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“VANQUISHING THE GERMANS with Precision Bed Corners,” Fleurette said. “I can’t believe we’re to have a course in making up a bed.”

“You’ve never made up a bed in your life,” Norma said.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t know how.”

Constance stood outside the mess hall, ticking names off a list as the girls went inside. Scientific Bed-Making was a required course at camp, at the insistence of the Red Cross. Each camper was expected to make up a bed three times in rapid succession if she hoped to graduate. The difficulty with this requirement was the short supply of beds with which to practice. Only four metal beds had been delivered, and they would be picked up at the end of the week, as soon as the course was complete. To accommodate all two hundred campers, the course had to be held twice a day, every day.

“Where’s Roxanna?” Constance asked as Norma, Fleurette, and Sarah passed by.

“She’s been in the infirmary all morning,” Norma said. “I went over there just now. Nurse Cartwright says it’s dyspepsia.”

“It was awfully kind of you to look in on her,” Sarah said.

“I wasn’t intending to be kind.” Norma sounded alarmed at the prospect. “I was trying to get her into class, where she belongs. Nurse Cartwright is our instructor. You’d think she’d want everyone in attendance.”

“Roxanna’s obviously not well. I’ll speak to her this afternoon and put her on tomorrow’s list,” Constance said.

Nurse Cartwright arrived just then, huffing up the hill and pumping her arms. “One of yours is down in the infirmary,” she said to Constance, as soon as she came within earshot.

“Will she survive?”

The nurse grinned and lifted her hat to wipe the sweat away. “They’ll all survive. They miss their mothers, more than anything. These girls like to be tended to. They just won’t admit it.”

“I don’t suppose I’ve done much tending,” Constance said. Should she have been going around to the tents at night, soothing homesick hearts and troubled minds? Had she thought of them too much as soldiers-in-training and not enough as girls who missed their mothers?

“I don’t mind them coming to me,” Nurse Cartwright said. “I put them to bed with a cold cloth or a hot water bottle, depending on their disposition, let them tell me their troubles, and after a few hours they come out right as rain. Do you have your list?”

“I do,” Constance said. She was to take half the class and tick off each girl’s name as she completed her bed-making tasks. With everyone on the roster marked as present, she closed the tent flap and Nurse Cartwright began her lecture.

“Get yourself into groups,” she called. “It’s five girls per bed.”

The dining tables and benches had been pushed to the sides and replaced with the hospital beds. Nurse Cartwright took a folded sheet from one of the beds and held it aloft.

“The lower sheet is the foundation of a hygienic bed,” she called in a sing-song voice. “Queen Victoria insisted on having hers sewn fast every day. We might not have that luxury in a field hospital, but we can do the next best thing and tuck a good half-yard of fabric under the top of the mattress, even if that leaves the bottom short. Invalids will tend to slide down in bed and take the sheet with them. As for the upper sheet, it must be tucked well under the foot of the bed, as patients like to pull the covers up. Now, for the coverlet . . .”

She continued in this manner, lecturing on the benefits of a tightly made, wrinkle-free bed, until girls who had never enjoyed making a bed in their lives were suddenly eager to get to it, if only to put an end to the lecture. Constance watched them struggle with the sheets as if competing in an athletic event, running from one end of the bed to the other and heaving the mattress up by its corners. Under the nurse’s explicit instructions, Constance issued her check marks only after the beds had been made quickly and competently, even if it meant starting over a half-dozen times. Norma, with her penchant for military precision, passed on the first go, as did Fleurette, which didn’t surprise Constance at all. Anyone who’d spent a lifetime handling fabrics could whip a sheet around a mattress as if it were a length of crêpe de Chine around the hips.

Nurse Cartwright announced the final lesson, which was to make up a clean bed while the patient was still in it. At the start of camp, the plan had been to require each girl to complete this task three times, but there was so much mirth and antics among the girls playing the part of the patient that the requirement had to be reduced to one successful attempt per student.

“In making up a bed for an invalid,” the nurse said, “the patient must be moved as little as possible, and must be uncovered not at all. This requires you to pay as much attention to the upper sheet as the lower. Deft, rapid, and noiseless is the way to go about it.”

Some of the students were rapid, some were deft, but none were noiseless. The girl playing the part of the patient inevitably gave in to laughter as her fellow students tried to maneuver her. Constance could see why Nurse Cartwright put this lesson at the end: it dissolved into a social hour, no matter how stern the lecture or how watchful the instructor.

This didn’t bother Constance, who found that in walking among them, she could learn quite a bit about what was going on under her nose.

“I heard they have chocolates over in tent fourteen,” one girl said.

“Unless they’re filled with whiskey, I’m not interested,” said another.

“The nurse will give you a little brandy in hot water if you can summon up a convincing cough.”

Constance made a note to speak to Nurse Cartwright about her reliance on medicinal spirits — this was hardly a war zone, after all — and went on down the line, where she heard this, from a group of girls from Pennsylvania:

“I heard those gunshots again last night. It was just after you went to sleep.”

Constance froze, and waited for the reply.

“I was up long after you were, and I didn’t hear them.”

“You weren’t up after me. You were snoring. I’m telling you, this is the third time I’ve heard them.”

“It’s probably just an auto firing. What do you think, Miss Kopp?”

Constance forced herself to walk on by, slowly, as if it didn’t matter. “It’s an engine,” she said. “I’ve heard it myself once or twice.”

They’d been out three times at night for rifle and pistol practice. Norma swore she couldn’t hear them from the center of camp, but these girls were camped along the fringe, closest to the forest — and one of them had sharp hearing.

It was impossible, under the circumstances, to continue. For firearms training they’d have to go back to play-acting.