| Summary/Abstract |
On a bright and breezy October day near the end of the Great War, an imperious Quaker woman in a gray corduroy suit sat in her family home in Mt. Kisco, New York, and wrote a short note to her denomination’s fledgling “Service Committee.”1 She had a “concern,” she said—not especially for her fellow Americans or for any of the Allies, but for the notorious “Huns” whom the world blamed for the horrors of the Great War. “For the past two or three years I have felt a concern for service among the people in Germany,” the woman, Carolena Morris Wood, wrote on October 15, 1918. “As the opportunity for such service seems to be approaching I write to volunteer under your leadership. I believe that Friends have, awaiting them in that country, an important service in spiritual healing and reconstruction.”2 A member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Wood felt called to be a friend to the friendless. And Germany in 1918 was truly a forsaken country, a byword for suicidal imperialism at the dawn of a democratic age.
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