Old Glory and Verdun, and other stories

"Old Glory and Verdun" by Elizabeth Frazer is a collection of wartime narratives and reportage written in the early 20th century. It focuses on frontline hospital life in France during World War I, seen through the eyes of an American volunteer nurse’s aide. The vignettes mix pain, bravery, and gallows humor, sketching vivid portraits of wounded French soldiers, resourceful nurses, and tireless orderlies amid relentless dressings, operations, and recovery. The opening of this collection follows the narrator’s first day in Ward Eighty-three at the American Ambulance in Neuilly, where terror of doing harm gives way to hard learning under pressure. She meets Claudius, a young soldier with an infected leg and one eye, and Justin, a seasoned orderly who quietly saves patients with skill and nerve, while the ward’s routines—painful dressings, shouted “Doucement!”, jokes, and small rebellions—reveal both agony and resilience. Brief, piercing scenes accumulate: a delirious sergeant relives a grenade charge; a comic “hen” routine lifts spirits; a boy with a gangrenous arm dies almost unnoticed; and later chapters widen to the shock of first weeks, the youth and humor of the poilus, “cafard” (black moods) broken by love and visitors, the tenderness of “copains,” and the scorn for “embusqués.” It closes this opening stretch with the long, watched dying of a man with gas infection—his wife and father arriving, a priest called, even an X-ray man taking a photo in the same room—capturing the ward’s stark blend of endurance, ordinary kindness, and absurdity.

Old Glory and Verdun, and other stories, by Elizabeth Frazer. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #77406.