by Julie Dobrow
Millicent and the others in her YMCA contingent departed for France in early April of 1918. “For the first time I have a grasp of the glory of the canon for which I am going to work,” she wrote in her journal. “Free, free, free of a personal consideration!” The group arrived in Paris on April 19. “As our great, grey steamer sailed to the enchanting shores, lush, green, misty, a great garden from end to end, unspeakably beautiful, we began to see the sight that was to accompany us all the way. Every woman, every child, every old man waved from the shore and cheered.”2
But once Millicent got into the war-fatigued country, things looked a bit different. “Here we are again, in this most heavenly spot on earth,” she wrote to Mabel of the place they’d traveled to together, “but it is strangely changed. Everybody in the streets looks so sad, so tired.”3 Millicent went on to tell her mother that soon the delegation would be stationed at a place she could not mention due to censorship rules, near the front but “far away from the firing line, so I shall be entirely out of danger.”4 Millicent’s canteen was actually in Angers, about three hundred kilometers southwest of Paris. This became her base for six months, until October, when she moved to Grenoble.
Millicent felt in her element. She was finding ways to use her education and intelligence to bring her closer to a wide variety of people. This was the epitome of the “vitalized” education she’d embraced at Miss Hersey’s school. Appreciated for her talents, Millicent felt that she was making a real contribution. “The work is too delightful for words. I really can’t tell you how happy I am to be doing the smallest bit—it is all there is in the world just now,” she wrote to Mabel.5
But as time went on and the wounded poured in, the work was anything but delightful. Millicent recorded some of the horrible, poignant scenes she saw: “Shell shock boy calling for me, but not time to go there. . . . The boy with the broken back is failing fast—can’t eat anything and just whimpers . . . I wrote three letters for a gassed fellow with swollen eyes . . . a little boy brought in tonight, his legs all crushed by a truck that had run over him, he died just as taps were sounding.”6 The images were still vivid years later, when she recalled the time: “From eight in the morning until ten at night at Base Hospital 27, I was humbled by the sight and sound of young men who had returned from the front maimed. Their backs one great mustard gas blister, shell-shocked, eyes blown from their sockets by a too close exploding shell, or perhaps worst of all, lungs partially burned out by mustard gas.”7
MILLICENT TEACHING FRENCH TO A CLASS OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS AT BASE HOSPITAL 27, ANGERS, FRANCE, 1918.
On balance, though, Millicent still felt good about the work she was doing and was glad to be part of the war effort. She wrote to Mabel, “I wish I could even in [a] thousand years tell you how great the experiences we’re having here are, but I can’t. There is one thing I can say. That is that the courage and sublime unselfishness of these everyday soldiers is the biggest thing in this world, and I know it. The American private is the man who should be honored and worked for with the last ounce of one’s strength. I for one intend to do it, although all I can do for them seems so insignificant.”8
There was another reason Millicent initially felt so satisfied with her life in France during the war: she was in love.
In June of 1918, Sergeant Joe C. Thomas, crippled by shrapnel wounds in his knee and exposed to mustard gas, causing him crushing headaches and affecting his lungs, was brought to Base Hospital 27. He and Millicent began to talk and quickly felt a connection. The first thing he shared with her was that he had already earned a Croix de Guerre (literally “cross of war,” a medal for bravery awarded by the French starting in 1915). He told her he was an engineer by training, a doctoral graduate of the University of Chicago, where he’d been captain of the football team and an All-American baseball player. He oversaw many engineering projects throughout the Southwest and Mexico prior to the war, and would have much work to return to. The two had a mutual affinity for discussing world affairs and philosophy. Millicent felt that she and Joe shared not only interests but also a sensibility about life.
Joe told Millicent that though his father was a man of great wealth from his success in the oil fields, he was also a physician by training, a surgeon general in the Army. He reported that his grandfather had been a famous Confederate general in the Civil War. Joe also shared that he’d had a sister named Virginia who, like Millicent, was a Vassar graduate. Joe and Virginia had been very close, inseparable as children, but she’d been in a devastating accident and had died far too young. Joe said he always felt her watching over him on the battlefields.
“I count each day lost that I don’t spend time with Sergeant Thomas,” Millicent soon confided in her diary. “I am mute in [his] presence—his understanding, his wisdom, his quiet, his modesty.”9 Millicent also marveled at his boyish good looks and at the ways that other men seemed to respect Joe.
THOUGH MILLICENT DIDN’T LABEL THE PHOTO, THIS IS MOST LIKELY JOE C. THOMAS; THE SAME SOLDIER APPEARS IN MANY OF HER UNLABELED PHOTOS FROM FRANCE.
But of all of the things Millicent appreciated about Joe, she was most taken when Joe told her quickly and definitively that he was falling in love with her.
“Dear Millicent, I shall call you Millicent if you don’t mind. ‘Miss Todd’ means hardly anything but ‘Millicent Todd’ means much more than I ever dare tell,” Joe wrote her in a note early in their relationship. As Joe recuperated from his wounds throughout the summer of 1918, the two spent long hours talking. Though Joe told her he might never be able to walk again, he was soon not only up on his feet but taking walks in the countryside with Millicent. He credited her for his recovery. Millicent’s feelings for him deepened with each passing day, yet she still couldn’t believe that what was happening between them was real. At the beginning of August, she wrote to Mabel, “Have you ever known Surgeon General Thomas of the Army? His son is here at present, a most interesting fellow.”10 Given Millicent’s past history of unrequited love and unfulfilling relationships, as well as her insecurities about how attractive and vivacious her mother was, it’s perhaps not surprising that Millicent was so reluctant to share the full extent of her feelings for Joe. But there was another reason lurking in the background, a reason given voice only in Millicent’s most private writings.
“I haven’t told him that I am eight years older than he is,” she confided to her journal. “Though I know it will make no difference, I just have to tell him. Perhaps he would not have fallen in love had he known!”11 At thirty-eight, Millicent had some reason to be paranoid about this. U.S. Census data reveal that between 1910 and 1920, the average age for white women to marry was twenty-six, and fewer than 10 percent of all American women thirty-five and older had never been married.12 Millicent’s future prospects for marriage didn’t look too encouraging. She lived in fear that Joe would discover their age discrepancy and leave her. She continued to vacillate agonizingly between apprehension and denial: “Joe Thomas . . . is the most powerful man I have ever met as I love him enough to defy all the printed papers of statistics in the world,” she wrote in her journal.13 But despite her frequent self-reassurances that the age difference wouldn’t be a problem, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him about it.
October brought change for Millicent, for Joe, and for their relationship. Millicent was offered an opportunity she couldn’t pass up: a chance to travel to Grenoble to work with Professor Raoul Blanchard on a history of French geography. Considered the “father of modern geography,” Blanchard’s primary work focused on exploring and recording the Alps. He was one of the first geographers to propose a theory of regional geography, a way of thinking about spaces of the earth as regions that have their own unique environment, topography, economy and culture. Millicent had met him two years earlier when he was a visiting faculty member at Harvard and she was thrilled with the chance to work with him again. She helped him to collect and organize his data and to translate them from French to English. In her n
otes from France, she wrote that Blanchard wanted her to “be the hyphen between France and America via geography. It is a big, wonderful plan, to translate his geography which is something entirely new to Americans, and then to amplify it.”14 Their seminal work, Geography of France, was published in translation in 1919. Working with Professor Blanchard enabled Millicent, who was technically “on loan for educational work” from the YMCA, to get back into the field in which she had been doing graduate work at Harvard. For Millicent, this felt like a professional homecoming.
Though the written record is a bit unclear, it appears that sometime in early October of 1918, Joe was sent back to the front. However, his previous injuries were not entirely healed and his lingering, hacking cough began to bring up some blood. He returned from the battlefield to seek additional treatment.
He also, apparently, began to speak to Millicent of marriage. She could barely believe her good fortune. Though some of Millicent’s letters home telling her parents about her plans to be married no longer exist (she apparently destroyed them), letters from Mabel to Millicent about the upcoming nuptials remain. “I long to see the miraculous man who has actually conquered you!” Mabel wrote to her daughter in November of 1918. “Ah! Millicent, it is a happy thing to be conquered, really! If you come before spring, come here, which is a community of friends, and have a beautiful, tropical wedding in the little St. Stephens by our very good friend the rector, Mr. Solper, and then have a lovely reception in our new and impressive house. Really, it is a house designed for a wedding reception. . . . Will you give my love to Mr. Joseph Thomas and tell him I want to see him extraordinarily?”15
Yet Millicent was still plagued with worries, which she regularly wrote about in her diary and journal. She fretted about the giveaway gray in her hair. She agonized about whether she should have told him about her age long ago. “Joe, my beloved, who speaks of marrying him immediately! Does he really love me as much as he thinks he does? Would he if he knew how old I am? I can’t seem to write mamma about it. If I did everybody would know. . . . But is it fair to mamma not to?”16 Millicent’s urge not to disappoint her mother tortured her almost as much as the thought of losing Joe.
In addition, Millicent began to have some other doubts about him, doubts that she barely dared admit to herself even in her private writings. She was disturbed by his “awful grammar,” which, given his educational credentials, she simply couldn’t understand. Millicent started to catch Joe in a series of small untruths, something she found very unsettling. He told her he would be at certain places at certain times but then was not. He told her that he was going to do things that she subsequently found out he did not do.
She began to hear disconcerting things about him from third parties. “There is one thing that disquiets me, and so I am going to ask him point-blank. ‘Are you clean?’ . . . Youthful affairs may be one thing, but relations with a girl or two . . . that he could be tainted, no, that I couldn’t forgive.” In addition to worrying that perhaps Joe had been exposed to “a source of infection” going around in the Army, Millicent also began to hear rumors that he was, in fact, already married.17 Millicent could not understand why nurses would have started whispering about this, despite Joe’s reassurances to her that it was all rumor. She agonized when a YMCA colleague related that Joe “told his regiment that his one idea of a good time was a bottle of cognac and a French woman.”18
Millicent’s need to believe that Joe loved her trumped her desire to find out the truth. This often led her to bouts of mental wrestling, cognitive dissonance, and intensive rationalization. “Until unreasonably—if it proved to me that he has lied to me time and time again, I shall know he did it to win me. I shall fear perhaps the kind of lies he may tell again if he has told such now, but I shall marry him anyway, unless he does not love me—but that can’t be so. What we have is just as vibrant as love can be.”19 Millicent often convinced herself that doubting Joe was a sin far worse than any untruth he’d uttered. At times she even managed to believe this.
When she finally revealed her age, Joe told her that he knew she was a few years older than he was. “I’m 38,” she told him when he visited her in Grenoble shortly after peace was declared in November 1918. “Oh, I didn’t know it was that much,” he replied. Millicent wrote later in her journal, “I could have died on the spot.”20
Millicent’s fears were not unjustified. Joe did not write to her as frequently after his visit to Grenoble. After the celebratory moment when the war ended, he let her know that he would likely be discharged from the Army but that the blood he’d been coughing up might indicate that he had tuberculosis. He would need to seek treatment. Millicent was frantic, urging him to be treated at a hospital in France, but he didn’t tell her where he was, nor where he would be receiving treatment. He only told her that he couldn’t marry her right away because he needed to “clear out [his] system” first. Then he told her he must put off their marriage, indefinitely.
Though Millicent was both devastated and panicked, she admitted her feelings only to her journal. Publicly, she reported nothing amiss. She wrote to Mabel, “Gas in the lungs means that he is very sensitive to damp and cold, and the physicians feel that he ought not to cross the ocean until warmer weather. It is the most hideous instrument of torture that was used in that hideous war.”21
Around the same time, the Todds’ great family friend and patron Arthur Curtiss James, sent Millicent a letter. She recorded its contents in her journal, but apparently destroyed the actual letter, for it does not reside anywhere in the voluminous files of correspondence that she preserved. Arthur, suspicious of this unknown man in Millicent’s life, had him investigated. He wrote Millicent that though Joe had said, “he graduated from Chicago, class of 1912, he had not.” Though Joe had claimed to be captain of the football team and an All-American baseball player, “someone who was a spokesman for that never heard of him.” The sister who’d gone to Vassar? “No record of this, no such girl.” Arthur also wrote that someone reported that, in fact, Joe was already married.22
Though Millicent didn’t know this at the time, the real story was even worse. U.S Census records from 1920 reveal that Joe C. Thomas’s father did not list himself either as a World War I veteran or as a physician. The Census listed Joe’s birth year as 1896, which would have made him just twenty-two—not thirty—when he and Millicent met. And perhaps most damning of all, Joe’s “dear dead sister chum,” Virginia, the one who’d died in that devastating automobile accident? She was alive and well, living with her parents in Muskogee, Oklahoma.23
Millicent couldn’t bring herself to believe Arthur’s letter. “I don’t care if all is false,” she wrote in her journal, “He is not. He is a reality. He loves me as I love him. . . .”24 Yet Millicent needed to see Joe, to talk through what she had heard, to reaffirm their love. She begged him to meet her in Dijon a few days later, and he consented. Millicent traveled there and waited for Joe at the café at which they’d agreed to meet. But he didn’t come. Millicent stayed in Dijon through the end of 1918, waiting for Joe. But there was no sign of him, nor any word from him, at all.
ARTHUR CURTISS JAMES, AMHERST ALUMNUS, MULTIMILLIONAIRE. HE FUNDED SEVERAL OF DAVID’S ECLIPSE EXPEDITIONS, BOUGHT A LARGE HOUSE IN FLORIDA FOR THE TODDS, AND PAID FOR A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR TO LOOK INTO JOE THOMAS.
Millicent eventually found that Joe had been sent to a sanitarium in Germany, and then to one back in America, in Denver. She acted quickly and booked her own passage across the Atlantic, then traveled from New York to Denver. But at the VA Hospital in Denver, she discovered that Joe had been furloughed to his hometown. She boarded yet another train, this one to Muskogee.
The next morning dawned and the heat climbed quickly. Millicent, trained since her earliest days to record the daily temperature, noted that it was a blistering 110 in the shade. Along with the temperature, she recorded, “The day has come; I hardly slept at all.”25 She was plagued with doubts about whether she should have made this j
ourney. It turned out that Millicent should have been doubting Thomas much more than she did.
Later that same day, Millicent wrote in her diary, “Joe came at about noon and stayed two hours. I did the worst thing I possibly have done for him, for me, for our relationship.”26 And with that, Millicent noted that she took a 4 p.m. train out of Oklahoma. She did not write in either her diary or journal for two weeks.
When she could finally stand to relive the scene, Millicent wrote, “Tomorrow will be two weeks since that fatal day. I have gone about and done my work—and there has been much—in a trance. People are intolerable. I never want to see another man.” But then she declared, “I must write it. Yes. Then I shall leave this journal and write no more.”27 In excruciating detail, Millicent delineated her final encounter with Joe C. Thomas.
He met her in the lobby of her hotel. She told him she couldn’t speak with him there and asked him to come to her room. There she took both his hands in hers. “I should have known then that all would be all right and that he loved me,” she wrote. But it wasn’t all right. It couldn’t have been more wrong.
Millicent asked if it was his health that had been the trouble, the reason he’d fled, the reason he’d been so out of touch, the cause of his distance from her. He replied that it was not his health, at all. Joe admitted that he had lied to her about everything. “I’m sorry for that. . . . But I didn’t want you—I don’t want you.”
Millicent was stunned. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But “the climax was the worst of all,” she wrote. Millicent reached for the catch on the chain to take off the ring Joe had given her, the one he said was a temporary promise of their future until he could get her a proper engagement ring, which she wore around her neck. But the catch stuck. She asked Joe to help. He assisted her with the catch and she took the ring off the chain and handed it to him. He put it in his pocket and then removed it. He looked at it for several long moments, and then threw it to the floor and stamped on it. And then he walked out the door and let it slam behind him.28