White poppies on a friend’s blog just now set me on one of my little hunts for histories of interesting people—it had me running over the verses of Flanders Field in my head, and looking up some of the last words, I found the poem inscribed in a young woman’s handwriting in her Nurse’s Daybook, and that just captured my heart.
Her name was Ella Osborn, and she worked at Mt. Sinai in New York, I believe, before she took up the flag and volunteered for work right on the front lines in France---they were right under the bombers and felt the wounds and damages of the ordnance, the searing sting of the floating mustard gas, as they stood in their operating rooms or repairing rooms, hands deep in the wounds of soldiers, til sleep almost swept them off their feet.
She copied the poem on pages in and amongst numbers of lost
patients, hours at the operating table, and recounting the small simple joys of
an outing away from the melee into a town for a bowl of soup. Her fieldbook/daybook/nurse’s notes held the
diary of her days, from her term of service there, January 1918 to April
1919. A year and some-odd of a Hell no
one could imagine. She wrote once of an unthinkable
reprimand: “I went for a walk but had to
come back early to a lecture given by the colonel who gave us quite a raking
over, and said in a nice way we would have to come under Army Discipline.” (I’m trying to imagine what kind of rank and
courage and confidence it would take to dare bring reproof to such a group of
heroic, dedicated young women as those battlefield nurses).
And I just held her to my heart, with the absolute kinship of
family tragedy, with my Dad’s two oldest brothers, 5 and 7, dying within a week
of each other in the Flu Epidemic of 1918, before Daddy was born. I spent lots of hours scribing my finger
along the grooves of the lettering on their fading small stones, oldest in our
family section of the cemetery, and then
such searing pangs as a Mother later, of how in the world my Mammaw made it
through that, pregnant with Daddy’s sister born two months after their deaths,
and then Daddy’s birth a year later. Finding her words was a sort of "she was there doing THAT and my family was here in grief over THIS" in a time frame of mutual hardship.
Mammaw also lived through a rattlesnake bite in the pea patch
when Daddy was a teen---he drove her in their old Ford five miles on dirt roads
to the doctor, as his sister held onto her in the back seat. She “swoll up fit to pop,” but she made it,
circling the century and living another fifty-five years until 1987, within months of her 100th
birthday.
I’m delaying lunch to ferret out more on such a hero as Ella Osborn. I pray her life was a sweet reward for all the sacrifices she made and good she did in those months of unspeakable trials. And I hope there are poppies where she rests.
Another reference that came up just now: Her trip to France and her service there.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/847fad150ae74ff2a8e8e2df09d4a891
