A Soldier’s Heart: Love Amid the Great War

Sometimes intense situations in life can lead to completely new tracks. I was reading digitized old Swedish newspapers from the period between 1914 to 1921, to scan them for interesting information about Swedish born soldiers and their fate during the Great War.

Most of the information is dark and tragic, but this time a small note caught my eyes.

“A Swedish-French War Wedding”. Of course I had to investigate it further about what these words meant.

The small note described the wedding between the Swedish born Sergeant in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), Nils Widstrand, and miss Marthe Dubeau.

Nils Widstrand was born as Nils Wilhelm Gösta Widstrand in Hedvig Eleonora parish in Stockholm, September 2nd, 1895. He grew up in Stockholm and became a reporter as a son to a Swedish Publisher, his father Otto Wilhelm Widstrand.

Nils emigrated from Sweden through Norway, to North America in 1916, and lived in Toledo, Lucas, Ohio, when he was drafted on June 5th, 1917. He went over to France with his unit, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Division, AEF, in November 1917.

In July 1918 his unit was ordered to take a village near Soissons. The name of the village is not known. When I read about the fightings in the history of the 1st Division, and the fightings in July, 1918, it can have been the village of Saconin-et-Breuil, just South-West of Soissons.

The unit with Nils Widstrand reached and took their objectives, and they also took some German prisoners, and put them in a basement. When the situation was over it showed that the Germans had taken some women and had kept them as prisoners. Two specific women showed up. The younger of them turned up to be Marie Madelaine Marthe Dubeau, said in the article to be the daughter of a French Captain, Victor Dubeau, who , according to the daughter, had fallen in the War.

I haven’t been able to find a document that shows the death of a French Captain called Victor Dubeau, but I will ask some of my fellow Great War connections in the Great War Group, if they can help me. It may be some different spellings in the French documents.

Marie Dubeau was born in Montendre, France, on June 25th, 1898. She was raised by her mother Louise Virginie Bernard and her father, Victor Dubeau.

She was, according to the article, very happy to have been released from the Germans soldiers by the American soldiers. Marie said that she wanted to wait in the village before she was sure that her father had received a proper burial.

Then everything seems to have happened very fast.

Nils Widstrand left France with his unit in September 1919. Nils and Marie got married in Bourges in France on July 31st, when Nils still was in France. When I look into some archives it seems like Nils got naturalized through American authorities in Germany in December 1918.

According to the documents found in archives Marie applied for travel documents, to be able to travel to the USA, in August 1918. The document was only valid in France, and for the voyage to the USA.

In the States the Swedish-French couple became parents to two children, their son Herbert, born in November 1919, just a few months after Nils arrived from France, and their daughter Anne Ester, born in December 1920.

⇒ Read the entire article on the Swedes in the Great War website here:

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