It was sluicing down now; she had to shout to be heard over the wind.
“Too far gone,” said Fran, struggling over in her slicker, her boots squelching in the dark mud. “We’ll need the spare.”
Their cars were half-on, half-off the road. An army truck, going just a bit too fast, honked angrily at them.
“Maybe one of these nice men will help us!” hollered Liza, waving her arms over her head hopefully, but the army truck blazed obliviously past, coating them with mud in the process.
“They pr-probably don’t r-realize we’re female,” gasped Alice, slipping in the mud and just managing not to fall. “Just l-look at us.”
Fran spat mud. “What the fashionable chauffeur is wearing this season,” she said, and got the jack out of the back of the White.
“Mmmph mmmph,” said Alice, dancing around behind them. “Mmmph mmmpph mmpphh mmpph.”
“WHAT?” screamed Kate.
“FIVE INCHES!” yelled Alice, who had read all the manuals. “You need to get it up five inches to get the wheel off!”
It might as well have been five feet. It took them an hour, working in pairs, to get the White up high enough to take off the wheel, and nearly as long to pump up the spare tire by hand and fasten it into place, which would have gone faster if their wet and muddy fingers hadn’t kept slipping off the nut.
“We’ll get better at it with practice,” said Margaret Cooper, her hat dripping rain all around her face.
“I hope not,” muttered Kate. “I’m not sure I could take any more practice.”
Fran grinned wearily at her. “We’ll all be strong like bulls by the time we’re done.”
“Or mad like bulls,” offered Alice.
It was full dark by the time they made it as far as Nantes, having managed, in the course of a day, to go all of forty miles. They found the other Ford parked neatly in front of an inn and Mrs. Rutherford and Liza sitting down to soup and war bread.
“Only two hundred and sixty miles left to go,” said Kate, slumping into a chair. They had paused only to scrub at the worst of the mud with the two inches of cold water allotted them by the innkeeper. The result was, at best, mixed. It was a blessing the lighting wasn’t good; the mud just looked like shadows. It also disguised what was in the soup.
“It’s going to take us a week to get back to Paris at this rate,” said Alice, dragging her spoon through her soup.
“It’s going to take a week to get to the next town at this rate,” said Kate.
“I wonder why no one has invented puncture-free tires?” mused Liza, who hadn’t spent the day wrestling with one.
“Because then the tire companies would be out of business,” said Fran, dunking her war bread in her soup to soften it.
“Do you think they dropped the nails on the road?” asked Kate.
“No, that was probably the Germans,” said Fran, straight-faced, and Liza nodded eagerly in reply.
“They think of everything,” said Kate, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, so just gave up and ate soup instead.
It was only nine o’clock when they finished their meal, but it felt like midnight. Outside, the rain continued to sluice down. As she left the table, Kate found Mrs. Rutherford sitting in a tiny circle of light in the sitting room of the inn, surrounded by papers.
“I’m working out schedules,” she said. “We’ve so much to do that we’ll accomplish it best if we’re all divided into committees.”
“I had thought committees were a sure way to ensure nothing actually got done,” said Kate, too tired to mind her words.
Mrs. Rutherford didn’t look up from her charts. “That depends on the committee. Of bored society women, yes. Here, it simply means that those who can will. It’s much more effective than one woman trying to oversee everything, especially when we’re undertaking so much, so quickly.”
There were six categories on the page: House, Social Services, Nursing, Supplies & Stores, Motor, Children.
“But none of us are nurses,” Kate said. “How can we have a nursing committee?”
“None of you were trained mechanics either,” said Mrs. Rutherford imperturbably. “And yet our trucks still run.”
“When they run.”
“A puncture is an act of God—or of the French roads, which is much the same thing,” said Mrs. Rutherford, writing busily. “You can’t blame yourself for it. You aren’t responsible for everything, Miss Moran.”