Helen Fairchild Extended Biography
Helen FairchildExtended BiographyYou may wish to share this biography with students, or just to read it for your own information.When Nelle Fairchild Rote was in fourth grade, the First World War was not yet a distant memory. Her teacher, Ms. Ruth Moser, asked all of her students if any of them had a family member who had served in the First World War. Nelle raised her hand, and announced that she had an aunt who had served overseas – Her name was Helen Fairchild.“She doesn’t count”, the boys told her, “She’s a girl”.But Nelle knew that her aunt Helen’s service ‘counted’. She had been one of more than 21,000 American nurses who served this country during the First World War, 10,000 of them overseas. Their stories are little-known, but Nelle knew her aunt’s story was important, and spent many years of her life telling it. That story is preserved in a book that Nelle wrote, in a memorial marker in her hometown of Watsontown, Pennsylvania, in a bridge named after her, and in a quiet cemetery in France, preserved by the American Battle Monuments Commission of the Veterans Administration, close to where she served and died during World War One.Helen Fairchild was born in Turbot Township, Milton, Pennsylvania on November 21, 1884. When the United States entered the First World War, she was working as a nurse at had Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. Almost immediately following the U.S. declaration of war, she volunteered to join a medical reserve unit, which was rapidly called up for overseas duty. On May 14, 1917, she wrote to her brother Ned, in Maine:“I suppose mother has written you that our Pennsylvania Hospital Red Cross Unit of which I am a member has been called for service in Europe, so I am here in Philadelphia, waiting for the pokey old government to get things ready for us to go...... I would like to have seen you all but of course, can’t, so save your pennies so you can all come how when I get back. I may have some exciting tales to tell you”.Fairchild’s unit arrived in Europe before many American troops could be mobilized, and briefly organized in England. However, they were soon transferred to France. A major British offensive had begun behind the town of Ypres, in Belgium. Casualties were high, including many victims of German gas attacks, and medical units were in high demand. So Fairchild and fellow doctors and nurses were posted to a British Base hospital near the coast in France. Six of these hospitals were taken over in June by American medical staff, allowing British doctors and nurses to move closer to the front. These hospitals dealt with wounded soldiers who had been evacuated from the front lines, many of them needing significant surgery and recuperation before evacuation back to Britain. Many of them were suffering from terrible illness caused by mustard gas attacks, and Fairchild and other nurses spent hours washing their burns to try to eliminate all traces of the gas. Some of the soldiers she encountered in June and July 1917 were American volunteers in British service, and soon a trickle of the first American units began to arrive.In August 1917, Fairchild was asked to work closer to the front, in a casualty clearing station. These facilities, nearer to the front-lines, treated acute cases and tried to halt death long enough for the wounded to transfer to base hospitals. In this hospital, she treated men with horrible results of warfare – body parts missing, organs mashed by the concussive effects of shells, and always the corrosive burns inside and out caused by gas. She didn’t pass on these details to her family, only writing such simple messages as “We operated all day today, finished about six p.m”.As winter 1917-1918 set in, however, Nurse Fairchild became sicker and sicker, with symptoms that ranged from tonsillitis to indigestion. None of these should have caused her death, but in January she succumbed to her illness.
2Helen Fairchild - Extended BiographySubsequent autopsy revealed a fatal liver disease, probably caused by exposure to mustard gas on the men whom she had been treating for almost eight months. Helen Fairchild had been much admired by both her American compatriots and the British soldiers whom she treated. The Directoress of Nurses, Margaret Dunlop, wrote of her death, “It was a frightful tragedy to us all as she was one of my most beloved nurses”. She was buried in a British cemetery at Mount Huon, France, but her body was subsequently permanently interred at one of many cemeteries set up by the Veteran’s Administration to permanently honor Americans who served in the First World War. Fairchild’s grave remains there, at Somme American Cemetery in Bony, France – a memory of her service to her country in its time of need. She was also honored by having an American Legion post and a bridge named after her.