A Sweet Taste of America

If you've read anything about World War I, you probably know it was a grisly conflict that reduced whole cities to rubble, wiped small towns off the map, and left Europe covered in battle scars.

The scale of the destruction was hard to comprehend for us today and for people who lived through it.

Heavy artillery and chemical gas turned battles into hell scares.

Soldiers fought in cold, wet trenches, dug deep into the earth, where disease claimed more lives than the fighting.

By the end, many people had lost all faith in humanity.

And yet, amid the violence and despair, one small, sweet reminder of home made its way to the front lines, delivered by unlikely messengers just when the soldiers needed it most.

On today's episode, a sweet taste of America.

This

is a twist of history.

It's the summer of 1917 and World War I is raging.

Evangeline Booth sits outside of an Army office in Washington, D.C., stealing herself for another meeting where she's certain she'll be told absolutely not.

She knows what she looks like.

A lanky, 51-year-old woman in the curly wig she's worn since her 20s, when a bout of scarlet fever caused her to lose all her hair.

She's not exactly a battle-tested soldier like the general she's about to lobby.

In fact, she's worried he might laugh her out of the room.

He wouldn't be the only one.

All the politicians and military officials she's pitched her idea to have said no.

Even President Woodrow Wilson himself.

In a way, Evangeline understands.

She's asking for permission to do something that's incredibly dangerous, especially for women in her day.

But she can't let it go.

The door of the general's office cracks open, and a secretary in a linen pencil skirt motions for Evangeline to come inside.

Evangeline smooths her skirt as she stands.

It's now or never.

She thinks of the young American troops currently on battlefields in France, fighting and dying in the Great War.

They're young.

Most are only 18 or 19 years old.

If she can just get the general to see the simple beauty of her plan, She knows she can help these boys.

Maybe even save some of them.

It's a long shot, but she has to try.

So she takes a calming breath and strides into the general's office.

At this point, the Great War is in its third year.

The Allied powers, that's Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, and Japan, are fighting the Central Powers, Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The war started in 1914.

after the assassination of a little-known archduke named Franz Ferdinand triggered a diplomatic crisis that escalated to an all-out world war spanning three continents.

The United States tried to stay out of the war, but in the spring of 1917, Germany started attacking American submarines.

They also promised that if Mexico joined the Central Powers, Germany would help them reclaim New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

Now, you know what they say about messing with Texas?

Congress had enough and in April 1917 declared war on Germany.

They joined the Allied powers on the front lines in France.

They said that this would be the war that would end all wars and if the Allies won, make the world safe for democracy.

From the beginning, Evangeline has been skeptical of that claim.

She's followed news from the front lines ever since the war first broke out.

She's also been collecting supplies, organizing relief drives, and mobilizing volunteers to support European troops.

It's part of her mission.

She's the general of the Salvation Army, an evangelical organization that travels the world, preaching the gospel and meeting humanitarian needs.

Soldiers for the spirit, so to speak.

Evangeline's father founded the Salvation Army in London in 1865, the same year that Evangeline was born.

She always knew she'd follow in his footsteps.

She spent her whole adult life opening maternity homes, visiting the incarcerated, and running emergency shelters wherever help was needed.

She never married.

She was always too busy busy with her ministry to settle down and start a family of her own.

And now, Evangeline knows that her spirit soldiers are needed overseas.

The soldiers the U.S.

is sending to war aren't prepared for the horrors that await them.

Warfare has changed dramatically over the past 50 years when the U.S.

last saw a major conflict.

Tanks and machine guns caused destruction on an unfathomable scale.

Newspapers describe craters filled with corpses, entire cities reduced to rubble, soldiers burned from the inside by chemical gas.

In the heat of summer, the stench of death is inescapable.

Living conditions are bare bones at best, and disease is killing soldiers faster than bullets.

Young American soldiers thought they were going to France to fight for liberty.

It was painted as something patriotic and heroic.

Instead, These 18 and 19-year-old boys have marched straight into hell.

Morale on the front lines is abysmal.

Evangeline knows the Salvation Army can help.

These boys need a hot meal, a clean shirt, people to look after them, something to remind them of home just to keep their spirits up.

She knows that her Salvation Army soldiers could be more than a support network.

They could be a lifeline.

Evangeline leans over a polished oak desk to shake hands with General John Pershing.

He's the man in charge of the American troops abroad.

He looks imposing in his formal military uniform, decorated with medals for rank and valor.

But Evangeline doesn't let her nerve show.

After all, she's a general in her own right, there to fight for her troops.

Plus, she knows that General Pershing is an advocate for the Salvation Army.

Two years ago, in 1915, her organization helped him get back on his feet after a horrific house fire took his home and killed his family.

Now, Evangeline hopes he'll remember the care he received from her volunteers and allow her to extend that that same care to his soldiers abroad.

She sits down in front of the general's desk and tells him point-blank what she wants to do.

Send women to the front lines as part of the Salvation Army Volunteer Corps.

Let them travel through France with the troops, mending their shirts and tending to their wounds.

They could provide some of the comforts of home so the boys know their country hasn't forgotten them.

Evangeline expects a flat-out no.

All the top brass assumes she wants some kind of publicity stunt.

A few photos of attractive women mending uniforms, 20 miles from the front lines.

They figure there was no way a group of women would actually stick it out in the war camps.

But Pershing leans back in his chair, seeming to actually consider Evangeline's proposal.

Finally, he says that the front lines are dangerous.

Evangeline nods.

She understands that.

She says it's worth the risk.

Pershing says he'll need to think about it.

It's all Evangeline can hope for.

A few days later, Evangeline receives word from General Pershing's office.

She didn't know it at the time, but for weeks he's been receiving reports from France that his men are spiraling.

They're turning to brothels and booths to escape the dismal conditions of their war camps.

Pershing's been in the military long enough to know that whiskey never drowned a problem, just the soldier.

So he has a wire sent to Evangeline.

It says, send over some lassies.

It's August 17th, 1917.

A 28-year-old Helen Perviance leans over the railing on the boat deck of the USS España, a hulking warship headed from New York to France.

To her right and left are 11 Salvation Army volunteers, four women and seven men handpicked by Evangeline.

They're being sent to the front lines.

to aid the battalions living in the most dire circumstances.

Helen and her fellow volunteers wave down to Evangeline, who stands on the dock wishing them good luck.

Helen has been in the Salvation Army for more than a decade.

She's always looked up to Evangeline, so she's thrilled that Evangeline chose her for this mission.

She's also excited to be setting off on an adventure.

She's never left the United States.

Really, she's barely left her hometown of Huntington, Indiana.

She attended a boarding school in upstate New York, where she moved after college.

But Indiana and upstate New York are pretty similar terrains.

Small, quiet, nice people.

Nothing like what she pictures France to be.

The ship slowly pulls away from the dock.

Little by little, the shore shrinks behind them.

Helen's chest swells with salt air and something like pride.

She grips the railing, taking in one final glimpse of New York Harbor.

Around her, soldiers in freshly pressed uniforms are smoking and singing.

Some of her fellow volunteers join them.

But Helen bows her head for a prayer.

Not for safety, but for courage.

To show up fully, to hold her ground.

She has no idea what awaits her, but she's resolved to meet every challenge head-on.

One week after setting sail for the front lines of the Great War with the Salvation Army, Army, Helen Perviance walks down the gangplank of the boat and fights a wave of wooziness as she steps foot on solid ground.

She's so used to the tossing of the ship that she can't stop swaying back and forth now that she's on dry land.

Slowly, she finds her balance and can look around to take in the small port city of Bordeaux, France.

It's like something out of a fairy tale with its half-timber houses and cobblestone streets.

except for the harbor full of soldiers preparing to go to war.

Helen and the other volunteers unload their supplies onto the dock, and then they wait.

Before they left for France, they were told that one of the most challenging aspects of planning their mission was transportation.

The army needs their vehicles to transport soldiers, so the volunteers had to find their own way of getting around.

And because of the war, there aren't many cars available in France.

It took a lot of back and forth for the Salvation Army to secure a vehicle for the volunteers to use.

Helen hears a car rumbling down the cobblestone toward the dock.

She guesses that's their vehicle on the way to pick them up.

But she nearly chokes when she sees what comes lumbering around the corner.

It's a boat-sized, dinged-up, dusty old limousine rumbling over the cobblestone with the finesse of a beached whale.

Helen looks around, waiting for someone to laugh and admit this is a joke.

But nope.

It seems like she and her team will be driving a limousine into battle.

With a disbelieving grin, she and the other 10 volunteers cram into the outdated limo and head for the front lines.

Hours later, the limousine bounces down a dirt road in northeastern France.

One of the volunteers is driving while another does his best to navigate.

It's humid and sticky outside.

They roll down the windows to get some air into the back seat.

Helen leans her head out the window, taking in the French countryside.

In every direction, grassy knolls and lush lush tree lines bake in the summer sun.

It's beautiful and almost reminiscent of upstate New York.

But then, Helen catches the faint smell of sulfur, like someone's building a bonfire somewhere behind the tree line.

She realizes it's gunpowder.

No turning back now.

They are driving into war.

Now Helen knows she's going to puke.

She keeps her eyes on the horizon until a small town appears in the distance.

It's Desmange, a support zone for the soldiers on the front lines.

It's where they house supplies and treat the wounded.

Soldiers serve in the trenches for a few weeks, then come back to Desmange to calm their nerves.

It's where the salvation army will be needed most.

As they get closer, Helen can see a series of stone footbridges built over a mossy canal that surrounds the town.

And just beyond the footbridges, chaos.

Mud-caked soldiers cram the streets, drinking and smoking with bandaged hands.

Nurses race in and out of the buildings that they're clearly using as hospitals.

The stench of vomit and rot welcomes them to the once idyllic town, turned stronghold of misery.

Helen stumbles out of the limo, her stomach churning.

In the distance, she hears what she thinks is a clap of thunder.

Then she realizes, no,

that was a mortar shell exploding on the battlefield.

She repeats that prayer she said in New York.

A few weeks later, Helen sits on a log outside one of the canvas and wood huts she and her comrades built.

These are their living and working quarters.

Beside her is Margaret Sheldon, a warm, generous volunteer, always ready to roll up her sleeves and pitch in.

And today, they're elbows deep in soap.

Helen and Margaret are washing and mending uniforms.

Behind them, inside the hut, the other volunteers serve hot coffee to the soldiers.

So far, the soldiers seem grateful for the clean shirts and whatever scraps of comfort food the Salvation Army can throw together.

But they also treat the volunteers like a passing attraction, like they're waiting for them to pack it in and leave the moment the going gets tough.

Helen can't blame them.

Everything about their living conditions are miserable.

Nobody in their right mind would willingly stay here.

And to the soldiers, that must seem especially true for women.

But Helen has no intention of leaving.

She actually wishes she could do more for the boys.

A few miles from here is a muddy trench lined with barbed wire, a field stained with blood and littered with bodies.

Every soldier in camp has fought there.

Half of them came back to Des Monge on stretchers.

They're lying in a makeshift hospital about 100 yards from the Salvation Army huts.

injured or sick with cholera or whatever other disease they've contracted on the battlefield.

Many of them will die.

And here Helen sits, mending shirts.

She feels helpless.

Another mortar shell booms in the distance and a shiver runs up Helen's spine.

As much as she wants to do more, some small part of her is still grateful that they're a few miles away from the action, relatively safe in Des Monche.

Beside her, Margaret whistles a folk tune and sews a patch over a shrapnel hole in the uniform sleeve.

She mentions she's getting hungry and glances towards the hut as though willing it to be lunchtime.

Helen glances at the hut too, just in time to see the lead volunteer walk out into the yard.

He says that Helen and Margaret are just who he's looking for.

They have a new assignment.

Apparently back in New York, Evangeline Booth has been fighting for them, advocating for them to get closer to the action.

And surprisingly, General Pershing agreed.

So as of tomorrow morning, the Salvation Army will be reassigned about 10 miles northeast to Montier-Surso.

They're going to travel with the 1st Division.

Helen's jaw hits the floor.

The 1st Division are the battalions assigned to the front line.

A wall of sandbags is all that separates those soldiers from the German army.

Montier would be so close to the action that they'd hear gunshots.

They wouldn't be in a support zone anymore.

They'd be serving the support trenches, as in the patch of land land directly behind the front line.

The lead volunteer warns that as they head into autumn, relentless rain and gray skies have turned the battlefield into a muddy swamp.

The dead are too numerous to count.

The constant sound of gunfire is driving the men to the brink of madness and fraying their every nerve.

These boys need whatever help the Salvation Army can give them.

It's a terrifying prospect, but this is what Helen signed up for.

She's ready to go.

A few days later, relentless rain hammers Helen and her fellow volunteers, soaking through their coats as they trudge over rivers of mud and into a sagging barn in Montier.

A barrage of gunshots sounds in the distance.

Helen drops a sack of flour on the hay-strewn floor.

The barn is musty, the air thick with the smell of rotting wood and human sweat.

But there's also music playing.

She looks around.

A pack of soldiers are huddled together on the other side of the barn, gathered around a scratchy record player.

They look exhausted, with sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks.

It's clear that every one of these boys has lost weight since landing in Montier.

She can't imagine how hungry and homesick they must be.

The 1st Division has been fighting for months.

The trenches are close, just on the other side of the tree line.

The boys rotate in and out of the trench, staying in Montier just long enough to catch their breath and have a hot meal.

It's no wonder they all look shell-shocked and twitchy.

They've spent days taking fire and watching their friends get ripped apart by machine guns.

The soldiers finally look up.

They take Helen in.

For a moment, their eyes glaze over, like they're so tired they're incapable of registering new information.

Too exhausted to try and figure out why a rain-soaked woman is standing in their barn.

Then there's a flurry of quiet movement.

One soldier sweeps a corner of the barn with his feet.

Another grabs a keg and and tips it upside down to make a chair.

He invites Helen to sit and asks where she wants her supplies moved to.

It's so kind that Helen feels her heart break.

She tells the young men to take it easy.

She and the rest of the volunteers will tend to their own supplies.

They've come to help the boys, not the other way around.

The soldier smiles and introduces himself.

Jim.

Then she meets his friends, Roger, Benny, Beau, and a score of other names she scrambles to to remember.

The boys follow her out of the barn, intent on helping her unload her vehicle.

They break into fits of laughter when they see the limo, and already it's like a small weight is lifted from their shoulders.

That night, they all have dinner together, the Salvation Army volunteers and the troops.

There isn't much conversation around the barn.

It's clear everyone is too tired to talk.

But Helen notices that the boys have given the volunteers the best cuts of meat and the biggest, soggiest slices of pie.

They're trying to be good hosts, she realizes.

And suddenly, any fear she felt being this close to the front melts away.

By morning, the rain's cleared and the weather is good enough for Helen and the other volunteers to build a new hut out of wood and canvas.

To the sounds of mortar shells and gunfire, they construct drafty but serviceable huts on the edge of Montier.

This will be home for as long as the 1st Division is stationed here.

The volunteers are quick to fall into a routine.

Every day they cook simple meals for the soldiers awaiting their turn to go into battle and tend to the boys who come back to camp.

Helen mostly works the stove.

She boils coffee and fixes soupy dinners that get eaten too fast.

Between meals, she scrubs boots and patches uniforms.

She visits the hospital and writes letters for boys who are too injured to write their own.

But none of her efforts feel like enough.

It's late autumn now, and the rain is relentless.

Helen can't remember the last time she was dry.

There's an ever-pervasive rot soaking its way through the huts and eating at their clothes.

The days are long and food is scarce, and each morning, Helen waves goodbye to soldiers who never return to camp.

She tries to remember their faces, but it's impossible.

She always ends up imagining them dead on the battlefield, their bodies frozen through by the morning frost.

Helen thought her efforts were futile in Des Manches, but in Montier, it's even worse.

The war is just too big.

Her boots slosh as she follows Margaret into the makeshift hospital the volunteer medics have set up in an abandoned house.

The battlefield is claiming soldiers, but the bullets are nothing compared to illness and infection.

Pneumonia, bronchitis, dysentery, cholera.

War will take a body any way it can.

She and Margaret keep their expressions soft as they enter the hospital, trying not to gag from the smell.

Some boys are asleep on cots, their heads bandaged and their arms in slings.

But that's not who Helen and Margaret are here to see.

They move through what used to be a living room, then a kitchen, and finally out into the backyard where a triage tent has been set up.

In the tent, a medic nods to a few young men laid out on stretchers, their uniforms soaked with blood.

These ones are not going to make it, and Helen and Margaret are here to sit with them so they won't go alone.

Helen puts a hand on one of the young men's shoulders, just so he knows someone is there.

She fights back tears as the soldier asks for his mom.

The faint sound of gunshots are a steady backdrop, mixing with cries and screams from soldiers in the triage tent.

It's soul-killing.

The cruelty of war is overwhelming.

Helen is tired all the time.

She feels useless.

She thinks this war is useless.

And every time she sits by a dying soldier, some part of her goes with him.

She squeezes the boy's shoulder again, praying.

But not for him this time, or for herself.

She has the courage to stay, but now she needs the tools to help.

To give these boys something to look forward to, or just ease their pain for a little while.

She has to find a way of bringing hope to this camp, or misery will eat away at them faster than the rain and rock.

Helen's head is still spinning a few days later as she and Margaret walk from their tents on the edge of town to Montier.

All week, she and Margaret have been spitballing ways to make camp more livable.

Eventually, they decided that the least they could do was go into town and buy some chocolate for the boys.

But when they get to the commissary, Helen's dismayed to see empty shelves, no chocolate, no apples.

All that's left is a sack of flour and a couple dozen eggs.

Margaret looks the bare shelves up and down, clicking her tongue.

Helen crosses her arms, thinking, eggs and flour aren't exactly what they were hoping for, but Helen's not ready to turn her nose up at it either.

They also have milk and lard back at camp.

That's when Margaret and Helen look at each other.

They have an idea.

They take all the flour and eggs in the store, then hurry back to the hut.

Margaret goes to scrounge up some sugar while Helen heats up a vat of lard.

Then they mix the flour, eggs, sugar, and milk and knead it into a dough.

Behind them, the lard sizzles.

It's ready.

So they drop in a heaping spoonful of batter.

The fat sputters to life.

The smell hits them immediately.

Rich and warm and heavenly.

The aroma curls through the cracks in the hut walls.

Soon, the men smell it too.

Before long, Jim pops his head into the tent and asks, Is someone making doughnuts?

Within minutes, more soldiers appear at the door.

Helen waves them in and hands each of them a fat, lumpy ball of fried dough.

They're not pretty, but they're piping hot and wonderfully sweet.

The men devour them.

One soldier takes a bite and lets out a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob.

He says, If this is war, let it continue.

Donuts.

They're cheap, easy to make, and to Helen, they've just become the unsung heroes of this war.

It's not that the boys loved donuts specifically.

They weren't even that popular a dessert back home.

But they're warm and sweet and fresh.

They fill the boys' stomachs in a way camp dinners never could.

Plus, they're decidedly American.

A little slice of home all the way in France.

Helen figures, if a simple donut can bring the soldiers that much joy, then she and Margaret are going to make them.

That night, they spend hours kneading dough, frying batch after batch of doughnuts.

They're at it for hours on end, until there's more than 300 donuts piled on the rickety table in their hut.

They only stop when the lard runs thin.

By sunrise, hungry soldiers line up outside the hut eager for a lumpy donut.

The whole pile is gone in minutes, and Helen and Margaret realize they're going to need a lot more dough to accommodate the soldiers at camp.

Each day they churn out more doughnuts, from 300 to 500 and 1,000.

Soon they're up to 5,000 donuts a day and still it doesn't seem like enough.

It quickly becomes a morning ritual around camp.

Helen, Margaret, and a few other volunteers are up before dawn, brewing coffee and making batter.

They sing while they work.

Some mornings the soldiers sing too.

And the effect the doughnuts have on camp is palpable.

The mood lifts.

Soldiers come back from the battlefield and head straight to the donut hut, sometimes before they stop by the hospital for a much-needed bandage.

The donut hut becomes a place to hang out, like a soda shop back home.

The soldiers make friends with Helen and Margaret.

They tell them things, fears and confessions they don't even tell the chaplain at camp.

Some of them cry.

The donuts make them homesick in the best possible way.

It's clear how bad these boys needed this.

And finally, Helen feels like her work in this war is helping.

One morning, a few weeks after the donut ritual begins, Jim and another soldier slip into the hut holding what looks like a bundle of fur.

They announce that they've brought Helen a present.

This isn't unusual.

A lot of the boys have been bringing little presents to their donut girls.

That was the nickname popping up around camp.

Helen had received handwritten thank-you notes, a few shell casings, a dented German helmet, small tokens of appreciation, but she's never received anything furry before.

She wipes her hands on a towel and goes over to see what Jim brought her.

To her surprise, it's a baby fox, barely bigger than her forearm.

It looks weak and it's shaking like a leaf.

Jim says they found him orphaned near the trench line and carried him back to her, because she's the one who fixes things.

Helen grins.

She's touched.

She has no idea what to do with the baby fox, but she takes it from Jim's arms and promises to nurse it back to health.

She takes the fox back to her tent and dries it off with a towel.

She feeds it a few scraps from breakfast and nestles it in a pile of blankets.

By nightfall, the fox has a name, Pity Dink.

He quickly becomes a fixture by the stove in the donut hut, a mascot around camp.

Over the next few months, the donuts take on a life of their own.

They keep the boys warm all winter.

By spring, word spreads down the front line, till every battalion in France has heard that First Division is getting doughnuts.

By summer, the front line has moved.

Slowly but surely, the Allied forces are pushing the Central Powers back into Germany.

Helen knows it's good news, but it's hard to feel victorious when lives are still being lost every day.

She feels herself becoming desensitized to the horrors of war, to the death and decay that surrounds her.

And as summer turns to autumn, the slaughter intensifies.

At this point, the Salvation Army has been in France for more than a year, making doughnuts for the 1st Division.

A few weeks ago, the Allied forces initiated the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.

It's a massive campaign led by the American military to push German forces out of France.

The fighting is brutal.

Over 1.2 million U.S.

soldiers are on the front lines, and the offensive is quickly becoming the deadliest campaign in American military history.

It also means that the 1st Division is on the move.

On a cool morning in the fall of 1918, Helen, the other volunteers, and Pittidink load into their battered limousine and travel 50 miles north to a field hospital near Chepille, a battered village in northeastern France.

Helen was close to war in Montier.

But in Chepilly, the field hospital sits just in front of the artillery line, so close that every American shell launched toward the Germans whistles overhead.

Now, Helen isn't just on the front lines.

She's on the razor's edge of a brutal battle and one of the most lethal conflicts the world has ever known.

Helen Perviant steals her nerves as she surveys the field hospital where she and the other volunteers from the Salvation Army will be stationed, right in the crossfire of bullets and bombs from both sides of battle.

Just then, an American officer approaches.

He says exactly what she's thinking.

Setting up shop this close to the fighting is a bad idea.

He has a slightly safer spot for them to make camp.

Helen follows the officer across a grassy yard beside the field hospital to a cave carved into the nearest hillside.

He explains that the Germans carved this cave a while ago to use as headquarters.

They had to abandon it when the 1st Division pushed them out of Shepi.

They walk through the mouth of the cave and Helen is stunned by the vastness of the cavern inside.

It's easily 100 feet long, more than enough space for the Salvation Army.

They set up their doughnut table right near the front.

A few days later, Helen wipes sweat from her brow and takes a swig of coffee.

She and Margaret have been up since three in the morning making donuts.

Helen's surprised by how quickly she adjusts to her new living quarters.

A hail of gunfire rattles the walls of the cave.

She and the other volunteers are used to this.

They work about 18 hours a day and to a chorus of gunfire.

When they're not making donuts, they're in the trenches, bringing coffee and water to the soldiers.

Another round of bullets hit the field between the cave and the hospital, kicking up flurries of dirt.

For a moment, the air is sucked out of the cave.

Then the hillside by the mouth of the cave explodes.

Margaret shrieks as the walls of the cave shudder.

Dirt and debris rain down on Helen, and she lunges for her gas mask just in case.

Her heart is pounding as she pieces together what just happened.

That was a German mortar shell.

They were used to the American military firing artillery over their heads, but German ammunition had never landed so close to them.

It was terrifying.

The air pressure in the cave changes again, and Helen braces herself.

Another mortar shell explodes outside and the floor in the cave lifts.

Helen and Margaret exchange looks.

The Germans are on the offensive.

It's going to be a rough day.

The onslaught continues for hours on end.

Helen keeps her head down, frying donuts like her life depends on it.

All day, bloody and broken soldiers amble into the cave, caked in mud and soaking wet.

They treat the donuts like a lifeline.

They say the enemy is firing on all cylinders.

They must know they're at the end of their rope and are making one last stand.

Helen doesn't know if that's true or not, but her nerves are shot.

Beyond the cave, soldiers are being rushed into the field hospital on stretchers, screaming in pain.

She sees missing limbs and incurable injuries.

Her stomach turns.

The onslaught continues overnight, gunfire and mortar shells rattling the cave while Helen makes futile attempts to sleep.

She wants to take food to the boys in the trench, but she knows she'll just be in the way right now.

Donuts are all she can do.

So they keep making them, day after day beneath the sound of continuous gunfire.

On the fifth day of the onslaught, An officer ducks into the cave and tells Helen and the rest of the Salvation Army to pack pack up.

Orders have come down from the top.

They have to fall back.

The front line has gotten far too dangerous for volunteers, especially women.

They're being sent to a safer post a few miles behind the line.

Helen glances over the officer's shoulder toward the field hospital across the yard.

She knows the officer is being protective.

But the idea of leaving the 1st Division now is unconscionable.

They're the ones who need her most.

She tries to argue, but the officer is firm.

They're leaving first thing tomorrow.

Tear down the kitchen and pack up.

That night, Helen can't sleep.

She looks across the cave to Margaret, who she can tell is also awake in her bed, listening to the trenches explode.

Without a word, Helen gets up.

She walks down the length of the cave to the kitchen and pulls out the flour and eggs.

She hears Margaret's cot creak, and soon Margaret is next to her, heating up the lard.

They're not leaving.

They aren't enlisted soldiers.

Top Brass has no command over them, technically.

They'll refuse to fall back, and the army will simply have to let them stay.

For the next two months, Helen and her fellow volunteers follow the 1st Division as they push towards Soudon, France, near the Luxembourg border.

The fall is brutally cold, and Helen can't count the number of times she wakes up covered in a light layer of frost.

Her feet are dotted with frostbite.

She yearns to be dry and warm.

But she stays.

All the volunteers stay.

Then, one morning in early November, for the first time in months, the guns stop.

Everything goes still, and Helen swears she can feel the entire world exhale.

Then the news comes.

The central powers have surrendered.

The war is over.

A wave of disbelief crests over camp, followed by unbridled joy.

That night, the troops light bonfires all around camp.

Helen sees more bonfires dotting the hillsides in the distance.

From the sounds of it, the whole French countryside is singing.

She stands by a fire, watching the light dance over the boys' faces, grimy, sunken eyes, but smiling.

Weeks later, Helen and Margaret step off a naval ship onto American soil.

The same way they stepped onto the Espana more than a year ago.

Quietly, hands folded.

But now, their duffel bags are worn and their boots are ruined.

Helen knows the lines around her eyes run a little deeper.

They're saying that more than 20 million people died during the war.

soldiers and civilians.

Another 20 million are wounded.

Helen has seen entire towns erased, borders redrawn, empires dismantled.

This was the war that was supposed to end all wars.

But in Helen's opinion, it just showed the depravity that humans are capable of.

Helen and her cohorts fried over a million donuts during the war.

She spent months on the front lines living through near-constant gunfire.

She'd had enough adventure for a lifetime and returns to Indiana and tries to re-establish some semblance of normalcy.

But the world isn't so quick to move on.

Word has spread about Helen and her volunteers.

A name sticks.

She's remembered as the donut girl, the one who brought a small comfort to the trenches.

She's asked to speak at churches, at rallies, and fundraisers.

She helps establish a local Salvation Army post in Indiana.

before eventually taking over the one in upstate New York.

And eventually, she joins the organization's training school school in the Bronx, where she taught for over a decade and became the dean.

Meanwhile, the humble donut also took on new life.

The story of the donut girls created a widespread national taste for them.

A craze, if you will.

Donuts were suddenly everywhere.

They started showing up in bakery windows, stacked high on breakfast counters, nestled in the greasy paper bags of commuters and children alike.

And by 1934, the donut had been crowned the food of the century at the Chicago World's Fair.

Though for her part, Helen often said she never wanted to see another donut again.

She loved helping the soldiers during the war, but she'd eaten enough fried dough for a lifetime.

According to recent numbers, Americans now eat over 10 billion doughnuts each year, and the first Friday in June is National Donut Day.

Your favorite bakery is probably celebrating.

From Balin Studios, this is A Twist of History.

A quick note about our stories.

They're all heavily researched, but some details and scenes are dramatized.

A Twist of History is hosted by me, Joel Blackwell.

Executive produced by Mr.

Ballin and Zach Levin.

Our head of writing is Evan Allen.

Produced by Perry Kroll.

This episode was written by Robin Miniter.

Story editing by Luke Baratz and Aaron Lamb.

Sound design and audio mixing by Colin Lester Fleming.

Post-production supervision by Jeremy Bohm and Cole Lacasio.

Research and fact-checking by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, Alex Paul, Patricia Nicole Florentino, Calvin Riley-Holgate, Matt Gilligan.

Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel.

Artwork by Jessica Kloxton-Kiner and Robin Vane.

Thank you for listening to A Twist of History.