The War Librarian, page 6
“So where do you send them?”
“Farther back to base hospitals in the intermediate section.”
I didn’t respond out loud, but Nellie must have read the confusion in my face. “Don’t worry. You’re the librarian. You don’t need to know about the sections or the evacuation system or the medical detachment. You just need to focus on the men at 42.”
That didn’t sound so simple, either, when I considered the sheer number of men.
“And you? How did you end up doing this?”
“Long story.” Nellie laughed. “I was initially made a clerk, because I was a secretary back in the United States. But then one day when they were driving me back to the station, the brakes in the car failed and we hit a tree.”
I gasped, and Nellie smiled. “I know. The driver was fine, but he was dazed enough from a bump on the head that he needed a moment to rest. I hopped out, fixed the brakes, and drove the rest of the way. By the time we got to our destination, he wanted me to work for the Motor Corps. I had to pass a mechanic’s test and first-aid exam, but that was it.”
That was it? It sounded impossible to me. “How did you know how to do it all? The brakes, the mechanic’s test?” Even the driving seemed like a strange thing for a woman to know.
“Papa’s a mechanic back home. He taught me and my sister both how to do just about everything there is to do with a motorcar. I’ve always loved it, but Mabel—my sister—can’t stand the work.” She laughed. “I suppose she’s stuck helping Papa with all of it now.”
Her face turned more serious. “I’ll have to make it up to her when I get home.”
“Mabel.” It was a pretty name. “How old is she?”
“Four years younger than me. Twenty-one.”
That made Nellie twenty-five, two years my senior.
I heard myself sigh. “I always wondered what it would be like having a sister.”
“No siblings?”
I shook my head.
“Having a sister is infuriating,” Nellie said. But then she softened. “And so special. Mabel’s my best friend.” She glanced at me. “You remind me of her, actually. Soft-spoken.”
I grinned sheepishly back at her. I’d never had a sister nor a best friend, though I didn’t say that out loud. My life in D.C. might not have seemed so empty if I had.
But I hadn’t been as interested in the boarding school girls who returned home to happy households as I was in the orphans I read about: Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre. It was no wonder I’d hardly lived at all before going to Camp Meade.
Now I was here, maybe even risking my life in order to live. But my mother always told us that dvúm smertjám ne byvàt’, odnój ne minovát’: one cannot have two deaths, but cannot run from one. It mattered less how long you lived than how, and I had hardly lived a life worth protecting before.
Buildings fell away and forest began to encroach as Nellie and I continued on. I was relieved at first, glad to see the end of ruined towns and cemeteries.
But the forest was no better.
The trees rose like crooked spindles, like if I touched my finger against one, I’d fall into the cursed deep sleep of the Grimm brothers. Not a single trunk braved the sky; each one instead snapped at the halfway point or at the height of a soldier. What had happened, I wondered. Was this damage from a bomb? From artillery shells? It could have been either, or something else entirely. I could recite every street in D.C. and translate novels into French and Russian, but I knew nothing of war.
Whatever the cause, I shuddered. The trees stood like starched corpses, eerie and unsettling. It was September, barely fall, but not a single leaf remained. Not even on the ground. Instead, the ground was littered with branches. I realized with a start that that was what made the trees look so ghostly: not their lack of leaves, but the fact that they’d been wrenched of all their branches. They were straight lines, arrows up to heaven.
I tried to tear my gaze away but couldn’t. A single tear rolled down my cheek, and I was grateful for Nellie’s speed; she kept us moving too quickly for me to see more than snippets of barbed wire or flashes of stone fortifications that looked disconcertingly like portals to some sort of fairy-tale world.
If only. If only the stone huts were home to forest druids. If only the violent gash of each trench were a gently curving river of nymphs. Instead, the blackened, pockmarked land was a sign of anything but magic.
“I know,” Nellie said, placing her small hand on my knee. I imagined Mabel, a smaller version of Nellie, being comforted in the same simple way.
“Do you get used to it?” I wasn’t sure what I hoped her answer would be.
“Sometimes I think I have.” Nellie sighed. “It’s been a month, after all. But no. You simply find ways to cope.”
I wanted to pat her knee the way she’d patted mine, but I hesitated. The opportunity passed, and I clenched my fist in my lap in shame.
And then the world shattered. A roar like the engine of the Aeolus, a hissing like an angry cat. An explosion of orange fire across the sky.
I screamed and couldn’t hear myself. I could see my chest rising and falling, knew I must be breathing heavily, but I couldn’t hear anything but the artillery exploding above us. My vision swirled, and I couldn’t distinguish up from down or car from ground. All I saw was fire, and I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled my knees to my chest. Trying to quell my nausea, I rocked in the seat until the sound stopped.
Was I dead? I choked out a cry, but this time, I was able to hear it.
Then I heard Nellie. “Breathe. Emmaline, breathe. Inhale. Count to four. Exhale, two, three, four. Again. Inhale. Exhale.” I heard her words from a distance, like she was talking to someone else, and only started to obey halfway through. I inhaled; I exhaled. “Can you see my hat?” The red cross on Nellie’s cap wavered in front of me, and I tried to focus my eyes on it. “Just look at the red cross, Emmaline. Breathe. You’re going to be okay.”
When I could process my surroundings, I realized we’d pulled off the road and stopped. “What happened?” I managed. “Did the explosion—”
“No,” Nellie rushed to answer. “I pulled off so I could help you. The explosion is miles away, on the front.”
“How often—how often does that happen?”
“Enough that you do start to get used to it,” Nellie said grimly. But still her lips went up in a slight smile, like we’d shared a joke or an understanding. This girl was so relaxed, so endlessly positive. I envied her.
In shame, I buried my head in my hands. “I’m so sorry.” What I meant was I’m so embarrassed. To fall apart like this my very first day in France, at the sound of one explosion? Men like Nicholas lived through those explosions every day. What must Nellie think of me, I wondered.
Nellie shook her head. “Listen to me.”
I kept my head bowed but let my eyes drift up to meet hers.
“This is war. We are all afraid.”
“But—”
“No. Listen.”
I could tell Nellie was the older sister. She was at once commanding and soothing.
“We’re all afraid,” she repeated. “But being scared like that just means you still have your humanity. And going on anyway makes you far braver than if you didn’t have any fear at all.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I just nodded. Nellie waited for a moment before starting the car again to be sure I wasn’t going to crack, and then we continued in silence to Toul.
The city’s white stone ramparts came into view first. They were at least twice my height and topped with grass, though the green was interspersed with brown. Behind the ramparts rose the turrets of a Gothic cathedral that took my breath away. This was the France I’d imagined.
But Nellie didn’t stop. We continued another mile north of the town and its people and stopped in a desolate, barren field packed with wooden barracks. Each was identical, long and single-storied with small square windows at the end, and they made for a dreary picture against the brown of the land. An airplane buzzed above us. I cowered instinctively, but Nellie put a hand on mine. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The American Air Force is based here. That’s our plane.”
I didn’t bother hiding my sigh of relief.
“You can wait in the car,” Nellie said. “I’ll be back in just a moment.”
I waited with my fingers twisting in my lap as she darted off toward one of the wooden buildings. Would another explosion rip through the sky? Would the men waging their offensive a mere ten miles away come charging across the field with machine guns blazing?
I was so relieved when Nellie returned that I smiled at her broadly and without self-consciousness. She smiled back. “Ready to see your new home?”
“Does it look like this?”
Nellie pulled a face. “I’m afraid so.”
Well. This was war. I couldn’t expect luxury.
Something in my expression must have changed, because Nellie burst into laughter as she pulled us back onto the road. “What?”
“Your face,” she gasped. “When I said 42 is set up the same way.”
I scrunched my nose, somewhere between mortified and amused. “I didn’t come from luxury,” I said, “but a wooden shack in the mud does seem a bit . . . perilous. Not like it would do much against a bomb.”
Nellie shook her head. “It wouldn’t. Air raid sirens go off sometimes at night, and everyone goes outside to check for planes. But there’s nowhere to hide if we see them.”
Nowhere to hide. The words should have filled me with dread, but they gave me a much-needed jolt of adrenaline instead. “That’s why the men need books.”
Nellie shot me a quizzical look, her driving never faltering. “Books against bombs?”
“Books are the best place to hide,” I said quietly. “When the world is just too much to take.”
Nellie patted my knee once again, and then we drove on in silence. Back through the eerie forest and the ruins of small towns, back past Neufchâteau and south to Bazoilles-sur-Meuse. Night was falling, and I was in a foreign country in the midst of the war to end all wars. But somehow, with Nellie beside me and fog blanketing the landscape in silence, I felt almost at peace.
Chapter 6
Kathleen Carre
July 1976
Susan, Linda, and I tumbled into our cots and pulled up our blankets after two more hours of “basic” instruction: how to hold and put on our hats (“plebe our covers”), chopping, the expectation that we shout responses loud enough to make us light-headed, and further lessons on saluting and responding to officers. It was hours past dinner by the time we returned to our rooms after sixteen and a half hours of training, and it had only been one day. It seemed like years ago that I’d been at the D.C. bus station.
Though I wanted to call Nana, I knew she’d be asleep by now. I should have been, too. Linda was breathing slowly next to me, a far cry from the nervous, shallow breathing I’d gotten used to during the day. Susan too was quiet, which could only mean she’d fallen asleep.
I stared at the ceiling and wondered how late it was. The ceiling was plain like the walls, but the lack of decor didn’t bother me. Decor, in my opinion, was a waste of space and a waste of money. And decorating was a waste of time.
Speaking of time, I pulled a face. We weren’t allowed to have watches or clocks; knowing the time was apparently a privilege too generous for us plebes. A cadre of officers would wake us at 5:30 a.m. every morning, but I hated that I couldn’t set an alarm half an hour earlier to prepare.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Nothing I could do about it, was there? I kept my eyes closed, tried to push my anxiety away, and forced myself into sleep.
Before I knew it, whistles blew and knocks penetrated our door. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, swung my legs off the side of my bed, and stood. Linda and Susan blinked at me as I immediately made my bed and changed into my uniform. We were allowed sneakers from home for the morning physical education, thank God. No heels.
I brushed out my short hair, pleasantly surprised by how quickly I could do so now that it was bobbed, and brushed my teeth. We weren’t to wear jewelry or makeup, so that was it.
Susan, Linda, and I chopped outside for PEP, the plebe summer Physical Education Program. We began with calisthenics in our squadrons, and I found myself sandwiched between Robert and Tom.
“Still here?” Robert sneered.
I ignored him, keeping my eyes straight ahead, or “in the boat.” I certainly wasn’t going to get myself in trouble by taking Robert’s bait.
“Don’t listen to him,” Tom whispered on my other side. “He’s just jealous because you look better in your uniform than he does.”
I nodded a thank-you to Tom, and then the officer instructed us to begin. We did jumping jacks and toe touches to warm up, shoulder stands to stretch and wake up our abdomens, and then sit-ups in the still-wet, dewy grass. Next were push-ups.
“Women are permitted,” the leaders thundered, “to do these push-ups on their knees.” He paused. “Men must do complete push-ups, remaining on their toes. Understood?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” I joined the rest of the class in calling back, but my face burned. They were singling us out already.
I did the first two sets on my toes, which was easy after the twenty I’d done to get in. But halfway through the third set, my arms gave out and I dropped to my knees. I cursed under my breath, sweat stinging my eyes. Robert scoffed beside me and I gritted my teeth. I’d do push-ups every night if I had to. He wouldn’t laugh at me again.
After calisthenics, we ran. They sent us on a two-mile route, going easy on us for the first day, and I smiled. My body was warm, and I reveled in doing something I’d done for years. I remained a few steps ahead of Robert the first mile, and I narrowed my eyes and practically sprinted to be sure I’d beat him the second. I couldn’t do push-ups on my toes yet, but I could beat a snobby boy in a race.
When I was done, I stood on the other side of the finish line catching my breath. My lungs felt hollowed out and empty, but I had a smile on my face.
“Midshipman Carre!”
“Sir!” I turned to Ensign Michael. He’d told me yesterday I’d have to prove I deserved my spot here; I imagined I was on my way to doing just that.
“The Naval Academy expects cooperation and a sense of teamwork within squadrons, platoons, and companies.”
“Sir, yes, sir.” I didn’t know what he was trying to say.
“Bilging your teammates, or making them look bad to make yourself look better, is not permitted.”
I wiped my smile from my face, surprised I was being chastised.
“You left your team behind.”
I blinked and looked back. Indeed, the other dozen men in my squadron were just crossing the finish line. I’d been so focused on beating Robert that I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that I was beating Tom, Pat, and all the others.
Brow furrowed, I looked back at Ensign Michael. This was the Naval Academy. Didn’t they expect our best?
Ensign Michael’s face said otherwise, and I grimaced. “No excuse, sir.”
Except that Robert was taunting me. That he doesn’t want me to be here.
But neither, I supposed, did the squad leader.
“If you’d left your team behind in the field, they’d be dead.”
I’m not allowed in the field, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Do you understand the expectation?” he barked.
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Do you understand the expectation?” His voice was louder, his eyes darker.
“Sir, yes, sir!” I screamed. My throat rasped, dry after my run, and I was grateful when Ensign Michael left me. After a cool-down series, we were sent back to our rooms for showers before breakfast. I saw Linda and Susan walking together ahead of me, but I didn’t run to catch up. After the way I’d been treated this morning, I didn’t want to draw any more attention to the fact that I was a woman. I didn’t need to glue myself to the other girls like we were something separate.
We each took two minutes to shower. I hardly had time to rinse my body and wet my hair before it was Linda’s turn, and breakfast was no leisurely affair, either. We suffered through uniform checks in our heels before being permitted to eat, and then we had to keep our eyes in the boat and repeat our rates as we ate. The questions were easy: on the five basic responses, the uniforms to be worn at different events, the expectations for saluting officers and the flag. But our ensign warned us that the ease wouldn’t last. I patted Reef Points in my waistband. There was a lot to learn.
The first few sessions after morning chow covered rank structure and the honor system, the NATO alphabet, and the expectations for memorizing Reef Points. When those were done, the men and women were separated for hygiene lectures.
“Thank God we don’t have to sit through a hygiene talk with the men beside us,” Linda whispered as we filed out. I shrugged. It might have been embarrassing, but I’d have preferred that to being singled out.
Eighty-one of us spread across the auditorium. We filled up so many fewer seats this way, just eighty of us rather than a thousand plus, and it was the first time I got a good look at the girls outside my company: blondes, brunettes, a redhead or two. They looked like any other girls off the street, except that none of them had the long, straight hair that was so fashionable right now. Otherwise, they could have been anyone. We ranged from thin and lean to stocky and muscular, and our expressions ranged from apprehensive to excited to guarded. The only unchanging variable was our hair length—and, but for one exception, our race. Out of eighty-one women, only one appeared to be Black.
