"Two Women in Love and War"

Jack and Eve, Wendy Moore  (2024 TBR)

I bought this book after hearing the author on the BBC History Extra podcast. It is the story of Evelyn "Eve" Haverfield and Vera "Jack" Holme, who met while working for suffrage with the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Eve had been married twice and had two sons, while Jack's relationships were primarily with women. They fell in love, eventually moving in together into a house that Eve owned. They found a community of other queer women, and both sometimes had flirtations or affairs, Jack in particular. But their bond remained strong.

Eve was a friend and ally of Emmeline Pankhurst, and Jack became Mrs. Pankhurst's driver, one of the first women chauffeurs in Britain. When the Great War broke out, they began organizing women to serve on the home front and abroad. Eve and Jack then joined Dr. Elsie Inglis's Scottish Women's Hospital (SWH) group in Serbia, where they worked to set up hospitals wherever the Serbian forces were fighting. Like many of the SWH women, both became deeply attached to the Serbian people and their country, refusing to leave even as enemy forces pushed the Allied armies out. After a desperate retreat, Jack ended up in Russia as the revolution was breaking out. Once safely evacuated to England, both she and Eve continued to raise money for Serbia. Eve felt called to return after the war ended, to open orphanages for the thousands of children left destitute. Jack followed her, but after Eve's death in Serbia in 1920, she returned to Britain, where she lived until her own death in 1969.

This book fascinated me on so many levels, starting with Eve and Jack's work in the suffrage movement. Reading Constance Lytton's autobiography (and then a biography of her) introduced me to the inner circle of the WSPU and the Pankhursts. But I didn't know about the WSPU car that Jack drove all over Britain, carrying the movement's leaders to meetings and protests. Both she and Eve were accomplished equestrians, and they often led suffrage parades (riding astride rather than side-saddle). Eve was arrested with Emmeline Pankhurst after a London rally in 1909, and their trial made headlines around the world.

Eve and Jack took their experience and connections from the suffrage movement into their war work. I learned so much about women's work in the Great War, about women in medicine, and about the war on the Eastern Front (the subject of podcasts and articles in recent months, though not focused on women's work). Like many women in the Britain, Eve wanted to put her talents and energy to use in supporting the war effort. She had an absolute belief that women could do anything men could, including working with the armed forces. The British government could not have disagreed more strongly. With other like-minded women, Eve founded the Women's Emergency Corps (WEC), "to register and coordinate offers of help from women . . . Within two weeks more than 10,000 women had registered..." She then went on to set up the Women's Volunteer Rifle Corps, which could function as a home guard if needed. Next, she organized the Women's Reserve Ambulance Corps, known as the "Green Cross Corps," which would later send the first women's ambulance team to France.

Jack worked with her through all of this, but both of them wanted to do even more. When Eve heard Dr. Elsie Inglis speak on Serbia, raising funds to send a hospital unit, she was quick to volunteer. In September 1914, Dr. Inglis had offered to set up and run a military hospital, staffed by women. She was told, "My good lady, go home and sit still." Instead, she established the Scottish Women's Hospital organization. The governments of France, Belgium, and Serbia gladly accepted her hospitals and her staff. The time that Jack and Eve spent in Serbia is the largest section of the book. The SWH worked under incredibly difficult and dangerous conditions, often short of supplies and food. They dealt with epidemics of disease, in the civil population as well as the soldiers they treated. I did find the military aspect difficult to follow sometimes, particularly since the only small period maps included were in the photo sections. Wendy Moore also spends a lot of time on conflicts between the different members of the SWH, which made their work even more complicated.

Finally, this book explores queer women in Britain in the early 20th century, which is a subject I knew very little about. As Wendy Moore points out, we cannot know how people in the past defined themselves. Jack preferred male dress and re-named herself "Jack" in her early twenties, which is the name Wendy Moore uses (but refers to Jack as "she" and "her" since Jack did not present herself as a male person). She and later Eve were part of a circle of queer women, some of whom were settled domestic partners. Triangle relationships were also common, and after Eve's death Jack met two women with whom she shared a home and life for 32 years. From this book, I learned that there was little concern over women's emotional or physical relationships until the publication of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, which sparked an uproar over lesbianism and eventually an obscenity trial.

I had previously read Wendy Moore's No Man's Land, about "the trailblazing women who ran Britain's most extraordinary military hospital during World War I." I am happy to see that our library systems have several more of her books. I also want to find a biography of Dr. Elsie Inglis, who persisted despite the misogynistic dismissal of her work.

An English Governess in the Great War, the diaries of Mary Thorp

I came across this book while looking for more accounts of nursing in the Great War. The subtitle caught my eye: "The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp." As the introduction explains, it was secret because anonymous, and because keeping a diary in occupied Belgium during the Great War was dangerous. In her first entry, in September 1916, Mary Thorp writes

Several times, in the beginning of the war, I wanted to start a diary, but was dissuaded from doing so, because it was considered dangerous; a Jesuit father was shot during the tragic Louvain days of August 1914, for having written a few impressions.

A footnote explains, "MT refers to the well-known fate of Eugène Dupiéreux, a young Jesuit student executed during the invasion of Louvain for keeping a diary of the 'atrocities.'"

What I have read on the Great War has focused mainly on the war itself, the experiences of soldiers and nurses. With the Second World War, I have read more about life on the home front, both in the United States and Britain, and under Nazi occupation in Europe. It was through Dorothy Canfield's short stories that I first saw the European home front in the Great War, written of course from an American perspective and focused on France and Belgium.

Mary Thorp lived most of her life in Belgium. Her parents moved there from England when she was nine, in part because of family conflict over their illegal marriage (her father married his deceased wife's sister, and only four months before Mary's birth at that). Mary took her first position as a governess in a Belgian family at age 24. The editors note that she was well-educated, speaking and writing French superbly. She had also converted to Catholicism at some point, which was an asset for an English governess. "By 1910, she was working for one of the wealthiest families in Belgium, the Wittoucks." Paul Wittouck owned one of the largest sugar refineries in Europe. Catherine de Medem Wittouck was a Russian aristocrat who "propelled the household to the center of Brussels social life..." Thorp had charge of their three sons, Pavel, Micha, and Serge. The family moved between their townhouse in Brussels and their summer residence, La Fougeraie, which Paul Wittouck had remodeled in the style of a Louis XIV chateau.

Mary Thorp's life with the Wittoucks was a comfortable one, and it certainly cushioned her against the worst effects of the German occupation of Belgium. She was very aware of her privilege. She volunteered with two organizations, the Assistance Discrète and the Union Patriotique des Femmes Belges, that provided food and other assistance to the needy. She visited clients, bringing them food and clothing, helping them with appeals to the German authorities, trying to find work for them. One 1917 diary entry records, "Mr. W. gave everyone in the house 5 kilos of delicious sugar," a very expensive gift at a time when sugar was heavily rationed. Thorp goes on to say "I have made 20 1/2 lb packets to give to the needy..." She could presumably do so because the Wittoucks' house was stocked with sugar, but I was still struck with her immediate generosity.

Mary Thorp kept her diaries in small notebooks. The editors, Sophie De Schaepdrijver and Tammy M. Proctor, have kept the divisions between the notebooks, with short introductions to each new volume that provide context both to Thorp's life at the time and the larger situation with the war. They also include a very helpful discussion at the start of the book on "Life in an Occupied City: Brussels," as well as many explanatory footnotes. I learned so much from this book, which gave me a completely new perspective on the war. It was sometimes difficult to read, as the war dragged endlessly on. The winter months were particularly hard, because the German authorities commandeered food to be shipped to back to Germany while also cutting fuel rations, to the point that civilians were dying of hunger and cold. There were also massive drafts of forced labor sent to Germany, devastating families. Again, Thorp was cushioned against these dangers, but she saw and recorded them among her friends and her voluntary work.

Mary Thorp remained with the Wittouck family after the war, eventually retiring with a pension to a home they provided. She lived through World War II in Belgium, dying in December of 1945. If she kept any diary of those years, it hasn't been found. I can only imagine what she felt in September of 1939.

The superb interlibrary loan services in our Harris County libraries found me a copy of this at Arkansas Tech University. However, they want it back, so I have found my own copy to add to my small but growing collection on the Great War.

A Nurse at the Front, The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton

August 13 [1915]

Last night was remarkable for two terrific explosions which woke us at 2 a.m. and frightened us out of our wits. People have various theories of what they were - Zep[pelin] bombs, mines being exploded or our own guns a field or two away. The whole building trembled and rattled with the vibration. Have been feeling thoroughly nervy all day, silly fool that I am.

August 14

Evacuated nearly all patients, so had half day off duty and spent it at Mont des Cats with Miss Congleton. Delightful sunny day with splendid views all over Pop[eringhe], Ypres, Vlamertinghe. A Roman Catholic padre left his binoculars us, so we had a wonderful clear view beyond La Bassée, and the colours of the sky at sunset were glorious. As it got dark we saw them sending up coloured rockets from the aerodrome. . . Shells were bursting over our trenches south of Ypres. The picture was vivid, and the huge volume of smoke and muck shot up into the air gave a suggestion of what was happening to our Tommies. All the time the khaki-coloured ambulances were creeping to and fro, bringing the wounded in. 

This was one of the books that Mary Robinette Kowal cited as background reading for Ghost Talkers, and I put it straight on to my reading list. I've read only one other diary from World War I (as opposed to memoirs), and it was also from a nurse, the American Helen Dore Boylston's "Sister." Like Boylston, Edith Appleton was a trained nurse, though she had years more experience before she joined Queen Alexandra's Imperial Nursing Service Reserve. A month later, she was at her first posting in France, and by February she had moved to the front. She served in hospitals and casualty stations across France and Belgium. After the Armistice, she remained to help with the transport of convalescent soldiers. The diary she kept was apparently sent home on a regular basis to her mother. In 2008, her family built a website to honor her memory, and the publication of her diaries followed.

It is clear from the entries just how hard Appleton and the other nurses worked, and how exhausted she often was. The exhaustion wasn't just physical either. Appleton took every chance she could to get away from the work, noting long walks and picnics, and writing about the "splendid views" and the scenery around her - as well as the contrast with the columns of "smoke and muck" and the long lines of wounded and dead. She appreciated simple comforts where she found them, sharing biscuits and chocolate with a friend on a walk, relaxing with a book for a few minutes. When she was assigned to a unit temporarily housed in a wing of a "lunatic asylum," the director offered the nurses the use of the patients' bathroom.

I don't fancy bathing in company, but since I have not sat in water deeper than an inch since last year, the temptation is great. . .Three of us went up to another part of the asylum at 7 a.m, and had a deep BATH! Up to our necks in water - glorious! A dear old nun came trotting in when I was in my bath and felt to see if the water was the right heat. She thought the bath was too full and pulled the plug by a patent in the floor. I was sitting on the hole where the water runs away and was sucked hard into it!

Even more than a century later, it is difficult to read about the suffering of Appleton's patients. She didn't go into gruesome detail, perhaps because she was writing for her mother, but she didn't gloss over things either. She recorded the first use of gas in the trenches, and its effects on the men coming in to her ward. She noteed the deaths of individual patients who somehow stood out amidst all the carnage. She tried to give them all a clean handkerchief, because that small thing brought them great comfort. This is not a comfortable book to read - and it shouldn't be - but it is a wonderful record of one part of the Great War by a brave, observant and compassionate woman.

Ghost Talkers, by Mary Robinette Kowal

I loved the cover of this book, and the story caught me from the first page:

16 July 1916

    "The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died."
    Ginger Stuyvesant had a dim awareness of her body repeating the solder's words to the team's stenographer. She tried to hold that awareness at bay, along with the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army. Even with a full circle supporting her, she ached with fatigue, and if she weren't careful that would pull her back into her body. It wouldn't be fair to force Helen to assume control of the circle early. The other medium was just as exhausted. Around them, the currents of the spirit world swirled in slow spirals. Past events brushed her in eddies of remembrance. Caught in those memories, scent and colour floated with thick emotion. The fighting at the Somme had kept the entire Spirit Corps working extra shifts trying to take reports from the dead, and the air was frigid with souls.

In this Great War, the British Army has a secret weapon. Mediums have worked out a way to route the souls of the soldiers who die on the battlefield away from The Light long enough to report what they saw just before their death. "Spirit circles" linked through the mediums help them take these real-time reports while anchoring them firmly in this world. The information collected by the reports shapes British tactics and strategy. The crucial work of the Spirit Corps is camouflaged by the Women's Auxiliary Committee and its hospitality centers. Ginger's aunt, Lady Penfold, is the head of the Spirit Corps, reporting to the Army - though she usually skips all meetings, leaving Ginger to make the actual reports to the sometimes difficult Brigadier-General Davies.

On the same day that Ginger is taking reports from Delville Wood, she has a visit from her fiancé, Captain Benjamin Hartford, an intelligence officer. He brings bad news: "We've received reports that the Spirit Corps is being targeted by the Central Powers. . . The last thing [one dying soldier] heard was, Noch ein gespenstiger Spion . . . Another ghost spy."

I enjoyed this story on several levels. The work of the Spirit Corps is fascinating, with its circles of mediums and "mundanes," and the sensitives in between, each with her or his part to play in the work. Ginger's circle includes a soldier who lost a leg on the battlefield but chose to stay to work with the Corps rather than being invalided out. I enjoyed the interviews with the soldiers reporting in, as sad or difficult as they sometimes were. After drawing out the military information, the mediums encourage them to leave messages for family or friends. The magic of the story is grounded in the realities of the First World War. It was clear to me that Ms. Kowal had done her research, even before I read the "Historical Note" at the end of the book.

This being a story of the Great War, I was braced for a lot of deaths. I began to suspect early on that one character was doomed, and I decided to skip to the last chapter to check. Sure enough, this person was dead. I was a little put out by that, since I liked them. When I went back to my place in the story, I turned the very next page and read about their murder - which surprised me. So the story shifted to become a murder mystery, alongside the intelligence work both through the Corps and the officers like Captain Hartford, assessing in particular the risks to the Corps. But here those investigating the murder have the assistance of the victim, though their memories may be fragmentary and incomplete. And the recently-deceased become difficult to work with over time, even for experienced mediums.

I would happily read more stories of the Spirit Corps. In the meantime, I went looking for some of the books Ms. Kowal cited in the "Historical Note," starting with A Nurse at the Front: The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton. I'm also hoping interlibrary loan can find me a copy of Kate Adie's Fighting on the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in World War One.

The Day of Glory, Dorothy Canfield

These days, I seem to lose the ability to write coherent sentences after about 7.30 in the evening. It is really cutting into my blogging time, particularly when my weekends get busy. Maybe the time change this weekend will help, with the longer light in the evenings.

I ordered my copy of this book back in January. I had pretty much given up hope of it, figuring it was lost in the mail, when it turned up in my mailbox on Friday. I was immediately intrigued, because it is a small book, only six chapters, less than 150 pages in my Henry Holt edition. I was also intrigued by the 1919 publication date, which suggested a connection to the Great War - as did the title of one of the pieces, "France's Fighting Woman Doctor." It turns out that the entire book is about France in the war years. It felt like a companion to DCF's 1918 book, Home Fires in France.

But this book felt different than most of the collections of her short stories that I have read.  Except for the first chapter, "On the Edge," these pieces read more like magazine articles than fiction. Most have authorial comments in the first person. The second chapter, "France's Fighting Woman Doctor," is a profile of a real person, Dr. Nicole Girard-Mangin, whom DCF seems to have known personally. According to DCF, the authorities who called her to military service didn't realize she was a woman until she arrived at the front (according to Wikipedia, she volunteered for service). I loved learning about her. And having read a bit about medical service from British and American nurses, it was so interesting to see it from the French side.

"Some Confused Impressions" describes a day spent "Near Château-Thierry, July, 1918," where the author meets French troops and civilians, as well as United States soldiers recently arrived in France. The last chapter, "The Day of Glory," is an account of the November 11th armistice in Paris. Only one chapter doesn't deal directly with the war, "Lourdes," focusing instead a day at the shrine among the pilgrims.

There are authors whose work I enjoy, whose books I buy, that I read and re-read. Then there are the authors whose work so resonates with me that I want to read - and own - everything that they have written. Dorothy Canfield is one of those authors, though I haven't really looked for her children's books yet (other than Understood Betsy). I think of them as the "complete" authors, and the list includes Jane Austen, Dorothy Dunnett, Kate O'Brien, Maura Laverty, E.O. Somerville & Martin Ross, even Laura Ingalls Wilder. It doesn't include Georgette Heyer (because I don't want to read her medieval historical novels), Dorothy L. Sayers (I feel no call to read her Dante translation), or even Anthony Trollope (ditto his book on Cicero or his biography of Thackeray). Do you have authors like that?

It's 7.24, and I feel my brain turning into a pumpkin!

A short book on a long war

The First World War, Michael Howard

My branch library has a small exhibit up on the First World War, and there is a cart of "suggested reading" books next to the case.  Reading Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth several years ago made me realize how much I have forgotten - or never learned in the first place - about the Great War.  As is my wont, I quickly bought a couple of books to remedy that: Barbara Tuchman's classic The Guns of August and John Keegan's The First World War.  As is also my wont, I added them to the TBR stacks and left them there, though I did get a few chapters into the Keegan book at some point.

When I saw this short book of 154 pages, and read in the Foreword that it is "intended simply to introduce the vast subject of the First World War to those who know little or nothing about it," I decided it would be a better start for me.  However short, I knew this wouldn't just be "WWI for Dummies," since it is from the Oxford University Press, the work of Sir Michael Howard, a professor at both Oxford and Yale. And I was right.  The first chapter sets out the background of "Europe in 1914," covering the major powers, their alliances and continuing conflicts.  The second explains "The Coming of War."  The chapters that follow are divided by year, focusing on the major campaigns and briefly touching on the home-fronts of the major powers.  The last chapters cover the Armistice and the 1919 peace conference.  I found the narrative generally easy to follow, helped by the excellent maps showing both the Western and Eastern fronts.  The sheer number of generals and other leaders was sometimes a bit confusing, though I only had to resort to the index once or twice.There are just a few illustrations, but they are well-chosen, particularly of the devastation of the battlefields.

I learned a lot from this book, brief as it is, and I have ordered a copy for myself.  It reminded me of things I had learned and forgotten, and it helped me make connections with things I already knew, from Vera Brittain and Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Helen Dore Boylston.  I loved how it stretched my mind and made me think.  I took as many notes on this book as I have on books three times its size.  After reading it, I feel more ready to tackle those two books already on my shelves, as well as another (an unread book club choice) on the Paris peace conference.  There is also a brief section on "Further Reading" to consider.  

It felt appropriate to be reading this on November 11th.  I was also reminded as I read of how big a part the Great War plays in books I love, starting with Peter Wimsey.  I took down The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club last night, which opens on Remembrance Day, as Peter arrives for a quiet dinner hosted by Colonel Marchbanks for friends of his son, killed at Hill 60.  The war shapes the story in Laurie King's Folly, in my opinion her best book, as well as the first two books of the Holmes-Russell series.  And I am still discovering its place in Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Elizabeth von Arnim's books.

The home front in France in the Great War

Home Fires in France, Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Katrina's review of this over on Pining for the West caught my eye the other day.  I've been looking around for more of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's work, after falling in love with The Home-Maker and Understood Betsy last year.  A book of stories about France in the Great War sounded very intriguing.  From reading about Fisher, I knew that she and her husband spent three years doing relief work in France, so I expected that her stories, while fictional, would be based on her own experiences.  Ever since reading Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth a few years ago (before I started blogging), I've wanted to learn more about the First World War.  It was a bit of shock to realize from that book just how little I do know.  I can't remember studying it in any great detail, even as a history major in college.  Only a random assortment of names and dates comes to mind - August 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the invasion of Belgium, Ypres and the Somme.  Thinking this might fill in some of the blanks, I requested a copy through interlibrary loan and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it arrived.

Home Fires in France was published in America in 1918, presumably while the war was still going on.  According to the "Publisher's Note," Fisher wrote him that "What I write is about such very well-known conditions to us that it is hard to remember it may be fresh to you, but it is so far short of the actual conditions that it seems pretty pale, after all."  Her stories certainly aren't subtle.  They are clearly and strongly pro-French (one wouldn't know from them that the British are actually in the war). 

There are eleven stories in this book, and they are an interesting mix.  As the title suggests, they are not about the armies in the trenches but the home front.  They focus on both French soldiers and their families, and on Americans in France, many working for relief organizations.  Several of the stories are in the first person, with presumably Fisher herself narrating, others in the third person.  Some are set in Paris, flooded with refugees and invalided soldiers, others in the country-side, while two are harrowing accounts of events in northern France under German occupation. Fisher shows that while America was officially a neutral power, France was full of Americans like herself, collecting supplies and money from the U.S., organizing ambulances for the wounded, rehabilitation for the maimed and blind, food and clothing for the refugees.  Some of the Americans in her stories are there just to get their pictures in the paper, or to play at nursing handsome young men (as were some of the French involved in relief work as well). Others with a sincere desire to help are unprepared for the scope of the work and simply overwhelmed.  Several of the stories feature demobilized soldiers, maimed and blind, who must be provided for.  The narrator of one, "A Honeymoon . . . Vive l'Amérique," runs a Braille printing press producing books for veterans, which was one of Fisher's own projects.

The most affecting story, to me, was the one called "A Little Kansas Leaven," about a young woman named Ellen Boardman, twenty-seven, unmarried, an office manager, "plain, rather sallow, very serious."  Reading about the invasion of Belgium startles her into an awareness of world events, outside of her small Kansas town.  From the start, she cannot understand why America is standing by, unwilling to help France and Belgium (Britain apparently is on its own).  She ask questions of the fellow residents of her boarding house, and of her co-workers, many of whom see her as something of a crank, yet they find themselves reading the war news with more attention.  Eventually Ellen decides that she has to do something.  She takes leave from her job, over her boss's objections, takes out her life savings, and sails to France, to do what she can.  In Paris, she finds her way to a refugee bureau run by prominent Americans who desperately need her practical skills.  She spends four months there, organizing their work and their office.  In the evenings she goes to the Gare de l'Est, where soldiers returning to the front catch their trains.  There she timidly passes out chocolate and writing paper to those she finds alone, without family seeing them off.  When her savings run out, she sails back to America and her hometown, where she finds a hero's welcome.  I have to admit, this story brought tears to my eyes, a rare occurrence in reading.

I enjoyed these stories, though they weren't always comfortable reading.  However fictionalized, they opened up a new world to me, and they sparked my interest again in learning about the war itself.  I had no idea, for example, just what parts of France were occupied in the Great War.  Unlike Fisher and her readers in 1918, though, as I read I couldn't help thinking of the future, of what would happen in France just twenty years later.  It was especially poignant, reading the constant mention of fathers, husbands, sons lost, to know that her own son would die in the next war, in the Pacific.

A soldier's last request

A Duty to the Dead, Charles Todd

I have never read anything by this author before, or I should say authors, since "Charles Todd" is a mother & son writing team, Caroline and Charles Todd.  I was at a "Mystery Author Luncheon" the other day, naturally hosted by Murder by the Book.  I didn't know anyone else at the table where I was seated, but we all fell into an easy conversation about books that lasted through the luncheon, an exchange of reviews and recommendations, and a constant refrain of "Have you read this?"  It was such a treat for me, because I rarely get to talk books with such enthusiastic readers.

Charles Todd was one of the names that came highly recommended.  I found out later that they have written a series of twelve books featuring a Great War veteran who resumes his career at Scotland Yard after demobilisation.  They have a second series whose main character, Bess Crawford, is a nurse in the war.  I've become interested in reading about World War I from fictional accounts of the war's effects like Laurie R. King's Folly and Justice Hall, and particularly after reading Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. Since I'd recently read Helen Dore Boylston's account of war nursing in France, "Sister", I decided to try the first Bess Crawford mystery, A Duty to the Dead.

The story opens in November of 1916, with Bess traveling on a hospital ship to collect wounded soldiers.  The ship is the Britannic, which strikes a mine and sinks in the seas off Greece.  Despite a badly-broken arm, Bess makes it into a lifeboat, is rescued, and returns to England to recuperate.  There she finally faces a promise she made to a dying soldier, Arthur Graham, to give his brother an intriguing message: "Tell my brother Jonathan that I lied. I did it for Mother's sake. But it has to be set right."  When Bess travels to Kent to meet the Graham family and fulfill her duty to the dead, she stumbles into family secrets, including an older brother confined in an asylum for murder.  She is compelled to learn more about the family, and to try to unravel Arthur's last words.

Every character in the book is touched by the war, but the story has less to do with the war itself than I expected.  The mystery kept me guessing (wrongly, as usual) and turning the pages to find out what happened next.  Though her background is only sketched in, Bess is an interesting character and good company.  I'll be interested to see where the next book in the series takes her (a third has just been published).

Two innocents in America

Christopher and Columbus, Elizabeth von Arnim

One of the symptoms of a new literary crush is that I immediately start looking for the other books that my new discovery has written (I'm currently waiting on Otis Skinner's autobiography from the library).  I was introduced to Elizabeth von Arnim with The Enchanted April, and the copy I read included brief descriptions of several of her books.  Of course I will be reading Elizabeth and Her German Garden, but what really caught my eye was Christopher and Columbus:

"As the First World War looms, Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas, seventeen-year-old orphan twins, are thrust upon relatives. But Uncle Arthur, a blustering patriot, is a reluctant guardian: the twins are half-German and, who knows, they could be spying from the nursery window ... Packed off to America ..."

This all sounded so intriguing, from the Great War setting to the Sara Crewe element to the voyage to America.  Maybe my expectations were initially too high, because the first part of the book dragged a little for me.  I didn't find the twins quite as captivating as I think I was supposed to, though to be fair we meet them at a very depressing moment, as they huddle together on the deck of the ship taking them to America. The twins' mother returned to her native England after the death of their Junker father.  She died shortly afterwards, leaving them to their Aunt Alice and her husband Arthur, a spiritual twin of Mellersh Wilkins and Vernon Dursley.  England is in the early days of the Great War, and Uncle Arthur already hates Germans, even half-Germans. In the world of this book, the father's nationality trumps the mother's, in part because the twins speak English with an accent (a rolling R), and in part because everybody automatically hates Germans.

Still, I found it hard to believe that Uncle Arthur could have these seventeen-year-old girls put on a ship to America, alone and in second class, with £210 and two letters of introduction.  Even Sara Crewe got to stay in the attic bedroom and eat kitchen scraps.  Aunt Alice, worn down by twenty years of marriage to Uncle Arthur, is torn between her duty to him and to her nieces, but in the end she chooses her husband.  What she needs is a trip to Italy in April

On the boat, the two Annas meet Edward Twist, an American returning from France.  The inventor of the marvelous "Twist's Non-Trickler Teapot," he has funded an ambulance and has driven it himself at the front, and he is now returning for a leave in America.  He becomes increasingly concerned about their situation, eventually appointing himself their de facto guardian.  Their adventures after the ship reaches New York make up the rest of the book, with Twist trying to ride herd on two devastatingly lovely and outspoken young women, while becoming more and more attached to them.

Much is made of America's status as a neutral country, and yet the twins face constant hostility when their German identity is disclosed.  They are automatically assumed to be spies or German agents, much as Americans of Japanese descent were in World War II.  I saw from the biographical note in the book that von Arnim traveled to America in 1916, after the break-up of her marriage to Earl Russell, so she may have seen this prejudice at first hand. The information that her daughter, Felicitas, died in Germany during the war adds a poignant note to Anna-Felicitas' name, and to the book as a whole.

An American nurse in the Great War

"Sister,"  Helen Dore Boylston

I have loved the Sue Barton books, by Helen Dore Boylston, since I was a kid, and I have five on my shelves today.  My mother was a nurse, and I was in love with the idea of going to nursing school.  Other girls might have been reading about boarding schools and wishing their parents would send them to the Chalet School.  I wanted to follow Sue Barton and Cherry Ames to nursing school.  I've forgotten most of the other series, but I still re-read Sue Barton (and I much prefer her to the less realistic Cherry Ames).

I never gave much thought to the author, though.  I don't know if the library copies I read even had an author note; if they did, it didn't make any impression.  In just the past few weeks, thanks to the internet, I've learned that Boylston served as a nurse in France during World War I; that she kept a diary of her experiences, which she later published; and (most surprisingly to me) that she became close friends with Rose Wilder Lane, with whom she took a driving tour from Paris to Albania in 1926.

I still feel, after reading Testament of Youth, that I know far too little about the First World War.  So I got Boylston's nursing diary, "Sister," from interlibrary loan.  I thought it would be an interesting companion to Testament of Youth.  Boylston, a trained nurse and an American, kept a diary that she published in 1925. Vera Brittain had no experience when she left Oxford to volunteer as a V.A.D. nurse.  Her Testament is a memoir, published in 1933.

Boylston's diary opens in February, 1918, at a convalescent hospital in Paris Plage, where she is recovering from flu and trench fever.  There is no introduction, no background, nothing to tell us how she came to be in France. A later entry mentions her third anniversary in France, but it's not clear if she only kept a diary in 1918 or only chose to publish the last year's entries.  From other sources I learned that, soon after her graduation from nursing school, she volunteered for service with a medical unit from Harvard.

Boylston details the day to day life of the medical station, which from what I can tell was located on the western coast of France, near Le Touquet.  She records her fellow nurses, the patients she cares for, the different wounds they suffer, the arrivals of yet more wounded, and the terrifying air raids that go on for weeks.  But the diary is just as much about her time off-duty, getting all the fun she could out of life to balance the mud, the fear and the death.  There is very much a "seize the day" flavor to her entries, especially with regard to the men she dates.  Normal rules and moralities don't apply; married men are considered "war rations," available for the moments of fun snatched between bombs and 48-hour shifts in the operating theatre.  Brittain's Testament is much more sombre in tone, reflecting of course the loss of her fiancé Roland Leighton in 1915, perhaps Brittain's different temperament, and also their different circumstances.  Boylston doesn't mention any relatives or friends in the armies. In addition to her fiancé, Brittain lost her only sibling Edward and two of their best friends in the war.

When Boylston returns to the United States in January 1919, like many veterans she finds the adjustment difficult:

"How we worked! We gave all we had to give, and life was glorious. Even numbed with fatigue as we were, we knew it was glorious. . . I can't stand it here much longer, in this place where nothing ever happens and every day is like every other day."

On the last page of the book, we learn that she has volunteered again, for the Red Cross, and is sailing to Paris.  As far as I can discover, she never wrote of those adventures.

I can't say I learned much about the Great War itself, but I caught at least a glimpse of what it was like to be part of that war, caring for those who fought it.