If that’s the way of American kindergartens, maybe we ought to send our children to school in France. . . .
—Miss Maud Randolph, ’09, to her fiancé, Mr. Henry Craig
September 1917
Grécourt, France
“Have you seen the skipping ropes? I could have sworn I took out the skipping ropes.”
“Anne Dawlish took them.” Kate dodged out of the way as Emmie staggered past, bearing an armload of hoops.
The mass was over and the Unit was attempting to marshal an alarming number of children on the lawn behind the chateau. Alice Patton and Margaret Cooper presided behind a long trestle table, doling out coffee for the adults—very watery coffee, but coffee all the same—and milk from their own cows for the children. The cows, contrary to all of Kate’s expectations, had arrived as promised and had responded well to the enthusiastic, if untutored, ministrations of the members of the Smith College Relief Unit.
The cows weren’t the only unexpected success. Kate looked around the lawn, at the members of the Unit rushing about being useful, at the villagers overflowing what had once been the baroness’s private preserve, and had to admit that the mass had been . . . well, a smashing success.
Kate had been privately convinced that it would be a disaster. She’d been worried that no one would come or that the Unit would embarrass themselves. It would, thought Kate, be both the beginning and the end of their usefulness, when the French villagers saw seventeen American Protestants blundering their way through a mass, slaughtering the canticles and making inappropriate comments in carrying voices.
But Julia had led them in procession across the fields, and Julia had sung the canticles in her high, clear voice, and, somehow, with Julia in charge, it had all come out exactly right and even Maud had behaved herself, clothed in an odor of self-conscious sanctity. The inhabitants of villages from miles away had streamed into the small church, filling it to capacity and overflowing into the churchyard. Kate had stood in the back of the church with the rest of the Smith Unit as the priest in his scarlet vestments led the familiar Latin service, her lips moving to the long-known words, even as her gray uniform set apart her, set her with the other Smith women.
Domine, non sum dignus. . . .
Lord, I am not worthy.
Alice had looked around nervously and copied whatever Julia was doing, usually several seconds behind; Liza had bounced on the balls of her feet and made the wrong responses in the wrong places, but with vigor. Emmie, of course, sang loudest of all, and almost entirely out of tune. The French were very patient about it and complimented them all lavishly, and Kate had left feeling somehow—not cleansed, but with some unspoken fear unrealized.
Even the weather had cooperated. It was the most perfect sort of autumn day, the midday sun gilding the grass and the browning leaves, lighting the faces of the old Robecourts on the walls of the chateau. The mayor had cleaned all their uniforms for them and the gray with its touches of French blue looked wonderfully official as they all darted this way and that among the villagers, fetching milk, holding babies, explaining about the dispensary and the store.
The Unit was, Kate realized with a faint sense of disbelief, doing just exactly what it had set out to do. For all their differences, all their false starts, it was working. Over the past ten days, they had made a start, a true start. The social workers had been diligently making their rounds, bringing with them milk from their own cows. The villagers had begun to straggle into the makeshift clinic the doctors held at Grécourt in the mornings. Their traveling store was to begin the next day, the Ford truck loaded with the results of Maud’s buying trip to Paris.
Maud had brought with her not just the chickens but three of the missing members of their Unit: Miss Baldwin, the librarian, who had arrived clutching an armload of French children’s books she had begged, borrowed, or quite possibly stolen; Miss Mills, full of ideas about nursing picked up during her brief time at the Villier hospital （Kate foresaw trouble there with Julia, who had pointed out that Miss Mills hadn’t actually trained as a nurse）; and Miss Ledbetter, the journalist, who came armed with a legion of anecdotes about the history of Grécourt from the Merovingians to the present, almost undoubtedly apocryphal. They had all found themselves retiring very early from dinner the previous night under the onslaught of Miss Ledbetter’s learned discourse.
Fran poked Kate in the arm. “Quick, the Ledbetter is heading our way. Time to get more sweets for the children.”
“Do we have more sweets for the children?” Maud had bought what she could in Paris, but anything made with sugar cost the earth, and whatever packages had been sent them from home were all held up by the Red Cross Clearing House, distributed as it pleased them.