I owe a special debt to my good friend Vicki Parsons, who, when I got stuck and wanted to scrap the whole thing, read the first few chapters and persuaded me to put down the coffee and step away from the delete button. （Okay, maybe not put down the coffee.） Perpetual thanks go to my sister, Brooke Willig, and my college roommate, Claudia Brittenham, who have now made it through twenty-one books’ worth of “are you around so I can talk book at you?” and haven’t yet blocked my number on their phones. I love you both. And your book instincts are impeccable. Speaking of talking book at people, hugs to Carlynn Houghton and her World War I literature class at Chapin who let me babble about Smithies at them for a whole class period （and didn’t make a break for the door）。
Mille mercis to Professor Jessica Sturm, Chair of the French Department at Purdue, who served as French language consultant for this book, preventing me from any number of bêtises. All remaining Franglais is entirely the fault of the author and of the members of the Smith College Relief Unit, who persisted in peppering their letters home with French phrases of varying degrees of accuracy, some of which I suspect they made up to confuse future novelists.
Book people are the best people. I am endlessly grateful for the support, friendship, epic text chains, and unabashed enabling of my writing sisters, Beatriz Williams and Karen White; any excuse for lunch or a coffee with M.J. Rose, Lynda Loigman, and Alyson Richman; the fellowship and joy of the New York writers’ cabal, including, but not limited to, Amy Poeppel, Sally Koslow, Susie Orman Schnall, Fiona Davis, Jamie Brenner, and Nicola Harrison; wise advice and industry gossip with Andrea Katz, Suzanne Leopold, Bobbi Dumas, and Sharlene Martin Moore; and all the book bloggers, booksellers, and librarians to whom I owe so much （you know who you are!）。 Huge hugs to all of the readers I’ve gotten to know over Facebook, Instagram, and my website. I can’t tell you how much it means to know you’re there.
And, of course, there’s my family. With only a month until deadline on this book, New York plunged into lockdown and I suddenly found myself confined in my apartment with a two-year-old, a six-year-old, and my husband—and a Nespresso machine. （It’s very important to note the Nespresso machine, my first and best pandemic purchase, without which this book would not be here.） But, primarily, without my husband this book would not be here. He kept the kids at bay for three hours a day so I could work. Thanks are also due to my children, who only flooded the apartment once while I was trying to cadge extra writing time. And it was really only a small flood. So much love and thanks to my parents, who heroically took us in when my husband had to quarantine for two weeks and I still had Zoom book talks to do and deadlines to meet and no one to watch the kids while I did it. And to my siblings, who spend endless hours on FaceTime with my kindergartner while I sneakily try to get work done. I won the lottery when it comes to family members.
This book also owes a great deal to the Chapin School and its legendary headmistress, Mildred Berendsen. Full disclosure: I am not a Smithie. But I did have the incredible privilege of spending thirteen years at an all-girls school run by a Smithie. Our headmistress had been a scholarship girl at Smith. Every year, she would call us together and tell us how Smith had changed her life and how much we owed the world in exchange for the great gifts and opportunities that had been given us. When I stumbled on Ruth Gaines’s memoirs, when I read Harriet Boyd Hawes’s stirring call to action, when I dug into the Smith Unit’s alternately earnest and breezy accounts of their incredible work in the Somme, I could hear Mrs. Berendsen’s voice in my head, exhorting us to do more, to do better—but to do it with grace and dignity and a sense of humor. Smith shaped Mrs. Berendsen; Mrs. Berendsen shaped Chapin; and Chapin shaped me. Reading about the Smith Unit, I felt moved and grateful beyond words to be part of that lineage. It also struck me forcibly, while researching this book, how very much the Smith Unit belonged to the same world, shaped by the same ideals, motivated by the same principles, as their contemporaries: the founders and first generation of students at Chapin. I owe both Chapin and Mrs. Berendsen more than I can say—including my deep feeling of kinship with the women of the Smith Unit. To thee dear Alma Mater, indeed.
Last but not least, I would be remiss if I didn’t express my gratitude for the true heroes of this book: the real women of the Smith College Relief Unit, who plunged into a war zone, risking their lives to bring help and hope to women and children crushed between two armies. I only hope I did them justice.