"From here to Chambry the fields are just full of graves. It is a terrible sight. They are all mixed up-French and German-for the fighting was hand to hand, with bayonets and rifle butts, all across that region." (Diary, May 2, page 25)

Orville F. Rogers

Orville F. Rogers [1918] War: World War, 1914-1918 Branch: Army Unit: Medical Corps Service Location: France; Texas Rank: Major Place of Birth: MA

The diary of Orville Rogers illuminates a little-documented chapter in America's involvement in World War I. In 1915, three years out of Harvard Medical School, Rogers volunteered to serve a three-month stint with the Harvard Medical Unit in Paris. Between April and July he served as a member of the Army's Medical Corps at the American Ambulance Hospital, founded when the war broke out in 1914. He charted how the French were good hosts and hopeful that America would join the war. After the May 7 sinking of the Lusitania, which failed to bring the U.S. into the fighting, the French remained hospitable to him but turned sour toward the American government. Rogers paid several visits to former battlefields and was astonished at the evidence of killing on an unimaginable scale.