An American Nurse in Paris: Novels of the Great War

Nursing Staff, American Red Cross Hospital #1, Paris

John F. Andrews

46 North Publications, 2025

Reviewed by David F. Beer

They don’t need to paint a target on me. I wear a skirt. The only one in the American press corps in France.

Imagine you’re a young American woman who has graduated as a registered nurse and finds herself in Paris as the Great War is painfully drawing to a close with its terrible human cost. Moreover, you’re not at all interested in a nursing career because your heart has always been in the written word, and especially journalism. Your one goal now is to work as a war correspondent—specifically as a medical journalist. This woman is Alice Simmons, whose experiences from 24 May through July 1918 reveal a myriad of situations and intrigues involving not only Alice but also the world of war journalists, AEF officials, wounded soldiers and marines, and the fighting in and around Belleau Wood.

An American Nurse in Paris is a rewarding historical novel. In some 300 pages the author (himself a career physician) takes the reader through the challenges and setbacks of a young woman who is seen by the American Press Corps and military as presumptuously vying for recognition she shouldn’t be awarded—because she is female.

The barriers Alice must overcome (including discrimination and an attempted rape by two U.S. officers) are numerous, but she persists. Fortunately, she has a few supporters among the AEF officer ranks and she does manage to get a nursing position in an American Red Cross military hospital. Her demanding work and trying experiences in the hospital among badly wounded and dying American troops comprise over half of the book and make for captivating reading.

Some of the characters are based on real people, as the author points out in an afterword. Thus we meet General Ireland, Brigadier General Nolan, Brigadier General Harbord and others who, as actual persons, played important roles in the AEF in World War One. Their attitudes, conversations and actions in the book’s plot are of course fictionalized. An actual journalist who was quite popular in his time is Floyd Gibbons, a flamboyant writer who was wounded in the war and who wrote a short memoir of the conflict. In the novel he is also unhappy about Alice’s final acceptance as a nurse and journalist.

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Ultimately, the narrative of the book centers on Alice and how she meets the numerous challenges that face her in these few months. She not only determinedly overcomes social and professional discrimination but also comes to terms with her own self-doubts and aspirations. And she becomes both a valued nurse and an effective war correspondent who shows us the terrible aftermath of battle when writing about her hospital work and patients:

The physical wounds are obvious and the topic of much conversation. The unseen, unspoken wounds lurk in the shadows. Will they ever heal? Many are sad about the loss of comrades, gone in ways too horrific to imagine. Tasting air filled with the blood mist of their best friends and the chemicals of an industrial death creates indelible memories that a lifetime of nightmares cannot reconcile (p. 198).

If you enjoy historical novels of the Great War, you will enjoy this book.

David F. Beer