“I—I wish you well.” What else did one say to a man heading to horrors unspeakable? “Good luck.”
“And to you,” he said solemnly. He raised his hat to her. “To decency and those who persist in practicing it.”
With that he was gone, walking away, straight-backed. He hadn’t, Emmie realized, ever told her his name.
“Who was that?” demanded Maud, arriving pink-cheeked with an empty basket.
Emmie looked after him, joining a group of men similarly garbed. “Sir Percy Blakeney. Baronet.”
“Oh, is he a friend of your family?” Maud didn’t wait for her to answer, setting down her empty basket on the table and adjusting her hat to a more becoming angle. “It’s amazing the people one knows who one meets here. Liza and I just bumped right into the cousin of a friend of one of my parents’ neighbors from Montclair—”
Emmie didn’t even try to untangle the relationship. She let Maud ramble on while she looked again for the British officer, but there were too many khaki uniforms to find one specific one. It seemed unlikely she would ever see him again. Their discussion felt, already, vaguely unreal.
But she was glad, glad to have met him even for that moment. It had made her feel like herself again, for the first time in a very long time.
“—which is why what I wanted to talk to you about is so important.”
“What you wanted—” Emmie blinked, trying to remember what Maud had been saying.
Maud sighed with exaggerated patience. “Yes, about our boys. I really think it’s absurd that we’re bothering with livestock and all that when we could be here, doing something for our boys.”
Emmie looked out at the rows and rows of troops, French and English and American. One could tell the Americans because they looked much better fed than their Continental counterparts, their uniforms fresher and cleaner. “But we are here, doing something for our boys.”
“Yes, now. But what about when Mrs. Rutherford gets back? If she has her way, she’ll drag us out to some godforsaken place to do goodness only knows what.”
“But we do know what,” said Emmie, feeling vaguely bewildered. “We’re to offer aid to those in the devastated zone.”
“You mean practically in the trenches,” said Maud. “That might have made sense four months ago, but you must agree, now that the new offensive is on, it’s perfectly insane to be even thinking of going anywhere near the front.”
“There’s a new offensive on?” That was one of the strangest things about being in Paris; they heard so much less about the war than they had in New York. The censors did their work well. But Maud appeared to have her ways, which, as far as Emmie could tell, consisted of dining out with a great many friends of friends and shamelessly interrogating all of them.
“Didn’t you hear? They’re clearing out all the Paris hospitals to make room for more wounded.”
“No, I hadn’t heard,” admitted Emmie. She spared a thought for Julia and Dr. Stringfellow, touring hospitals, Mrs. Rutherford at Grécourt. “But surely the passes wouldn’t have been issued if it were unsafe?”
“It’s a war,” said Maud, as though Emmie were particularly slow. “Everything is unsafe. But really, it’s quite mad to make oneself even less safe—and to do it to play milkmaid for a bunch of French peasants!”
“But you knew what it was when you joined,” said Emmie carefully. “It was always clear we were meant to be offering civilian relief. Mrs. Rutherford was quite specific about that.”
She could still remember the way the room had stilled as Mrs. Rutherford spoke, back at the Smith College Club in Boston in April, telling of the evils she had seen in France, the good they could do, they, American college women, with their will and wit and resourcefulness, to comfort the forgotten and give shelter to the homeless.
“Mrs. Rutherford,” retorted Maud, “is a ridiculous old pacifist. I pointed out to her what we could be doing for our troops, and do you know what she told me? She told me that men will always tear things up and it’s our job to put things back together. As if we were on a different side from our own boys! It’s absurd. Not to mention her obsession with farm animals. I think she’s quite mad and I’m going to tell the committee so.”
“You’re going to tell the committee?”
“That a group of us agree, Mrs. Rutherford isn’t fit to lead. We’re just wasting their money on cows and plows and . . . and . . . chickens! And all this with the trucks! I’m sure we’d have had them ages ago if she hadn’t annoyed everyone.”