The trees here weren’t leafy anymore; they were stunted, twisted things, the branches and bark blasted off by artillery, leaving only blackened stumps in their wake.
Along the bare horizon, Emmie could see tangles of barbed wire, long stretches of churned earth and abandoned encampments, and, in the midst of it all, the bright, incongruous red of flowers, like splashes of sealing wax.
Or the Scarlet Pimpernel, she thought, and wondered why she was thinking of that now, of the little red flower and the Englishman she had last seen at the Gare du Nord, headed back to the front.
Who might, even now, be food for flowers, another man lost in the trenches, his bones sunk deep in the mud of the Somme.
“The jitney’s stopped,” said Alice.
“I think that’s a guard post up ahead,” said Kate, slowing the White truck and just managing to pull around the jitney instead of bumping into it.
Mrs. Rutherford waved them forward. They climbed awkwardly down from the truck. Emmie was rather amazed that she could be so sore just from sitting; she hurt in places she hadn’t been sure one could hurt.
“We’re to show our feuilles bleues,” said Mrs. Rutherford.
“Not our carnets rouges?” asked Alice, digging for her papers.
“I feel like a French lesson,” whispered Emmie to Kate. “Avez vous le carnet rouge de ma tante et la plume jaune de mon cousin? Oh, bonjour, monsieur. Here’s my carnet—I mean, my feuille. You know the one.” Emmie smiled apologetically at the guard, feeling like an idiot, but it seemed her papers made more sense than she did, because he waved her forward.
She supposed she didn’t look much like an enemy agent. As Auntie May liked to point out, she seldom looked like much of anything.
Kate’s papers passed scrutiny, and then came Liza. And the whole procession stopped.
“This paper,” said the guard, holding it up so they could see. “It is for Monsieur Shaw.”
“But it can’t be,” said Liza blankly. “It’s me. I mean, it’s meant to be me. Er, for me.”
“I assure you, mademoiselle, it is,” said the guard, and he held it up. There it was, clear as day, on Liza’s feuille bleue, “M. Shaw.”
“Does she look like a man?” demanded Maud indignantly.
“That is the problem exactly,” said the guard, not bothering to hide his boredom. “This paper permits Monsieur Shaw to enter the zone des armées. If Mademoiselle Shaw wishes to enter, she must go back to Paris and get another paper.”
“It’s a mistake,” said Emmie, wondering how on earth none of them had seen it before. Of course, they didn’t tend to go through each other’s papers, and the writing on the safe conduct was next door to illegible, but even so. “You can see it’s a mistake.”
“I could drive her back in the jitney,” said Margaret Cooper hesitantly. “Maybe we could fit everyone else in the White and the truck.”
“Oh no,” said Emmie. It wasn’t just that they couldn’t possibly fit everyone and everything into two of the cars. It was that they were meant to be a unit, and she had the oddest feeling that if anyone turned back now, that would be the end of it.
“I’ll come too,” said Maud quickly. “If everything else is this ill organized, I don’t want any part of it.”
“There’s no need for that.” It was Julia who had come forward, speaking in her perfect, beautiful, aristocratic French. Emmie always forgot that Aunt May’s second husband had been a French count. He might even have been from somewhere not far from here; Emmie had never been entirely sure where the count’s chateau was, only that it needed a new roof and her mother firmly refused to pay for it. “If you won’t believe us, will you take the word of Le Soir?”
Julia held out a page cut neatly from a newspaper, folded so that the photo of the Smith College Relief Unit—all seventeen of them—was staring up at them.
Emmie waved enthusiastically at the photo. “You can see, that’s us! And there’s Mademoiselle Shaw, you see?” Liza obediently perked up, trying to look like her photo. “We’re les Collégiennes Américaines!”
“Les Collégiennes Américaines, eh?” said the guard, studying the photo. In it, they were arrayed in two rows, Mrs. Rutherford and Dr. Stringfellow seated in the middle. Emmie wished she didn’t look quite so tall looming in the back row. And that someone had told her that she needed to brush her hair. But the overall composition seemed to be having its effect on the guard. “All the way from America?”