The Saturday Review noted that her book told “the epic of endurance and courage in a fight which sometimes looks heroic, but more often proves to be only burdensome and cruel; which is not reported in the official war communiqués but represents an essential part of the great struggle of our times.”[1] Lorna Lindsley was born on 2 January 1889 to Frederic Jesup Stimson (1855–1943) and Elizabeth Bradlee Abbot Stimson (1858–1896) in Dedham, Massachusetts.
Her father was U.S. ambassador to Argentina from 1915 to 1921, and author of several law books, including The American Constitution (1908) and Popular Law-making (1910), as well as novels and short stories.
Lorna moved to Paris in the 1920s, where she took an apartment at 20 rue de Cels in Montparnasse and became part of the circle of expatriate Americans living in the city.
[3] In 1936, Lorna and her daughter Leonora journeyed from Auckland, New Zealand, to Tahiti aboard the sailing ship Joseph Conrad under the command of Alan Villiers.
[4] Lorna Lindsley began to write articles for American newspapers in the late 1930s, including the Manchester Guardian, the New Statesman, the Nation (U.K.), Time and Tide, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Herald Tribune.
She had been a member of the Rochambelles, the only female combat unit on the Western Front during the Second World War, and was posthumously awarded the French Croix de Guerre avec Palme.
In between articles, she served as a nurse to wounded Republican soldiers and wrote letters home for those too badly injured to hold a pen.