So much has happened over the last two months. The night we got here, we were called to the station to help feed the refugees coming through—just a big freight shed, two smoking stoves, cases of unopened and unlabeled supplies, thousands upon thousands of wretched old men and women and children and invalids crowding in, and a cluster of exhausted Smith women rushing about diluting milk and desperately trying to find cups and bowls enough to serve everyone. After a night of that, we came up with a system of eight-hour shifts, and got in some more stoves and supplies, so we had that all pretty well up and running within three days. With every train of evacuees that leaves the station, we try to make sure each person has a packet containing a can of meat or sardines, bread, chocolate, and a can of condensed milk.
We’d just got that in order when one night a doctor came to our door asking if we could give his blessés something to eat. So off we went and the next thing we knew we were in the business of providing hot milk and soup and cigarettes to the trains of wounded that go by. They try to put the English-speaking men together, so we gather up all the daily papers in English we can for them. Our own boys were so happy to see American faces again that one thing led to another, and now, on top of it all, we’ve been doing hospital visits, taking writing materials and treats to “our boys,” and have made a sort of club for the men where they can come as they convalesce, with a parlor and a reading room and sing-alongs for the boys two nights a week （it’s become a general theory around here that if they can survive Dr. Clare singing Gilbert & Sullivan at them, they can survive anything that battle has to offer）。
As you can see, we’re quite safe here in Beauvais and keeping busy. One of the Red Cross men told us yesterday, “We don’t need any more women who want to hold the dying soldiers’ hands; we need ones like you, who can wash dishes.” If you’ll believe it, he meant it as a compliment. He told me that it gave him hope to see women of refinement （that’s me, apparently） have the spirit to take on the ugly jobs, cleaning up messes, scrubbing floors, and washing dishes.
I know you wanted something more for me, Ma. I know you scrubbed because you had to and not because you wanted to. Everywhere we’ve been, there’s been squalor and confusion and we’ve been able to plunge in and turn it all around—and that’s something I learned from you. Even when we were poorest, you took what little we had and you made it work, somehow. You always found a way. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for showing me that it isn’t what you have, it’s what you make of it—whether it’s turning a can of sardines and some condensed milk into a supper or turning a group of strangers into a band of sisters.
I don’t know when I’ll be back—the work keeps coming and coming and sometimes it seems like this war will never be over, and I haven’t quite given up the hope that we’ll be able to go back to Grécourt and set that to rights again too—but I’m sending love to Dad and the boys and particularly to you. Happy Mother’s Day, Ma.
With love, your Katie
—Miss Katherine Moran, ’11, Assistant Director, to her mother, Mrs. Francis Shaughnessy
May 1918
Beauvais, France
“Have you written your letter yet?” Kate asked Emmie.
Emmie looked down at the crossed-out piece of paper in front of her. In the hall of the club, a large sign had been posted: “To-day is Mother’s Day. Have you written your letter?” Emmie had spent the morning visiting hospitals, helping the boys there write their letters home. Some had been lovely. Others had been heartbreaking: the boys who couldn’t hold a pen, the boys who could hardly speak because their lungs were so groggy from being gassed, the boys who were never going home again, no matter how they pretended.
But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t seem to write her own.
Dear Mother, she had written. And then she stuck. Because what could she possibly tell her mother of their life here? Of the calls from the station, the trains that went through, unloading the lost and the wounded. They knew all the trains now: the improvised trains for the petits blessés, the lightly wounded, who needed to be fed with rich soups and brought cigarettes and a hard bread they sarcastically called gateaux, who would thank them for the English papers and joke and laugh with them. Then there were the permanent trains for the grands blessés, those who were grievously hurt, who could only be tempted by oranges and chocolate, and who needed letters written with alarming urgency, to send their last messages back home.