Aline Havard – författare

Excerpt from Captain Lucy and Lieutenant Bob: The war is as yet only beginning for Lucy Gor don, and the old, pleasant times are just ending, but, like every other girl in America, she is trying hard to find the courage and cheerfulness which have never yet been wanting in our Service and which are going to help America to win.

Excerpt: "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."

Excerpt: "To those who made friends with Lucy Gordon on Governor’s Island it will seem a great change to find her, in this second story, so far away from home. She is only one of thousands, though, to whom a few months of the great war brought more changes than they ever thought could be crowded into a lifetime. Lucy can look back over less than a year to her old life at the army post in New York Harbor before the Colonel was ordered overseas. To that brief summer time when the Gordon family was united during her brother Bob’s West Point graduation leave, and to the dark days of the winter of 1917 when Bob was in a German prison. Even then Lucy never lost hope, and her brave confidence was gloriously rewarded with Bob’s freedom. But in those dreadful weeks of waiting she outgrew her childhood, as though even in that pleasant home on Governor’s Island she knew that peace and content could never come back to her and to those she loved until America had fired her final shot at Germany’s crumbling lines. She could not guess what lay before her,—what old friends she was to meet again in strange new places. Yet she had resolved, even before she had any hope of crossing to the other side, that, come what might, she would serve in her own way as steadfastly as her father served, as valiantly as Bob."