Introduction
In October’s issue, the article by Wendy Elkis Girnis (HHS ’77) about military nurses reminded me that two Hicksville women served in the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) during World War I: Mary Keller, whose parents operated a hotel/tavern at the corner of Woodbury Road and Park Avenue, and Elise Bergold, whose family had a farm on Old Country Road, near the border with Westbury.
Background
World War I began in 1914, but the U.S. could not declare war until 1917 – it took nearly three years to draft, train, and equip an Army of the requisite size. Such an Army would need thousands of nurses, but when the nation finally declared war, it had only 401 of them. Ironically, the civilian American Red Cross (ARC) had 8,000 trained nurses, and many of these were already serving in France and the UK, primarily caring for wounded British soldiers. Both groups worked hard to recruit more.
The two groups reached an agreement: the Army would draft willing Red Cross nurses into the Nurse Corps for wartime service. Today, this practice may lead to confusion. For example, the question “How many Army nurses served during the war?” yields different answers depending on which nurses one counts. Only nurses inducted into the Army Nurse Corps? Or also Red Cross nurses in non-U.S. hospitals who treated American and other military Allied casualties as well?
Danger Everywhere
Trained nurses were essential to the Army on both sides of the Atlantic. We may think that working stateside at an Army camp was safer than being in Europe, treating men from the Front -- but that was not so for a nurse. The global influenza pandemic was at its peak in the U.S., and spending a day face-to-face with thousands of soldiers – who were fresh from overcrowded cross-country troop trains that took them from one huge training encampment to another – was highly risky. During the war, 272 ANC nurses died of disease; many had never left the U.S.
In this context, note that the Army did not knowingly send women to or near the Front at that time. Nurses and orderlies at the Front, or in Field hospitals, were male. The closest female nurses came to combat were the Base Hospitals, often near but still removed from the Front. Note that Hicksville’s Mary Keller spent some months assigned to a Base Hospital.
Base Hospitals
During the War, the U.S. Army established more than 130 of these “mother ship” hospital units, receiving patients from frontline medical units, which triaged them and gave them emergency treatment. The earliest B.H.s began stateside before American troops were in combat as quasi-experiments. At first, each B.H. was only a team of people -- hospital administrators, medical specialists, and technicians assembled by the Army in conjunction with a major medical school. The teams worked out how their future hospital would work: what equipment would be needed, what medical practices would be standard, what procedures would be followed, etc.
As the months passed, the teams set up operational hospitals in buildings, becoming more familiar with equipment and procedures and learning how to work smoothly. When the American Expeditionary Forces left for France, B.H. units went as well, the teams eager to test the lessons they’d learned. Feedback from the experience was positive, and eventually, the Army used the experience’s lessons to create new B.H.s with little input from private medical schools.
Note that Base Hospitals were not all made from the same cookie-cutter – the idea was adapted to different settings. At Limoges, for example, there was a lush campus of many B.H. units laid out among lawns and trees, each unit with its own new pre-fab buildings, some with multiple levels. It resembled a civilian cluster of research facilities more than a wartime hospital. In contrast, many a B.H. built later, when American forces were spearheading the push that swiftly moved the German Front back east, simply requisitioned the nearest suitable shell-scarred school or business and got to work ASAP.
Mary Frances Keller
Mary Frances Keller was an experienced nurse when she joined the ANC “from civilian life” in September 1918. She was 33, and she had resided at – and presumably worked at -- Greenpoint Hospital. (In this era, many hospitals still demanded that nurses be single and live in the hospital’s nurses’ residence, where senior nurses were expected to guide and “keep an eye on” the younger nurses.) Keller began her ANC duties at the Army’s NYC Mobilization Station, assisting doctors who assessed draftees and recruits by taking temperatures, recording test results and observations, treating/bandaging minor infections, looking for signs of communicable disease, etc. The hours would have been long, and the work monotonous.
She soon was added to the Base Hospital #91 team, which, in early November 1918, set sail for Europe to relieve another B.H. team, which had spent months dealing with the carnage of the intense American advance through the Meuse-Argonne region. The willingness of Germany to finally seek an Armistice is often attributed to this determined and extremely bloody effort. Although the fighting was over when B.H. #91 took over, Nurse Keller would be busy for months, caring for hundreds of gassed and machine-gunned soldiers -- not all of whom would survive.
Elise Bergold
25 years old when the U.S. declared war, Elise Bergold was younger than Mary Keller and likely a less experienced nurse. Her initial ANC assignment was at Camp Upton in Yaphank, a “warehouse” at which large numbers of draftees and recruits were collected, processed, and dispatched for training elsewhere in the Eastern U.S. After training camp, many were funneled back to Upton to await assignments to ships bound for France.
For some of these same men, the post-war trip home was not as smooth because of wounds or other infirmities. Nurse Bergold was transferred from Upton to Debarkation Hospital #3, a temporary hospital for more than 4,000 patients – then the largest hospital in the world! – which was carved out of the old Mercantile Exchange in Manhattan.
Back Home to Celebrate
Nurse Bergold’s active service in the ANC ended in the Spring of 1919 when she was honorably discharged. Officially, Nurse Keller’s European tour and active service ended in mid-July; she was discharged stateside two weeks later. However, she was able to “cut class” and get back to Hicksville by July 4th.
We don’t know if Nurses Bergold and Keller had been acquainted before the war, but on that day, they surely met. All of Hicksville stopped what it was doing that morning and began a celebration for all the village’s sons and daughters who had served in uniform.
The festivities were grand and varied, including a parade that featured as many of the honored 141 survivors as could make it, not to mention Hicksville’s two surviving veterans of the Civil War. There were speeches, a picnic, a baseball game at Cantiague Park, a formal dinner, and open-air dancing nearly until dawn on Broadway.
The names of Hicksville’s ANC Nurses are listed on the WW I commemorative boulder, taking their proud places among the names of the men from Hicksville who also had served in uniform during the war.
Life After the War
Both women maintained their ties with Hicksville. Bergold married; she and her husband, Charles Camden, settled down on Newbridge Road, adjacent to a farm owned by one of her siblings. She worked as a nurse in a doctor’s office. Elise Bergold Camden passed away in 1962 and was buried at Plain Lawn Cemetery.
Keller lived on East John Street and worked as a nurse for Nassau County. She outlived the younger Bergold by 13 years, dying in 1975 at the age of 90. Her grave marker proclaims her service in the Great War.
Appendices
Sources
What I’ve written in this article is based primarily on these two sources:
- Contributions of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in World War I co-authored 2014 by Col. Elizabeth Vane, Army Nurse Corps Historian, and Sanders Marble, Senior Historian, Office of Medical History, US Army Medical Command
Note that this article can be read online at https://e-anca.org/History/Topics-in-ANC-History/Contributions-of-the-US-Army-Nurse-Corps-in-WWI
- Abstracts of World War I Military Service for Army Nurses, a collection of index card records, as illustrated by the examples included in the body of this article
Discrepancies
It is common for different sources to present statistics about this topic that seem to disagree, especially with regard to the number of wartime deaths of Nurses. As noted earlier, such disagreement may stem from failure to disentangle Red Cross and ANC nurses, but there may be other reasons. Phrases like “died in the War” and “died as a result of enemy action” can have very different implications. A nurse who died of influenza at one of the huge, jam-packed Army training posts certainly died in service to her country during the war, but she did not technically die as the result of enemy action. A nurse who died in France when an ambulance crashed after hitting a crater left by German artillery could be said to have died in an accident – but that accident was the direct result of enemy action.
Sources of Images
- Photo of War Memorial boulder in its original location: old postcard listed for sale on ebay.com
- 1916 ARC Recruiting Poster: ebay.com
- Abstracts of Service Records: Ancestry.com
- Lounge at Debarkation Hospital #3: Library of Congress (I think)
- Hicksville’s Biggest Day: Huntington Long-Islander, July 11, 1919
- Grave Markers: findagrave.com
- Photo of Private Frank Kowalinski (below): Soldiers of the Great War, Volume 2 (accessed via Google Books)
Post-Script
In a way, this article is personal for me.
In October 1918, my mother’s first cousin, childhood friend, and neighbor Frank was wounded by enemy machine gun fire during the American advance that pushed back the German troops. With the aid of a Chaplain, he wrote home afterward from a Base Hospital, praising the care he was receiving and the people who helped him. He died a few days later. In 2015, a street in Queens, NY -- Frank Kowalinski Way – was co-named in his honor.