Meanwhile: 1918, The Folks at Home

Florence, Lawrence's 16 year old cousin, wrote regularly. One of the family's talented musicians, she played and sang the patriotic songs of the day.

From the back of the sheet music:
"War isn't all battle, mud and devastation--there are rays of sunshine, smiles and good fellowship, too. If you could visit the trench, the dugout, and the billet Over There, you'd hear the boys singing--singing from reveille to taps."
Lawrence's letters refer to singing--impromptu music at the YMCA where he spend most of his off-duty hours while at Camp Devens.
Somehow I doubt that "the boys" did much singing in the trenchs and the dugout, but the patriotic fervor of the times meant encouraging the public at home that war was bearable.

When I was "home" in August for my Dad's funeral, I started sorting through my Mother's vast collection of music. Some of it, yellowed and crumbling, belonged to my grandmother, Helene. This copy of the well known, sentimental tribute to the Red Cross nurses of WWI, has cousin Florence's signature in the top right corner.

The Rose of No Man's Land

I've seen some beautiful flowers,

Grow in life's garden fair,

I've spent some wonderful hours,

Lost in their fragrance rare;

But I have found another,

Wondrous beyond compare.

There's a rose that grows on "No Man's Land"

And it's wonderful to see,

Tho' its spray'd with tears, it will live for years,

In my garden of memory.

It's the one red rose the soldier knows,

It's the work of the Master's hand;

Mid the War's great curse, Stands the Red Cross Nurse,

She's the rose of "No Man's Land".

Out of the heavenly splendour,

Down to the trail of woe,God in his mercy has sent her,

Cheering the world below;

We call her "Rose of Heaven",We've learned to love her so.

There's a rose that grows on "No Man's Land"

And it's wonderful to see,

Tho' its spray'd with tears, it will live for years,

In my garden of memory.

It's the one red rose the soldier knows,

It's the work of the Master's hand;

Mid the War's great curse, Stands the Red Cross Nurse,

She's the rose of "No Man's Land".

Lawrence's half-brother, Harold, had dreadful asthma, probably the reason he was not drafted. Harold found work, as did many others, in the "Gear Shapers" plants of Springfield and Bellows Falls, Vermont, which were running full bore with wartime orders. This appears to be a group of the men who boarded there. Harold is on the right in the back row. His photos from this era depict a young man with something of a swagger--a slouching, "James Dean" sulkiness. Harold had a girlfriend in his hometown, sometimes got home on the weekends. He also may have taken the train to Ayers to visit Lawrence at Camp Devens.

While Lawrence waited impatiently for his "shipping out" orders, his younger sister, Minnie, gave birth to her 4th child. Her husband, Les, had taken over his late father's farm.


At home on the farm, seasonal work continued very much as usual. While Lawrence was packing his kit and then traveling by train to Camp Merritt, the maple sugar season would have been in full swing. Mac, Lawrence's brother-in-law and partner in the farm, probably had started tomato seeds, bringing in a bucket of garden earth which he had stored in the woodshed over the winter, setting it near the kitchen wood range overnight before he layered it in wooden flats which would rest on the sunniest windowsill. Mac plowed, harrowed and hauled wood using his beloved team of horses. Eddie "took the milk" several times a week to the nearby milk plant, kept the farm books in his beautiful script, drove the noisy Fordson tractor; both men milked, cleaned the barn, doctored the cattle.
In the long narrow kitchen, Eliza and Helene prepared three meals a day: the hearty breakfasts of pancakes and syrup, oatmeal, ham or bacon with eggs. On Saturdays the house filled with the aroma of beans baking slowly in the brown pot and the delicate yeasty scent of rolls set to rise under a white cloth.
In spite of war time shortages, farmers ate better than most. Sugar might be rationed, but maple syrup provided a cash crop and boiled down to maple sugar, could be used for all but the most delicate baked goods, spooned onto hot cereal, molded in special tiny tins for maple candy. It was pancakes and maple syrup that Lawrence most often yearned for when he wrote of home-cooked food. Like most farm families the Ross and Lewis men butchered a beef and a hog each autumn; Mac tended a huge potato patch; the women canned vegetables from the garden and made jams and jellies from the fruit produced in the back yard. It is no wonder that Lawrence's homesick thoughts often focused on the food his mother and older sister spread on the table!


On a snowy winter day Eddie took time to pose with Mac and Helene's son, Billy and "Old Shep."

Back across the lake in Hague, New York, home to the Rosses and their kin for generations, Lawrence's cousin, Wilford took over more and more of the farm management from his father, "Uncle Amos." Amos had worked for years in the Graphite mines and suffered from "black lung." Wilford and his wife , Julia, had two little girls by now. Lawrence wondered wryly in one of his letters how Wilford would have managed army life.