Within the confines of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center exist the last remaining vestiges of Helen Bulovsky. The creation of a de facto arranged marriage between a Czech-American from Chicago and a Czech from Austria-Hungary, she was born in 1895 and died of a heart condition just 28 years later. Through inference from her records and family history, it seems Helen, a dainty five feet tall, knew she inherited her father’s weak heart, which killed him in 1906. After working a short time at Madison General Hospital (now Meriter) she joined the Army Nursing Corps and kept an account of her experiences abroad. Her records consist of photographs, letters and a diary all almost exclusively dated between 1917 and 1919 while she trained, travelled to France with the American Expeditionary Force, and finished her adventure peacefully in Belgium.
Undoubtedly realizing she was participating in one of the greatest events in history, Helen’s day-by-day diary is not used regularly until April 1918 while she trained and awaited deployment in New Jersey.
The unused portions of the diary contain glued photographs of family in Madison, including one at the steps of their 500 block West Mifflin Street home. After a quick guess to its location I realize it is one of the dozens of houses that contemporarily participate in the Mifflin Street Block Party; it saddens me slightly that such a dwelling is the home of transient undergrads and (knowing that block) negligent landlords. Surrounding pages of the diary consist of tokens from her trip(s) to New York City and details of her activities including getting her passport picture taken and receiving smallpox and typhoid vaccinations.
Writing aboard her transport ship on June 12th, 1918, she explains the “ocean doesn’t seem so big to me as it did in the books…” and “the waves don’t compare [to] those I have seen in pictures. It really is a disappointment,” she complains, “but a fortunate one.”
Her letters from France detail her busy life and the encumbrances of army life. Upon arrival to a bullet riddled train station the nurses “had no shelter but for ourselves” and, after transport to assume their duties, immediately saw to patients with but a “small piece of canvas in a swampy field hospital” to protect their belongings and worked so much she “forgot sleep was an option.” Despite the carnage of her surroundings she ends with a joke—“Now, for my bed—I mean cot.”
Although she writes with sadness for tending to wounded men for whom she can do nothing (“Oh! how [sic] I wished I had a dozen hands and feet to help these boys”), Helen Bulovsky spends equal time pleading with family to write her. “After four months of watchful waiting, I received my first letters from home,” she laments. In another letter dated July 1st and addressed to her sister Bess she writes “I just can’t see why you have not written to me for such a long time. Surely you have been away from home and know just what I would like to know.” She chides further and preempts her negligent sister’s excuses: “I know you are busy but now you have not your school work to bother you” and while their mother’s letters were precious they are too short since “[a] letter from home could never be too long.”
Her day-by-day diary is all but empty for those first months in France and a few entries in Belgium. After a long break from writing, she vents her sadness and loneliness from July 21st to August 5th in a spate of long-form composition spanning the sixteen pages; on July 29th she grieves “I am mighty homesick and no sign of mail.”
Naturally she accounts for other things as well: Aborted trips to town, the condition of known Madison men in the trenches, the carnage of war—including a graphic scene of a horse launched into a nearby tree and hanging limply as it decomposed in its naked branches—and the oddities of army life. “It’s going to seem funny to look after ones personal affairs again” she writes in February 1919, “since we have been in the army we have been like children” complete with bedtimes and permissions to leave encampment; one transcript letter references censorship and, indeed, the original has strategically thin strip permanently redacted from the body.
“Not to be discounted, Helen did quite a bit of scrapbooking herself.”
The finding aid for her collection speculates this same man was the source of the “Sketches of Tommy’s Life...” postcards. The postcards depict the misadventures of a patriotic young Brit through several humorous series: “In Training,” “At the Base,” “Up the Line,” and “Out on the Rest” mention nothing of the war’s carnage save for the indignity of getting your morning tea ration’s water from a metal pail.
Three years after her return she married her step-brother only to die nine months after; despite her delicate frame or perhaps the very cause of it, her weak heart enlarged and eventually failed. Family legend has it that she fraudulently passed an army medical exam by claiming her rapid heartbeat was from running up stairs to make the appointment. Felled by a congenital defect rather than German shells, she lived more in those months abroad than many of us do in our lifetimes. She spent her entire adult life caring for the sick and wounded but could not care for herself. She should not be remembered as a tragic figure, however, but rather an intelligent, curious, and playful soul who witnessed previously unknown degrees of carnage but still craved “juicy bits” of gossip from her preoccupied family.
[Post written by Alex Champion.]
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