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“It makes more sense to stay here, rearrange the loads, and try to find our way in the morning,” said Kate, siding with Fran. “It’s taken us this long to get here; what does it matter if we arrive tonight or tomorrow? No one will be waiting up for us this late.”
Everything she said made perfect sense, but Emmie felt, strongly, that it did make a difference. Certainly to Julia, who looked as though she wouldn’t be dragged back into that inn for all the world. And to Emmie. Two days, the mechanic had said. Maybe three. To have made it this far and be stranded in Noyon seemed intolerable.
“Fran and I could stay with the truck,” offered Margaret Cooper, “and the rest could go on.”
“No need for that!” Mrs. Rutherford appeared from the scrum of French soldiers, dragging a thin man in a uniform with the three gold bars denoting a captain. “Look who I found! This is Captain Jaouen, currently of the French army, but previously a professor at the University of Michigan. He’s offered us a replacement truck and the men to drive it.”
“A temporary loan only,” Captain Jaouen said quickly.
“The camion or the men?” Alice whispered with a giggle, and was hushed by Kate.
“So we can get on immediately,” said Mrs. Rutherford. “Well, as soon as we transfer our load from the Ford to the camion. The captain has said he’ll have his men get started right away—we’ll be on our way within the hour.”
“How does she do that?” asked Margaret Cooper, staring at Mrs. Rutherford as she marched off arm in arm with Captain Jaouen, discussing something that happened in Crete back in ’98 or ’99. “It’s as though she snapped her fingers and conjured him out of thin air. Like—magic.”
“She does seem to find a way to make things happen,” said Kate cautiously.
“Magic,” said Emmie. Four months ago, no one had even thought of such a thing as a Smith Unit, but one speech from Mrs. Rutherford and here they were, equipped and ready, mere hours from their post, all the intricate layers of army and civilian bureaucracy dealt with, all the red tape cut through. Mrs. Rutherford had done all that, and now she’d even conjured an army truck for them. “And just think, we’ll be escorted by brave cavaliers all the way.”
“Don’t you mean poilus?” said Kate practically. Poilus were the rank and file of the French army. “I doubt any of them will be on horseback.”
“I don’t care who they are,” said Fran Englund, “as long as they’re the one hefting the trunks instead of me. I can’t think how she got them to do it.”
“Neither can I,” said Maud darkly.
“Only Betsy,” said Dr. Stringfellow, to no one in particular, and went to help direct the disposition of their belongings.
Chapter Nine
Our scrap of France must have once been lovely. Down a long lane of poplars, half-felled by the Germans, one passes through a massive iron gate, beyond which you see the scarred, roofless walls of a once grand château. In a bowl of green behind, at the edge of a great wood, the army put our three barracks, each with two rooms—each smaller than our room in Northampton! I’ve bunked in with two class of ’11 girls, Emmie Van Alden and Kate Moran. Emmie is a dear and very welcoming. Kate is a little harder to know—but not unkind. Just quiet. She’s so efficient, it makes me feel all arms and legs.
The handful of people left in Grécourt live in the ruined stables, except for the gardener’s wife, who has stubbornly remained in what is left of her old cottage by the castle gate, with a canvas awning in place of a roof. She is in possession of the one stove in the village, so she once cooked for the Germans and she now cooks for us—when she has a mind to.
I can’t tell you what a difference it makes to feel we can finally do some good. Sitting around in Paris, there were moments when I felt I wasn’t worth the food I was eating. I really do hope I can do some good, Beth. I feel so useless so much of the time. . . .
—Miss Margaret Cooper, ’14, to Miss Elizabeth Long, ’14
September 1917
Grécourt, France
There was a moat.
There was an actual moat, separating the castle from the chapel and outbuildings. Kate hadn’t noticed the moat the night before. She hadn’t noticed much of anything. It had been past midnight when they arrived, after an endless round of arguments with Julia, who insisted that they couldn’t go wrong if they navigated by the North Star. Kate pointed out that the half-obliterated signposts might be a more reliable guide, since they were hardly the Three Wise Men. That, of course, led Emmie into entirely unhelpful musing about the nature of myrrh.
The soldiers in the camion had been no help. Either that, or they were too busy trying not to snicker to say anything.
When they finally arrived, all Kate had registered was looming gates that framed a darkness that seemed to swallow everything beyond. But behind the menacing bulk of the château were three small and very modern army barracks, with two rooms each, nothing more than plasterboard squares, but clean and new and built on a human scale.
Kate couldn’t remember much beyond that, just kicking their cots into place and falling asleep wrapped in her coat, too tired to bother with bedding.
She had woken this morning to two coat-wrapped lumps: Emmie and Margaret, still fast asleep. It had been taken for granted that Emmie and Kate would room together, and Margaret had followed. Kate suppressed an unworthy thought that she would rather have had Fran. But Margaret had attached herself to Emmie like a stray cat.
Or like other charity cases of Emmie’s acquaintance.
Kate had snuck out very quietly, so as not to wake them, to take stock of their new world. It was . . . beautiful. She hadn’t expected beauty. She had been braced for ugliness, for trenches and barbed wire and ruin. There was ruin here, but even the ruin looked picturesque, as though the manor house had crumbled into disrepair in centuries past, had sat here, like the Beast’s garden, for a century or more, and not been deliberately bombed out by the Germans just this past spring.
It made her wary. The loveliness of the woods, the russet vines twining around a stone tower, the stolid redbrick facade of the village church, strangely unmarred by war. It felt like a trick, a way to lure them into a false sense of security.
