Author: Charlie Knight, Curator of Military History
Although the United States did not officially enter World War I until April 1917, Americans were involved in the conflict almost from the beginning. One of the first was a nurse from Asheville named Madelon Hancock; in fact, she was likely the very first North Carolinian to enter the war.
Hancock was born in Pensacola, Florida, on August 30, 1881, and grew up in Asheville. Her father, Samuel Westray Battle, was a Navy surgeon from a prominent Rocky Mount–area family. Hancock attended St. Mary’s School in Raleigh and then went to nursing school in New York, where she met Mortimer Hancock, an officer in the British army; the two were married in 1904.
Hancock seems to have been a touch on the adventurous side and an animal lover. Among her scrapbooks are photos of her with exotic animals, some of which she kept as pets, and a New York newspaper recounted a stir she caused when her pet rat got loose in the parlor of one of the city’s finer hotels. Another story passed down in her family recounts Hancock disguising herself as a dancing girl to gain entrance to the officers’ club at one British military installation in India; suffice it to say, her husband was not pleased when he recognized her.
Within days after Great Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, Hancock was working as a nurse at a military hospital in Belgium. For the next four years, she served at hospitals in Belgium and France, caring for wounded from both sides, witnessing unspeakable horrors, and surviving several artillery barrages and poison gas attacks.
Toward the end of the war, she wrote home: “I am on night duty again and alone, and we get 39 and 49 [wounded] in a night, all to be washed and their dressings done besides treatment for most of them, and by morning, I am like a resurrected corpse. I really never was so tired in my life. We all are. . . . Four years of this has about finished me in every way. I think everybody feels the same. Worn out mentally and physically. We have lots of German wounded. . . . Such nice mannered boys most of them. I was so surprised, and our wounded are good to them, waiting on them and talking to them. Poor devils, they don’t want to fight any more than our soldiers do.”
When wounded soldiers, regardless of nationality, came into the hospital, nearly all of them looked to the nurses for strength. Although she confessed that she was at her emotional breaking point on numerous occasions, Hancock never broke under the strain and maintained a strong front for her patients. Her always cheery demeanor earned her the nickname “Morning Glory” from some of her wounded British charges, and it was a name she enthusiastically adopted—literally, as she went by the name Glory Hancock for the rest of her life.
In recognition of her devoted work caring for perhaps thousands of wounded soldiers and enduring enemy fire, Hancock received a total of 11 decorations from three countries—Great Britain, Belgium, and France—making her not only the most decorated nurse of the war but the most decorated woman in history at that time.
After the war, she made at least one return trip to North Carolina to visit family and friends. She and Mortimer had one son, Westray Battle Hancock, who served in the British army during World War II. Hancock died in France on September 30, 1930, and is buried in Nice.