At 92, war vet Elsie sure is Dandy

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/mike_strobel/2010/05/03/13810026.html

GROESBEEK, Holland — I just met the world's cutest war vet.

Certainly the cutest ever to walk the sainted grass of the Canadian war cemetery here.

She is Elsie Dandy, 92, of Hamilton. And she is about to meet the Dutch queen, Beatrix.

The remembrance service done, Queen Bea, as I like to call her, leaves the royal canopy and strolls over to the veterans’ front row.

Bea wears suitable black, but her face is bright and white as the 2,338 headstones all around us.

She makes a bee line, so to speak, for that tiny nurse, barely visible in a forest of old warriors.

“You were wonderful,” the queen tells Elsie, who moments earlier carried a wreath with age-defying ease and, indeed, looked wonderful.

“Thank you, ma’am,” says Elsie, remembering not to curtsy. The Dutch aren’t quite as stuffy as the Brits.

For an instant, the two women are young again.

The Queen is a wee lass in exile in Ottawa, far from the Nazis’ clutches. Elsie is a bustling nurse, helping dig shrapnel out of young men’s brains, fixing burns and broken bodies at Basingstoke neuro- and plastic surgery hospital in England.

FULL story and photo at link.