Her daughter, Nancy, calls her a national treasure. Elsie Bandman, age 96, is all that and then some. A retired nurse, who served in the U.S. Army in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II, she brings a lifetime of energy, experience and conviction to her observations about life in the 21st century.
My connection to Elsie is recent. For the past few months, as a volunteer with the Hospice of the Fisher Home in Amherst, I have been visiting her at her home, where she has been receiving hospice services. With fading eyesight, she had wanted someone to read The New York Times to her, and I was delighted to do it. Delighted, too, with her lively responses of outrage or approbation to the words on the page. She is never less than fully attentive, fully aware.
A few weeks ago, on my way to her apartment in the Applewood retirement community in Amherst, I encountered the beginnings of the veterans protest at Hampshire College, a response to the college’s removal of the American flag. I told Elsie about it, and she said she had mixed feelings about the flag, but that she cared deeply about veterans. They’ve not been treated right, she said, not gotten the benefits or the medical care they deserve. She wanted to join the event, offer her support to the vets. After some thought about the pluses and minuses — she uses oxygen, is on a walker — we decided that I would stop at the demonstration and represent her views. When we finished making our way through several large newspaper pages about Fidel Castro, I drove down to the campus, where the event was in full swing. I got out and spoke to one of the vets and told him a little about Elsie. He told me he’d served in the Gulf War, in Panama, in Germany, and that he’d like to send Elsie a flag. He pulled one out of his backpack. I thanked him, and although I’m not much of a flag-waver myself, I found myself close to tears.
Elsie’s wartime service is one of the most significant parts of her long and useful life. Her cohort of about 60 nurses sailed across the Atlantic in February 1944, on an overcrowded “Queen Mary,” with not enough life preservers to go around, she said. They were accompanied partway to England by the Canadian navy, protecting them from the German submarines that prowled the North Atlantic sea lanes. In August, a couple of months after D-Day, the Allied landing at Normandy, the nurses were transported first to France and then to a hospital in Liege, Belgium, the 15th General Hospital. The Battle of the Bulge that took place in the winter, only about 20 miles from them, was the German army’s last big push, resulting in nearly 200,000 deaths, divided almost equally between Allies and Germans. It was midwinter, and the U.S. soldiers were poorly equipped for the cold. A number of them froze to death, Elsie says. She remembers making the rounds in the wards at night. “Kids — they were so young — were weeping.” One of them had lost an arm, and said to her, despairingly, “Who’s going to want me?” “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Someone is going to want you.”
When she returned home after the war, she found herself terribly lonely. The camaraderie of wartime was a powerful force, she discovered. She sympathizes with the emotional letdown felt by returning soldiers.
Elsie has a book, a sort of yearbook of the 15th General Hospital. In it, each doctor and nurse is represented with a photo and a brief description. Lt. Elsie L. Lucier is described in part as a lover of sports and of music: “She’s quite the jitterbug,” it says.
She still loves music. She and her husband, Bert, are opera lovers and regulars at the Metropolitan’s simulcasts at the local cinema. Elsie is dancing more slowly these days, but still with unmistakable verve.
Elsie Bandman died peacefully on Monday, Jan. 9, just days after this column was completed.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net