On Duty and Off, Letters of Elizabeth Cabot Putnam Written in France May, 1917-September, 1918

Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1919. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. 222 pp, 7.5 x 5.25 inches, in publisher's blue cloth with mounted spine label. Spine toned, label rubbed but legible, one small stain on front board. Internally clean and sound. No dust jacket. Elizabeth Cabot Putnam was the daughter of Harvard neurologist James Jackson Putnam. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1910, and in 1917 went to Paris, where she worked as a secretary for the American Expeditionary Force's Air Service and as a Red Cross volunteer. Her letters home to her family discuss both her work and her general experiences as a young woman in a foreign country at war. Occasionally she comes across as a breezy society girl rather than someone viewing the horrors of war, but at other times she is clearly deeply affected. Finally getting to rest after working at a hospital until three AM, she looks out a window at the beautiful sky and writes "It was more than one could bear with equanimity -- so heavenly outside and so horrible inside -- all the blood and the hacked-up flesh, and the thought of how each one is going to suffer when he gets out of ether." She cared for French soldiers ar the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris and for wounded Marines at a hospital in Neuilly. In mid-1918, she worked as a Red Cross searcher, helping to track down missing servicemen.