"When the first groups of boys were being taken to the various hospitals, I was going about shopping for them, writing letters for them, reading to them and attending to their personal needs as much as was possible. One day I got a letter, a pathetic, sad little letter, addressed to Mrs. Senator from Idaho at the White House. The letter reached me, despite its address, and I never read a sadder plea. It was from a mother who lived on a little ranch in Idaho. She had one boy and he had gone to France. She had had one letter, saying he had sailed for home when the war was over. She knew he had been hurt, but she did not know the particulars and with that one letter from him the rest was silence. She had waited and waited and no word came. She had no money to make a search and she had to stay on the ranch with an invalid husband, else she would have set out and worked her way to New York and begun her hunt for her boy. She sent me his picture and with only that and his name I began to search among the hurt boys.
"Finally one day in the psychopathic ward I found him, a great, big farmer boy, with the mind of a child, completely shattered, memory gone and no recollection of even his name." 