Mobilizing Morale: At the Front in a Flivver with the American Ambulanciers

Abstract

On March 25, 1916, soon after arriving in Paris from overseas, American Field Service ambulancier William Yorke Stevenson recorded the tragic circumstances surrounding two wounded soldiers in his war diary. Both suffered unbearable mutilation as a result of the war, and both languished in Parisian hospitals awaiting the fate their wounds laid out for them. Stevenson concluded his entry that day with their story:

I met a rather nice little French girl last night. There is a young Englishman in one of the hospitals, she told me, who has no arms, no legs, is stone blind and stone deaf. He can only feel and talk, and all he does is beg to be killed. She says a friend of hers who nursed a man, blind and without arms, is going to marry him because she thinks it is her duty, although she does not care for him. She is not pretty; but as the man is blind it will not matter, she says. Such cases are not rare.¹