Font Resize
Eureka » In June 1918, near the end of World War I, Maud Fitch finally achieved her goal of three years: to drive wounded troops from the battlefield to first aid stations and field hospitals.
They were, she wrote home, "poor, sick, gassed patients ... so miserably sick and tired of things."
And they would be the first of so many French, British and American soldiers, some able to board her ambulance unaided, others carried on litters. They suffered bullet and bomb wounds, mustard gas, plane crashes and shell shock -- everything imaginable in the brutal warfare of the time.
And while she was there, Maud wrote scores of letters, breezy and funny and intended to let her parents know that even in the middle of bombardments and airstrikes, of blood and death, their daughter was having the time of her life.
To her great nieces, Anne Quigley and her sister, the late Mary Quigley Feidt, Maud was lucky enough to have been born strong, smart and independent, and lived in a time when she could be. And she had a wealthy, well-educated Catholic family that cherished her for what she was.
Maud grew up in Eureka, where her father's mines yielded silver, zinc, iron, lead and gold. The extended family occupied what is still known as Fitchville, a collection of homes near the center of the mining operation.
Maud also had a mechanical ability that served her well when she had to repair the
Maud was in her 30s, unmarried, when she decided to go to the war. It took three years, with long stops in Chicago and New York -- where there was dancing and drinking and dinners and the theater -- before she finally boarded a camouflaged, fetid little ship and crossed the Atlantic.
Then endless weeks in Paris, where she worked with refugees, before Maud finally got close to the front.
On May 30, 1918, she wrote of a German bombardment: "I never in my life have heard such a conglomeration of terrible sounds, the anti-aircraft guns firing at a plane that was apparently dropping bombs on a troop train ... and all through the steady detonation of the artillery at the front."
Some time later, she went to Mass, and then stopped for a swim in the river.
From then until November, Maud's days and nights were filled with runs to the front to bring back the wounded.
Finally, on Nov. 11, 1918, with the signing of the armistice between the Allies and the German coalition, peace came at 11 a.m. -- the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month -- that we now celebrate as Veterans Day.
"Beloveds," Maud wrote the next day, "Peace at last -- isn't it too wonderful. All this suffering and hardship and misery of four years has ended."
On New Year's Day, she was on her way to Paris. In May 1919, she came home.
She married a mine superintendent named Paul Hilsdale and had a son, also named Paul. Two years later, her husband died in a mine accident. She never remarried. She did befriend Amelia Earhart, the aviator and adventurer who crash-landed her plane near Eureka in 1928.
In 1995, her son, Paul, wrote an introduction to the family's collection of Maud's letters.
"She lived alone, into her 90s, with the same kind of quiet, unassuming determination that she showed in these letters ... she was half blind, half deaf and mainly confined to a wheelchair. Wearing her brown beret, slanted rakishly on her white hair, and chain-smoking Chesterfields, she'd propel herself down the sidewalk that ran in front of her little Hollywood bungalow."
Maud died in 1973, and her family brought her back to the Fitch cemetery, ringed by a stone wall and dotted with juniper trees and the headstones of family members. Hers is a white marble cross; her husband's name is on the opposite side.
To Quigley, Maud and other adventurers are different from most of us. They don't worry about what might happen, they just go.
"Aunt Maud, she just thought, 'I want to go to the war,' " Quigley said, "Adventurers don't have to know what the end of something looks like."
