Peace Declared 100 Years Ago; Women Who Served

This Veteran's Day is more special than usual because this is the centenary of the Armistice in Europe. So I was very excited to discover that my aunt Florence Estella Rawles who was born and died in Montana (1925-2007), trained for the World War II Cadet Nursing Corps in both Montana State College in Great Falls, Montana and in Providence Hospital in Seattle! It seems that the war was over before she was sent to serve, and later married my uncle Hollis McBee. When I shared this new information with some of my genealogy buddies, David got excited because he also had an aunt who served in the Nursing Corps, and also trained in or around Seattle. However, it turns out that his aunt served in the Great War, which we now call the First World War.

David sent me his research on his great-aunt, which has been written up so well that this will be a guest post.

"Zowitza Nicholas left Dawson to study nursing in Seattle. She joined the American nursing corps and served in France, where she was called "The Angel of Ward 7" by one of the soldiers she cared for." - David E. Cann on page 188 of From the Klondike to Berlin: The Klondike in World War I

Zowitza S. Nicholas (1893-1984) was a daughter of two migrant parents who were naturalized Americans. Zowitza and her two siblings were born in Seattle (1892, 1893, and 1895) so were native-born citizens. Zowitza’s parents were estranged and her father died in 1917 and is now buried in Dawson, Yukon Territory, Canada... Zowitza’s mother’s date and place of death/burial is still unknown although David has reason to believe she died in California in or after 1935.

David contributed his research to a book From the Klondike to Berlin: The Klondike in World War I by Michael Gates (available at https://smile.amazon.com/Klondike-Berlin-Yukon-World-War/dp/1550177761 and other booksellers). Much of the rest of this post will be quotes from this fine book.

Zowitza (Zoe) Nicholas, second daughter of Mrs. Jennie Nicholas of Dawson, and later Mayo Landing, joined the US Army Nurse Corps and eventually left with a Seattle contingent. -pages 15-16

Zowitza Nicholas was...resting after the cessation of combat. She had left Dawson City sometime befor to study nursing in Seattle. A former Dawson High School student, she came north with her parents during the gold rush when she was just five years old. Her father took the name John Nicholas when he immigrated to the United States from Greece. Her mother, Jennie Wilhelmina Erickson, was a Swedish immigrant who married John in 1891. John had worked as a barber from his arrival in Dawson until his death in December 1917.  

In the summer of 1918, Zowitza shipped out as an army nurse and was stationed at Base 50 Red Cross Hospital at Mesves, France. It was one of more than one hundred hospitals established by the Army to tend to the wounded. After the armistice, she was granted leave and travelled widely through occupied Germany, Belgium and France. She travelled from Nantes to Paris, then Metz, Koblenz, Cologne and Brussels, visiting cathedrals, art galleries and museums. She travelled with another nurse to Nice, where they spent several days enjoying the warm Mediterranean climate. But it is the description of her journey from Brussels to Paris by train that stirs the emotions. The ten-hour trip took her through the battlefields of France and Belgium. There, she saw the barren wasteland that had been created by war. She saw countless bridges destroyed by the conflict; she witnessed overturned locomotives in the ditches beside the railroad tracks. She observed the wire entanglements, mowed-down trees and shell holes, big and small. She saw trenches, trenches, and more trenches. Small white crosses populated the landscape, some single, others clustered together. One had a helmet hanging from it. 

It is hard to believe that the mass of stone was once a town or a house or that people ever lived there and worked," she wrote in a letter to her mother: There are rods of twisted iron...and there there is the inevitable pile of stone. Stone and red bricks; perhaps a piece of wall standing, perhaps not, and more piles of stone. Town after town is like this--no people there--no sign of life.... 

At one place I saw a man with a long stick or rake--I don't know which--digging and pushing and scraping aside a mass of stone. I wondered if he was intending to build himself a home, or if he was only looking for riches that were once his treasures.

She didn't describe the horrors she saw in her hospital. Sixty years later, though, she remembered her work. Many soldiers died of influenza in the closing weeks of the war. The room was so full of coffins we had to step over them," she recalled. "I could never get over the terrible things that happened to those poor boys." She was remembered as the "Angel of the Ward" by one soldier she cared for in the winter of 1918. Sixty-five years later, he tracked her down to find her in suburban Los Angeles, where she continued to nurse until 1979. [see https://www.newspapers.com/clip/5119503/zoe_nicholas/]

The 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic that struck the soldiers in combat continued its spread around the world. The pandemic broke out on the eastern seaboard in early September. The deadly virus spread rapidly, and within weeks, reports from various cities and military camps confirmed the news that this influenza was highly contagious and killing people in large numbers. -pages 189-190

A lovely postscript: The University of Washington chose Zoe's image as provided by David E. Cann for a poster commemorating the hundredth anniversary of World War I. They did a research project and public display on what was then the 100th year commemoration of World War I and the Washington residents who left home to fight it and ended up making full-sized posters of Zowitza and put them all over the U. of Washington and other places. Zoe wound up the representative symbol of the entire display.

She did her nurse's training at Seattle General Hospital in Seattle, which became Maynard Hospital (where my dad was an orderly before WWII) before disappearing.

Zowitza S. Nicholas Anderson's resting place: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/84856972/zowitza-anderson