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AN ILLINOIS NURSE IN EUROPE
THE LETTERS OF ZELLA MAUDE JUDY 1917-1920
©William D. Walters, Jr. and Vernon D. Beck 2008
by William D. Walters, Jr.
Introduction to the nurse and her letters
The Wartime letters of Zella Maude Judy open a window into the world
of military nursing ninety years ago. They tell the story of a young
woman
who, when she found unspeakable suffering, stepped forward to do what
she could to ease the pain. In 1917 she was assigned to Base Hospital
12, one of the first American medical units to be sent to the war. Even
before she reached Europe, Maude found death close at hand. Only two
American nurses, Helen Burnett Wood and Edith Ayres nurses were killed
in a
combat related incident in World War One. Both were her friends. Maude
was standing next to them on the promenade deck of the troopship
Mongolia when they died in an often misunderstood gun accident.
Her
letters tell what she saw and explain what she felt. In France Maude
faced the worst metal and gas and germs could inflict on human bodies.
She was gassed and she was stricken by influenza; yet Maude emerged
with
her sense of duty intact and spirit of rebellion undaunted. After the
armistice she {volunteered} to go with the American army of occupation
into the grim world of post-war Germany. Here, the letters show her as
part caregiver and part open-mouthed tourist. Not content with these
adventures Maude returned to Europe in 1920 with the Red Cross. In
Poland she served in a hospital during the {Russo-Polish war}. Nothing
on
the western front had prepared Maude for the horrors she found on the
Polish plain in 1920.
Maude’s letters reveal a woman who does not fit easily into our
notion
of what a military nurse should have been like. While she was hard
working, skilled and completely devoted to the care of the wounded
soldiers that she called her “boys,” Maude was also
determined that a
small thing like a World War should not interfere with the important
business of having fun. Several times she was threatened with court
martial, but these threats did nothing to curtail the off duty
adventures that are gleefully described in her letters. She danced till
dawn with handsome officers, scaled Mt. Blanc, helped loot a stranded
freighter, and frequently disobeyed orders that she considered petty or
senseless. On one occasion she set off against regulations to visit the
front. The letters tell these stories.
The introduction to Maude’s life which makes up the first part
of the
document is intended to provide the context for Maude’s
letters. It
will try to identify the people, places, and historical events that
formed the background of Maude’s military life. It will quote
extensively from her correspondence. However, for a true flavor of the
times and to feel her forceful personality, it is essential to read
the full text of the letters found in the second part of the document.
{Most of the photographs in this paper came from Zella’s
scrapbooks. It is likely that her son David assembled them as a
child; the photographs are not always rationally arranged in the
scrapbooks. Many of the photographs have a handwritten description on
the back. Vernon, Maude’s grandson and owner of the scrapbook,
suspects that Maude processed and printed some of these photographs
herself. The photographs in the scrapbooks do not carry an attribution
and many were clearly not taken by Maude. It was common practice then
to print one’s personal photos directly on a postcard which would be
mailed; the text on the postcard almost always related to the
picture. Like the letters, the photographs carry the flavor of
the times. Most of the pictures in this document are thumbnails; click
them
to get a larger image.}
The Discovery of the Letters
It is only by chance that Maude’s letters have survived. Late
in 1972
Arden and Dora Vance decided to purchase the house next to their
residence at 200 W. Mulberry in Normal, Illinois. The house was close
to Illinois State University and the Vance family felt it could
profitably be subdivided into student apartments. Their purchase
included all of the jumbled contents of the old house that had been
left behind at the death of its previous owner, an eighty-four year old
spinster Bessie Irene Hibarger, who for many years had taught at the
university. The home had originally belonged to Bessie’s
parents Ralph
and Emma Hibarger. Bessie had been something of a pack rat. Mixed in
with an assortment of travel pamphlets, outdated receipts, teaching
materials, and unpublished poetry, the new owners found a large
collection of letters that had been sent over the years to Bessie or to
her mother Emma. Included in the collection was a remarkable group of
letters from Zella Maude Judy, Bessie’s aunt and Emma’s
sister. The
letters had been written when the author was serving as an Army nurse
in World War One and later as a Red Cross nurse in Poland. The
Vance’s
daughter, Carol Vance Koos, donated the letters and other items to the
McLean County Historical Society in Bloomington Illinois where they are
part of what is known as the Hibarger Collection.
Maude’s Early Years
Maude was born on 20 March 1885.[1] The surviving
correspondence reveals nothing of her early life. Her letters were
written to her sister and nieces, and these people did not need to be
told about the troubled history of the Judy family in Tazewell County.
Maude had many honored predecessors, people who did the sorts of things
descendants liked to brag about. One of Maude’s maternal
ancestors had
fought with the North Carolina militia in battle of King’s
Mountain
during the American Revolution. Her maternal grandfather Robert Musick
was widely regarded as the first white settler in central Illinois. Her
paternal grandfather, Jacob Judy and his brother John had been two of
the first three settlers to arrive in Hittle’s Grove in
Tazewell
County.
[2]
There was another part of family history that people didn’t
discuss.
Maude’s father Henry Clay Judy was a troubled man. He had
served for
three years in the Civil War and for a time after the war it looked as
if he would make a success of the family farm. However, by the time
Maude was in her early teens it became clear that Henry Clay Judy was
suffering from severe mental problems. Because all Illinois records of
mental health facilities remain sealed, we can not be certain of the
nature of his illness, nor of the date exact date when he was first
confined. However, in the Federal Census Schedules for 1900, 1910, and
1920 Henry Clay Judy was shown as an inmate confined in the
Jacksonville State Hospital. He remained there until he died in
1921. The family farm was rented, and a conservator was appointed to
handle the slender income. Only some of the conservator’s records have
survived. From these records it seems that the gross income was around
five hundred dollars year. After expenses, taxes, and a little money
for Henry's needs in Jacksonville, there wasn't much left to support
his wife and four daughters.
[3]
By 1900 Maude and her sister Berta had been placed in the Illinois
Soldiers and Sailors Orphans home in nearby Normal, Illinois. The home
served both true orphans of veterans and the children of veterans who
were in economic need. In order to be close to her daughters,
Maude’s
mother took a job as a domestic in Normal. Later, the family managed to
convince the conservator to pay a small amount for tuition and rent so
Maude could spend a few months attending Brown's Business College in
nearby Bloomington. 
In 1911 Maude’s mother died. The anchor of
Maude’s
troubled life was her older sister Emma. Emma Judy was eighteen years
older than Maude, and two years after Maude’s birth, Emma had married a
farmer, Daniel Lee Hibarger. Hibarger soon rented a farm near the small
town of Sibley, in Ford County, Illinois. 
{The photo to the right shows
detail of an October 5, 1912 postcard of
Daniel Hibarger and Frank Elliot hauling a wagon load of grain on the
farm. The photo on the left is Emma feeding her buff cochins on the
farm in Sibley in 1912. (Emma would have been David Beck’s Aunt
Em, and any resemblance to the film The Wizard of Oz and Kansas
is
purely coincidental.) I thank Emily DeRousse, Daniel and Emma’s
granddaughter,
for the photos
of Emma and the farm and also for identifying
additional people in photos.} Emma became Maude’s
surrogate
mother and confidant. 
Maude lived with the Hibargers for several years,
she listed Sibley as her home town, and she came to regard
Emma’s
children, especially daughters Dorothy, Bessie, and Mabel, more as
sisters than nieces. It was to these people that she addressed her
wartime letters. Many of the letters begin: “Dear Emma and
all.” {The farm at Sibley, Illinois is shown to the right.}
{Maude’s sister Berta subsequently married and
her
family lived in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Nearby,
the University of Chicago had just built Yerkes Observatory, site of
the world's largest refracting telescope. Zella had an interest
in astronomy and probably visited the observatory as did her son and
grandchildren 50 years later. The unwritten photo postcard may
show Berta and her two daughters.}
At the beginning of September of 1912 Maude
traveled to Chicago to enter the Illinois Training School
for Nurses
[4].
Illinois
Training School for Nurses had
been
established in 1880 at a meeting in Chicago’s famous Palmer
House
Hotel. It was to be managed by a twenty-five member board of who were
to be drawn from various Christian denominations and from
“Healthy
Infidels.” Originally the program was to be two years, but in
1896 it
became a three year school. At first the school had strong connections
with Chicago’s Presbyterian Hospital, but, by the time Maude
arrived it
was linked to Cook County Hospital. In order to be admitted to the
program students had to be ages twenty-one to thirty-five and of
“good
moral character.”
[5] With
fifty other student nurses, she was housed in the school's
Nurses’ Home
on Hanover Street.
{Given Maude's limited financial resources one wonders how she could
afford school but this was not a problem. The Illinois Training
School
for Nurses provided room and board for its students and their work as
student nurses at Cook County Hospital was of sufficient value to cover
their expenses.[5.5]
Although some parts of her education followed the
pattern of a medieval craft guild, she attended lectures on Hygiene,
Anatomy, and Physiology; on Materia Medica, Bacteriology; on Surgical,
Medical, and Gynecological Nursing as well as cooking.} One
of Maude’s classmates, Freeda Larson, has left a warm picture
of what
the
residence was like when she first arrived on 3 September 1912.
“I was
met at the door by one of the nurses and ushered into a lovely
‘sitting
room’ to await further instructions. 
A Miss Van Alstine was
sitting at
the piano playing Dvorak’s Humoresque. When she finished she
came over
and introduced herself to me and welcomed
me.”[6] The woman at the
piano was Annis Van Alstine, of Gilmore City, Iowa,
and
she would be another of the nurses who served in World War I and sailed
on the Mongolia.
{The photo at the
right was taken at Christmas 1912 and shows Maude on
the far left and
her classmate Caroline [Gardner (?)] in a staged photo with visitor
Bessie
Hibarger playing the role of the patient. Bessie is Maude's niece and
she preserved Maude's letters which are the basis of this website.}
At school Maude was frequently lonely. The Hibarger collection includes
two notes begging for mail from Sibley. In one she even asks how the
chickens are doing. In another, she writes with uncharacteristic
petulance and an unusual lapse of grammar, “Why don’t
somebody write? I
look for a letter every day and know you have plenty of time.”
(25
Sept. 1914)
[7]
Still, Maude had a gift for making friends. One of these was Edith
Ayers, who taught some of Maude’s classes. Edith came from the
little
Ohio town of Attica, and had graduated from the Chicago Training School
in 1913, two years before Zella Maude Judy. Like Maude, Edith's early
life had been difficult. She was born Edith Work on 26 September 1880
and in May 1899 had graduated from Attica High School. A little over
three years later had married Wayland C. Ayres, who ran a grocery store
in Attica. In October 1906, Wayland suffered an accident in the store
and soon died of tetanus.
[8]
For a time Edith tried to keep the store going, but eventually sold out
and worked as a dry goods clerk with her friend Bessie Gambee in a
store run by Bessie’s uncle. Edith lived with her parents in
Attica,
where her father Clark J. Work was city marshal. She had an uncle, R.
W. Ayers who lived in Chicago, and was a sales manager for Quaker Oats.
[9]
In the fall of 1910, Bessie Gambee and Edith Ayres left Attica and
together entered nurses’ training. After graduation, Edith went
to work
at Cook County Hospital where she became an instructor and
Maude’s
first head nurse. On 30 March 1913 Maude sent a post card to her Sibley
relatives saying that “Miss Ayres” was off for the day
and therefore
she was in charge of the ward. In Chicago, Edith Ayres shared lodging
at 453 Belmont Avenue, with a 1913 classmate, Kansas born Emma Matzen.
Maude Judy, Edith Ayres, and Bessie Gambee would all sail on the
Mongolia and would be within a few feet of each other on the
fatal day
of 20 May 1917
[10] {In the picture
to the left, Aileen Jensen is at the far left, Maude is third from the
left in front, and Emma Matzen is in back and to the right of Maude.}
Zella Maude Judy graduated from nursing school in
June of 1915[11]. {Her
first job was
as a private nurse in Deer Lodge, Montana, which was the location of
the division
headquarters for the Milwaukee Railroad in western Montana. This new
job certainly gave her an opportunity to travel to a place far from the
Midwest. Her
patient was an engineer who had suffered severe electrical burns in an
accident in the locomotive shown on the right. 
The Milwaukee was the only
electrified transcontinental railroad and was powered by locally
generated hydroelectric power which the railroad referred to as “white
coal”. Electrification even made it possible to reuse the
energy of trains descending the mountains to pull others
up. Perhaps she made the short trip to visit her Uncle Ralph
in Porthill, Idaho, on the Canadian border. In 1912 Bessie went
on an extensive trip through the west and sent Maude a postcard of
Uncle
Ralph’s back door neighbors, the Indians shown to the left.
} In early
1917 {Maude} was working
at St. Joseph’s
Hospital, at {the corner of} Clark and Diversey, in Chicago.
The work was tiring and her private life frustrating. In the spring of
1917 her
niece Bessie Hibarger wrote and asked Maude about her prospects for
marriage. Maude
replied that she had been dating a college graduate. {The
graduate's mother had
been
pressing} Maude to go with them to California, “but I still
place
common sense first and the heart last.” And then she continued
bitterly, “Well this is a little romance that will end in
tragedy”.
[12] Maude
stayed in Chicago
and we hear no more of the young man.
Over 185 nurses from the Illinois Training School
for Nurses served overseas during World
War I. Most served as American Red Cross Nurses, and served on
both sides before the United States entered the war in 1917.[12.5]
With many of her friends Maude signed up to join
Base
Hospital 12, which was being organized for the American Red Cross by
noted Northwestern
University
surgeon, Frederick A. Besley.
The hospital was one of many such shadow organizations that were
designed to
provide trained medical personal for mobilization in time of national
emergency. Base {Hospital 12} would come to include twenty three
physicians,
sixty five nurses[13] ,
and one hundred and fifty three volunteer enlisted men who were mainly
university students. The task of recruiting nurses for the hospital
fell to
Daisy Dean Urch (1876 - 1952), a former school teacher from Davison,
Michigan and a 1913 graduate of the Illinois Training School for
Nurses. She
began
signing up nurses in January of 1917.[14]
Once in Europe, the experiences of the nurses recruited for this Base
Hospital,
were typical of the hundreds of American nurses who volunteered to
serve, but
their voyage to war was much more dramatic.
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[1]
The birth date on Maude’s tombstone is March 20 1886, but all
early
Federal
Census records correspond with an 1885 date. Maude’s Red Cross
Employee’s
Service Record from 1919 gives a birth year of 1885; this brief
document may be
found in the Hazel Brough Records
Center, Falls Church, Virginia.
[2] For Maude’s
ancestors see, Bessie Hibarger, untitled manuscript biography of her
uncle
Henry Clay Judy, Hibarger Papers, McLean County Historical Society. Daughters
of the American Revolution Lineage
Books, 159, p.141, Miss Zella Maude Judy 158477.
“Biographical
Sketch of
Jacob Judy”, History of the Disciples of
Christ in Illinois 1819-1914, Cincinnati:
Standard
Publishing Company 1915, 549-549. Last Will and Testament of George
Musick,
Deceased, Logan County,
Illinois Book 5, p.144;
Online biography: “Esther
Allen
Musick Ewing
Hawes”, is in USGenWeb.
[3] Recorders Office, Tazewell
County, Conservator’s
File Box 566. Henry C. Judy.
[4] Grace Fay Schryver, A
History
of the Illinois Training School for Nurses 1880-1929, (Chicago:
Board of Directors I.T.S.N.), 1930, 218-219.
This book has been digitized and is available on line in both image
(.pdf) form (15MB)
and coded
text (djvu.txt)(0.5MB). The archives
of Illinois Training School for Nurses are at the University of
Illinois
Circle Campus.
[5]
Schryver, 1-7.
[5.5]
Schryver, 50 and 80.
[6] Freeda Larson, “Freeda
Larson’s Autobiography,”
http://www.leighlarson.com/freeda_larson.htm
(scroll down to Part II, WWI).
[7]
All of Maude’s letters quoted are available in the Hibarger
Collection
of the
McLean County Historical Society located in Bloomington, Illinois.
They have both the originals and transcripts. {Transcripts on this web
site were made
available by
the Illinois State University Archives, Normal, Illinois.}
For ease of reading,
two changes have been made to the originals: Maude often ended
sentences with
long spaces have been replaced with periods; Like many nurses Maude
frequently
used the shorthand of a letter “c” with a line over it
for the Latin cum {and a special character was made for the
transcripts appearing here.} All letters
quoted were written
to her relatives in Sibley.
Unless
otherwise noted they are either addressed to her sister Emma or to Emma
in
combination with one or more of Emma’s daughters. Transcripts
of letters written to Maude are included from Vernon Beck's
collection
[8] “Mrs.
Edith Ayres Attica’s First War Victim,”
Attica Hub, 24 May 1917, p.1; “Attica
Nurse First W.W. 1 Casualty,” Attica Hub,
31 May 1917, p.1.
[9] “Military Rites
Planned
for Nurses,” Chicago
Tribune, 22 May 1917, p.3.
[10] For
Bessie Gambee’s account of the deaths,
see her letter in the Attica Hub, 24
May 1917, p.1.
[11]
Schryver, 218-219.
[12]
Maude
to Bessie Hibarger (3 March 1917). Transcript unavailable
[12.5]
Schryver, 122-141.
[13] Early
reports give the number of nurses in
the unit as sixty five. Three died or were injured on the Mongolia.
Sixty nurses from the Base Hospital reached England. The missing two
are
unaccounted for.
[14]
Schryver, 194.
In 1911 Maude’s mother died. The anchor of
Maude’s
troubled life was her older sister Emma. Emma Judy was eighteen years
older than Maude, and two years after Maude’s birth, Emma had married a
farmer, Daniel Lee Hibarger. Hibarger soon rented a farm near the small
town of Sibley, in Ford County, Illinois. 
{The photo to the right shows
detail of an October 5, 1912 postcard of
Daniel Hibarger and Frank Elliot hauling a wagon load of grain on the
farm. The photo on the left is Emma feeding her buff cochins on the
farm in Sibley in 1912. (Emma would have been David Beck’s Aunt
Em, and any resemblance to the film The Wizard of Oz and Kansas
is
purely coincidental.) I thank Emily DeRousse, Daniel and Emma’s
granddaughter,
for the photos
of Emma and the farm and also for identifying
additional people in photos.} Emma became Maude’s
surrogate
mother and confidant. 
Maude lived with the Hibargers for several years,
she listed Sibley as her home town, and she came to regard
Emma’s
children, especially daughters Dorothy, Bessie, and Mabel, more as
sisters than nieces. It was to these people that she addressed her
wartime letters. Many of the letters begin: “Dear Emma and
all.” {The farm at Sibley, Illinois is shown to the right.}
A Miss Van Alstine was
sitting at
the piano playing Dvorak’s Humoresque. When she finished she
came over
and introduced herself to me and welcomed
me.”[6] The woman at the
piano was Annis Van Alstine, of Gilmore City, Iowa,
and
she would be another of the nurses who served in World War I and sailed
on the Mongolia.
{The photo at the
right was taken at Christmas 1912 and shows Maude on
the far left and
her classmate Caroline [Gardner (?)] in a staged photo with visitor
Bessie
Hibarger playing the role of the patient. Bessie is Maude's niece and
she preserved Maude's letters which are the basis of this website.} 
Still, Maude had a gift for making friends. One of these was Edith
Ayers, who taught some of Maude’s classes. Edith came from the
little
Ohio town of Attica, and had graduated from the Chicago Training School
in 1913, two years before Zella Maude Judy. Like Maude, Edith's early
life had been difficult. She was born Edith Work on 26 September 1880
and in May 1899 had graduated from Attica High School. A little over
three years later had married Wayland C. Ayres, who ran a grocery store
in Attica. In October 1906, Wayland suffered an accident in the store
and soon died of tetanus.
[8]
For a time Edith tried to keep the store going, but eventually sold out
and worked as a dry goods clerk with her friend Bessie Gambee in a
store run by Bessie’s uncle. Edith lived with her parents in
Attica,
where her father Clark J. Work was city marshal. She had an uncle, R.
W. Ayers who lived in Chicago, and was a sales manager for Quaker Oats.
[9]
In the fall of 1910, Bessie Gambee and Edith Ayres left Attica and
together entered nurses’ training. After graduation, Edith went
to work
at Cook County Hospital where she became an instructor and
Maude’s
first head nurse. On 30 March 1913 Maude sent a post card to her Sibley
relatives saying that “Miss Ayres” was off for the day
and therefore
she was in charge of the ward. In Chicago, Edith Ayres shared lodging
at 453 Belmont Avenue, with a 1913 classmate, Kansas born Emma Matzen.
Maude Judy, Edith Ayres, and Bessie Gambee would all sail on the
Mongolia and would be within a few feet of each other on the
fatal day
of 20 May 1917
[10] {In the picture
to the left, Aileen Jensen is at the far left, Maude is third from the
left in front, and Emma Matzen is in back and to the right of Maude.}
The Milwaukee was the only
electrified transcontinental railroad and was powered by locally
generated hydroelectric power which the railroad referred to as “white
coal”. Electrification even made it possible to reuse the
energy of trains descending the mountains to pull others
up. Perhaps she made the short trip to visit her Uncle Ralph
in Porthill, Idaho, on the Canadian border. In 1912 Bessie went
on an extensive trip through the west and sent Maude a postcard of
Uncle
Ralph’s back door neighbors, the Indians shown to the left.
} In early
1917 {Maude} was working
at St. Joseph’s
Hospital, at {the corner of} Clark and Diversey, in Chicago.
The work was tiring and her private life frustrating. In the spring of
1917 her
niece Bessie Hibarger wrote and asked Maude about her prospects for
marriage. Maude
replied that she had been dating a college graduate. {The
graduate's mother had
been
pressing} Maude to go with them to California, “but I still
place
common sense first and the heart last.” And then she continued
bitterly, “Well this is a little romance that will end in
tragedy”.
[12] Maude
stayed in Chicago
and we hear no more of the young man.