How heroic are you? American women traveled thousands of miles from their garden gates to save wounded soldiers during WWI! 99 cents for Veterans Day!

 

How heroic are you?
    Would you volunteer to travel thousands of miles from home with others you don’t know to live in tents, wash your hair in your helmet and work 12-24 hours each day?
    In the Great War, thousands of women did.
    For nurse Gwen Spencer, fighting battles is nothing new. An orphan sent to live with a vengeful aunt, Gwen picked coal and scrubbed floors to earn a living. But when she decides to become a nurse, she steps outside the boundaries of her aunt’s demands…and into a world of her own making.
    Leaving her hometown for France, she helps doctors mend thousands of brutally injured Doughboys under primitive conditions. Amid the chaos, she volunteers to go ever forward to the front lines. Braving bombings and the madness of men crazed by the hell of war, she is stunned to discover one man she can love. A man she can share her life with.
    But in the insanity and bloodshed she learns the measures of her own desires. Dare she attempt to become a woman of accomplishment? Or has looking into the face of war and death given her the courage to live her life to the fullest?

The story of their courage is 99 cents on sale for Veterans day!

*****

Excerpt: Copyright, Jo-Ann Power, 2013. All rights reserved.
When she did return to the tent, she had Colonel Scott in tow. She’d told him nothing except their German was now awake, aware and spoke English. She thought it best to let the officer discern the veracity of the man.
“Nurse Spencer tells me you speak our language. Might I ask you where you learned it?”
“At my mother’s knee, Colonel. I am Captain Adam Fairleigh, His Majesty’s Forces. Forgive me, sir, I would greet you appropriately but our erstwhile nurse has strapped me to the bed.”
“Then you must need restraining,” Scott replied. “What the hell is this that you say you’re with the Brits?”
“I am, sir. I am attached to General Pershing’s staff, Chaumont.”
“As what? How do you speak Hun so well and why in God’s name are you in one of their uniforms?”
Fairleigh arched both brows, looking at the short American down his very elegant straight nose. “Liaison to the American Commander, sir. Since December. I speak excellent German because my maternal grandmother came from Saxe-Coburg, the same principality as our late Prince Albert. I speak German, sir, as well as I do English. Before the war, that was no crime, but an asset.”
“I see. And how do you come by this uniform?”
Their patient was no longer so quick or cocky. “I took it off a dead man.”
Gwen swallowed hard at the savage image of this man removing clothing from a corpse.
“I had managed to crawl across a zone where they were not shelling. I thought if I could reach one of their forward trench lines, then I—”
“Preposterous. How did you get that far in your own uniform?”
“I went in peasants’ rags. Our lines abut an old village where only a few huts still stand.”
“Why discard your rags for a German captain’s uniform?”
“Well, sir, he was not only dead but conveniently my size.”
That shut the man up.
Gwen could only marvel at this creature in the bed.
“When I came upon their trench, I could hear their conversation below. Luck was with me. That bunker was a communications center. If I could get in there, I might learn quite enough to make my mission worthwhile. Of course, I couldn’t do that, couldn’t speak German to them and have them believe I was one of them if I wore French farmer’s culottes, could I? So I crept around…among their dead whose bodies they had not retrieved.” He stared at the American with blank eyes. “I happened upon the captain who seemed my height. Then I waited until night fell and—”
He halted, regarding Gwen once more. “I buried my rags and crawled into their trench. They accepted my story. I was privy to their orders that were to move their gun emplacements. Then, as you can expect, I was stuck with them, considered one of them. I had to run with them. I had no opportunity to escape until two nights later when the French opened a barrage in our sector.”
He lifted a hand, let it drop to the sheets. “I managed to hang back when they retreated with their line. I set out to No Man’s Land and prayed to Christ I’d find my way across to French lines. This took me…I’m not clear. A night. Two?” He shrugged. “Here I am.”
“Who is your American liaison in Pershing’s staff?”
“Colonel Samuel Rustings.”
Scott nodded, a hint of a smile curling his lips. “I see.”
“I gather you know him.”
“Same class at West Point.”
“Well, then. If you telegraph him, he will verify who I am and my mission. He knew I went out, you see.”
“A man from headquarters is already on his way here.”
“Splendid.”
“We thought we had ourselves a Heinie.”
The man’s mouth quirked in bitterness. “Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Oh, you’ll do, sir. What did you say your name was?”
Gwen noticed that Scott had not addressed him by his rank.
“Fairleigh.”
“We’ll see what our man from Chaumont has to say about you. In the meantime, my private is outside the tent.”
Fairleigh inclined his head in acknowledgement of his warder.
“Nurse. Finish up here. Untie him. ”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Good day, then.”
When Scott had departed, Fairleigh regarded her with appraising eyes. “What is your name?”
“Spencer.”
“Nice name. Spencer.”
“Thank you.” She pulled her cart closer to his bed. No matter who he was, he was to be made whole as efficiently as she could.
“I am sorry, Spencer, for being an ass.”
She saw on his face honest contrition. Unaccustomed to apologies from those who insulted her, she had no reason to trust the value of his. Yet she gave him credit for the courtesy of it. He had done such a brave act. What kind of man would do as he had done? A fool. An opportunist. A man who saw this was work which he and he alone was best suited for? Was that hubris? Cunning? Or duty? If indeed, he had done it. If he hadn’t lied.
“Spencer, I am grateful for your help. Please do patch me up. I’d hate to lose my hands because I lacked good manners.”
He was making conversation to heal their rift. She picked through her gauze looking for the needle she had misplaced when she had left him. Brusqueness served her where experience did not. “Lie back then and be good.”
“Chilly. Do you they teach you to be frosty like that in America?”
“Yes.”
He feigned a shiver.
She fought a smile. “Put that spoon between your teeth. This needle will hurt.”
“I wager it will hurt less than your German. You should have warned me that it was so bad.”
“Careful.” Fingering her needle, she began to thread the eye. “You need me to be gentle as I sew. Besides,”—she could taunt him now that he was rational and at her mercy—“I doubt I’ll ever sing with you again.”
“I will endeavor to ensure you do.”
His attempt to charm her flattered her. She would do well to ignore it. “This is war, sir. Neither of us has the time.”
“Then sing to me instead.”
“When I put my needle in your skin, I will hear you sing and off key, too.” She threatened him, hiding all the humor his compliment inspired. “The spoon, sir. Now!”

HEROIC MEASURES BUY links:  https://books2read.com/u/bzgaKn

Women of War: American girls who fought far from their garden gate!

Research can take you far, far from home!

Gates to
Suresnes American Cemetery

Here I begin a series about my travels to research a novel about the American women who volunteered to go abroad and nurse American Doughboys during the Great War, or as we now call it World War One!

A few of our women are buried abroad. If you go to Paris, do go to the American Cemetery high above the Seine at Suresnes. Situated just near a school Napoleon founded, this cemetery is land given to the United States to bury our dead after that war.

The families of these women—just as those of our men—were asked if they wished the bodies of their loved ones sent home or buried in the soil where they died.

Here are graves of four women whose families chose to have them remain. In this beautiful setting above the Seine, where one can see the Eiffel Tower and the flowing river, lie our national heroines. They bear their full names, hospital assignment, state they were from and date of their deaths. (These are my pictures taken in 2016.)

For more information about my research into World War One, medical care, and Army Nurse Corps, do visit my other blog: http://theyalsofought.blogspot.com  

Marian Henrietta White, Nurse, American Red Cross,
Pennsylvania, October 3, 1918

Katherine Dent,
Nurse, Base Hospital 24, ANC
Louisiana, June 16, 1918

Lucy N. Fletcher, Nurse, Base Hospital 6, ANC
May 6, 1918

Nellie M. Dingley, Nurse, Camp Hospital 4, ANC
New York, August 28, 1918.

#Veterans of #WWI included 22,000+ American #women! Read about them and #Centennial!

American women saved sick and wounded Doughboys during the First World War. But what do you know about them?

Here is a novel, historically researched, that tells a story all women will be proud of. HEROIC MEASURES by Jo-Ann Power is a critically acclaimed work, thoroughly documented, that tells a story of women who left home, when to do so was extraordinary. Here is the background and the new link to Jo-Ann's site on the USA's National World War One Centennial site!

Jo-Ann and her husband in Chateau-Thierry
on one of their research trips to American World War One battle sites.

When United States Congress declared war in April 1917, the United States had a standing army of only 200,00 men. To fight against a seasoned enemy in the war-torn trenches and forests of Europe, the country needed at least a million men—and a medical corps to care for their sick and wounded.

Caring for wounded, Base Hospital Johns Hopkins Unit, France

With only 403 nurses in the Army Nurse Corps [ANC] when the war began, the Surgeon General called for volunteers. Women in hospitals and private duty as well as many in training responded. Those already staffing hospitals could join the ANC through the Army’s newly established base hospital system and through the American Red Cross.

Beginning in 1917 through the end of the war a year and a half later, more than 22,400 American women left their homes and their families to join the Army Nurse Corps. Most had never traveled beyond their hometown. Few had ever visited a foreign land. More than 10,000 sailed from American ports amid blackouts through U-boat-infested waters. They slept in hammocks, trudged through knee-deep mud, lived in wooden barracks—and sometimes even washed their hair in their own helmets. Enduring rain and snow, disease and danger from bombardment, they nursed more than 320,000 American soldiers sick and wounded.

The cover shows a British captain and an American flyer in proper uniforms!
Both are characters, along with the heroine Gwen Spencer in the novel!
Buy Link to digital and print at Amazon

They worked in base hospital wards approximately 50 miles behind the front lines. Some worked in field hospitals closer to those in combat. Others worked in tents and bombed-out churches, their patients brought in on rickety ambulances and laid down on beds of hay. In mobile surgical units a mile or two from the advancing soldiers, they worked in teams with doctors to provide emergency treatment to critically wounded Doughboys. They treated soldiers with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, gangrene and septicemia, poison gas burns, infections like trench foot, exposure and “shell shock” that we now term PTSD.

For this service, these women held no rank. They received half what an Army private was paid. But like their male comrades in arms, they had volunteered for the duration of the conflict, however long that would last.

Operating Room, nurses and doctors. National WWI Museum photo.

At the start of American involvement, they worked twelve-hour shifts. By the war’s end as the fighting grew more intense and casualties multiplied, they often labored round the clock. Many suffered from exhaustion. Some fell ill themselves. Many died of pneumonia, ear infections, dreaded Spanish influenza and more. A few died in automobile accidents and air raids. None died of combat related injuries.

Most returned home and were discharged from the ANC. Many resumed their work in civilian posts. Twenty-seven nurses received United States service medals for their bravery and dedication. Dozens more received medals from Great Britain, France, Belgium and other allies.

American cemetery at St. Mihiel, France where many nurses
are buried. This is Jo-Ann's photo.

More than 200 nurses gave the ultimate sacrifice. Many remain in repose in foreign soil next to the men they fought to save. Beneath the same white marble crosses as their male comrades in our American cemeteries, they rest at peace beneath the lovely Linden trees.

In the 1980s, author Jo-Ann Power began to research in museums and archives the lives of these heroic women. In 2013, she published her historical fiction about a group of nurses who volunteered. HEROIC MEASURES is for sale in digital and print.

Yesterday, she inaugurated the section of the National World War One Centennial site about the Army Nurse Corps. World War I Army Nurse Corps Putting all her research to work in a new way for the Centennial Commission, Power recounts the nurses’ challenges, their exploits and their triumphs.  Do marvel at their courage to travel so far and endure so much to salve the wounds of war, heal the sick and comfort the dying. Do applaud these women who, like others afterward, declared that war’s horrors must end—and that this conflict, this Great War, should be "the war to end all wars."

     Read more about HEROIC MEASURES here.

    

     For more information, pictures and details about the Army Nurse Corps, American experience in World War One and Jo-Ann's research trips in the States and to France, read Jo-Ann's blog, They Also Fought.

Now, she invites anyone who has photos, letters, documents about a family member or friend or acquaintance to contact her so that she can put them up on the site for all Americans and everyone around the world to see, admire and honor.

This Armistice Day remember #women in #Army #Nurse #Corps, Doughboys of #WWI

In April 1917 thousands of American  nurses volunteered to join the Army Nurse Corps to care for

wounded soldiers going abroad to fight in the trenches in Europe. HEROIC MEASURES is the tale of a few of those women who offered their skills—and discovered the extent of their own courage and the value of love.

EXCERPT OF HEROIC MEASURES:

Amazon:     http://amzn.to/1dWojVz  digital

                     http://amzn.to/1f30XAx   print

When she did return to the tent, she had Colonel Scott in tow. She’d told him nothing except their German was now awake, aware and spoke English. She thought it best to let the officer discern the veracity of the man.

“Nurse Spencer tells me you speak our language. Might I ask you where you learned it?”

“At my mother’s knee, Colonel. Captain Adam Fairleigh, His Majesty’s Forces. Forgive me, sir, I would greet you appropriately but our erstwhile nurse has strapped me to the bed.”

“Then you must need restraining,” Scott replied. “What the hell is this that you say you’re with the Brits?”

“I am, sir. I am attached to General Pershing’s staff, Chaumont.”

Operating Room, World War I Museum,
Kansas City, Kansas

“As what? How do you speak Hun so well and why in God’s name are you in one of their uniforms?”

Fairleigh arched both brows, looking at the short American down his very elegant straight nose. “Liaison to the American Commander, sir. Since December. I speak excellent German because my maternal grandmother came from Saxe-Coburg, the same principality as our late Prince Albert. I speak German, sir, as well as I do English. Before the war, that was no crime, but an asset.”

“I see. And how do you come by this uniform?”

Their patient was no longer so quick or cocky. “I took it off a dead man.”

Gwen swallowed hard at the savage image of this man removing clothing from a corpse.

“I had managed to crawl across a zone where they were not shelling. I thought if I could reach one of their forward trench lines, then I—”

“Preposterous. How did you get that far in your own uniform?”

“I went in peasants’ rags. Our lines abut an old village where only a few huts still stand.”

“Why discard your rags for a German captain’s uniform?”

“Well, sir, he was not only dead but conveniently my size.”

That shut the man up.

Gwen could only marvel at this creature in the bed.

“When I came upon their trench, I could hear their conversation below. Luck was with me. That bunker was a communications center. If I could get in there, I might learn quite enough to make my mission worthwhile. Of course, I couldn’t do that, couldn’t speak German to them and have them believe I was one of them if I wore French farmer’s culottes, could I? So I crept around…among their dead whose bodies they had not retrieved.” He stared at the American with blank eyes. “I happened upon the captain who seemed my height. Then I waited until night fell and—”

He halted, regarding Gwen once more. “I buried my rags and crawled into their trench. They accepted my story. I was privy to their orders that were to move their gun emplacements. Then, as you can expect, I was stuck with them, considered one of them. I had to run with them. I had no opportunity to escape until two nights later when the French opened a barrage in our sector.”

Church used as ARMY FIELD HOSPITAL #1, France,
June 16, 1918

He lifted a hand, let it drop to the sheets. “I managed to hang back when they retreated with their line. I set out to No Man’s Land and prayed to Christ I’d find my way across to French lines. This took me…I’m not clear. A night. Two?” He shrugged. “Here I am.”

“Who is your American liaison in Pershing’s staff?”

“Colonel Samuel Rustings.”

Scott nodded, a hint of a smile curling his lips. “I see.”

“I gather you know him.”

“Same class at West Point.”

“Well, then. If you telegraph him, he will verify who I am and my mission. He knew I went out, you see.”

“A man from headquarters is already on his way here.”

“Splendid.”

“We thought we had ourselves a Heinie.”

The man’s mouth quirked in bitterness. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Oh, you’ll do, sir. What did you say your name was?”

Gwen noticed that Scott had not addressed him by his rank.

“Fairleigh.”

“We’ll see what our man from Chaumont has to say about you. In the meantime, my private is outside the tent.”

Fairleigh inclined his head in acknowledgement of his warder.

“Nurse. Finish up here. Untie him. ”

“Thank you, Sir.”

“Good day, then.”

When Scott had departed, Fairleigh regarded her with appraising eyes. “What is your name?”

“Spencer.”

“Nice name. Spencer.”

“Thank you.” She pulled her cart closer to his bed. No matter who he was, he was to be made whole as efficiently as she could.

“I am sorry, Spencer, for being an ass.”

She saw on his face honest contrition. Unaccustomed to apologies from those who insulted her, she had no reason to trust the value of his. Yet she gave him credit for the courtesy of it. He had done such a brave act. What kind of man would do as he had done? A fool. An opportunist. A man who saw this was work which he and he alone was best suited for? Was that hubris? Cunning? Or duty? If indeed, he had done it. If he hadn’t lied.

“Spencer, I am grateful for your help. Please do patch me up. I’d hate to lose my hands because I lacked good manners.”

He was making conversation to heal their rift. She picked through her gauze looking for the needle she had misplaced when she had left him. Brusqueness served her where experience did not. “Lie back then and be good.”

“Chilly. Do you they teach you to be frosty like that in America?”

“Yes.”

He feigned a shiver.

She fought a smile. “Put that spoon between your teeth. This needle will hurt.”

“I wager it will hurt less than your German. You should have warned me that it was so bad.”

“Careful.” Fingering her needle, she began to thread the eye. “You need me to be gentle as I sew. Besides,”—she could taunt him now that he was rational and at her mercy—“I doubt I’ll ever sing with you again.”

“I will endeavor to ensure you do.”

His attempt to charm her flattered her. She would do well to ignore it. “This is war, sir. Neither of us has the time.”

“Then sing to me instead.”

“When I put my needle in your skin, I will hear you sing and off key, too.” She threatened him, hiding all the humor his compliment inspired. “The spoon, sir. Now!”

AMERICAN CEMETERY, BELLEAU WOOD, FRANCE
A portion of the cemetery.
Cerise's photograph

 BUY LINKS for HEROIC MEASURES:

Amazon:     http://amzn.to/1dWojVz  digital

                     http://amzn.to/1f30XAx   print

NOOK     KOBO      iTunes      Allromanceebooks.com    Wild Rose Press

SEALS, Soldiers, Delta Force and American Nurses who served in France during World War I! Cerise declares Military Month on her blog!

     November 11 we mark nearly a century since the end of the first WORLD WAR. Here in the States we tend to call it World War One. In Europe, they term it the Great War. "The war to end all wars" was not that at all.
     And so we mark November 11 each year to honor our war dead, our disabled military and our loved ones, lost in times of combat.
     For the next month, I will honor the military the way many of my author colleagues do all year long—by writing about them.
     I'll remind you of great romances by my pals and my own stories, too.

     I hope you will support my wonderful, talented colleagues just as you gain hours of enjoyment about those who serve.
     Among those who served, I will tell you about the women who served too. Twenty-one thousand women whom you have never heard of, those who volunteered to nurse American Doughboys in France, are those I will tell you about.
    In my other name, I write historicals of a different note.     HEROIC MEASURES recounts the story of thousands of women who become the Army Nurse Corps. This novel I researched for years at various facilities in the US and abroad in France. It comes with glowing reviews from the Army, other branches of the military, from nursing organizations and from readers. I hope you will buy this and enjoy it. It is available in digital and paperback. Please leave a review, too.
    If you would like to learn more about these courageous women who earned half what an Army private did and who worked 12-24-36 hours a day sometimes knee-deep in mud, please go to my blog about them, http://theyalsofought.blogspot.com

HEROIC MEASURES
In 1917, one young woman volunteers to nurse wounded Doughboys in France. Sailing far from home, working around the clock in a foreign land, she learns that courage takes on new meanings and comes in extraordinary forms. When she discovers love amid the chaos, she finds yet another way to define courage. And when the war ends and she sees that she is a different person from the one who volunteered, she learns the true meaning of courage and embraces new heroic measures of her own. 

Amazon:

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iTunes:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/heroic-measures/id719986822?mt=11&ls=1

Allromanceebooks.com :  https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-heroicmeasures-1310153-162.html

Wild Rose Press: http://www.wildrosepublishing.com/maincatalog_v151/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=209&products_id=5334