Marie Louise van Vorst was born 1867 in New York City. With her sister-in-law, Bessie McGinnis van Vorst, she wrote The Woman Who Toils (1903) about their undercover experiences as factory workers.

Around 1900 she moved to France and in 1914 volunteered with the American Ambulance at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly. This book is a collection of letters to friends and relatives depicting her life in those war days.

Harvard Graduates Magazine, September 1915, pp. 227-231

Elliott Carr Cutler (1888-1947) was a surgeon. Harvard A.B. 1909, M.D. 1913.
In March 1915 he joined the Harvard Medical School Unit of the American Ambulance Hospital at the Lycée Pasteur where he served for three months. Two years later he returned to France and served in the Army medical corps.

... on January 11th, 1917, the sum of $1,600.00 was subscribed at the College for the purchase and maintenance in France for one year of a Williams ambulance. Additional subscriptions amounting to $12,000.00 were secured at a Williams meeting attended by about eight hundred people and held in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York on May 18th; contributions made by alumni and friends of the College, both before and after the meeting, increased the total to $19,600.00, a sum sufficient to provide sixteen ambulances for the American Field Service.

Excerpt from first chapter 'Our Book of Remembrance'.

Jean Jules Jusserand was the French ambassador to the United States from 1902 to 1925. He won the first Pulitzer Prize in History for With Americans of Past and Present Days in 1917.

personal experiences and adventures with both armies, 1870-1871

Personal Letters of a Driver at the Front

From the preface:

These letters, according to ordinary ethics in such matters, should not, perhaps, be published. They were merely intended as tributes of friendship and remembrance. Casually written --- in pencil often --- at moments between duties, with no thought of their being destined to any further purpose than that distance and absence might count a little less through the pictures they would give of a day's work far away.

Excepting that here and there in each letter a few details quite personal have been omitted, and of course the names of places sometimes changed, they are untouched. Their author has had no chance to revise them, nor, it must be confessed, has his consent to their printing been asked.

"Based on stories told by wounded in our care and on experiences as recorded in home letters during the period from July 1915 to October 1916." Preface.

A native from Hawaii, Dr. James R. Judd and his wife Louise travelled to France in 1915 where he first served in the hospital in Neuilly before he was made chief surgeon of the Juilly Hospital from 1915 to 1917. Mrs. Judd worked at the side of her husband throughout the war.

War poems

Young Hilda at the Wars

Who are Norman and Georgie Kunkel? They corresponded for two years during WWII while Norman was an ambulance driver, married in 1946, and raised a family of four. During this time Norman completed his education at the University of Washington and taught school for 25 years.