One hundred years ago this month, Natalie Scott of New Orleans was living in Paris when the Germans launched their last major offensive of the Great War. She was in her mid-twenties, a white woman educated at Newcomb College, where she had lobbied the administration of the affiliated Tulane University to equalize the education and activities offered to men and women. After graduation, she studied Greek drama, acted in plays, and taught high school. She traveled to France with the Red Cross in late 1917.
Now, in March of the next year, Scott found herself tending to refugees streaming into the French capitol. She did translation and distributed mattresses, catching scattered minutes of sleep alongside the evacuees in Paris railway stations. As the Allies began rolling back the offensive that spring, she left for the field hospitals of the Western Front to nurse injured soldiers from all sides. Through these experiences in Europe between 1917 and 1919, Natalie wrote long letters back to her family in Louisiana. They collectively offer up Natalie Scott as a microcosmic actor in a larger drama—the collision of the Great War’s meaning in the United States with the lived experience of those swept up in it.
The state and its allies sold the war as a defense of home, the family, and traditional gender roles, cutting past the confused jumble of loftier political and ideological ambitions usually associated with Woodrow Wilson’s intervention. Some parts of this justification were straightforward, if rather implausible, and lent themselves to visual expression: intervention would prevent the ape-like Germans from turning their brutal treatment of the Belgians and French toward American civilians, who were usually depicted as white. Other parts were more abstract but no less personal. The words attached to the war effort—“democracy,” “freedom,” “honor”—often translated in public culture to promises of domestic stability, of everyday safety, of the freedom to love and live. A nation that fought a war for such prosaic values, moreover, would showcase or restore its commitment to the family, an institution many arbiters of respectability thought in need of regeneration. Men would fight, women would wait, children would be safe.
The experiences of Americans at home and in France disrupted that narrative almost immediately, even as its defenders continued to tell the war story as a love story. Women and people of color joined the war effort in myriad ways. Soldiers confirmed once again that military life could corrode, not redeem, personal virtue, and the brass worked hard to separate doughboys from sex and alcohol. And of course, thousands of families would soon learn that a war fought in the name of symbolic families could devastate real ones.
Yet the war years witnessed no simple rivalry between traditionalists and disruptors. Natalie Scott embodied both impulses at once.
On one hand, she joined thousands of other American women whose service challenged the war’s chivalric narrative. Tales of German atrocities in Belgium and France inflamed Natalie’s outrage and propelled her to France, her determination undiminished by a brother’s concern about her being “thrown among so many soldiers.” As early as 1916, she was taking Red Cross courses and putting in a request to travel to Europe. She got to Paris well ahead of most of the doughboys. Although popular prescriptive rhetoric on nurses emphasized their “feminine” role as nurturers, Natalie joined a Red Cross that valued professionalism and competence as much as emotional succor. In ministering to the injured, she offered both.
It could be playful, sometimes, Natalie’s rejection of the idea that men should protect women. One surviving photograph shows her leveling a pistol at a male officer. At other times, her flipping of chivalric roles quite literally saved lives. At one of her nursing posts in Beauvais, Scott rescued convalescing doughboys during a German air raid, later earning her the French Croix de Guerre and praise in the American press as the “Air Raid Heroine.” In her nursing work, what was more, she saw past the sanitized expectations of war and witnessed its terrible impact on the bodies, minds, and families of soldiers.
On the other hand, Natalie Scott upheld the vision of a war fought for love. She cherished the story of gallant white soldiers accruing personal, even romantic credibility by their service. “And I find them as fine as the knights of old,” she once told her mother of the doughboys, “Lancelots, and Tristans, and Galahads, too.” Alongside her instrumental role in the war zone, Natalie also embraced the emotional one peddled in wartime culture: the place of women in France was to harmlessly remind the doughboy of his sweetheart or mother at home, not divert his attention from them. Natalie Scott spent many evenings in wholesome flirtation with Americans including Quentin Roosevelt, son of the former president and soon casualty of the Great War, and Dr. Hugh Young, in charge of Gen. John Pershing’s war against venereal disease in France.
Scott also helped police the war story’s racial boundaries. African American soldiers in France threatened a foundation of the chivalric narrative: white men, not black, should be the protectors of French womanhood and the rightful beneficiaries of their appreciation. The military brass wasn’t thrilled with any doughboy risking distraction or venereal disease with romantic dalliances, but it labored with singular zeal to separate black men from white women in Europe. Of course, such policies drew upon and invested with new urgency longstanding white fears of race mixing and sexual competition, the broader impulse to limit black power by playing to those fears, and the willingness to guard the sexual color line with violence. Of the eleven Americans executed in France, eight were black, all charged with rape, though soldiers of color represented a small minority of the American Expeditionary Forces.
Those patterns played out in Natalie Scott’s experience at a small French field hospital late in the war. The director was a French woman named Mlle. St. Paul. Natalie disapproved of her coziness with an African American lieutenant stationed with his all-black unit in the area. So emboldened, in Natalie’s view, the man “breezily” flirted with her as well. Here was precisely the racial apocalypse many southerners in particular dreaded: give the black man authority and he will convert it to sexual license—or at least that’s what many white supremacists claimed to anticipate when withholding political, social, or economic equality. “Just imagine,” Natalie wrote her mother, “the time we shall have with these people after the war.”
Both the revisions to the war story Natalie Scott fought and the ones she personified would become incorporated into that story over the next century. The military shed some of its prejudices of race and gender and Americans more broadly reworked their understandings of military service and citizenship. There is evidence Natalie’s own views, especially on race, evolved in a similar direction. She reminds us, then, that contradictory ideas can inhabit single historical figures, that historians do well not to make cardboard cutouts of their subjects—and, unfortunately, that Americans have long found war not only repellant but seductive.