THE TWO ENDINGS OF AUNT JANE’S NIECES IN THE RED CROSS
by Phyllis Ann Karr
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 24, no. 1 (Spring 1980), pgs. 20–22
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Karr, Phyllis Ann. “The Two Endings of Aunt Jane’s Nieces in the Red Cross.” Baum Bugle 24, no. 1 (1980): 20–22.
MLA 9th ed.:
Karr, Phyllis Ann. “The Two Endings of Aunt Jane’s Nieces in the Red Cross.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 24, no. 1, 1980, pp. 20–22.
Aunt Jane’s Nieces in the Red Cross, the tenth and last of L. Frank Baum’s Aunt Jane’s Nieces series, has a party of philanthropic Americans deciding to embark on an errand of mercy to aid the wounded foreign soldiers of World War I, still in its early months. The group includes John Merrick, his nieces Patsy Doyle and Beth De Graf, the former movie star Maud Stanton (introduced in the preceding book, Aunt Jane’s Nieces Out West), the South Sea pearl millionaire A. Jones or “Ajo” (also introduced in Out West), and Dr. Gys, an expert surgeon with a cynical, contradictory character and a face horribly disfigured through a series of accidents. Backed by the vast fortunes and considerable influence of Merrick and Jones, they transform the latter’s yacht into a hospital ship, procure Red Cross authorization, and embark in short order.
The first version of the story, as published in 1915, has twenty chapters in 256 pages. In the last chapter, during the Battle of the Dunes, Patsy is wounded when a shell drops near her. Dr. Gys, who has all his life delighted in taunting his own cowardice by deliberately putting himself in danger, and who has commented that he will be happier when he can shed the ravaged countenance caused by these self-sought adventures, goes to Patsy’s rescue, gets her back into a place ofrelative safety, and is himself mortally wounded while doing so.
He straightened up—his hand clutched his side—there came across his disfigured features a queer twisted smile—he sighed softly and slowly sank in a crumpled heap. A clean little puncture in the breast of his coat told the whole story. (1915 ed., p. 254)
The party now decides that, since they are hampered by the loss of their surgeon and by the “suspicious coldness” of the French after the escape of a German amputee from their hospital ship, and since “there are so many women coming here for Red Cross work—English, French, Swiss, Dutch, and Italian—that they seem able to cover the field thoroughly” (1915 ed., p. 256), it is time to end their three months’ tour of service and go home.
The 1918 edition has twenty-four chapters in 288 pages, with the revised ending spliced in on page 252. This time, it is not Patsy whom Gys rescues, but a new character, an American cameraman injured ·while filming the battle. Gys himself gets back through the flying bullets unharmed, commenting, “Confound the luck!” The cameraman, however, loses his right arm.”. . . when they came to his right side the flesh was riddled and his right arm a pulp of mangled flesh and bone.” (1918 ed., p. 259)
Maud Stanton, the movie star turned nurse, knows this cameraman, Charlie Holmes, from their old working days in Hollywood, and to her falls the task of telling him, when he comes to, that his arm has had to be amputated.
Meanwhile, Uncle John Merrick, who in the 1915 edition first proposed that the party return home to America, in the 1918 edition declares,
“It will be a long war . . . and it will grow in intensity as both sides become more desperate. It seems that fate has sent me here and mapped out a program for me to follow, as my part-however humble-in the gigantic strife. If I falter, or draw back, I shall hate myself.” (p. 270)
He rents a vacated chateau at Brielen, near Ypres, and turns it into a field hospital. He obtains a second surgeon from the National Hospital at Versailles, on the understanding that this medical genius, one Dr. Godrayal, who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to overwork, will be sent to the hospital ship where the work is lighter. This forces Uncle John to delegate Gys to the field hospital.
One day Gys disobeys Merrick’s strict order not to expose himself recklessly, accompanies the ambulance to the front, and is wounded. He is sent back to the ship, where Godrayal, whose genius has turned to the development of what we now call plastic surgery, not only treats Gys’ battle injury, but successfully repairs his face.
Not even the comparatively quiet period on the hospital ship can restore Godrayal’s own health, and he dies after his return to Versailles. The rest of the group are left at the end of the book still carrying on their work. Maud has married Charlie Holmes, who even as a one-armed cameraman is very successfully filming the war; Beth has become engaged to Dr. Gys; and there is “an understanding” between Patsy and Ajo that “when the war is ended they will unite their fortunes.” (1918 ed., p. 288)
At first glance, the 1918 ending may appear a sop to public demand for a happy ending. Nevertheless, in my opinion the original, 1915 ending is the soppy one. I have had the good fortune never to see battle at first hand, but the first twenty chapters of the book leave me wondering what Baum was talking about when, as “Edith Van Dyne,” he stated in the Foreword: “I wish I might have predicted more gently the scenes in hospital and on battlefield, but it is well that my girl readers should realize something of the horrors of war. . . .” (both editions, p. [5]) There are a few battle deaths, but only of anonymous characters. There is one cultured young soldier, whose wounds Gys pronounces fatal; but when Patsy and Uncle John set out to find the man’s wife of five months and bring her to see him one last time, Gys takes desperate surgical measures to keep him alive until his wife comes-and succeeds so well that after an operation lasting one hour (and left undescribed except for a few vague references in advance and retrospect) the youth actually recovers almost completely! And there is much talk of how shocked everyone is on seeing war up close, but on the whole, unless the reader exercises extreme imagination, the first twenty chapters suggest war as more of a heroic adventure than a horror. Then, as soon as the war actually touches one of the Merrick party by ki_lling Dr. Gys (and even the description ofGys’ death is neat and romantic) and injuring Patsy, the party finds excuses to decamp and head for home. The entire “story of how three brave American girls sacrificed the comforts and luxuries of home to go abroad and nurse the wounded soldiers of a foreign war” (Foreword, both editions, p. 5) has a kind of fairy-tale atmosphere. The girls embark with a full complement of reliable men, in a private ship outfitted with the best money can buy, as well as with the authorization and honor of Red Cross volunteer workers. After one day at the battle front, Uncle John forbids the girls to accompany the ambulance to the danger areas. (Patsy’s injury is a fluke: apparently Uncle John didn’t expect the back trenches would be so dangerous that day.) They dip into the war for three months and then dip out again as soon as their own wings are singed and the plaudits are not coming so thickly. Granted that not many of us have done so much (or would have the means to do so much), still, in the first version the protagonists come off as amateurs dabbling in philanthropy under the most comfortable circumstances possible.
On the other hand, the description of Charlie Holmes’ mangled arm in Chapter 21 of the 1918 version is the first thing in the book that I can equate readily with the photos of war injuries to be seen, for instance, in United States medical documents of the time. Merrick’s determination to stay and see the thing out seems much truer to character, and when the author points out on page 264 that “they all realized that the will-not to say stubbornness-that had enabled him to amass a great fortune, was merely dormant and could still be called into requisition,” then the reader who has followed the series through from its inception in the 1906 Aunt Jane’s Nieces realizes that the adventures have been brought full cycle. In the first book, Uncle John lifted his nieces from their working-class lives into the ranks of the leisured wealthy, and throughout ten books they have flitted from enterprise to enterprise, as if searching for new work-founding a local newspaper, helping get a friend elected to office, planning a company and string of theaters to film and screen movies for children, and so on. Now, in the last book, their philanthropy has brought them again to long, serious, enduring work. After playing at adventures, the girls have grown up; after dabbling in leisure activities, Uncle John has settled down again to a purpose broader than pampering his nieces.
A few loose ends remain. Kenneth Forbes, a character who early in the series seemed to have the inside track for Patsy’s hand, has completely faded out. The original third niece, Louise, who married in the fifth book, had a baby daughter by the eighth, and-was still in evidence in the ninth, is likewise absent—the group abroad could at least have had a letter from her. And Patsy’s father, Major Doyle, is the most mysteriously absent character of all. But overall, the second version of Aunt Jane’s Nieces in the Red Cross brings the series to a satisfying conclusion. Surely for all this we can forgive Baum’s leaving Dr. Gys alive and wearing a respectable face in 1918!
To the best of my knowledge, the Aunt Jane’s Nieces books have not received as much bibliographical, biographical, or critical attention as the Oz books, and so the following thoughts are mere speculation. It is even difficult, without additional information, to theorize from textual evidence alone as to when the new ending was actually penned. Baum’s oldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, served as a major in the War, and it is tempting to attribute the heightened sense of realism in such passages as the description of Holmes’ injury and of a soldier healed by Dr. Godrayal’s plastic surgery—”. . . a fragment of shell tore away his face and jaw” (1918 ed., p. 273)—to some of the younger Baum’s letters home. Yet Baum closes his last chapter in the present tense; and if America had entered the War at the time of his writing, we would have expected mention of the fact. Nevertheless, I see no reason to doubt that Baum himself wrote the 1918 ending, and I theorize that he wrote it, not to give his readers a “happy ending,” but to take into account new developments both in the war and in his own affairs.
In 1915, Baum still seems to have considered the Aunt Jane’s Nieces series open-ended. Later that year, at the suggestion of his publisher, he abandoned the nieces to begin a new series, the Mary Louise books, under the Van Dyne pseudonym. The new edition of Aunt Jane’s Nieces in the Red Cross gave him a fine opportunity for closing this series, even at the expense of saying nothing more about a few characters earlier very prominent.
The Great War appears still to have had a faraway and somewhat unreal aspect when Baum first wrote his book-already it was recognized as a pretty big thing of its kind; but, after all, it remained a bunch of foreigners shooting at each other on the other side of the Atlantic. It was very brave and generous of some rich Americans to go and help the wounded; but, really, there were quite enough foreign women already on hand to treat their own kind. On the other hand, if Baum shows a certain smug attitude toward foreigners, in the 1915 edition he is markedly neutral as to the rights and wrongs of the conflict. Being physically and geographically on the Allies’ side of the battlelines, the Americans gather in more French and Belgians than Germans; but the German characters they do meet are frequently brave, noble, held in no way personally responsible for the war, and treated by Baum and his Americans with the utmost respect. Lieutenant von Holtz, who befriends Uncle John and Patsy in Chapters 12 and 13, is the very model of chivalry; and when Lieutenant Elbl, the German casualty who has lost one foot, escapes from the hospital ship, Baum is able to let Gys remark quietly, “For my part, I’m glad of it.” (Both editions, p. 238)
In the 1918 edition, however, Merrick is
… now most earnestly convinced that the great war was destined to alter the social, political and economic conditions of the world; that it was the most important event that history has ever recorded and that all the Merrick money and energy must be expended in defeating the menace of the Central Powers. (p. 270)
Even earlier, on page 262, he fixes the blame by referring to “these stricken countries devastated by German cruelty.” Artistically, these developments do not dovetail very well with the original twenty chapters. If Uncle John has shown animosity towards any nationality up to now, it is the English. (“‘As a race the English hate us, I’m positive . . . the English have never favored us as the French have, or even the Russians.’”—both editions, p. 448.) There simply is no textual basis for him suddenly to launch out against the German side in particular, for as far as the story is considered, his tirade comes only hours after where events left off on page 252 of the 1915 edition. But in the context of the war’s later years, before or after the United States officially entered the fighting, the new sentiments make perfect sense. Had the book been entirely rewritten, the changed attitude would surely have been evident throughout.
But had Aunt Jane’s Nieces in the Red Cross been entirely rewritten, Baum might not have had time for one of his last Oz books!
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