To-morrow will be my last day at the hospital, as I start in the
evening for Nice, on my way to Rome. I have lately found myself sole
nurse in a ward with nine men....
It is full of English Tommies, and unless you nurse them and help those
English boys, you don't know what they are. They are too lovely and
too fine for words. One perfectly fine young fellow has had his leg
amputated at the thigh--his life ruined for ever. Another is blind,
staring into the visions of his past--he will never have anything else
to look at again. The chief amusement of these fellows seems to be
watching the funerals, and they call me to run to the window to see
the hearses covered with the Union Jack or the French flag, and they
find nothing mournful in the processions. One Sunday afternoon, as I
sat there, leaning against a table in the middle of the room, a few
country flowers in a vase near by--for Miss Hickman asks for country
flowers for country lads--I asked them if they wouldn't sing me a song
that I had heard a good deal about but had never heard sung. "What's
that, nurse?" asked the boy without a leg. "Tipperary"--for I had never
heard it. "Why, of course we will, won't we, lads?" and he said to his
companion, only nineteen, from some English shire: "You hit the tune."
And the boy "hit it," and they sang me "Tipperary." Before they had
finished I had turned away and walked out into the corridor to hide the
way it made me feel, and I heard it softly through the door as they
finished: "It's a long way to Tipperary." I shall never hear it again
without seeing the picture of that ward, the country flowers and the
country lads, and hearing the measure of that marching tune....
I have seen Mrs. Vanderbilt constantly. She seems to be ubiquitous.
Wherever there's need, she is to be found--whether in the
operating-room, the bandaging-room, or in one of the great wards where
she has charge. I have found her everywhere, just at the right moment:
calm, poised, dignified, capable and sweet. But none of this expresses
the strength that she has been to the American Ambulance since its
foundation--the heart and soul of its organization; and her personal
gifts to it have been generous beyond words. I don't know what we shall
do when she finally returns to America. She animates the whole place
with her spirit and her soul....