It was not the only award Lee was short-changed on. A recent graduate from Radcliffe College, she responded to an Army call for women to serve in administrative positions and sailed for France in the fall of that year as part of the staff of a field hospital.
The hospital deployed near Bordeaux and Lee worked there for some months before being enticed to take a secretarial job with an Army Air Corps office in Paris. Then, growing uncomfortable with the relatively luxurious conditions in Paris, she joined the YMCA and took a post running a field canteen for an aviation unit near the front.
She decided to stay on after the Armistice and set up and ran several canteens serving American Army units in occupied Germany, returning home to Massachusetts in late Lee later said she wrote the book to tell women the truth about the war. If people really knew what it was like — if women knew —. And when she finished it, she found no one interested in publishing it.
So she put the manuscript on the shelf. Lee retyped the manuscript, leaving off her name as the rules required, and submitted it. Unwilling to go against the general, the other four judges agreed to a compromise and split the award between Lee and William T. Rank and file Legionnaires objected to this compromise.
Ironically, this was exactly the sort of thing Lee intended to document. As long as war is made romantic, it will go on. They were starting out to make the world safe again…. That idealism begins to fade as soon as her ship docks in Le Havre. There, all along the quai, lie stretchers with the British casualties being loaded onto a transport headed for England.
