‘Twas the Christmas Eve edition of The Lake County Times newspaper 106 years ago this year that carried the remarkable and unlikely story of a popular entertainer who defied the odds – and the rules – and snuck to the front lines of World War I to aid and comfort allied troops…which ended with the Hobart, Indiana, resident convalescing in an “invalid home,” recovering from her injuries.
If the word “her” above caught your attention, you’re not alone. But first, some background. Sarah Mildred Wilmer was a well-educated and nationally renowned entertainer known for her skills in the then-popular art of elocution, performing dramatic readings and presentations of literary works in an age before not only the internet, but television and widespread radio as well. Examples of her success abound: 10,000 people attending a Chautauqua event to hear her; a newspaper in Kansas describing her as “the greatest reader of the present generation”; a similar publication in Wisconsin dubbing her “one of the greatest artists on the platform today.”
And, as an article from the Indiana History Blog in 2022 notes, “She was also glamorous, dressing in fine clothes and staying in the best hotels. It would have been difficult for her adoring fans to imagine her dressed as a soldier, wading through mud, and dodging shells only a few years later…Wilmer would return from France to her parents in Hobart, Indiana, in a wheelchair and celebrated as a hero.”
Wilmer’s parents, Benjamin and Ida Wilmer, had ensured that their daughter, born around 1881 in Buffalo, New York, and her sister both received the best education possible. Even as a child, Sarah was delivering public dramatic readings.
According to the “American Women in WWI” website, Wilmer met physicians William and Lena Sadler in 1907, Lena being the niece of John Harvey Kellogg, co-inventor of corn flakes cereal. The three would appear together on the Chautauqua circuit nationally. Chautauquas, named for the pioneering endeavor on Lake Chautauqua in New York state, emerged across the U.S. in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, typically featuring Christian preaching, a variety of music, more educationally oriented and cultural programming, and the like. Among others, nearby Lake Maxinkuckee in Northern Indiana was home to two successful Chautauquas and Fountain Park Chautauqua in Jasper County boasts the oldest continuing Chautauqua in the Hoosier State.
In 1912 Sarah Wilmer married Edward Bond, a Christian minister, at the Sadlers’ Chicago home, though Sarah’s husband died just three years later, in 1915, from heart problems.
Wilmer continued to be a sought-after performer, often visiting her parents, who had moved from Chicago to nearby Hobart, while in the area. In the summer of 1918 it was
announced that she would entertain troops fighting in the Great War overseas with the YMCA, turning down a salary and canceling a 10-week Chautauqua contract to do so.
She sailed in August 1918 to entertain the American Expeditionary Forces, arriving in Bar-le-Duc, France, on September 4. According to The Lyceum magazine, Wilmer’s experience in “surgical work” (which no source seems able to account for, based on her biography up to that point) qualified her to work in hospitals, where she would also give daytime performances, entertaining soldiers in camps by night. It was noted her well-known play readings would be combined with special programs she’d prepared for the soldiers.
Speaking to the Lake County Times for that Christmas Eve 1918 article, Wilmer, wearing a gold chevron “wound stripe” on her right sleeve and a service chevron on her left, described her arrival in France and added that, “Twenty minutes later I was in a jitney on my way to the front.”
“Right here let me say,” she continued, “that God never made men like the Yankees, bless them. And I’ve seen them all. I once [was] asked what was the most remarkable thing I came in contact with at the front and I replied it was the Yankee smile. In all that misery, amid those terrible surroundings and facing the gravest danger, the Yanks would smile. It was wonderful.”
When warned of the dangers of going close to the front, she reportedly responded, “That is what I hoped for. How’d I get to the front line? Well, I heard a young officer say: ‘Oh, it’s terrible up there tonight; a lot of the boys have been killed and wounded and there’s not nearly enough men to care for them.’ ‘Can’t you take me up there?’ I asked him. He told me I was a woman, that it would be breaking rules. ‘Well get me some men’s clothes and I’ll be a man,’ I replied. He hesitated and finally gave me a complete outfit: breeches, blouse, puttees, hobnails and all. And I went up. That’s all there was to it.”
The Times noted that Wilmer went to the front lines nine times, a feat believed accomplished “by no other woman,” according to the paper.
She reported that she would don the soldier’s uniform and accompany the ambulance corps to the front in the dark of night.
Surrounded by “cooties” (lice) and vermin (“rats – oh, plenty of them,” she recalled, “big as cats, that would scamper all over the place and me at night, and snuggle down in my warm blankets…one morning, as I woke, eight of them jumped from my bed!”), death and misery, Wilmer would later confess to being “scared to death every time I went up to the line,” asking herself why she had come. “And then I would begin to sniffle and sob. But every time something would happen to show me why I had gone up there.”
The reasons, of course, were to lend aid and comfort, which she did, assisting medical staff at first-aid stations and comforting soldiers as she could.
“I was frightened, oh, so frightened,” she told the Chicago Tribune in a December 22, 1918, article, “but I did not dare to let that be known, for I was supposed to be a man. I helped with the boys who were brought in, and saw vividly the horror of it all, the lads dying and suffering, and had to remain quiet.”
“One night I ran in front of the guns. They were shooting overhead. It was dark. I threw my hand flashlight on litters. I smoothed one lad’s hair. ‘My God, it feels like a woman’s hand,’ he whispered. I ran away. No one but the officer was to know I was up that far. ‘Orderly, bring him some water. He’s going fast,’ I was told. The lad was gasping. He strangled. ‘You’ll be so comfortable soon,’ I told him. ‘My God, a woman’s voice,’ he stammered again. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Your mother wanted me to come,’ I told him. ‘My mother. Oh, yes, I understand – lady won’t you say something from the Bible?’ And I did. I began a passage and then began to cry aloud and the tears came down my cheeks. The lad sank back in my arms – dead.”
The Times article went on to note that, at one time, Wilmer read to 15,000 men at one session, “after which they shouldered their packs and entered the line. And later, when some returned, they murmured hysterically her Godspeed remarks through the anesthetic.”
Wilmer recalled being present at the Argonne during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, part of the final allied offensive of the war, on October 29, when she was dressed as a dough boy (the nickname for U.S. soldiers) as a barrage was underway.
There, she said, she felt suddenly ill and smelled “burning cabbage and bad onions and then I realized it was chlorine. Gas shells were breaking all around me.”
Chlorine gas, first developed by the Germans, caused coughing, choking and, in some cases, severe lung damage, with Wilmer’s exposure contributing primarily to her post-war recovery needs.
As she grew sicker, Wilmer said she grew faint and stumbled into an abandoned German dugout where she lay for some five hours before hearing voices and walking out to find stretcher bearers, who she joined. It was her second time being gassed, though the first time, October 18, was far less serious.
Undoubtedly, Wilmer was suffering on an ongoing basis from the effects of the gas burning her lungs, though she noted she would not give up her work and continued to entertain the soldiers via her readings at the base camp, rather than the front, despite her discomfort.
She recalled the fateful day, commemorated each year even today as Veterans Day, November 18, when a colonel appeared, smiling, and reported that word had come over the radio that the Armistice had been signed and the war would end.
“Immediately a mighty cheer went up, and then those 2,000 lads sang the doxology as I never heard it sung before – and never expect to again. And then this officer said to me: ‘Miss Wilmer [sic], if you have a breath left in you, will you recite the salute to the flag?’”
She did, after which the soldiers sang “The Star Spangled Banner” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
Wilmer recalled, “One young fellow said: ‘Gee, ain’t it great?’ And then, in a sorrowful tone, ‘And my buddy killed only this morning and can’t be here for it.'”
Wilmer sailed for home, hiring a nurse, Mrs. Jane Redfield Vose, while in New York to assist in her care, as her injuries continued to plague her. She then headed for Chicago to visit the Sadlers, though even by then her condition necessitated that she be carried by two men into the house, according to the Indiana History blog, which added: “Once inside, Sadler’s two young children ran to greet their adopted aunt Sarah. Wilmer then needed restoratives to allow her to speak to reporters.”
And though the Chicago Tribune article reported she received the French Croix de Guerre medal for her service, that was not confirmed in YMCA publications listing decorations received by Y personnel.
After spending time with her parents in Hobart, Wilmer was sufficiently recovered by April of 1919 to deliver a speech in Indianapolis titled, “My Experiences in War.”
She continued to speak through the 1920s with her July 14, 1949, obituary noting that she opened a confectionary shop selling sweets in 1928, though it failed during the Great Depression.
Her obituary also reported she had a married daughter named Elizabeth Ann Wales, who would have been born around 1921 or 1922. The “Women in WWI” site suggests the daughter was likely adopted, given her busy touring schedule in the 1920s (a granddaughter, Dianna Kathleen Wales, was also listed).
Sarah Wilmer also continued to serve others the rest of her life through social work, including work with the deaf, besides joining the home front effort during World War II, where she worked in war production on the graveyard shift at the General Motors factory near her Rochester, New York, residence at the time. It was a fitting continuation of the remarkable work of a one-time Hoosier girl and nationally renowned star.
