Elinor was making the ultimate sacrifice to hold on to Frederick. She was putting her own future at serious risk. For one, she could not be pregnant and remain in the army. Further, once it became known that the father of her child was a “Nazi,” which is how Frederick would be perceived regardless of what was in his heart, Elinor would face scorn, ridicule, possible unemployment, spinsterhood, and poverty. Also, although the war with Hitler was over, Jim Crow was not, and for a black woman to raise a mixed-race child would be challenging at best. She would endure prejudice and hatred from both sides, black and white.

Their unimaginable plan worked, and before Frederick left the United States Elinor was pregnant with his child. If there were tears, or cries of sadness and fear during their final moments together when they had to say good-bye at Camp Florence, the two kept those emotional details to themselves. But it would have been inconceivable for them if they hadn’t felt a flood of heartache as they left each other’s arms for the unknown. No one left war the same person. And Elinor and Frederick found a surreal love surrounded by millions of soldiers dying or returning home broken and maimed. Years later, in a rare admission, Elinor briefly spoke about the moment when the baby was conceived. Although she never revealed the location or date, or any specifics bordering on salacious, she did share with her son Chris when he was an adult that the passion between her and Frederick on that particular occasion—when they knew they had that one chance to bond themselves together for life—had been so intense that she was certain they had made a child, and in fact they had.

Elinor’s final post in the United States Army Nurse Corps was at the Station Hospital in Fort Ord, near Monterey Bay, in California. She was placed on leave on September 12, 1946, and returned to Milton; with her army term officially ending on October 25, 1946. If Elinor was showing by the time she went on leave, there weren’t any photos to prove it, and it’s possible she concealed her pregnancy from the army. While in her second trimester, she could have fooled disinterested senior officers at Fort Ord about her condition by camouflaging a protruding stomach with oversized nurses’ jackets and blaming her bulge on pure weight gain. But there would be no fooling Gladys Powell.