Page 55 of Two Wars and a Wedding

I know you don’t agree with the decision I made—

You made your feelings quite clear about my plans—

What makes you think you always know best?

—Miss Betsy Hayes ’96 to Ava Saltonstall ’96 (letter unsent)

Athens, Greece

March 1897

“You have failed, Miss Hayes,” said Dr. Kalopothakes.

Failed? She couldn’t have failed. Betsy looked wildly from the examining board to the little urchin standing next to her, a gloopy mixture that looked like porridge dripping down his leg.

It wasn’t meant to be drippy.

It should have hardened into a cast. She’d done everything just the way Dr. Kalopothakes had showed them—well, mostly the way Dr. Kalopothakes had showed them. Betsy had been a little vague on the exact quantities of gypsum and water involved, so she had just guessed at it as she went along.

Apparently, she had guessed wrong.

“But . . . but . . . if you’ll let me try just one more time,” Betsy offered. Behind the examiners sat the queen and Crown Princess Sophie, who had come to lend their countenance to the examinations. Betsy looked to them for help. “I can do it again. I’ll get it right this time. You’ll see. Or ask me to bandage him! I’m excellent at bandages.”

All right, maybe not excellent, but at least passable. How hard could it be to wrap a strip of cloth around a leg? Easier than mixing up a plaster of Paris cast, at any rate.

“On the battlefield, Miss Hayes, there are no second chances,” said Dr. Kalopothakes.

She didn’t have to sound quite so smug about it. But wasn’t that just Radcliffe for you? Betsy wouldn’t be surprised if she’d chosen a deliberately impossible task just to trip her up. She’d bet the next woman along got something simpler.

“Maybe there was something wrong with this batch of plaster of Paris,” said Betsy desperately, catching at straws. “Maybe it was diluted with . . . something. If I were to try again another day . . .”

“Goodbye, Miss Hayes,” said Dr. Kalopothakes firmly.

Queen Olga and Crown Princess Sophie offered Betsy identical expressions of polite sympathy as the doctor called up the next candidate for examination.

Betsy wandered out of the theater in a daze. Failed? She never failed. No matter how little she studied, no matter how fine she cut it, in the end she always came out in a blaze of glory and her teachers shook their heads and said they didn’t know how she did it.

But she hadn’t done it. Not this time.

Who would have thought they’d have her making a plaster cast? How many casts did you make on a battlefield? What was she supposed to do, lug along a little tub of gypsum and water from man to man? Tell the enemy to wait while the plaster set?

Betsy wasn’t going to be telling the enemy anything. She wasn’t going to be anywhere near the enemy. She wasn’t even going to be helping at the Evangelismos Hospital back in Athens. It appeared her usefulness to the war effort was over. Because she had failed. Failed, failed, failed.

She was supposed to be meeting Ava for chocolate and cakes to celebrate the successful completion of their course. Betsy stood for a moment, in the city where she had lived these past six months, the city whose every street she had traversed on foot or on her bicycle or in Aikaterini’s barouche, completely disoriented.

Around her, all the buildings were decked with bright blue-and-white bunting in honor of Greek Independence Day, just a few days away. The streets bustled with refugees fleeing the Turks and volunteers heading in the opposite direction, toward the Turks, eager to fight for a united Greece in which Crete and Macedonia could fly the white-and-blue flag and pledge themselves to the king of the Greeks.

Who was actually a Dane. With a Russian wife. But that was immaterial right now. The king had stood strong against the Great Powers, had sent his own son the crown prince off to fight just yesterday, which made him the Greekest of the Greeks, a national hero.

Volunteers flocked to Athens from all corners of the Greek-speaking world, from Cyprus, from Samos, from Bulgaria and Egypt and Smyrna, making the streets bright with their colorful native costumes. Why, just over there Betsy could see the blue bloomers and high boots of someone fresh from Crete, and, on the opposite corner, a cluster of bright red-and-green sashes that marked their wearers as coming from the Levant. There were even Italians come to town, Garibaldians, followers of the son of the great Garibaldi, in their iconic red shirts and caps.

It made Betsy’s heart swell with vicarious pride, that the whole world had come to Athens to celebrate the independence of Greece and fight for the freedom of Crete.

Except the Great Powers, of course. They were thoroughly on the side of the sultan and had declared that Crete should have local governmental autonomy while remaining nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, which everyone knew was nothing short of maintaining the status quo and a world away from what the Cretans really wanted, which was, of course, to be Greek.

What sort of American would she be if she didn’t support self-determination?

The prime minister, a namby-pamby man, had refused to let the minister of war send more troops to Crete, so the minister of war had resigned in protest and had to be comforted with tea and cakes at Aikaterini’s, while Aikaterini and Betsy had patted his arm and assured him he had done exactly the right thing. He had blinked tears from his eyes and told Betsy that with women such as she fighting for their cause they could never fail.