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Captain Lucy in the Home Sector

Chapter 2: Introduction
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About This Book

A nurse’s aide attached to the American occupation force stays in Europe after the armistice, working at a woodland convalescent hospital and helping wounded soldiers adapt to peacetime. The narrative follows her daily duties and personal anxieties about delayed repatriation, her friendships with fellow officers and airmen, and efforts to comfort displaced families and recovering men. Episodes move along the Rhine and into troubled regions farther east, presenting scenes of military occupation, small domestic dramas, and encounters with local inhabitants. Throughout, she balances longing for home with steady compassion and practical service, and the group looks forward to return with guarded optimism.

If the young people who read this last story of Lucy Gordon’s army life are disappointed that the end of the war does not bring her home to America they cannot possibly be as disappointed as she herself. She hoped that the war had really finished with the armistice but, like lots of us, she found that there was a great deal left to do that she had not counted upon. Peace was slow in coming, and the American army overseas had its hands as full trying to hasten it as all America on this side had, and still has, in trying to get back to peace-time ways.

The tangle of affairs in war-swept Europe is more than Lucy can understand, though she sees a little of that great unrest, and catches a glimpse of its hidden dangers, even in the Home Sector.

She does what she can to help, generously, and, though peace is not come and America is still distant, she and Bob and all the Gordon family find happiness together, and look forward with brave confidence to the glorious future of the dear country to which they will before long be homeward bound.

Aline Havard.