Dear Ma,
It’s Mother’s Day here at the “club.” We helped 160 servicemen write letters home today, and now we’re writing our own.
So much has happened over the last two months. The night we got here, we were called to the station to help feed the refugees coming through—just a big freight shed, two smoking stoves, cases of unopened and unlabeled supplies, thousands upon thousands of wretched old men and women and children and invalids crowding in, and a cluster of exhausted Smith women rushing about diluting milk and desperately trying to find cups and bowls enough to serve everyone. After a night of that, we came up with a system of eight-hour shifts, and got in some more stoves and supplies, so we had that all pretty well up and running within three days. With every train of evacuees that leaves the station, we try to make sure each person has a packet containing a can of meat or sardines, bread, chocolate, and a can of condensed milk.
We’d just got that in order when one night a doctor came to our door asking if we could give his blessés something to eat. So off we went and the next thing we knew we were in the business of providing hot milk and soup and cigarettes to the trains of wounded that go by. They try to put the English-speaking men together, so we gather up all the daily papers in English we can for them. Our own boys were so happy to see American faces again that one thing led to another, and now, on top of it all, we’ve been doing hospital visits, taking writing materials and treats to “our boys,” and have made a sort of club for the men where they can come as they convalesce, with a parlor and a reading room and sing-alongs for the boys two nights a week (it’s become a general theory around here that if they can survive Dr. Clare singing Gilbert & Sullivan at them, they can survive anything that battle has to offer).
As you can see, we’re quite safe here in Beauvais and keeping busy. One of the Red Cross men told us yesterday, “We don’t need any more women who want to hold the dying soldiers’ hands; we need ones like you, who can wash dishes.” If you’ll believe it, he meant it as a compliment. He told me that it gave him hope to see women of refinement (that’s me, apparently) have the spirit to take on the ugly jobs, cleaning up messes, scrubbing floors, and washing dishes.
I know you wanted something more for me, Ma. I know you scrubbed because you had to and not because you wanted to. Everywhere we’ve been, there’s been squalor and confusion and we’ve been able to plunge in and turn it all around—and that’s something I learned from you. Even when we were poorest, you took what little we had and you made it work, somehow. You always found a way. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for showing me that it isn’t what you have, it’s what you make of it—whether it’s turning a can of sardines and some condensed milk into a supper or turning a group of strangers into a band of sisters.
I don’t know when I’ll be back—the work keeps coming and coming and sometimes it seems like this war will never be over, and I haven’t quite given up the hope that we’ll be able to go back to Grécourt and set that to rights again too—but I’m sending love to Dad and the boys and particularly to you. Happy Mother’s Day, Ma.
With love, your Katie
—Miss Katherine Moran, ’11, Assistant Director, to her mother, Mrs. Francis Shaughnessy
May 1918
Beauvais, France
“Have you written your letter yet?” Kate asked Emmie.
Emmie looked down at the crossed-out piece of paper in front of her. In the hall of the club, a large sign had been posted: “To-day is Mother’s Day. Have you written your letter?” Emmie had spent the morning visiting hospitals, helping the boys there write their letters home. Some had been lovely. Others had been heartbreaking: the boys who couldn’t hold a pen, the boys who could hardly speak because their lungs were so groggy from being gassed, the boys who were never going home again, no matter how they pretended.
But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t seem to write her own.
Dear Mother, she had written. And then she stuck. Because what could she possibly tell her mother of their life here? Of the calls from the station, the trains that went through, unloading the lost and the wounded. They knew all the trains now: the improvised trains for the petits blessés, the lightly wounded, who needed to be fed with rich soups and brought cigarettes and a hard bread they sarcastically called gâteaux, who would thank them for the English papers and joke and laugh with them. Then there were the permanent trains for the grands blessés, those who were grievously hurt, who could only be tempted by oranges and chocolate, and who needed letters written with alarming urgency, to send their last messages back home.
The grands blessés were the saddest, but even the petits blessés were a heartbreaking sight, crawling out of the straw, their uniforms so matted with dirt and blood it was nearly impossible to discern the original color.
The Unit was doing good work—Emmie knew they were doing good work. They were busy and useful and together and working in a terribly organized way, sleeping in proper beds, and eating proper meals, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had been so unhappy.
It wasn’t just unhappiness. It had taken Emmie some time to identify the feeling, because it was so unexpected. She was angry, with a horrible, snarling, brooding sort of anger that colored everything. It made her resentful and hateful.
She hated that they’d had to leave Grécourt. She hated the work. She hated the new people, with their cheerful assumption that this was what they were here for, this was what they were meant to do. She hated seeing the broken men with their broken bodies and broken spirits, the huddled refugees passing through, headed goodness only knew where. She hated all the articles praising the Unit for being angels of mercy and towers of strength when she didn’t feel either merciful or angelic. She just felt furious.
She hated that she’d found the one person in the world she’d wanted to spend her life with, the one person in the world who looked at her and saw something wonderful, and now she hadn’t the faintest idea where he was or if he was alive or dead.
It wasn’t heroic or patriotic. It was wasteful and horrible.
And now, this letter to her mother, it was the very last straw. Emmie couldn’t, wouldn’t write what she knew her mother wanted to hear—how marvelous it all was, what a fine showing they were making. She couldn’t speak of the people they served as statistics, so many fed, so many outfitted, so many sent on.
Alice had been collecting funerals. They’d seen so many men die, so many without family—Scotsmen from remote islands, boys from Kentucky farms, New Yorkers, Liverpudlians, and Nova Scotians—that Alice had taken it on herself to attend every funeral she could, to make sure someone was there to bear witness. She wrote to all the next of kin after, a personal letter in addition to the official one. Emmie had promised she would help her—with the letters, not the funerals—but she found it so very hard. She found it all so very hard.
Emmie wanted to be back at Grécourt, with her chickens who were really roosters, and with the hope of summer to come. She wanted to deliver milk to adorable, pink Boche babies, not cigarettes to men wounded beyond bearing.
Maybe that made her unpatriotic. Maybe that made her ungenerous. She wasn’t sure. Mostly, it made her moody.
Kate had taken to checking in on her. Not explicitly. Just stopping by throughout the day, saying a word or two, giving Emmie a chance to fume if she needed it. That, at least, was one good thing that had come of all this—she had Kate back again, not in the old blithe way of the Smith days, but in a new, more concerted way. They’d stopped taking each other for granted. They listened to each other now, really listened. And sometimes, like now, it was enough just to be, to know the other was there.
“Is that your letter?” asked Kate, perching on the arm of Emmie’s chair.
Emmie grimaced at the marked-up page. “I haven’t gotten very far. Do you think it counts if I write to my brothers instead?”
“Or you could just give an interview to the papers,” said Kate blandly, and Emmie made a horrible face at her, because, of course, that was just what Emmie’s mother had done, after the evacuation, when the Smith Unit was in all the papers. She’d told the New York Times that it was no more than she would have expected of her daughter and it was time the world recognized the potential of the modern college woman.
Emmie wasn’t sure which bothered her more, the idea that this was somehow a measure of her being her mother’s daughter, or the idea that she was meant to be an archetype of the modern college woman, a bloodless model of an ideal, rather than a person who had tramped through mud and gone two weeks at a time without a shampoo and cried over spilled chickens and found immeasurable joy teaching children to sing rounds in French.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when she would have been delighted to have made her mother proud, whatever that meant. But now—
She was just so angry.
“She hasn’t the faintest notion,” said Emmie. “Of course, why should she? No one would who hasn’t been here. But . . .”
But the thoughtlessness of it all, the complete lack of any attempt to understand, the idea that they were just grist for her mother’s mill . . . Emmie was certainly happy that people were seeing the potential of the American college woman, and it didn’t at all offend her when Mr. Hamlen of the Red Cross said the exact same thing, or when Major Perkins wired that they needed more college girls like the Smith Unit in France—but when her mother said it, said it to a paper, it made her want to snarl.
“I keep thinking about that night in Amiens.” Emmie looked up at Kate, struggling to put her emotions into words. “You remember. That horrible cellar, with the bombs falling and falling.”
“Oh, I remember,” said Kate with feeling.
“That was the first time I really thought we might die—actually die, not just talk about it. Those bombs didn’t care who we were. It didn’t matter to them that we were Smith girls or les dames Américaines—they were just falling anywhere they landed, obliterating everything in their paths. We might have been anyone. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me. I don’t think my mother has ever, in her whole life, been somewhere where she’s been just anyone. All those railings she chained herself to—no one was ever going to arrest her, not really.”
The police were never going to haul Mrs. Livingston Van Alden off to the Tombs or beat her with a nightstick, not when she was the niece of a senator and second cousin to a former president.
“I know that doesn’t make it a sham, precisely,” said Emmie slowly. “None of it changes what she’s done—we probably wouldn’t have the vote in New York now if it weren’t for her, and if we ever get to vote nationally, it will owe something to her, so I suppose she has done more good for more people than I ever could, but . . .”
“But it doesn’t seem quite so heroic anymore?” offered Kate.
Emmie nodded. All her life, her mother was the model she’d striven to follow. She was Lady Liberty and the entire pantheon of Greek goddesses all rolled into one. Emmie had tried so very hard to contort herself into what her mother wanted her to be, to follow her mother’s example.
Emmie looked down at her unwritten letter, the ink blurring in front of her. “It makes me so angry that she’s trying to take credit for our work when she hasn’t been here, when she hasn’t done any of it—and it’s nothing to take credit for. It was just surviving. The things that we did that were good, the things that matter, those are the things she doesn’t care about. Like getting pumps for the villages and making sure there were enough combs to go around. And teaching the children to play again. Those were the things that mattered. And that’s what no one seems to care about now.”
“You could always write her that,” said Kate.
“She’d never read it.” Emmie was fairly sure her mother had never read any of the letters she’d written home from Smith. “And I’d just feel silly and petty for writing it. We’re meant to be keeping our end up.”
“I don’t think keeping our end up means pretending everything is wonderful when it isn’t,” said Kate. “It’s a war. It’s meant to be awful.”
Emmie managed a wobbly smile. “I just—I hate the work we’re doing here. You don’t, do you?”
“I don’t hate it, no. Not the way you do. If we’d done this from the beginning, I’m not sure I would have minded it so much. But I feel like Grécourt spoiled me for other things.”
“I know this is what’s needed. But—it’s just so disheartening. I keep thinking of all our people and wondering where they are now and whether we’ll ever be able to keep our promises to them.” It had all seemed possible in Montdidier with the mud of Grécourt still fresh on their boots. But that had been in March, and now it was May, and the Germans still pressed on. The idea of going back, rebuilding, seemed impossibly remote. “Sometimes I wonder if there was any point in it. We worked so hard and then it was all swept away again.”
There was silence for a moment as the wheels of ambulances rumbled by on the street outside, bringing more wounded, always more wounded.
“If we had never come,” said Kate, “hundreds of people would have died this winter. They may have lost their homes again, but they’re alive. They can go back. We can go back for them.”
“Can we? The new girls have no idea—they seem to think this is what the Unit is for. Nursing and canteen work.”
“But we know what it’s for,” said Kate, and Emmie had never been more grateful for Kate’s determination, that streak of mulishness so entirely at odds with her fine-boned delicacy. “Florence would go back in a moment. She’s held on to the cows and goats for just that purpose. She takes it as a personal affront that she wasn’t able to finish the planting. And Liza too.”
“Liza?” Emmie looked up at Kate in surprise. “But she always wanted to do canteen work.”
“She says she misses the store. And being outdoors. And fresh air.” Kate glanced over her shoulder, checking to make sure no one was listening. “It was always really Maud who wanted to do canteen work—and now Maud’s left, Liza doesn’t have to listen to her anymore.”
Emmie sat a little straighter, feeling a faint, dangerous spark of hope. “What about Nell and Anne and Alice?”
“I haven’t spoken to them yet. I know Anne misses her school in Boston. I doubt she’ll want to stay on that long. Nell might, but I’m not sure.” Kate looked at her seriously. “It wouldn’t be for a while, you know. We’re not going to make it back to Grécourt until the war is over.”
If the war ever ended. Emmie stared down at her hands, large-fingered, calloused, bare of rings. “Will and I used to talk about what we’d do after the war. It was like a game—only it wasn’t.”
She felt Kate’s hand on her shoulder. “Has there been any word?”
It was amazing how hard it could be to choke out one syllable. “No.”
She’d searched and searched the casualty lists for Will’s name. Of thirty officers from his battalion, twenty-two had been officially reported dead. Emmie wasn’t quite sure what that meant for the other eight. Will wasn’t marked as missing—there was that. Did that mean he was sick somewhere? Wounded? Or simply serving wherever it was he had been called to serve? The censorship of the French papers was so complete; it was almost impossible to get any information. They had no idea who was doing what where; only rumors.
It was at times like these that being engaged to be engaged seemed a rather flimsy thing. If they’d been engaged, properly engaged, she might have done what her mother would have done, and badgered every relative who had contacts anywhere in the State Department or at the Court of St. James’s. She would have had the phone lines buzzing, diplomats calling hospitals—but it was very hard to explain to the authorities that a pile of letters signed yours to be yours counted as at all the same thing as an engagement announcement in the Times.
Not to mention that the letters themselves were now somewhere behind enemy lines, in a locked trunk in an army barrack behind an abandoned château, most likely torched by the Germans.
“I ask on every train,” said Kate. “And Julia knows to keep a lookout when she does her rounds.”
“I know. I suppose it’s better that he hasn’t turned up? It means he’s off fighting somewhere.” Or dead. Emmie made a show of checking the clock on the mantel. “Oh dear. If we don’t get moving, we’ll be late for our shift at the station.”
She left the letter to her mother unfinished. If her mother wanted to know what they were doing, she could read it in the papers. It was a small defiance, but it made Emmie feel better in a petty sort of way.
She did write to her brothers, though. For them, she wrote a cheerful letter talking about the unexpected visitors who would stop by, the group of aviators knocking on their door saying, “Hallo, Smith Unit! Just wanted to say hello. We’re the Lafayette Escadrille.”
She wrote about the sing-alongs they had twice a week at the club, with Dr. Clare pounding out a combination of hymns and light opera. We go from “Onward Christian Soldiers” to “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General”—the only thing they have in common is that they’re both martial and we can’t sing either of them on key.
One group of men who had come through the club sent them 346 francs to buy a Victrola.
“So other poor boys won’t have to listen to Dr. Clare singing,” suggested Kate, sotto voce, making Emmie choke on her coffee.
The Smith Club of Japan sent two boxes of supplies, including the most beautiful writing paper Emmie had ever seen, silky and whisper thin. It made her think of gossamer and butterfly wings and the stuff of dreams, the sort of paper that should be used for writing poetry and love letters, like something out of that Keats poem—or was it Coleridge?—with casements opening upon fairy lands forlorn.
Nothing like the sturdy stuff on which she and Will had exchanged letters, a motley collection of stationery cadged from Paris hotels and paper torn from notebooks and on one occasion, when nothing better could be found, brown paper packaging cut into squares.
Emmie gave the paper to Alice for her condolence notes, which were multiplying at an alarming rate as May raged into June and the Germans kept on and on. Sirens screeched overhead; there was something far more fearsome about an air raid in a city than in the countryside. At Grécourt, they’d managed to make a joke of it, but here, in Beauvais, the planes screaming overhead were fearsome things. The cannon boomed, the antiaircraft guns fired, and the church bells rang in frenzied cacophony as the Boche planes screamed past on their way to Paris, dropping bombs in their wake.
The wounded poured into Beauvais. The train station was a terrible thing, trains belching out the dead and the dying in a fog of smoke and blood. Emmie had only just fallen into bed, still wearing her soiled uniform, when Mrs. Barrett shook her awake.
“We’re all needed at the hospital.”
They made their way through a nightmare landscape of smoldering houses and shattered glass, dodging craters in the pavement, whole streets blocked off by rubble. There were American nurses in the hospital, just shipped in from Paris, some just in from the U.S. One was being sick in a corner. Emmie couldn’t blame her. The floor was thick with stretchers, with hungry, filthy, thirsty, feverish men, all dropped wherever the stretcher bearers had been able to find room. It was almost impossible to see; lights were allowed only in the operating room. For the rest, there were only shuttered lanterns, creating more shadows than sight.
Across the way, in the operating room, under the glare of the lights, all three tables were full, Dr. Clare bending over one, Julia over another, and a French surgeon manning the third. Someone was carrying men out of the operating room, someone else lining up stretchers waiting to go in, the men so bloodied they looked less like human beings than like meat hanging out in front of a butcher’s shop.
“Anne,” Mrs. Barrett was saying. “There are forty-five grands blessés just out of surgery in there. If you could tend to them. Emmie, this lot has just come in. . . .”
Emmie didn’t even bother to take off her hat or her gloves. She found a container of drinking water and began making the rounds, one by one, checking each for fever and wounds, offering water, wiping their faces as best she could. The whistles were still blowing and the bombs falling, the walls shaking with each explosion, but the noise seemed to recede as she worked, the horror outside less than the horror within. She had never imagined anything like this, not in Grécourt, not in the evacuation, not even in Amiens.
She was balling up a blanket to try to use as a bolster for a wounded man when Kate tapped her on the shoulder. “Emmie. Emmie! Come with me.”
“But I’m not done here. . . .”
“It’s your captain.” Kate had blood on her face and her dress; her usually neat hair was straggling out of its pins. “I think it’s your captain. I’ve been helping in the operating room—”
Emmie was on her feet in an instant, feeling sick with hope and fear. “But these men—”
“Nell says she’ll stay with them.” Emmie hadn’t even noticed Nell, but there she was, behind Kate, taking over without a word, Nell, who usually had a pithy comment for every occasion, her eyes burning hollows in her white face.
“Go,” Nell said, and gave Emmie a little push.
They had to step over more stretchers to get there, to the operating room, where a man lay on Julia’s table as she dug a needle in and out of his flesh.
Emmie had only a glimpse of his face—a face pitted with burns and scrapes from exploding shrapnel—before there was a tremendous crash and all the lights went out.
She could hear Julia cursing, and then a flashlight was shoved into Emmie’s hand.
“Hold that,” she said crisply, and Emmie held the flashlight as still as she could, that momentary glimpse of his face burned into her memory, trying to resist the urge to turn the beam of the light and look again.
“How bad?”
Julia shoved wadding into the wound. “It missed anything important. He’ll live. As long as it doesn’t go putrid on him. What?” she demanded, as someone came up behind her.
“The alert has sounded,” said Mrs. Barrett grimly. “The officer in charge has suggested you stop and seek a place of safety.”
“Jamais!” protested the French surgeon working at the next table. “I operate all night.”
“While there are wounded here, I stay here.” Julia snapped her fingers at the stretcher bearers. “Take him away and bring the next one.”
On her other side, Dr. Clare, who had been operating for twelve hours straight, her usually immaculate hair matted with sweat, her apron covered in unspeakable fluids, was wordlessly humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” as she bent her head over the man on the table.
Handing off her flashlight to Kate, Emmie took one side of the stretcher, helping the stretcher bearer lower it to the floor in one of the wards. The room was humid with sweat and fear, the air acrid with the smell of burning things. The darkness was horrible, making all the smells and sounds more acute, playing tricks of perspective. The room might have been the size of a closet or a baseball field; she couldn’t tell. All lights were needed for the operating room. The men in recovery would just have to lump it.
Emmie touched what she thought was his shoulder. “Will?” she whispered.
“Emmie?” His voice was hoarse, but it was his. “Emmie? I can’t—I can’t see.”
She felt like laughing, which was an entirely inappropriate reaction, but she couldn’t help it; she was such a mix of joy and fear. “It’s the lights,” she said. “The Germans have shot the power out.”
She heard him draw a shaky breath. “Thank God. I thought I’d gone blind. I thought I was never—going to see—your face again.”
“Where have you been?” As soon as she said it, Emmie realized it was really a rather ridiculous thing to ask. He’d been fighting. She groped for his hand, clutching his cold fingers. She didn’t like that they were so cold. “I couldn’t get any word—I only heard that most of your battalion—”
“Slaughtered.” His voice was very weak. “I had pneumonia. Out of my head with it. I’d been knocked into a trench hole and apparently lay there for three days before some Frenchies found me. That’s what they told me. I don’t remember any of it. When I came to—they declared me fit for service and sent me out again. It’s all been a bit of a blur.”
Emmie clung to his hand. It was so strange, to be able to hold him but not see him, to feel the shape of his palm, the calluses on his fingers, as if she were learning the geography of him one small isthmus at a time.
“I left your letters in Grécourt. They were all I had of you and I left them.”
“They were only paper and ink. The words—the thoughts—whatever was in them of any value—you have already. It all amounted to just one thing, anyway.”
“Yes?” The bombs were still falling outside; there were roughly forty other wounded men packed around them, nurses navigating as best they could in the dark; but right now there was nothing in the world but Will, here, with her, the rasp of his breath, the feel of his fingers around hers.
“I love you,” he said in his beautiful voice, scratchy now, faint, but still his. “Whatever happens, wherever we go. In this world or the next.”
“You’re not going to any other world but this,” said Emmie fiercely, swiping away tears with her free hand and giving an entirely inelegant sniff. “Julia said it was a perfectly incompetent shell and missed anything that mattered. So you’re not allowed to go all elegiac on me.”
“‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’?” he managed.
“Yes, Kate gave me your message about the compass.” Emmie’s throat was so thick with emotion she could hardly get the words out. “It’s all very romantic, but you’ve got it all wrong. I’m not forbidding mourning. I’m forbidding dying. I simply won’t have it. You’re not allowed.”
He gave a shaky laugh that turned into a gasp of pain. “I’ll do my best.”
The sirens were wailing for all they were worth. Some of the men were crying, others praying. Another bomb crashed down, closer now. Emmie could hear glass shattering and someone screaming, screaming and screaming, alarmingly close.
Will pressed something into her hand, something hard and round and cool. “This is my signet. If I promise to try not to die, will you promise to wear it? I’d go down on one knee, but since I’m already prone . . .”
Emmie leaned over and kissed him. She didn’t quite get the right part of his mouth, but they got that sorted out rather quickly. She couldn’t embrace him because she didn’t want to tear his stitches, and they both reeked rather strongly of sweat and blood, but she found that didn’t matter in the slightest.
“Emmie.” Kate squeezed her shoulder. “Emmie, I’m so sorry, but we have to go.”
“We’re engaged,” Emmie said, the words feeling very small in the darkness. Will’s ring was loose on her finger. “For real this time.”
“Congratulations.” Emmie couldn’t see Kate, but she could feel the hem of her uniform skirt swishing back and forth, a clear sign of anxiety. “I mean it, I do. I’m very happy for you both. But we’re all being evacuated. Now.”
“I don’t understand.” Emmie sat back on her knees, clenching her hand around Will’s ring to keep it from falling off. It was too loose. She would have to wrap string under it to keep it on, or maybe hang it on a chain around her neck. “What happened?”
“Part of the hospital is gone.” Kate was trying to sound calm and businesslike, but Emmie could hear the panic under it. “They want us to get our things from the hotel. It’s not safe in Beauvais anymore. You’re being evacuated too, Captain DeWitt, but I’m not sure where.”
“Will . . .” Emmie stared down at the dim shape on the stretcher. It seemed such a cruel trick to not even be able to see him, to see his face before they were parted again.
“I’m sorry,” said Kate. “I’m so sorry.”
Behind them, Emmie could hear people bustling about, stretchers being lifted, men moaning, Dr. Clare protesting about something.
Will squeezed her hand, and then, very deliberately, let it go.
“Go,” he said. “Be safe. I’ll find you, wherever you are. Remember? The compass.”
“The points always come together again.” Emmie leaned over and kissed him, one last time, not caring who saw, knowing Kate would understand. “When the war ends, come find me at Grécourt.”