''It truly was,'' she said, reminiscing in her Augusta living room, a spread of wartime love letters and photos on the table in front of her. ''I didn't realize how it was until I found these letters.''

She keeps them now in a pink shopping bag, and most are still folded in red, white and blue-trimmed envelopes. They stayed in a footlocker for years, put away after World War II and rediscovered after the death of her husband a couple of years ago.

''(My husband) knew all about Don,'' she said. ''He didn't know about these letters but I didn't, either.''

Today, the letters make telling her story a little easier. In the days and weeks after she found them again, though, it was different.

''For the first time, they brought back a history I didn't want to remember anymore,'' she said.

It's a history that includes a 1945 jeep accident that left her deaf in her right ear and with a lifetime of back pain. It's a history that includes a suitor, a future husband and hundreds of battered soldiers. And it's a history that can still bring the Augusta woman to tears.

A love found

The story begins in 1942 in the halls of Spartanburg (S.C.) General Hospital. Anne Marie Poole, just 19, was training to be a nurse when her class joined the cadet nurses and Red Cross Reserve.

By the end of 1943, she was part of the first class of nurses to graduate from basic training at Camp Rucker, Ala. She transferred to Fort Benning Regional Hospital in Columbus, Ga., where war news took a back seat to adapting to Army life.

That's when she met Donald H. Spurlock, a first lieutenant from Baton Rouge, La. Their courtship began, and they spent nearly every evening together at the Officers and Nurses Club.

All that changed in July 1944, Mrs. Murray said. She was making rounds in the hospital with a doctor when a soldier approached.

World War II nurses, among them Anne Marie Murray, worked at a field hospital near Cherbourg, France. SPECIAL

''He said, 'Lieutenant, you have orders,''' Mrs. Murray said. ''I thought he was talking to the doctor so I looked around. He said, 'You!'''

She was slated to go to New York, then France. Her final destination was the 165th Field Hospital.

''All I was thinking about was how to reach Don,'' she said.

A friend handled that, and the couple said a tearful goodbye before Mrs. Murray left.

Love letters

In France, she spent her time around Cherbourg - the area depicted in the film Saving Private Ryan. The city was almost a ghost town by 1944, Mrs. Murray said.

''Occasionally, we'd see an old man walking with a loaf of bread under his arm,'' she said. ''Or there was a little girl that milked the cows next to the camp.''

At the camp, the nurses slept four to a tent and used a potbelly stove for heat. They received two cupfuls of water a day for bathing. Around the holidays, they got cognac - it took the place of kerosene for the stove.

The 165th Field Hospital - an encampment of tents about 15 miles outside Cherbourg - was the first stop for many soldiers wounded in nearby battles. They came by the truckload and trainload - bodies destroyed, spirits wounded.

''They came in screaming and hollering, and a lot of them would go right into surgery,'' Mrs. Murray said. ''Many a night I'd sit on the side of their cot, hold their hand and just tell them: 'You're going to be OK. You're going home.'''

Some did. Some didn't.

But the whole time, Mrs. Murray had letters to keep her company. By the end of 1944, 1st Lt. Spurlock had been assigned to France and the front lines of the Battle of the Bulge.

''All the girls were so jealous because I was getting all these letters,'' she said.

Mail delivery was sporadic because of the war - sometimes, letters would arrive seven or eight at the time.

A love lost

With the Battle of the Bulge raging around him in December 1944, 1st Lt. Spurlock's bedroll was soaked, his tent was a mess, and his mind was miles away, focused on a nurse in the 165th Field Hospital.

''There will be just two of us, my darling, with no formations to meet to no one to tell us what we can or cannot do,'' he wrote to Anne Marie Poole. ''... To go on writing like this will only give both of us the blues so I had better stop now. Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps I can write something more cheerful.''

A day after 1st Lt. Spurlock wrote that letter, a battlefield bullet left part of his body paralyzed, and the Cajun country soldier was sent to various hospitals for months, making the love he yearned for just a memory.

After that, the letters kept coming, even discussing marriage. But Mrs. Murray knew something was different. First Lt. Spurlock didn't tell her he was paralyzed and his morale low, and they drifted apart over the war-torn years. In addition, a young captain named Richard F. Murray had come into the nurse's life.

''(Captain Murray) was very persuasive,'' said Jean Everett, one of Mrs. Murray's best friends.

Anne Marie Murray served as an Army nurse in France during World War II. She still has the letters sent to her by a first lieutenant who courted her during the war years. JIM BLAYLOCK/STAFF

''That's right,'' said Mrs. Murray, smiling like a twentysomething in love.

Within two years, Anne Marie Poole was Anne Marie Murray. Eventually, she followed her husband to Fort Gordon and Augusta. But through it all, there was a question tugging at Mrs. Murray: What ever became of her wartime suitor?

''We probably would have married,'' she says now. ''But the Lord works in mysterious ways.''

Her answer came in church. One Sunday about seven years ago, she sat next to Hazel Bennett, the mother of First Baptist Church's minister of education. They talked, and Mrs. Bennett mentioned she was from Louisiana.

They talked more.

The Spurlocks were her neighbors back in Baton Rouge. Donald Spurlock had come home, married and worked for more than 30 years at Louisiana State University. Now, cancer owned his body, but he'd welcome a call, she said.

Mrs. Murray phoned her former suitor.

''He said there was something always missing, and my call fulfilled that need,'' she said.

She also wrote him a letter detailing her memories of the war.

A few months later, the soldier who had survived the Battle of the Bulge - and filled a pink shopping bag with wartime love letters - was dead.

''His wife wrote me the sweetest letter after he passed away,'' Mrs. Murray said.

Somewhere, she still has a copy of that one, too.

Reach Jason B. Smith at (706) 868-1222, Ext. 115, or jbsmith@augustachronicle.com.