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“Are you mad? They would have said I invited it. Bad enough to have women in medical school. Worse to have them distracting the real doctors. I would have been out on my ear.” Julia flexed her gloved hands. “I started carrying a knife in my pocket. I told him if he did it again, I’d gut him and stand in the dock with pleasure.”

Her voice resonated with emotion, so much emotion, more emotion than Kate would have thought Julia was capable of feeling.

Kate said the only thing she could think to say. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he’ll be hit by a shell.”

Julia gave a guttural laugh. “I’m not sure I want to rely on the intervention of Providence.”

“We can just tell Maud he’s a German spy and let her at him,” Kate offered.

“That might be punishment enough.” Julia cast Kate a long, sideways look. “You won’t say anything to Emmie?”

Kate had never expected to feel sorry for Julia. Or to feel kinship with Julia. “No.”

Julia stared straight ahead, at the raindrops glinting in the light of the lamps. “I was such a little fool. I thought we were colleagues. Equals. When he said he wanted to exchange notes, I actually thought he wanted to exchange notes.”

Kate winced as the White slid a little too far to the right, fighting to keep the truck on the road. “He ought to have. You were always at the top of our class at Smith.”

“That was only because I worked extra hard to stay ahead of you.” Julia turned away before Kate could see her face, pointing at the signpost. “There’s the turnoff for Grécourt. Do you think that reporter’s still infesting the place?”

Chapter Fourteen

In addition to running our own classes, we are making an effort to supply the schools with everything the state gave them before the war, so the education of the children won’t suffer any more than it already has. You can imagine our joy when the Inspector of Education in Amiens told us there were some old school benches in the attic of the National School—there are scarcely any benches or desks and no wood to make any, which has been a great trial in trying to restore school hours to what they were. He said he had been trying for four months to send them to a certain sector, but there was no way to get them to the station (!!). We asked him if we could have them if we could move them. He said yes, only it couldn’t be done, and anyway, it would require the permission of some other official, and what about the other people to whom he’d promised the benches. We told him we would wait while he got the proper papers. He shook his head and said something about Americans. The poor man stayed over his lunch hour before he knew it, and I don’t think he will ever quite recover.

But we have our benches! I know how deeply you concern yourself with education and particularly the education of young women, so thought you might like to hear of this small victory in the grand battle for universal education. . . .

—Miss Emmaline Van Alden, ’11, to her mother, Mrs. Livingston Van Alden

November 1917

Grécourt, France

“‘In the midst of a vast desolation close to the front, seventeen American college girls are carrying the kindly spirit of the new world to martyred peasantry. . . .’”

“Martyred peasantry?” Nell Baldwin choked on her war bread. “That sounds a little too Golgotha for me.”

“Joan of Arc would be more appropriate, I should think,” offered Kate, sounding more relaxed than Emmie had heard her in ages.

A holiday air prevailed at the breakfast table, where the Smith Unit was partaking of an unusually late repast, not because it was a Sunday, but because the engineers were coming for luncheon. It had been decided that there would be hardly enough time to do their morning rounds and prepare for guests. So here they were in their dining/sitting room, with Nell toasting her feet on the fender and Alice reading aloud from a crumpled piece of newspaper that had just been forwarded to them via the Paris Committee. Even Dr. Stringfellow had closed the dispensary for the morning and was eating bread and jam quite like a normal person.

It was cold in their makeshift dining room, but the cold didn’t bother Emmie as it had in New York. Maybe it was because here they were always doing, always busy, always moving. There was always a visit to make or animals to feed or something to be repaired or crates to be stacked or beds to be delivered to villagers. They could do duty as furniture movers when this was all done, Maud complained, but Emmie loved the feeling of her muscles stretching, of walking distances she never would have contemplated at home, of being able to be really, truly useful.

Even if she did worry, sometimes, that her use was limited to fetching and hauling and bandaging scraped knees, the sort of thing anyone could do. She didn’t have Julia’s medical training or Kate’s grim determination; she couldn’t even drive the cars. When it came to bullying bureaucrats, she was, Emmie had found, rather ineffectual.

Yesterday in Amiens, for example. They’d got word of some school benches, stored away in an attic somewhere, a find so rare that Kate had agreed to take the jitney and drive Emmie up. But after ten minutes of the official from the department of education telling them how sad it was the benches were just sitting there and how impossible it was for them to be moved, Kate had taken over. The benches couldn’t be moved? Why not? They had been promised to four other villages? Well, clearly, they were going to none of those, so why not the Smith Unit? Haulage? They would deal with haulage. Really, they were doing the department a favor, taking these benches off their hands.

There was something about the way Kate spoke that made Emmie think of building blocks: each phrase a stone in an indestructible wall. The poor Inspector of Education had been so cowed, he’d not only promised them the school benches; he’d stayed past his lunch hour. They’d left him muttering something about “les Américaines,” looking thoroughly unnerved by the whole experience.

But they’d got the benches. Glorious, glorious benches, which would furnish the schools at Hombleux and Canizy and, most particularly, Courcelles, Emmie’s own special village. Kate had promised she’d have first pick of the benches for Courcelles. Emmie had already wrangled a temporary building that they could use as school and town hall, over the objections of Miss Mills, who had protested that the nearer and larger villages ought to be served first. But the nearer and larger villages hadn’t been so thoroughly decimated as Courcelles, and Emmie was determined, determined, that her people there, her fifty children, none of them well, would get their due in buildings and benches, tools and schoolbooks.

She couldn’t wait to tell them. Wednesday, perhaps. Her visits to Courcelles were limited by the number of cars in service at any given time, and right now the White was in Paris having hard rims put on and the old Ford truck was sounding decidedly rheumy, leaving only the jitney. Sometimes, Emmie rode with Maud and Liza and the store, but they never stayed quite long enough for Emmie to visit all of her families, not properly. With the cars constantly out of commission, it was a struggle to find someone who would take her. Even the doctors were doing their rounds on foot, hiking miles across muddy fields with their medical bags strapped to their backs.

So she supposed she shouldn’t complain, not really. It was just that the need in Courcelles was so great. . . .

“What on earth is this rubbish?” Kate took the paper from Alice. “Ah. This must be that pest who came the day we went to get medicine, Julia. ‘I would have turned back, thinking I had mistaken the way, had I not then perceived two female figures in black oilskins and rubber boots. Their quick muscular movements left no doubt these were Americans.’”

Alice looked down at her arm, in its rather ragged gray wool casing. “I wouldn’t say we were muscular, would you? It just sounds so . . . mannish.”

“At least the engineers don’t seem to mind,” said Liza cheerfully through a mouthful of war bread.