Nursing School · The Army · The Wards · Fifty Christmas Cards · Forty Years After · Arlington · Mom's Rules for Nurses

My mother was an Army nurse. She served in England and in France in the Second World War, came home to Pittsburgh, and nursed for forty more years. She died at home in February of last year, at seventy-seven, with her nursing pin fastened to her bathrobe because she asked for it.

I am her daughter, Eva Burke. I'm a guidance counselor at a high school in Pittsburgh, which Mom said was nursing without the bedpans. I put this page up because the women who served in that war are leaving us fast, and most of them never told their stories, and Mom told hers only a little at a time. This is everything I could gather.

Nursing School

Lily Elam grew up in Pittsburgh, the second of four children of a steelworker and a seamstress. In September 1939 she entered the three-year diploma program at St. Brendan's Hospital School of Nursing, where student nurses lived in the nurses' home, worked the wards in twelve-hour days and went to classes in between, and were in by ten o'clock at night or else.

After six months as a "probie" she was capped: a white organdy cap with a fluted edge, which she starched herself every week for forty-five years. At graduation in 1942 the cap got its black velvet band, and she received the school pin, gold with a blue enamel cross. I have both of them in a shadow box in my living room. She passed her state boards that summer and went to work on a men's surgical ward.

The Army

In the spring of 1943 she signed up through the Red Cross, which was how nurses joined the Army then, and was sworn in as a second lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps. She was twenty-three. About 59,000 women served as Army nurses in the Second World War, and every one of them volunteered.

She did a month of basic training (marching, map reading, gas mask drill, pitching tents, and climbing down a rope net, which she said was the only part she was any good at), and early in 1944 she sailed for England on a troopship with the rest of her unit, a general hospital of more than a thousand beds. They set up in rows of long, curved metal huts in the English countryside, and for the first few months they treated sick soldiers and training injuries, and waited.

After D-Day the waiting was over. The wounded came across the Channel and up from the coast on hospital trains, often at night, and the nurses met every train. In the fall of 1944 the hospital packed up and crossed to France, where they lived in tents for a while and then moved into an old French army barracks for the winter. That was the winter of the Battle of the Bulge.

She was promoted to first lieutenant in 1945, and she came home on a troopship in the fall of that year. She never said much about the trip home except that she was seasick both ways and didn't care the second time.

The Wards

Mom did not tell war stories, but every few years one would come out, and I started writing them down on index cards when I was in college. Here are the ones I have.

• Penicillin. It was new then. A shot every three hours around the clock, for every patient who needed it, and on a full ward that meant a nurse walked from bed to bed all night with a tray of syringes. She said she could do it in her sleep and some nights nearly did.
• The winter. In December 1944 so many boys came in with trench foot, from weeks in wet boots in the cold, that they filled whole wards. The treatment was mostly rest, feet up and kept cool and dry. She said they were the most patient patients she ever had, because they couldn't walk away.
• Letters. She wrote letters home for soldiers who couldn't write, because of their hands or their eyes or because they didn't know how to say it. She wrote hundreds. She said she always ended with "the nurse says I'm doing fine," and always made sure it was true before she wrote it.
• The German ward. The hospital also cared for wounded German prisoners. One of them, a farm boy younger than her little brother, cried when he was moved out. She said a fever is a fever.
• Christmas, 1944. The nurses saved their candy rations for weeks and made stockings out of gauze for every patient on the ward, and the cook found an orange for each one. Nobody would say where the oranges came from.

Fifty Christmas Cards

One of the boys on her ward that Christmas was a private from Kansas named Guy Leist, twenty-four years old, in with pneumonia on top of trench foot. She wrote his letters to his mother for him for two weeks. In December of 1945 a Christmas card came to her parents' house in Pittsburgh, signed "your patient, Guy Leist, Bed 14."

The next year another one came. Then another. He never missed. Through her marriage, two moves and my whole childhood, every December there was a card from Kansas signed "Bed 14," eventually with a wife's name added, then children's, then grandchildren's. They met only once after the war, when he and his wife drove through Pittsburgh in 1976 and came to supper. He and Mom shook hands at the door for a long time and neither of them said much.

The fiftieth card came in December 1994. In the fall of 1995 a letter came from his daughter instead, saying he had died, and that he had asked her to write. Mom kept all fifty cards in a shoebox in her closet, in order. They're in my closet now.

Forty Years After

She went back to St. Brendan's in 1946. At a church dance that summer she met David Burke, who had come home from the Navy and was working for the gas company, and they were married in June 1947. I came along in 1949.

She worked at St. Brendan's until 1985: first as a staff nurse, then for fifteen years as head nurse of a surgical floor, and for her last eight years as night supervisor, because, she said, the night shift needed somebody who'd already seen everything. In thirty-nine years she trained more student nurses than anyone could count. When she retired, they lined the hallway and she walked out between them in her cap. She was the last nurse at St. Brendan's who still wore one.

Dad died in 1991. Mom kept the house, kept the garden and kept going, until her heart began to fail in the last year. She knew exactly what was happening and explained it to the rest of us, kindly, like a nurse.

Arlington, October 18, 1997

In 1996 I helped Mom fill out the form to have her name put in the register of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, which was being built at the main gate of Arlington National Cemetery, behind the old curved granite wall there. On Saturday, October 18, 1997, we drove to Virginia for the dedication.

I have never seen so many women in one place. Women who had been WACs and WAVES and SPARs and Marines, nurses from three wars, young women in uniform today, and their daughters and granddaughters pushing wheelchairs. Women walked up to Mom all day, saw the Army Nurse Corps pin on her coat and said "Army nurse?" and she'd say "England and France," and that was enough for them; they hugged her or they saluted. Mom, who never wanted any fuss in her life, did not object once.

Inside the memorial there's a computer where you can look up the women in the register. We waited in line for most of an hour. When her name came up on the screen, Lt. Lily Elam, Army Nurse Corps, 1943 to 1945, she put her hand flat against the glass and didn't say anything for a while. Then she said, "Well. There I am." Four months later she was gone. I am more glad than I can say that we went.

Next: Mom's Rules for Nurses, the list she typed up in 1962 and gave to every new nurse on her floor.

Another page: Earl Ferguson's Glenn Miller Page. Mr. Ferguson served with the Army Air Forces in England and heard Glenn Miller's band play in his hangar there. He was kind enough to link to this page and to say the nurses never got enough credit. Thank you, Mr. Ferguson.

If your mother or grandmother was an Army nurse, I would love to hear about her.

visitors since Veterans Day, 1998

Eva Burke · [email protected]
Last updated September 19, 1999