I can’t imagine why more farms aren’t clamoring for Smith graduates. . . .
—Miss Maud Randolph, ’09, to her fiancé, Mr. Henry Craig
October 1917
Grécourt, France
“—and they had a wonderful dinner for us!” Alice said as the White bumped back across the moat. “It wasn’t a cakeless day, so we reveled.”
“That was kind of the Paris Committee.” Kate maneuvered around a rut masquerading as a swimming pool. The rainy season was upon them, turning everything to mud, mud up to their knees, mud that tugged at the tires of the trucks and created hazards at every turn. The Paris Committee had invited her—in her new position as assistant director—but Kate had turned them down on the grounds of work. To take two days away, as things were, was impossible.
It had nothing at all to do with the fact that she was afraid of using the wrong fork.
“Well, we are something of a sensation now,” said Alice frankly. “Mrs. Barrett was telling me there have been articles in the Chicago Tribune and New York Globe—they’ve been terribly complimentary, but they all include that same horrid photo of us together before we sailed. I do wish our uniforms were more becoming.”
“They may not be glamorous,” said Kate, drawing up by the Orangerie, “but no one can deny we’re well supplied with pockets.”
“Yes, because Mrs. R—” Alice looked at Kate, flushed, and broke off, looking guilty. Kate had never asked, but she strongly suspected that Alice had been part of Maud’s cabal to oust Mrs. Rutherford, not out of any personal animus, but because Maud had asked and Alice wouldn’t have liked to say no.
Kate wondered what they had been saying of her in Paris. She knew that Maud had been writing to the committee again, writing about her.
“Did you see Margaret in Paris?” asked Kate, swinging down from the truck.
“Only briefly.” Alice stepped down somewhat more gingerly, wincing as her Paris boots sank ankle-deep in mud. “She didn’t stay at the Quai Voltaire—I don’t think she wanted to be around the Unit after—well, after whatever happened. I bumped into her once shopping, and she seemed awfully broken up about breaking her contract and leaving.”
“Well, thank goodness you’re back,” said Kate honestly. “No one has a way with the motors like you do. We’ve been relying on the engineers to fix our engines, and they’re not nearly as good at it as you are.”
Alice’s head popped up, a gratified expression on her face. “It’s just a knack; I can’t think where I got it. . . . Do you mean the 11th Engineers—the ones we met before I left?”
“Those are the ones. They’ve taken to inviting themselves over at odd hours, along with half the other men on the front. We’ve been overrun by American engineers and Canadian foresters—and even some Quakers. They’ve got a base near Ham.”
Maud had tried to send the Quakers packing, on the grounds that they didn’t want a pack of pacifists hanging about, but Kate had overruled her, on the grounds that whatever the Quakers’ principles, they certainly had better carpentry skills than the Unit. Maud was still simmering over that.
“Goodness.” Alice sat up straighter, unconsciously adjusting her hat to a more flattering angle. “I hadn’t realized it would be so social.”
“Neither did we,” Kate said wryly. “We’ve had to ask them to confine their visits to weekends. The engineers had us to supper at their camp last weekend—which means we’ll have to reciprocate at some point, although goodness only knows how. We haven’t nearly enough cups and plates to go around.”
Or enough food, or enough coal to cook with. The cold had set in with a vengeance, but the coal delivery they had been promised had yet to arrive.
Kate was finding it very hard to untangle Mrs. Rutherford’s systems. Mrs. Rutherford had procured supplies from all sorts of places, getting the Unit classified as an infirmary so they could receive more than the usual ration of sugar, and as a military unit, so that they might qualify for an allowance of essence, but not everything had been properly recorded; some transactions were with the civil authorities, others with the military, and others still with the American aid organizations: the American Fund for French Wounded and the Red Cross. Mrs. Rutherford seemed to have managed almost entirely on force of personality. Lacking that kind of charisma, Kate would have been glad for some nice, plain record keeping.
Ledgers, for instance. Ledgers would have been marvelous. Not just piles of letters and receipts and carbons typed too thin to read.