Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) FINDING THEMSELVES [Illustration: colophon] THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO [Illustration: JULIA C. STIMSON From the photograph for her passport, May, 1917.] FINDING THEMSELVES _The Letters of an American Army Chief Nurse in a British Hospital in France_ BY JULIA C. STIMSON, M.A., R.N. CHIEF NURSE, NO. 12 (ST. LOUIS, U. S. A.) GENERAL HOSPITAL, B. E. F. “Now God be thanked who has matched us with His hour And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.” --RUPERT BROOKE. New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918 _All rights reserved_ COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1918. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. DEDICATED TO ALL MY MAJORS WHOSE KIND HELPFULNESS WAS NEVER FAILING NOTE These letters were written as the daily record of the work of a Unit of Red Cross nurses who were sent to France in May, 1917, in response to the request of the British authorities. The Unit, almost immediately after its arrival in England, was sent across the Channel to take over a British Base Hospital established on a race course, where they have cared continuously for a stream of from eight hundred to two thousand wounded “Tommies” at a time. The original sixty-five American nurses were assisted for several months by English Volunteer Aids, and when these were withdrawn, they were reënforced with some thirty American nurses.