The grands blessés were the saddest, but even the petits blessés were a heartbreaking sight, crawling out of the straw, their uniforms so matted with dirt and blood it was nearly impossible to discern the original color.
The Unit was doing good work—Emmie knew they were doing good work. They were busy and useful and together and working in a terribly organized way, sleeping in proper beds, and eating proper meals, and she couldn’t remember the last time she had been so unhappy.
It wasn’t just unhappiness. It had taken Emmie some time to identify the feeling, because it was so unexpected. She was angry, with a horrible, snarling, brooding sort of anger that colored everything. It made her resentful and hateful.
She hated that they’d had to leave Grécourt. She hated the work. She hated the new people, with their cheerful assumption that this was what they were here for, this was what they were meant to do. She hated seeing the broken men with their broken bodies and broken spirits, the huddled refugees passing through, headed goodness only knew where. She hated all the articles praising the Unit for being angels of mercy and towers of strength when she didn’t feel either merciful or angelic. She just felt furious.
She hated that she’d found the one person in the world she’d wanted to spend her life with, the one person in the world who looked at her and saw something wonderful, and now she hadn’t the faintest idea where he was or if he was alive or dead.
It wasn’t heroic or patriotic. It was wasteful and horrible.
And now, this letter to her mother, it was the very last straw. Emmie couldn’t, wouldn’t write what she knew her mother wanted to hear—how marvelous it all was, what a fine showing they were making. She couldn’t speak of the people they served as statistics, so many fed, so many outfitted, so many sent on.
Alice had been collecting funerals. They’d seen so many men die, so many without family—Scotsmen from remote islands, boys from Kentucky farms, New Yorkers, Liverpudlians, and Nova Scotians—that Alice had taken it on herself to attend every funeral she could, to make sure someone was there to bear witness. She wrote to all the next of kin after, a personal letter in addition to the official one. Emmie had promised she would help her—with the letters, not the funerals—but she found it so very hard. She found it all so very hard.
Emmie wanted to be back at Grécourt, with her chickens who were really roosters, and with the hope of summer to come. She wanted to deliver milk to adorable, pink Boche babies, not cigarettes to men wounded beyond bearing.
Maybe that made her unpatriotic. Maybe that made her ungenerous. She wasn’t sure. Mostly, it made her moody.
Kate had taken to checking in on her. Not explicitly. Just stopping by throughout the day, saying a word or two, giving Emmie a chance to fume if she needed it. That, at least, was one good thing that had come of all this—she had Kate back again, not in the old blithe way of the Smith days, but in a new, more concerted way. They’d stopped taking each other for granted. They listened to each other now, really listened. And sometimes, like now, it was enough just to be, to know the other was there.
“Is that your letter?” asked Kate, perching on the arm of Emmie’s chair.
Emmie grimaced at the marked-up page. “I haven’t gotten very far. Do you think it counts if I write to my brothers instead?”
“Or you could just give an interview to the papers,” said Kate blandly, and Emmie made a horrible face at her, because, of course, that was just what Emmie’s mother had done, after the evacuation, when the Smith Unit was in all the papers. She’d told the New York Times that it was no more than she would have expected of her daughter and it was time the world recognized the potential of the modern college woman.
Emmie wasn’t sure which bothered her more, the idea that this was somehow a measure of her being her mother’s daughter, or the idea that she was meant to be an archetype of the modern college woman, a bloodless model of an ideal, rather than a person who had tramped through mud and gone two weeks at a time without a shampoo and cried over spilled chickens and found immeasurable joy teaching children to sing rounds in French.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when she would have been delighted to have made her mother proud, whatever that meant. But now—
She was just so angry.
“She hasn’t the faintest notion,” said Emmie. “Of course, why should she? No one would who hasn’t been here. But . . .”
But the thoughtlessness of it all, the complete lack of any attempt to understand, the idea that they were just grist for her mother’s mill . . . Emmie was certainly happy that people were seeing the potential of the American college woman, and it didn’t at all offend her when Mr. Hamlen of the Red Cross said the exact same thing, or when Major Perkins wired that they needed more college girls like the Smith Unit in France—but when her mother said it, said it to a paper, it made her want to snarl.