Nurse Cazenove Lamar Helm Oral History

title:

Nurse Cazenove Lamar Helm Oral History

creator:

Helm, Cazenove (Lamar Miller) (1892 March 14 - )

subject:

Army Nurse Corps

description:

Cazenove Lamar Helm (formerly Miller) was born on March 14, 1892 in Augusta, Georgia. She lived there until she was 8, her parents divorced, and she and her brother moved to New York to be with their mother. They lived there until her mother married a Major, moving with his stations including Fort Williams, Maine; Washington, DC; Atlanta, Georgia; and the Philippines. She stopped going to school before she was seventeen in part because of this travel. She eventually returned to Augusta, Georgia with some Army friends and her aunt threw her a debut party. She then returned to her family in Florence, Italy at the time, and continued living in cities around Europe with them. They returned to Augusta, Georgia in the early 1910s. When World War I began, a cousin of her mother said Helm should go up to the Massachusetts Children Hospital he worked at to go through nurse’s training. She did so and graduated after three years in January 1918, applied for an orthopedic unit, and went to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC as an Army nurse in May. Soon after, she was sent to France and was initially stationed at a base hospital in Bordeaux. After the Chateau Thierry push in northern France, she was sent to Paris with nine other nurses to handle the sudden influx of wounded servicemen. They spent a week at a tent hospital in the Boise de Boulogne before they were told they were in the wrong place. They were moved to a different tent hospital, which was essentially as close as any nurses got to the front lines. One day, General Preston Brown, who had been on the staff her stepfather was on in Atlanta, found her while she was working and told her to pack her bag and come to Germany. She went with him to his headquarters in Koblenz, Germany for a few days before returning to her station in Bazolles, France. After the war ended, she found her brother who was also serving in France and saw him for a day before returning to the United States from Paris in November 1918. She visited her mother in Havana, Cuba before moving to New York and working in a Ruptured and Crippled Hospital. For her service, she was awarded a World War I Victory Medal. A transcript of his interview is available.

publisher:

Military Women's Memorial Foundation

contributor:

Capers, Peggy

date:

1988-01-01

type:

Audio

format:

Cassette

identifier:

1988.39

source:

NSCD | CLIR - Recordings at Risk

language:

English

relation:

541692

coverage:

World War I | 1918

rights:

Unrestricted