Consistently stationed to the most forward of surgical hospitals during America’s five major campaigns of the First World War, this reminiscence by Rose Peabody Parsons (1892 – 1985) movingly recalls the sorrowful experiences involved when working among men who slowly die while in the bloom of their youth. Haunted by the memories of these dying boys for a period of five years, the nurse asks her readers as to whether they feel the world has kept the promises made to those who sacrificed: is the France they died to protect a better place? is the country that demanded they fight a better place? As the veterans of that war go about their business, they
“think of those who bravely died. We think, too, of our dead selves who once vowed that these others should not have died in vain. Can we, dare we, travel our smooth road farther and farther away from those great peoples of the earth whose companions we once were?”
