work of war at Military Hospital No. 1. Who performed this work? How was it accomplished? We may gain a sense of the hospital’s wards and workings, as well as its specialization, such as attending to facial injuries in the “Jaw Ward,” but we do not see all work, like those who mopped the floors or cooked patients’ meals. A second layer of investigation encourages visitors to think about how Alma Clarke’s scrapbook is a credible, “insider’s” view (Alma’s), yet we are exploring collected memories: selected, subjective, and of what she wished to remember (or what artifacts she had available to remember.) Similarly, “Touring Memory” contains only 27 selected images from her scrapbook’s 178 digital pages. While the images taken from it are representative of its contents (photographs, sketches, handwritten notes), its layers of meaning designed here for a “visitor” to explore and “tour” are certainly not all that might be gained from Alma Clarke’s preserved recollections. Thus, a third layer of memory is this project’s own reconstruction of remembering a hospital’s crucial work during World War I.
“More memory” – in the form of typed excerpts – was drawn from three memoirs and published reports written by visitors and volunteers at Military Hospital No. 1 during the years 1914-1919. The complete accounts are available digitally from the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Digital Collections, Archive.org, and JSTOR:
K. K. and M.E.H. “Experiences in the American Ambulance Hospital, Neuilly, France,” The American Journal of Nursing 15, no. 7 (April 1915): 549-554. https://archive.org/details/jstor-3404888
Acknowledgements: Thank you, Professor Deb Boyer, for being able to imagine my envisioning of a “tour” and your suggestions of helpful digital tools to do so. At Villanova’s Falvey Library thanks go to David Uspal for finding hidden code (and deleting it) and Laura Bang for teaching me care in the digital preservation of archival materials. Final thanks are to all graduate students in Fall 2015’s “Digital History” course for their semester-long collaboration and creativity.
“Untitled Image of French Orphans and Nun,” Alma A. Clarke French World War I Scrapbook, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections
Alma A. Clarke was passionate about children’s welfare. As a volunteer nurse working on behalf of the American Red Cross and partnering with the The Franco-American Committee for the Protection of the Children of the Frontier, a wartime relief agency dedicated to helping orphaned/single caregiver children from devastated areas, Clarke did everything she could to assist her adopted country. Clarke played an integral role in caring for children at the largest “orphans’ colony,” the Colony Franco-Americain du Chateau de la Coeur at Cheille, Indre-et-Loire. Her care and consideration was evident from the dozens of scrapbook images of orphanages and the enormous Child Welfare Exposition, held in Lyons, France in 1918. Many of these images are shown within the map below.
The Franco-American Committee’s official report demonstrates the amazing work the organization accomplished in rehabilitating children’s lives. Children were evacuated from hideously devastated areas like the Somme, Lille, Presles, Aisne, Charleville, Ypres, and Poperinge by “camion” truck and transported to railroad depots such as the Gare du Nord and Gare d’Orsay. From that point, they were housed in locations like Touraine and Tarn. The Franco-American Committee sometimes wrote about individual children’s experiences in their report. They stated about the general welfare of the children:
“They are all frightened and homeless, many of them ill from shock and exposure. One little boy of 3 was so shattered that he did not speak for three months after his arrival; but in most cases a few weeks restored the confidence of the child.”
Therefore, simply being transported to the countryside and and receiving proper care benefited many children. Research indicated that the orphanages were spread out throughout multiple destinations, most of which were either in Paris or in rural areas east of the Front. The farthest destination was Lacaune-Les-Bains, Tarn, which is at the extreme Southern tip of France and is mentioned in Clarke’s scrapbook as a destination the Gare d’Orsay photo. Many of the Franco-American Committee’s orphanages were Catholic charities run by nuns and priests (described in the Franco-American Committee report as an “alliance with Sisters and Fathers”). This is also evident from many of Clarke’s photos which show Sisters of Charity caring for the children. At the orphanages and colonies, children lived comfortably and were taught a rigorous curriculum, consisting of domestic skills like lacemaking for girls, and carpentry, cobbling, and agricultural training for boys.
While little background information could be obtained about the children following the war, it is clear that without the remarkable work of these relief organizations and volunteers like Alma A. Clarke, many children would have perished or led bitterly scarred lives. This map in 3 parts documents the relief committees’ legacies, shows the 3,000 miles it took for relief workers like Clarke to travel from the agency’s New York headquarters to France, and most importantly, demonstrates the impact of the war on France and Belgium’s children.
Please zoom in to view individual locations and layers on the map.
Layer 1: French Relief
The beige colored school building icons represent orphanages where children were housed under supervision of the American Red Cross or the Franco-American Committee for the Children of the Frontier. Most of the orphanage names are listed in Clarke’s French scrapbook. If you click on the icons of orphanages, you may view pictures of the orphans’ colonies and the children who were housed there.
Also included in this layer are two train stations, the Gare du Nord and Gare d’Orsay, showing routes of children’s travel from the scrapbook. The most important element of this layer is the locations from France and Belgium where children were rescued, represented by the yellow child icons which were mentioned either in Clarke’s scrapbook, or the Franco-American Committee report. A line on the map reflects the travel patterns of some of the children and their routes from the railroad stations to the orphanages. Unfortunately, exact and complete numbers on how many children were evacuated could not be located, but the Franco-American Committee estimated that by December 1, 1917, 1,365 children were in their care and it can be surmised that these masses of children traveled along several routes to reach their new temporary homes.
Additionally, this layer features several blue icons representing the Red Cross Headquarters in Paris, Clarke’s residence during the Child Welfare Exposition, and the huge relief fair, Child Welfare Exposition of April 1918 in Lyons.
Layer 2: The War
The second layer (red standard map markers and diamonds) is simply a grouping of cities which comprised the French/Belgian front in WWI. The cities were gathered from a standard map of the WWI Western Front. The red markers tell a dramatic story of where the children were in relation to the war, and the accompanying pictures show how scarred the land was in the areas in which children had lived. One can see by the juxtaposition of the war markers and the children markers that the war did indeed surround them.
Layer 3: American Relief
This layer features markers of the Franco-American Committee and Red Cross’ respective Headquarters which were located in New York and Washington, D.C. (cross icons). It also shows newspaper headquarters from Yale to Chicago (newspaper icons). The line from Paris to New York provides a visual representation of the lengths relief workers like Clarke went to and the distance they traveled in order to help French and Belgian children.
The primary sources for the map were Clarke’s images of children in the France in WWI scrapbook. Her handwriting from letters and postcards and and photo captions were transcribed in an attempt to determine locations, although many areas could not be exactly determined and finding the orphanage buildings, with the exception of the Child Welfare Exposition, proved to be impossible. The Till I’ve Done All That I Can website on the Exposition, the Yale and Chicago Tribune articles, and the Franco-American Committee’s records, mainly located on archive.org were useful for determining historical context.
The map was organized according to a format which demonstrates the vast reach of the war and the distance children (and relief workers) traveled to be spared from the war’s worst devastation. Clarke and the broad network of relief workers, committee members, religious charities, and concerned French and Belgian citizens truly went the distance to ensure that children would feel the care and support which extended from thousands of miles away.
Alma A. Clarke, “French World War I Scrapbook, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections Library, http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/almaclarke/id/450
“Map of World War I Western Front,”Trench Warfare on the Western Front, Weebly.com, http://trenchwarfareonthewesternfront.weebly.com/the-western-front.html
Alma A. Clarke, “French World War I Scrapbook, Bryn Mawr College Special Collections Library, http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/almaclarke/id/450
“Relief for French Orphans,” The Yale Alumni Weekly Reader,Vol. XXVI No. 1, 1917, 475.
John T. McCutcheon, “The Franco-American Committee for the Protection of the Frontier Children,” Chicago Tribune,November 4, 1915, http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1915/11/04/page/13/article/franco-american-committee-for-protection-of-the-frontier-children
Women performed noncombatant roles during the WWI in the U.S. and in Europe. Their presence in the war, sometimes overlooked, can be observed through a wide scope of visual culture that circulated during the years of the Great War. Photographs, postcards, and propaganda show different dimensions of the female persona during this period. They were mothers, but they were also providers; they were waiting at home, but they were also in the battlefield healing the soldiers.
The visual culture and printing media that circulated during the Great War reflects the imagery towards gender roles, shows the multifaceted character of the female representations, and women’s engagement in different activities at home and overseas. Giving the inextricable relation between war and gender, the following storytelling portrays and explains some of the female representations of women during the WWI based on propaganda, photographs, and videos I have selected from digital databases related to the Great War. These resources serve to explore in more depth the role of women in the early-twentieth century U.S., which opened a road to women’s involvement in the political and public life of the country.
Women became the “second line of defense” that secured the moral, social, economic, and political sustaining of the U.S. in ways the male soldiers and civil men could not achieve. As Susan Grayzel sustains, World War I was the first modern war that required the full participation of both combatants and noncombatants, altering the battlefield as well as the domestic and social spaces of the Homefront in Europe and the U.S. Even though the outcome of WWI did not radically changed the place of women in society, this epoch did had a great influence in different aspects of the domestic and public life that affected women and men. As well as the image of the country and the male soldiers highlighted the cohesion of a national identity, the visual representations of the war also relied and engaged female imagery. At the same time, the war opened new opportunities for education, employment, and national service for women in the country and overseas, performing duties as nurses, stenographers, factory workers, food producers, among others. The composition of different types of visual culture using female models, especially in propaganda, reflect this transition.
This is a story about female imagery – how they were envisioned during the course of the war.
Visual content
This project bases on the visual analysis of different photographs and printed media -mostly propaganda- produced and circulated during the course of the Great War. In order to compile and curate the images, I have used the following digital databases:
Printed media and photographs had an important role in the distribution of information by the turn of the twentieth century. Their use seems remarkable during the course of the Great War in which, for example, a great scope of newspapers, commercial photographs, postcards, and propaganda circulated worldwide to keep the population informed.
To construct my story about female imagery in the war, I have incorporated different types of propaganda I have found at the Library of Congress Digital Collection, a very comprehensive database to locate printed media from U.S. and overseas from the early twentieth century. I have also used printed media and photographs from the scrapbooks of Alma Clarke, Frank Steed, and the Scrapbook from the Home Front (anonymous), who offer a personal perception of the war from the angle of three different persons who, from Europe and from Home, gathered, selected, and constructed their memories into scrapbooks.
The comparative examine of these sources -propaganda and scrapbooks- allows to see collective and individual perspectives based on gender, occupation, leisure activities, social interactions, and personal values.
The Storytelling
“The Second Line of Defense” goes through a main narrative, divided in four themes. Each excerpt offers a particular view or role I have defined to understand the female imagery during the WWI: Motherland, Healers, Muses, and Providers. Each excerpt is formed by a main argument presented through a comparative analysis of different visual resources. This gives the sense of an “interactive museum,” where in each gallery the user cannot just observe the visual culture but also manipulate the images and learn through the contrast between visual and writing content.
Scroll down the page to read the storytelling. You can also hover over the images to learn more information about their visual content.
If you wish to know about the composition of the storytelling, click here. Meanwhile, enjoy the wonderful story of the female imagery during the WWI.
Motherland: Female Symbolism of National Identity
In the early-twentieth century, the battlefield was considered a place solely for the male warrior to defend his nation. Nonetheless, from a century before the image of the United States had a female face that made the call and unify the people under the same national sentiment. Her name was Columbia.
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Roll over the images to learn more about them!
Once the thirteen colonies began to acquire a greater sense of national identity, the image of Columbia emerged to personify this new spirit. The references to Columbia date back from 1697, when Chief Justice Samuel Sewall of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote a poem suggesting that America’s Colonies should be called Columbina, a feminization of Christopher Columbus’ last name. But it was not until late-eighteenth century that Columbia acquired a more meaningful place in the way United States depicted itself as a nation in search for independence from Britannia, the female representation of the empire overseas.
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Columbiaappeared for the first time in a poem written by Phillis Whatley, a former slave who wrote in 1776 during the revolutionary war. Since then, the image would become a recurrent symbol that unified the country.
Columbia, as well as the national embodiment of the European countries, was inspired in Roman symbols that resembled images of mythical figures. Columbia’s physical attributes and clothes gives her the image a classic goddess. Some of the representations depict her wearing a white draped garment, but during the course of the war it is also common to see her body covered with the flag of the United States.
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Beside Columbia, other pseudo-mythical representations took part in the way war propaganda animated combatants and noncombatants to participate in the war. The most popular image, one that remain until our days, is Uncle Sam, who displays a male representation.
Move the arrows at the center of the image to the left or to the right to appreciate the similarities and differences between Columbia and Uncle Sam!
Nonetheless, we can notice Uncle Sam is almost coercive to the viewer, suggesting obedience or threat if the person fails to obey the call for duty. His use to encourage enlistment in the military and working duties during the war suggests his association with the governmental institution. Meanwhile Columbia, a softer and motherly image, would embody the virtuous and protective motherland.
Throughout the propaganda from the period, it is noticed how Columbia became a more powerful symbol to enact national identity, as the voice and the face of the mother -the country- who called her sons –soldiers- and daughters –noncombatant nurses, wives, and workers- to involve in the battle, to take action.
The image of Columbia was used to recruit soldiers as well as to request the help of civilians to contribute with the nation by preserving food, working as volunteers, and performing other duties, such as serving for the Red Cross. Along her, other female representations named Liberty and Victory took part in the advertising that circulated during the war.
Similar to Columbia, these pseudo-goddesses also use draped garments that combined white, the colors of the U.S., and physical features of classic Roman imagery. Nonetheless, these two representations also represented other meanings. Even though they suggested patriotism, their moralizing voices called the population to engage the population in different levels. For the male population, it is common to see Victory, shoulder to shoulder, holding a sword and leading the men with bravery in the battlefield. Liberty, on the other hand, called the attention of the female and the male population in the Homefront, guiding them to produce the land, to enlist the army, to volunteer as nurses.
The use of these different representations highlights the power of the WWI propaganda and shows the circulation of patriotic ideas that sought to create guilt, passion, and bravery among the U.S. population. Their representations, as well as their messages, also expose how men and women played particular roles in the war, the first seeking for victory, the seconds at home, securing the nation’s freedom.
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Healers: Nurses in the Battlefield
Columbia called men to join the battle, but she also addressed women to travel away from home and serve as nurses and nurses’ aides for the Red Cross.
The posters from the period show a predominant use of female representations, an embracing and motherly image that suggests the role of nurses as healers of the physical and moral state of the men.
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Others images also show nurses serving civilians, they became comforters of a context broken by the destruction of the war. Several posters depict female nurses standing aside of wounded soldiers, while others depict them taking actions holding men, performing medical assistance. There are, on the other hand, photographs of women in action, such as the images preserved in the Alma Clarke scrapbooks.
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The relevance of the war propaganda is evidenced in Alma Clarke’s papers. In these, she used photographs along printed media to frame her experience and perception of the war. Alma and many other U.S. American women were part of the healers that aided in the physical and moral assistance of the soldiers in the battlefield.
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While Alma captured her memories in a scrapbook, while other healers of the war, such as the British Vera Brittain, compiled her experience in a written memoire titled Testament of Youth. Vera Brittain was a student at Oxford when she decided to train as a nursing auxiliary. Her autobiography, Testament of Youth, records her experience before and during the Great War with profound sorrow by witnessing wounded and deceased soldiers during her time serving in England, Malta and France. Her fiancé Roland and her brother Edward died in combat.
Vera published her autobiography in 1933 and it became one of the most compelling stories about the effects of the war on the women and middle-class civilians in European youth population.
Muses: The War in the Domestic Space
“Knowing the women he loves is safe and waiting for his return becomes far more important to the soldier that the work provided by women as comrades in arms” –Susan Grayzel,Women’s Identities at War (1999).
Perhaps one of the most famous role of the women during the course of the Great War that has perpetuated until our days, is the women who stayed at home, waiting for her beloved one to return. Vera Brittain depicts part of this story, using her own voice to narrate her time in Oxford thinking about her brother and fiancé before deciding volunteering as nurse. This image of the lover, the mother, and the daughter in despair served to recruit soldiers. The messages embedded in the poster argues the necessity of men to involve in battler to defend their families and lovers, as well as for the safeguard of their male honor.
It is interesting to observe how these images affect the construction of men and women that lived in flesh and blood the consequences of the war in their social and family circles. Alma Clarke’s scrapbooks, for example, puts greater emphasis in the images of nurses and nuns as mothers and caretakers. Alma’s memories frame the way in she saw herself as a noncombatant in the battlefield, how the posters of recruitment from the Red Cross highlighted their role to “heal” the damages of the war.
However, Alma does not emphasize the domestic space in the same way as Frank Steed or the author, probably a man, of the Atlantic City scrapbook. The vision of these persons, which we can observe through the scrapbooks, reflect the gender and work relations in the midst of the war. These men, in Europe and in the U.S., compiled almost simultaneously media representing ideal versions of female as inspirational motifs of male heroism and in leisure environments.
The women portrayed by these men always look young, radiant, and smiling. These men, unlike Clarke who relied on her heroism as a nurse in the war, utilized photographs and printed media of real-life muses to create their memories. They focus on an image of female’s positive and embracing images to maintain the spirits high in the midst of a chaotic context.
But even though there were women who stayed at home, their duties went beyond the romanticized idea of the lady in despair. The propaganda that circulated in the country call the attention of the housewives to honor their men and serve their country by rationing food and donating supplies for the cause of the war. These media gives the idea women should serve a sort of penitence while men are overseas sacrificing their lives for them and for Columbia.
Providers: Working Women in the Homefront
While the image of Muses is very popular, the recruitment campaign during the war also aimed at involving women in different duties in the Homefront. The main goal of these tasks was to provide different means: food, weapons, information. Along with the role of nurses, this imagery of women turns empowering and provided a channel of social mobility in the public sphere of the U.S. In the absence of men, women took agency and went to the factories, to the fabrics, and to the farmland.
Then, women became providers, a fundamental system that secured the well-being of the soldiers and the stability of the country.
In terms of resources, the most prominent scope of propaganda targets the role of women working the land, planting the seed, and preserving food.
The image from the right exposes the sentiment that the battle was not isolated in Europe, but it affected the way people saw their quotidian task in the U.S. In this case, women became “the army land,” adjudicating implicit combatant roles that addressed their importance in the production of good for the civilian and military population. The image from the left, which belongs to the “Scrapbooks – the Home Front”, reasserts the role of women as providers, as the sources of the energy that would guarantee the success of the soldiers in battle. Furthermore, the images exposes the women also in a combatant role with her duty, since she is also wearing an uniform. Even though this image seems to be more patronizing than the previous, it does give an idea on how the domestic and the public sphere merged to create the female role of provider.
While the production and preservation of food appears as the most constant theme of the propaganda and printed media, there were also other two roles that increased female’s involvement in the war, as providers of weapons and providers of information.
These four dimensions of female imagery -Motherland, Healers, Muses, Providers- show the multifaceted character that surrounded women’s role in the early twentieth century. They also show the transitions of women from the domestic environment of the home, preserving food, to the public spheres working shoulder to shoulder, reaffirming an active position among men, occupying positions once limited in the past, and serving as examples for the nation. Women in the Great War played important roles that preserved the national sentiments in the home front and the battlefront, that healed the soldiers physically and spiritually. Most of all, these women opened new paths for the following generations, and in the same way as WWI transformed men, countries, and governments, it also changed and reaffirmed the importance of women at family, social, and economic levels.
Hopefully, this storytelling exposes how fundamental the presence of this imagined and real women was for the place female population occupies nowadays!
Pitz, Marylynne. “Hail, Miss Columbia: Once a U.S. symbol she’s lost out to Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2008 http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/2008/03/18/Hail-Miss-Columbia-Once-a-U-S-symbol-she-s-lost-out-to-Uncle-Sam-Lady-Liberty/stories/200803180240
“Columbia (name). Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_%28name%29#cite_note-3”
Prior, Neil. “How Land Girls helped feed Britain to victory in WW1.” BBC News, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-26238755; Kim, Tae H. “Where Women Worked During World War I.” Seattle General Strike Project. https://depts.washington.edu/labhist/strike/kim.shtml#_ftn15
Patch, Nathaniel. “The Story of Female Yeomen during the First World War.” National Archives 38 3 (2006). http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/fall/yeoman-f.html” target=”_blank; “World War I: 1914-1918.” Striking Women. http://www.striking-women.org/module/women-and-work/world-war-i-1914-1918
“Enclosure: Poem by Phillis Wheatley, 26 October 1775.” Founders Online. National Archives. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0222-0002
Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press), p. 2.
Women performed noncombatant roles during the WWI in the U.S. and in Europe. Their presence in the war, sometimes overlooked, can be observed through a wide scope of visual culture that circulated during the years of the Great War. Photographs, postcards, and propaganda show different dimensions of the female persona during this period. Women were portrayed as vulnerable and defenseless, but they also played more active roles, ranging from healers, to providers, and embodiment of national identity. All these representations portrayed the imagery towards femininity and gender stereotypes, as well as depicted the changing identities of women during the course of the war.
The visual culture and printing media that circulated during the Great War reflects the imagery towards gender roles, shows the multifaceted character of the female representations, and women’s engagement in different activities at home and overseas. Giving the inextricable relation between war and gender, I created a digital storytelling project that portrays and explains some of the female representations of women during the WWI. The storytelling is based on propaganda, photographs, and videos I have selected from digital databases related to the Great War. These resources serve to explore in more depth the role of women in the early-twentieth century U.S., particularly in the context of the war.
Women became the “second line of defense” that secured the moral, social, economic, and political methods of sustaining of the U.S. in ways the male soldiers and civil men could not achieve. As Susan Grayzel notes, World War I was the first modern war that required the full participation of both combatants and noncombatants, altering the battlefield as well as the domestic and social spaces of the Homefront in Europe and the U.S. Even though the outcome of WWI did not radically change the place of women in society, this epoch did had a great influence in different aspects of the domestic and public life that affected women and men. As well as the image of the country and the male soldiers highlighted the cohesion of a national identity, the visual representations of the war also relied and engaged female imagery. At the same time, the war opened new opportunities for education, employment, and national service for women in the country and overseas, performing duties as nurses, stenographers, factory workers, food producers, among others. The composition of different types of visual culture using female models, especially in propaganda, reflect this transition.
Depicting the Battlefront and the Homefront: Sources
Printed media and keep the population informed. During this period, mass media was accessible and cheaper, which increased their circulation and their conservation, as occurred with the making of scrapbooks and clipping albums. Similarly, the development of technologies during the industrial revolution increased the production of photographs that registered the fast-moving world. The use of photographs expanded the concept of fine arts beyond the canvas and the brush, as well as improved the circulation of information. Photography, in conjunction with printed media, became fundamental forms of documentation and visual representation in the post-WWI era.
Within this context, the wide scope of government propaganda that circulated in the U.S. and Europe is significant for understanding the recruitment of common citizens as combatants and noncombatants of the war. According to David Welch, war propaganda had a significant impact within the public, since their content tackled specific goals of nationalist sentiment.
Propaganda justified the war to the people, helped to promote recruitment into the armed forces, and convinced the population that their sacrifices at home and in the war would be rewarded with victory. Propaganda targeted men to join the military forces, alluding almost to a sentiment of shame if they were unwilling to protect their women and children. These advertising also used a similar discourse calling women to duty, whether helping with food provision for the soldiers or joining the Red Cross to assist men in the battle zone. The messages are usually patronizing when it comes to women, but they also reflect the importance of women –their moral image and their work- in the success of the battle, a message male imagery did not fulfill. I decided to incorporate several types of propaganda I have found at the Library of Congress Digital Collection, a very comprehensive database to locate printed media from U.S. and overseas from the early twentieth century.
By analyzing the scrapbooks from Frank Steed and Alma Clarke, I found recurrent use of visual media -photographs, postcards, and propaganda- showing female symbolism and women performing different roles as workers, nursers, nuns, and even models of leisure and fashion. These scrapbooks offer a more personal perception of the war, from the angle of two different persons who were in the battlefield and gathered, selected, and constructed their memories into a physical form. In this sense, Alma Clarke, a female nurse from the Red Cross and Frank Steed, a male soldier of the casualties division, are two similar but divergent views of the war. The memories they framed in their scrapbooks allow readers to see individual perspectives based on gender, occupation, leisure activities, social interactions, and personal values.
Another enriching source is the Scrapbook of the Home Front. Even though the author remains unknown, we have knowledge the scrapbook is from Atlantic City and was made circa 1918. This source gathers visual elements that circulated in the U.S. during the period when Clarke and Steed were in Europe.
The scrapbook contains different newspaper clips showing images of soldiers going to the war and different female representation, which reflects the inspirational and nurturing vision embedded on the women’s roles.
Page from Scrapbook, Home front – Atlantic City, 1918. Digital Library, Villanova University.
The Tools: Digital Storytelling
The main goal of this project is to analyze visual culture produced and circulated during the WWI and its relation to the construction of female representations. Hence, a digital storytelling project is an enriching and dynamic way to present this historical theme, which allows to combine writing text, images, and videos in a dynamic way.
Digital storytelling allows to construct compelling narratives with the use of different tools, guiding the user through the topics in discussion with interactive methods. The project is built entirely on WordPress, which allowed me to use different plugins simultaneously. This is a feature that strengths the concept of storytelling with text visualization within the images and comparative exposition of the visual content.
For my storytelling, I have used mainly Visual Slide Box Builder to embed text analysis in the images. This plugin is very useful for appreciating the visual content but also gives the user the opportunity to explore more about their composition and messages with brief explanations. I have also used Juxtapose JS and NextGen Gallery. Juxtapose JS permitted me to create comparative visions of certain images. Meanwhile, NextGen Gallery offers the opportunity to create sets of pictures from a similar theme to observe several examples. By using the three tools, I can create contrasting views of the visual content and examine their similarities and differences in more depth. Moreover, I can create elements that are dynamic for the users, which allow them to make decisions and engage with the narrative of the storytelling.
The structure of the project goes through a main narrative, divided in three themes. Each excerpt offers a particular view or role I have defined to understand the female imagery during the WWI. The sections are 1. Motherland: Female Symbolism of National Identity; 2. Healers: Nurses in the Battlefield; 3. Muses: Longingness and Domesticity; 4. Providers: Working Women in the Homefront. Each excerpt is formed by a main argument presented through a comparative analysis of different visual resources. This gives the sense of an “interactive museum,” where in each gallery the user cannot only observe the visual culture but also manipulate the images and learn through the contrast between visual and writing content.
The user can scroll down the page, as when reading a web article, and hover over the images edited with Visual Text Box Builder to gain more insight and information about the visual content. The images in Juxtapose offer a contrasting view between male and female representations, empowering the visibility of women in the war.
Future directions
Beside the levels of analysis I expose in the storytelling (motherland, healer, and provider), I would like to identify other feminine identities highlighted during and after the war to expand the multifaceted faces of women during the early twentieth century.
I would like to see how the imagery of women continued once the soldiers returned home and new relations took place once women increased their participation in the productive and political sectors of the U.S. I would like to see if women gained more agency in depicting themselves through the printed media of the epoch. Except for Alma Clarke scrapbook, most of the material used for this project was made by men. Hence, I considering the idea of trying to identity later images produced and designed by women compelling, especially during the suffragist movement in the 1920s.
Overall, this project has thought me how important noncombatant individuals were for the outcome of the war, and how a battle that engaged multiple nations had such an impact in the quotidian relations of women, children, and men. Soldiers were fundamental to win the battle, but women, those who usually remained relegated to a minor place in history, also played a fundamentals roles in the outcome of the war. This is my tribute to them.
Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press), p. 2.
Alison Nordström explains how, by the end of the nineteenth century, the availability of mass produced visual culture also enhanced the culture of collecting and scrapbooking in the U.S. Alison Nordström, “Making a Journey: The Tupper Scrapbooks and the Travel they Describe,” in Photographs Objects Histories, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart ed. 81-95 (New York, Routledge, 2004), p. 88.
Katherine Ott et al, “An Introduction to the History of Scrapbooks,” in The Scrapbook in American Life, Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott and Patricia Buckler ed., 1-21 (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2006), p. 7
Juliana Kreinik, “An Introduction to Photography in the Early 20th Century,” https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/beginners-guide-20-21/a/an-introduction-to-photography-in-the-early-20th-century; Department of Photographs, “Early Documentary Photography”. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/edph/hd_edph.htm
David Welch, “Propaganda for Patriotism and Nationalism,” British Library http://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/patriotism-and-nationalism
The Library of Congress has a very rich of collection of material from the U.S. and other countries. To see more examples of WWI propaganda, visit: http://www.loc.gov
Following the guidelines of The Goggles Manifesto, a digital storytelling should be grounded on a linear script that guide the user through the exploration of the topic. Transom.org, May 30 2012, http://transom.org/2012/the-goggles-welcome-pine-point/”>http://transom.org/2012/the-goggles-welcome-pine-point/
When I first read Nurse Alma Clarke’s English-language scrapbook of her WWI experiences, I struggled to envision her photos, drawings, and notes as a digital project. The content seemed to lend itself to an essay on cultural history, not a map, timeline, or other digital item. As I kept reading, though, I discovered pages of soldiers’ names. Most of the soldiers were American, but a few of them were French and one was British. Alma perserved their names, hometowns, injuries, major battles, and medals in tables that she drew longhand in pencil. I realized that Alma included enough data in her inventory of patients to pinpoint the soldiers’ journeys on a map. Suddenly, I had a project. I would visualize the arc of the soldiers’ travels, from their hometowns to the frontlines and finally to Alma’s Red Cross American Military Hospital, No. 1, housed in the Lycée Pasteur academy in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
Arguably the hardest part of the project was transcribing the inventory. The scrapbook has been digitized, but since the scrapbook’s text is handwritten, not typed, OCR software will not transcribe the document. As such, I had to retype every page and arrange the data in a chart that emulated the scrapbook’s layout. In the process, I learned that the data was less cooperative than I had hoped. Some entries had no hometown address, or even a hometown, in a few cases. Other entries omitted the names of battles or summaries of the wounds that soldiers received. One man’s name on page BMC_010r was struck through and illegible. Information from one entry might spill into another part of the chart, as was the case with the illegible name on BMC_010r, or with Herbert Martin & Grady Salter’s entries on BMC_028r.
The data posed problems of greater significance. First, the entries were not written in one hand, as I had initially thought. I now believe that Alma asked the patients, and perhaps other nurses or orderlies, to fill out the ledger. These individuals wrote with varying levels of neatness and grammatical accuracy. We cannot know for sure who authored each entry.
I ran searches for some of the trickier soldier names on Ancestry.com, but a few names remained illusive, so I had to make educated guesses when transcribing them. Such was the case with the French soldier Leo Tasquet (hopefully that is his correct name) on BMC_028r. A secondary problem arose: Several entries, including Leo’s, were in French. I cannot read French, so I asked around for assistance. Ultimately, an undergraduate from Villanova’s Romance Languages Department helped me to transcribe and translate these entries. Merci, Alice! No documentary editing project happens in solitude.
The third issue with the scrapbook was the omission of key dates. When I first skimmed through the book, I assumed that every battle would be matched with the date a patient fought in it. However, when I read the scrapbook in its entirety, I learned this was not the case. Similarly, the inventory did not always say on which day, or even in which battle, the patients were injured. The last battle a soldier mentioned was not necessarily the place he received his wound(s). My initial plan for visualizing the data had been to create an animated map — as you scrolled past a date, a new marker would appear — but I realized this plan would have to be discarded. You cannot show change over time effectively if half (or more) of your events have no date! As such, my final project is a stationary map. I provide the dates of battles in the captions where applicable. The map may not be the most fancy from a digital perspective, but all the available data is there.
The fourth complication with the data was finding latitude and longitude coordinates for the places each man fought. Places like “Saint-Mihiel” or “Wissous” were easy to identify, as they are specific towns. Unfortunately, “Argonne Forest,” “Somme,” and “Champagne” refer to battles that spanned dozens of miles, with swaths of the countryside torn apart. If I had a lot of time and access to the National Archives’ holdings on the U.S. military, I could probably find each regiment, track it through the battlefield, and write down the sequence of GPS coordinates. However, that process would take weeks, if not months. The scale of this project was greater than the time left in the semester.
I compromised by identifying sites at the center of major battlefields. Even though I failed to locate every troop position, I believe that my map provides a general sense of where the soldiers traveled. In some ways, my map is an artistic impression of the soldiers’ movements, rather than a strictly historical account. I know that Alma’s patients began their journeys in America and ended them in the Lycée Pasteur; where they went in between those locations remains hazy. Still, the artistic fiction of my map sits atop a base of historical research, which I have embedded on this page and made available to download.
Some cartographic issues popped up near the end of the project. Google Maps only shows one marker per set of latitude/longitude coordinates. In other words, if every soldier in a particular battle had the same coordinates, then only one point would appear on the map, and this would not convey the volume of individuals in each zone. As such, I gave the soldiers who fought in Champagne or the Argonne Forest coordinates that were very similar, but different by a few decimal points. Again, there was an element of historical fiction to this process. I also gave each soldier a distinct color and/or shape for his map markers, so that his narrative could be followed easily across the map.
What does my project reveal? Above all else, Alma’s inventory illuminates the spatial dynamics of WWI. Alma’s patients hailed from towns all over the United States, as well as France and Britain, but military service funneled these soldiers into the same places. Look through the transcribed inventory. 32 men fought in or near the Argonne Forest. 23 men fought on or near the Champagne front. 13 fought at Verdun. And so on. Shared battle experiences united Americans from diverse geographic origins, not to mention diverse economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Those combat experiences also forced Americans to interact with French and British soldiers from the broader alliance. My map visualizes only a sample of the patients, but the markers clustered in Champagne and Argonne make this unifying spatial dynamic clear. The war blurred not only class, nationality, and social status, but also the physical spaces that men occupied.
10 of Alma’s 32 patients who fought in the Argonne Forest. From “The Long Road” Map by Daniel Gorman Jr., based on Alma Clarke’s patient inventory.
Reading the inventory hammers home the casualties of WWI. It is one thing to read that thousands of men died or were wounded at Verdun, but it is another to read their individual names and injuries. By preserving portraits of her patients, Alma humanized the war’s cold statistics. At the same time, Alma’s inventory only encompasses men from Ward 185 of the Lycée Pasteur. That’s just one ward of just one hospital, amid a vast theatre of war. The scale of the casualties is appalling.
Yet I suspect that Alma kept the records simply because she cared about her men. She may have also wanted to save their impressions of her:
“Give my gratitude to Mademoiselle Clarke for the good care.” — René Bausc (French).
“If you want to know the auxiliary in No. 1 ^hospital,^ it’s Miss Clarke of New York. She was more than to willing to do anything in her power for every one of the boys, and personally I can’t thank her enough for the many things she’ done for me.” — Elmer Ohlson (American).
“Cared for in the American Ambulance, Neuilly, by Miss Clarke, the nice and dedicated nurse, to whom I give my sincerest thanks for the good care that she gave me.” — Antoine Descombes (French).
“Thanks to the care of Miss Clarke in ward 185, – I am still going strong and nearly ready for another scrap.” — Clarence T. Barnes (American).
The inventory provides other vivid vignettes. A newspaper clipping attached to one page tells how Hugh MacNair earned the Croix de Guerre, Legion d’Honneur, and the American Distinguished Service Cross — at the cost of his right leg. Other entries reveal additional recipients of the Croix de Guerre, among other commendations. Finally, Private Larkin Bailey shares a U.S. Marine Corps joke that still circulates in 2015: “If the Army and the Navy / Ever looked on Heaven’s scenes, / They would find the streets are guarded by / The United States Marines.”
The logical way to expand this study is to find more GPS coordinates for each regiment and produce an expanded map. Next, historians should determine which of the patients, if any, died in the hospital — something Alma never recorded. Websites like Ancestry.com and Fold3 supply enough census data for historians to conduct this kind of research. Finally, historians could investigate soldiers’ long-term health struggles after returning home. Many soldiers had abstracts of their service, which outlined their experiences and medical issues. Ancestry.com has digitized a significant number of these abstracts, but the full collection is available only at the National Archives.
These projects would be lengthy, but they would provide a full portrait of the journeys that American soldiers undertook, even after WWI came to an end.
Thank you, David Uspal and Laura Bang at Falvey Library; Prof. Deb Boyer; Alice Zylla, B.A. ’16, for helping with the French passages; Dr. Seth Whidden, Romance Languages Department; and my dad, Lt. Col. Daniel Gorman, for teaching me to read military maps.
Historical & Geographic References
“2nd Battle of the Marne: Soissons and Vicinity, Franco-American Counterattack, 18 July–6 August 1918.” Dept. of Military Art and Engineering, West Point Military Academy. Wikimedia Commons. File in the Public Domain. File uploaded by Lawrencema [pseud.], modified by Hohum [pseud.]. Last modified January 11, 2012. Accessed November 26, 2015. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2ndBattleOfTheMarne.jpg.
Duffy, Michael. “Battles – The Second Battle of the Marne, 1918.” First World War.com: A Multimedia History of World War One. Last modified August 22, 2009. Accessed November 25, 2015. http://www.firstworldwar.com/battles/marne2.htm.
Highsmith, Carol M. “Architectural details on the Colorado Building, 14 and G. Street, NW, Washington, D.C.” Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, 2010. Accessed November 27, 2015. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010641340/.
Quintiliano, Barbara. “An Auxiliary Nurse’s Scrapbooks of the Great War.” Home Before the Leaves Fall: The Great War, 1914–1918. Villanova University Special Collections and Digital Library. Last modified October 23, 2014. Accessed November 23, 2015. http://wwionline.org/articles/auxiliary-nurses-scrapbooks-great-war/.
For more about Red Cross American Military Hospital, No. 1, Lycée Pasteur, Neuilly-sur-Seine, see: Barbara Quintiliano, “An Auxiliary Nurse’s Scrapbooks of the Great War,” Home Before the Leaves Fall: The Great War, 1914–1918, Villanova University Special Collections and Digital Library, last modified October 23, 2014, accessed November 23, 2015, http://wwionline.org/articles/auxiliary-nurses-scrapbooks-great-war/; A Little Guide to AFS in Paris, “Chapter Three: Neuilly-sur-Seine,” Our Story: The Field Service, accessed November 23, 2015, http://www.ourstory.info/library/Paris/ParisAFS3.html; “Our History: The History of the American Hospital of Paris,” American Hospital of Paris, accessed November 23, 2015, https://www.american-hospital.org/en/american-hospital-of-paris/about-us/our-history.html.
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