Introduction
Last December, I wrote about Elise Bergold and Mary Frances Keller, two Hicksvillians who served in the Army Nurse Corps during World War I. This month, we look back a little further, and we see that before Ms. Keller was a nurse serving in Europe in the Great War, she had been... well, a nurse serving in Europe in the Great War. While the conflict was still new, she had served on a team sent to Belgrade to establish a Red Cross Hospital, at a time when that city was bombarded daily by Austrian mortars.
The American Red Cross was founded in 1881 to provide disaster relief to communities anywhere in the world. Nurses played vital roles in its work, but it waited until 1909 to establish its own Nursing Service. That timing reflected an increased awareness that 20th-century America would need a large pool of nurses who had solid and modern training. Thanks to that awareness, when disease and war hit Europe in 1914, the Red Cross was able to assemble relief teams of surgeons and nurses to send where they were needed most.
War, Famine, and Epidemics: Déjà Vu
The inconclusive First (1912) and Second (1913) Balkan Wars had shown that the Balkan states were neither inclined to unite under a common flag, nor live peacefully as independent neighbors. Not everyone learned that lesson, however, and in June 1914, Archduke Ferdinand (heir to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones) and his wife were assassinated by a radical student. The young man wanted to persuade the world that there would be lasting peace in the Balkans only when all the contentious states, with all their disagreements, willingly became part of an independent Serbia. In other words, there would be peace only once everyone got peaceful. Instead of his message of peace, headlines now reported bloody combat -- but soon a different type of grim news also began to bubble up to the front pages.
The war had begun in harvest season and now, north from Greece to the Danube, harvesting had all but stopped, because farmers were not in their fields: they had been called up into the army. Many doctors had been drafted, and the most critical medicines had been allocated to the military. Obviously, when essentials like food, doctors, and medicine become unavailable, people grow weak, they get sick more easily and more acutely, and mortality increases. And so, epidemics began to appear in Greece and in the Balkans, spreading among both civilians and soldiers. People who tried to outrun the disease inadvertently brought it with them. Roads and cities overflowed with sick refugees.
During World War I, more people were killed by disease than by weapons. On the Eastern Front alone, 1.5 million soldiers died of malaria (!), and several million – the number cannot be nailed down precisely – died of typhus.
Keeping a Secret
In August, newspapers reported that the American Red Cross would soon dispatch a large ship filled with grain, medical staff, and supplies to France (much of which was already occupied by German troops). Another vessel was to sail to Greece and Serbia. For reasons of security, the details of where and when that ship would reach Serbia, and the main purpose of the expedition -- setting up an emergency hospital -- were not divulged.
The team for Serbia was directed by two experienced Red Cross project leaders – one a young doctor, the other a mature nurse – each of whom had previously created war-zone hospitals in far-flung locales. But the Belgrade mission was going to be a unique challenge: to put together and run a hospital that housed thousands of patients, all the while under repeated barrages of shells that landed randomly on centuries-old plazas and stone buildings.
In anticipation of dealing primarily with battle casualties, the doctors on the team were surgeons. The nurses had signed on for six-month stints. Spoiler Alert: Not all of these volunteers would live to return home.
Why Mary Keller?
As the departure date approached, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle included profiles of several Brooklyn-based nurses who would be sailing to Serbia.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 4, 1914
Why would the Red Cross not want to take such a person along? She had enough initiative to have acquired better than average training, which included surgical experience, and she had become Superintendent of a downtown Brooklyn hospital before she turned 30. She would be comfortable making decisions and shouldering responsibility – being Superintendent for the night shift had made her the senior person on duty at St. Mary’s.
Architect's rendering of St. Mary’s Hospital, Brooklyn, NY 1910
Keller’s abilities may have been known beforehand to project leader Mary Gladwin. In-between the latter’s various Red Cross assignments abroad (Tokyo, Philippines, UK, Europe), Gladwin had held a number of prominent positions in the American medical community. Most recently, she had been Supervisor of Manhattan’s Woman’s Hospital. Perhaps she and Keller had connected through inter-hospital committee work in New York City.
Postcard of Woman's Hospital, New York, NY, published by Albertype Company c.1906
Off to Greece
Crossing the Atlantic turned out to be more arduous than anticipated. Ships were in very short supply as the war took shape, and the team had to sail on the venerable and threadbare S.S. Ioaninna.
S.S. Ioaninna, location and date unknown
Its cabins were so infested with gnawing rats (not a surprise on a ship full of grain) and bedbugs that the Red Cross people resorted to sleeping out on deck. They repeatedly had to repair the holes that rats chewed into their duffel bags. Conditions were likely even worse for the passengers in steerage, who were residents of Greece or the Balkans, and had been caught abroad by the war. Now these desperate folk wanted to return ASAP to their families -- who, ironically, might have already fled their family homes because of epidemic.
The voyage was interrupted several times by British patrol vessels, which dispatched boarding parties to Ioaninna to confirm that she was neither a military vessel in disguise, nor a civilian steamer transporting criminals, spies, or contraband. In Mary Gladwin’s diary, the account of one such visit stands out: an encounter with the 1895-vintage battleship HMS Glory.
HMS Glory; instead of being retired and scrapped, she remained in service,
but was relegated to patrol duty in the West Atlantic
Facing a boarding party of young officers and sailors, Gladwin succeeded in being permitted to speak on behalf of her entire contingent (Does a Monty Python “Don’t talk about the hospital!” sketch come to mind?). She found the young Royal Navy men quite charming, and the very sight of the approaching Glory with its looming guns riding over the Atlantic’s waves had stirred her deeply. As the men of the boarding party later said their goodbyes, she gave them candies to share with their shipmates. That day, Gladwin concluded her diary entry with the happy observation that no word of the project for a new hospital had slipped from her lips.
Sicily
On September 29 – a full three weeks out from New York -- Ioaninna docked at Palermo to unload a portion of its grain cargo, for which the need had become more dire. Originally, the ship was to have docked at Thessaloniki, and thence proceeded to Belgrade, but Thessaloniki was now closed due to “plague” (NOT bubonic plague, but a serious epidemic of something else). After several days of government indecision about where the ship should be rerouted, impatient steerage passengers threatened the outnumbered crew with mutiny, forcing the Captain’s hand. In violation of orders, he scoured Palermo for, and was glad to find, a qualified harbor pilot, who guided the ship to Athens that night via the Corinth Canal.
Athens was an acceptable destination for all those on board. When they reached it in the morning, the steerage passengers could depart and focus on what to do next. The Red Cross people could check into a hotel, wash, sleep late, and then worry about getting the ship to Belgrade.
That evening, in a scene worthy of an old romantic novel, the rat-infested ship carefully puffed its way through the canal in the moonlight, and the passengers on deck oohed and aahed at the canyon-like walls of the canal cut that stretched up towards the stars. There would be abundant time in the coming days (and months, and years) to resume fretting about war and disease, but for the moment, there was only time to ponder the moonlight.
Vintage Postcard of the Corinth Canal
Appendices that list photo credits and sources will be provided in Part 2 of this article, which should appear next month.
Note that the portrait of Nurse Keller that appears above is a “digital restoration” which I made from an online group photograph in the Keller Family Collection, in the Hicksville Public Library portion of the New York State Heritage Collection.
Ciao for Now!
