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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.