ANNA FELT CERTAIN THERE HAD to be a mistake. She opened her bag and pulled out the letter with the address where she had been ordered to report. There it was, the Aldwych, just like the sign said. Yet this vast stone building she stood staring up at looked more like some ancient temple than a nursing barracks. Weary from the overnight train journey from Liverpool, she found an empty bench in a small park across the street and sat for a moment, trying to escape the bustle and noise of strange accents to collect her thoughts. This foreign city felt suffocated under a great cloud of sadness mixed with manic frivolity. Only two blocks away, top-hatted men and expensively dressed women exited laughing from theatres and walked aside veiled widows and mourning mothers in black. It almost seemed that half the British population had resolved to do everything it could to avoid thinking about the other half.
Across the street, the uniformed doorman caught her eye and nodded to her with a knowing smile. He strolled over and bowed. “Madam, might you be the nurse from America?”
She was shocked that a stranger knew of her arrival. “Yes, but—”
Before she could stop him, the doorman took her suitcase. “Worry not, Miss Raber. I have seen that same fuddled look many times this week. Welcome to the Waldorf Hotel. Please, follow me.”
Trailing him to the entrance, she shuffled hesitantly through the revolving glass doors, fearful of catching her coat hem on the moving frame that chased her heels. Inside the hotel, she stood gawking in awe at a spacious courtyard planted with a garden and surrounded by a marble terraced lit in pale green and white. In one of the open ballrooms, couples were dancing to the music of an orchestra, stopping only to enjoy cups of tea and cookies. At the doorman’s behest, she resumed walking down a broad, carpeted corridor toward the registration desk. As she passed, every bellboy and guest turned and, smiling at her, offered a slight bow as if she were the queen being escorted through Buckingham Palace.
Seeing her approach, an elderly gentleman at the registry came to attention and produced a key. “Ah, you must be Miss Raber. We have been expecting your arrival with great anticipation. Room Four Nineteen. The lift is that way.”
“Lift?” Before she could ask what that meant, the clerk snapped his fingers, signaling for the doorman to show her the way. Moments later, she heard a great crash, and the door opened on its own, revealing a small box lit with gas lanterns inside. She stepped back and asked the doorman, “What is this?”
Her reaction amused him. “I think you call it an elevator in America. It rises and lowers between floors.” He gestured for her to step inside. “Perfectly safe, I assure you.”
She inched a toe across the crack to test the contraption’s stability. The doorman dragged her trunk in, and when the doors closed behind them, he dropped a lever. She felt an exhilarating sensation as they slowly ascended. The grinding and groaning caused her to wonder if some poor beast of burden in a stall below ground was being forced to drag the box up on pulleys. Finally they came to a jolting stop, and the door folded open. She followed him down the shadowed hall, until he stopped at one of the rooms and knocked.
The room door opened. Greeting her stood a petite, attractive young woman with wavy, dark brown hair and limpid green eyes that seemed at once warming and melancholic. The diffuse London light from the far window cast her in a soft, gilded penumbra, giving her a spiritual, almost ephemeral, quality. “You must be Anna. They’ve put us in the room together.” She offered her hand in greeting, then thought better of it and came in for an embrace. “I’m Helen Fairchild.”
Anna quickly escaped from the hug, uncomfortable with the intimacy. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Anything you require, Miss Raber,” the doorman said. “Please let us know.”
Anna suddenly remembered the English practice of tipping, a tradition about which she had been sternly lectured by one of the crew on the Cunard crossing. She fumbled for some coins in her purse.
The doorman waved off her effort. “Not necessary. We’re all very grateful to you ladies for offering to help our chaps at the Front.” He bowed and departed, closing the door behind him.
Helen retreated to a large mirror to adjust the collar of her crisp blue uniform. “We were afraid you missed the train. Isn’t this room just grand? The Brits are treating us like royalty. We’ve even had tea with Lady Astor at Cliveden.”
Anna nodded warily, pretending to know who Lady Astor was. Before leaving home, she had resolved to try her best to hide her ignorance of the outside world. And after seeing what had happened to Micah in the military camp in Kentucky, she also thought it best not to reveal her Mennonite upbringing and faith. She prayed that she would receive enough training in France to avoid suspicion about her lack of nursing experience.
Helen finished putting the final touches on her hair. “I’m afraid I don’t have much time to show you around the city. We received our disposition orders this morning. We’re to cross the Channel to Dieppe tomorrow at midnight. They say a night crossing is safer.”
Anna tried not to betray alarm. “Do you know where we’ll be assigned?”
“Colonel Johnston hasn’t told us. There are only sixty-four of us here at the moment. I’ve heard rumors that they intend to spread us out. Some to the hospitals behind the lines. Others to the clearing stations up near the fighting. Oh, I nearly forgot. The colonel left your uniform here.”
Helen rushed over to the dresser and pulled out a long, one-piece pinafore that dropped to the ankles. The cloth was heavy dark blue serge, with big broad pleats over the shoulders, white bands around the collar and sleeves, and rows of large black buttons down both sides. Accessories included a broad buckled belt, black shoes with short heels, and a flat-brimmed blue hat.
Anna lifted the uniform to the window light. “They expect us to wear this in the hospital? It looks like you can hardly move in it.”
Helen regarded her quizzically. “Of course not. These are our street uniforms. For work, they’ll give us white cotton dresses that can be washed easily. But believe me, you’ll want to wear this one wherever you go when off-duty.”
“Why? It looks hideous.”
Helen winked. “Take my word. It will protect you. The men won’t paw at you—”
“Paw?”
“And you’ll get free meals. Try it on. We’ll go out and give it a test.”
Anna reluctantly changed into the uniform. Its itchy wool chafed her skin. How would she ever get used to such a stiff garment?
Helen put a nurse’s cap on Anna’s head, tipping it a bit for a little fashion. “The others went to the theatre, but I found a great little restaurant on Charing Cross Road. Let’s dine in style before we have to start eating military rations.”
Anna’s charming new roommate threaded arms with her, and together they hurried down the stairs and out the hotel. As they walked along the Strand, Helen reached into her handbag for a few crumbs of bread to throw at gulls hovering along the banks of the Thames. As she fed the birds, she asked Anna, “How many years have you nursed?”
Anna prayed that the Almighty would forgive her the lie. “A couple.”
“They didn’t tell us much about you. Only that you were from Indiana.”
“What about you?” Anna asked, trying to deflect the attention.
“Most of us worked at hospitals in Pennsylvania. We organized and decided to come over to help. What caused you to come?”
Anna yearned to reveal the real reason she had taken the assignment, but she knew it was too dangerous for Micah’s safety. “I just felt the need.”
“Well, you come highly recommended,” Helen said. “Colonel Johnston said he received a glowing letter from the commandant of Camp Taylor on your work there.”
Anna didn’t know what to say without violating the biblical strictures against lying and bearing ill words against another, so she remained silent. As they turned and walked north toward Leicester Square, she saw a homeless British veteran curled up in the corner of an alley, his head dipped to his knees. She gasped at the pitiful sight.
“You’ll see a lot of them here,” Helen whispered. “Broken souls.”
Anna inched closer to the poor man. “He’s shaking.”
Helen put a hand on the slumped soldier’s neck. He appeared to be semiconscious. She opened the collar of his frayed uniform to ease his labored breathing. “He’s running a fever.”
“Maybe we should get him to a hospital.”
Helen shook her head. “They won’t take him. He has no limbs missing. The government shuns these men as shirkers. They don’t believe one can be wounded in the mind.”
Anna was horrified by the callous attitude caused by the war. “We have to do something. Help me lift him to his feet.”
When the man finally managed to stagger up with help, he opened his eyes and, looking up at Anna with a glance of terror, tried to crawl away.
She gently restrained him. “Wait, can you walk?”
The soldier blinked hard, only then realizing that they were nurses, not alley thugs. He nodded hesitantly. “I walked all the way to Albert.”
Anna lifted the man to his feet.
Helen looked down both ends of the street. “Where are we taking him?”
Anna didn’t reveal what she had in mind, but together they helped the man shuffle back down the street toward the Strand. When they reached the park bench where she had rested earlier, she motioned for Helen to stay with the veteran while she approached her favorite doorman to whisper a request.
The doorman glanced at Helen clutching the veteran. Despite the risk to his employment, he nodded and motioned them to the rear of the building. “Bring him around back to the loading dock.”
Waiting until no passersby were around, Anna and Helen helped the veteran limp into the side alley next to the hotel. The doorman assisted the veteran onto a small trolley and placed a canvas over him. They wheeled him toward the delivery lift used only by the employees and took the elevator to the fourth floor.
The doorman rolled the trolley to their room and lifted the veteran onto one of the beds. “I’ll send up some broth.”
“Could you spare some ice, as well?” Helen asked the doorman.
He nodded as he departed and shut the door behind him.
Helen rushed into the bathroom to soak some towels. “Get his shirt off. We have to cool him down with packs.”
Anna unfastened the man’s smelly drab tunic, which still held mud and blood stains. She shot the back of her hand to her mouth. “My God!”
Helen came running from the bathroom. “What’s wrong?”
Standing over the prone veteran, both nurses stared down at two female breasts.
“He’s a woman,” Anna said.
Stunned, Helen stroked her cheeks until she woke. “Who are you?”
The woman on the bed looked up at them with heavy-lidded eyes. “My name’s Dorothy Lawrence.”
Anna fingered the regulation buttons on the woman’s sleeves. “Why are you in a uniform?”
“They don’t believe me.”
Helen washed the grime from the woman’s face. “Who doesn’t believe you?”
“The government. I told them I fought in the trenches, but they don’t want anyone to know it. They tell people I’m daft.”
Helen shook her head at Anna, silently communicating her suspicion that they had rescued a mentally ill person masquerading as a veteran. “I’ll call the Lunacy Commission.”
Anna searched the pockets of the woman’s uniform to search for some identification. She found a photograph of the woman in the very uniform she was now wearing. On the reverse side was written: Sapper Dorothy Lawrence, taken at Albert, France, 1915. By her fellow sapper mate, Tommy Dunn. “Wait, I think she may be telling the truth.”
Helen examined the photograph. “How did you manage this?”
The female veteran exposed her crooked tombstone incisors in a grin. “You’ll tell them for me, won’t you, matron? You tell them that I was the only woman who ever fought on the Front.”
Anna opened the last couple of buttons on the woman’s uniform and saw that a binding of cotton bandages had slid down to her stomach. “She wrapped her breasts to fool them.”
“What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?” Helen asked the woman.
The female sapper gazed up at the nurses with a look of comradeship. “The same thing that’s possessing the both of you to go over there now, I’d wager.”
“That’s different,” Helen insisted.
“All my life, I wanted to be a correspondent,” the homeless woman explained. “I wrote a few articles for the Times. But the editors there just laughed at me when I said I wanted to go to France and cover the war. That’s a man’s business, they said. So I went on my own. I was an orphan, no family, so what did I have to lose? Hang it if I was going to miss out.”
“But how did you get into the lines?” Anna asked.
Dorothy was eager to recount her adventure. “I met a few boys who thought a girl ought to have a chance to kill the Boche, too. A couple of Scotties gave me this uniform, and I cut me hair and ran a razor across me face a few times to raise a stubble. I took the ferry to Boulogne and then rode a bicycle to Senlis. The Frenchies arrested me, but I escaped into the forest and spent a few nights with the rats until me accomplices got me into the tunnels at Albert.”
Anna gasped. “Tunnels?”
Dorothy took a shuddering breath, nodding to confirm the horror of the underground war there. “That’s when the damn ruperts caught up with me and interrogated me like I was a spy. Six generals gave me the dirty look-over and kept me under wraps until they lost the Battle of Loos. I came back home with nary a pence to my name. Every time I try to tell my story on paper, the bullies over at the Ministry of Defence censor it. Everyone shuns me now, even my own village. They’d prefer I just died so they don’t have the suffragettes coming around demanding to go over there like I did.”
Glancing at Helen, Anna wondered if the Almighty had arranged this miraculous encounter to firm her own courage for what lay ahead.