Because there were so few secondary sources, I relied very heavily on the Smith Unit’s own letters, trying, when necessary, to make allowances for unreliable narration, and to cross-reference with other contemporary accounts whenever possible. The members of the Smith Unit, I noticed, had a tendency to downplay the danger to themselves when writing home, something that was highlighted when I compared accounts of being bombed out of the hospital in Beauvais by, on the one hand, the Smith Unit, and, on the other, an American nurse （not a Smithie）。
For anyone wanting to hear the voices of the members of the Smith College Relief Unit, I highly recommend checking out the 1917 and 1918 issues of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly, which are sprinkled with letters written home by Unit members. I was deeply amused, reading their private letters, to find them scolding family members for sending in their letters to the alumnae rag, and, for heaven’s sake, these were for private consumption only. Apparently, some letter recipients didn’t listen, because you can find excerpts of their letters included in the alumnae magazine straight through 1918. These issues are freely available online through the Smith Alumnae Quarterly archives. You can also find a compilation of letters—including some gems not included in the Alumnae Quarterly—in a 1968 pamphlet by Louise Elliott Dalby called “An Irrepressible Crew: The Smith College Relief Unit.”
You can find glancing references to the Smith Unit in books such as Dorothy and Carl Schneider’s Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I and Ed Klekowski and Libby Klekowski’s lively （and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny） Eyewitnesses to the Great War: American Writers, Reporters, Volunteers, and Soldiers in France, 1914–1918, as well as a few other places, but there has not yet been a monograph written entirely about the Smith College Relief Unit—an omission that Professor Jennifer Hall-Witt of Smith College is in the process of remedying.
In the meantime, for those wishing to know more about the real Smith College Relief Unit—as I hope you do!—you can find a Readers’ Guide on my website, www.laurenwillig.com, which contains pictures, maps, and other items of interest.
I hope you find the Smithies who went to war as fascinating and inspiring as I do!
Acknowledgments
Every book has its list of people who helped it on its way. In this case, this book wouldn’t have existed—wouldn’t even have had a hope of existing—without the incredible generosity and kindness of the librarians at Smith College Special Collections. It is a truth universally acknowledged that librarians are heroes. These librarians aren’t just heroes, they’re superheroes. I stumbled on the Smith College Relief Unit back in 2018 via Ruth Gaines’s Ladies of Grécourt, an account of her time in the Somme. The incongruity of it struck me. A group of American college women in the Somme, right in the middle of World War I. What were they doing there? Who were they? I gobbled up all the publicly available material, with their tantalizing scraps of period letters, and then made the happy discovery that there was a treasure trove of primary sources in Northampton. There was just one wrinkle. I had, at the time, a one-year-old and a five-year-old. There was no way I was spending three months in the archives in Northampton. A day trip was a stretch; a week was an impossible dream.
I emailed Smith College Special Collections. Without blinking an eye, the amazing super-librarians of Smith College digitized thousands of pages of material for me: letters, journals, reports, lists, photos. There were faded music scores of the canticles the Smith Unit learned to sing for mass with the villagers. There were doggerel poems handed around on Christmas Day, memorializing each Unit member. There were photographs with handwritten inscriptions. I could see the stationery they’d used, cadged from Paris hotels; the colors of ink; where they’d crossed things out. There are no words for how grateful I am to Roxanne Daniel of Smith College Special Collections for bringing the archives to me when I couldn’t come to them. This book wouldn’t be here but for you.
I am also very grateful to Professor Jennifer Hall-Witt of Smith College who is currently writing a monograph about the Smith College Relief Unit and was kind enough to answer emails from a random person claiming to be a historical novelist. Anyone wanting to know more about the real Unit and the context in which it was formed should run and buy her book as soon as it is available. （I, for one, cannot wait to read it.）
As always, huge thanks to my agent, Alexandra Machinist, who encouraged me to go chasing Smithies in the Somme. So many thanks to the team at William Morrow: to Rachel Kahan, editor extraordinaire, who took the Smithies to her heart （and coined the working title Smithies at War, which I’m still trying to remember is not the actual title of the book）; to Elsie Lyons, cover design genius, who managed to work real Smithies, the real Grécourt gates, and real French villagers into the cover, and make it everything I ever wanted this cover to be; to Danielle Bartlett in publicity and Tavia Kowalchuk in marketing, there is no way to ever calculate how much I owe both of you for all you do and for your incredible patience with the five zillion “so I just had this thought . . .” emails you’ve fielded over the years.