Back in June, I was poking around in newspapers.com* looking for examples of May Birkhead’s war reporting in World War I. In the process, I stumbled across a fascinating story about her mother, Laura Birkhead (1858-1938)

Mrs. Birkhead was visiting her daughter in Paris when Germany declared war on France on August 3, 1914. Despite the fact that her brother ordered her to come immediately,** she chose to stay and devoted herself to the welfare of first French soldiers, and later French orphans. She founded and ran an American ambulance organization. When the strain of running the ambulance organization became too much for her, she turned it over to others and took charge of a hospital in Paris which treated wounded French soldiers. After the United States entered the war, she also searched for information about missing soldiers at the request of their families.

When thousands of French war orphans began to pour into Paris, she organized an organization called American Volunteer Workers to provide them with housing and clothing. As part of her work, she also organized relief societies back home in Missouri.  These groups sent money and millions of pieces of clothing to France for the benefit of French war victims, all of which were shipped directly to Mrs. Birkhead for distribution.***

The fact that Mrs. Birkhead went to school with General John Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, may have made her endeavors a little easier. We know she was in touch with him: she received a ham from home that was intended for the general’s Thanksgiving dinner, delivered via a new Red Cross volunteer.

In her own way, Mrs. Birkhead was a much of a war correspondent as her daughter. One of the many small town paper in Missouri which printed her appeals stated that “the description of conditions met with by Mrs. Birkhead is probably the most vivid that has come out of the war zone.” Without the constraints of journalistic ethics, she pulled no punches. In one letter home she told her friends that subscribing to the Red Cross wasn’t enough: “..we may consider ourselves as coming out well by being able to pay out with money…our country will never be devastates, our homes destroyed and polluted, our women violated and our children mutilated. It is impossible to grasp the situation by reading about it. Only seeing is believing. I have seen hundreds of children that have been rescued from destroyed towns that have no idea who they are or where they came from.”**** In another letter, she stated “It is terrible to see the mutilated soldiers, but it is worse to see the almost naked and staved children, with bedraggled and have crazed mothers, with no place to lay their heads…The Germans evidently reasoned ‘If we killed the women and children, France will not have to feed them, but if we leave them naked and hungry she will have them to care for.’ ” Inspired by such accounts, the women of Missouri sewed clothing and collected money for the children’s relief.

When the Germans neared Paris, American citizens were warned to leave the city. Mrs. Birkhead refused to abandon her work. The St. Louis Republic gave her credentials as a special correspondent, which allowed her to stay in the city.

In 1919, before she sailed home, Mrs. Birkhead received what American newspapers called the Medal of Honor from the French government for her relief efforts on behalf of French soldiers. I’m not sure whether they meant the Croix de Guerre or the Legion of Honor.

So many women, so many unexpected stories.

*A very useful site for historical research that is a nightmare to use in my opinion.

**Why he thought that would work is a mystery to me.

***Shades of Clara Barton,who developed a personal supply network to support her work among wounded soldiers in the American Civil War!

****It is worth pointing out that Mrs. Birkhead and her contemporaries who grew up in Missouri would have been children during the American Civil War. They might well have had memories of war horrors. The only state that experienced more battles in the Civil War than Missouri was Virginia.