by Amy Stewart
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Norma
Fleurette
Constance
Norma
Fleurette
Constance
Norma
Fleurette
Constance
Norma
Constance
November 11, 1918
Historical Notes
Read More From the Kopp Sisters Series
Learn More About the Kopp Sisters
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2020 by the Stewart-Brown Trust
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stewart, Amy, author.
Title: Dear Miss Kopp / Amy Stewart.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | Series: A Kopp sisters novel ; 6
Identifiers: LCCN 2019057826 (print) | LCCN 2019057827 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358093121 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358093107 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358093015 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.T49343 D43 2020 (print) | LCC PS3619.T49343 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057826
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057827
Cover illustration and design by Jim Tierney
Author photograph © Terrence McNally
v1.1220
To
Maud Cauchois
and
Franck Besch
Norma
Langres, France
Constance to Norma
May 2, 1918
Dear Norma,
You’re a terrible correspondent and there’s no excuse for it. Fleurette and I are left stateside while you march off to France. We had a few decent letters when you were in Paris and a passable selection when you arrived at your secret location, but lately you’re sending us nothing but an occasional “I am well” to let us know that you’re alive. Are words also being rationed overseas, even short ones?
I’m beginning to suspect that you wrote a year’s worth of brief, perfunctory letters already—did you do them on the ship?—and now you simply select one to fit the circumstances.
It’s true, isn’t it? That sounds just like something you’d do. To wit:
Yours of a month ago read in its entirety: “All is well here and the meals are decent. Work continues apace.”
Two weeks ago we were treated to: “Health is good. Food ordinary but adequate. Work proceeds as expected.”
Yesterday the postman oughtn’t to have bothered, so light were his duties. “Am well. Expect the same for you.”
Really, Norma! Not even a mention of the decent, ordinary, adequate meals this time?
It’s bad enough that our letters take weeks or even months to reach each other. Can’t you put something in them that’s worth the wait?
For the better part of 1917, when you were still here in New Jersey, we were treated to almost daily dispatches from Fort Monmouth. You seemed to have no difficulty in recounting names, personalities, conversations, arguments (mostly there were arguments, as I recall, but somehow the Army decided to keep you anyway), and, if anything, excessively detailed descriptions of the military’s pigeon messenger program, its small triumphs and all too frequent setbacks. Why, then, is it so difficult to put down a line or two now that you’re working on the very same program in France?
Meanwhile, here I am in a boarding-house with twenty other women. A letter from overseas is an occasion: we all gather around the parlor in the evenings to read them aloud. Just last week, Kit in 3F had a letter from her brother about a French mutt his unit picked up. He even drew a picture of the dog. I’ve heard tales of dances with officers (not that I expect you to dance with an officer), pitiable descriptions of wounded men coming out of surgery and asking how many limbs remained, and accounts of air raids that would set your hair aflame.
Pages, Norma! Pages and pages they write. The soldiers, the nurses, the ambulance drivers—every one of them has something to say about the war, except you.
I know that your work with the carrier pigeons is of great importance and must be cloaked in secrecy. But once—just once—give the censor something to do! Let him go to work on a four-pager. As it is, he hardly need hold your envelope up to the light to see that it contains nothing of interest to the Germans (or to your family, for that matter). He can probably tell by weighing it how little ink has been spilled.
We’ve never been apart in our lives, and there you are, half a world away. Couldn’t you paint a picture of the sort of place you’ve been sent, or give some general idea of the goings-on?
If nothing else, I hope you’ll take seriously my suggestion to keep a diary, and to make a record of anything that wouldn’t be allowed past the censors. I put three note-books in your trunk when you left, and I’ll send you more if you like. I’m convinced that if you don’t write something down for us to read when you return, you’ll come home and say that you single-handedly won the war and there’s nothing else to tell. Well, there is quite a bit to tell, so get to it.
Yours,
Constance (and Fleurette, if she were here, but she hardly ever is)
Norma to Constance
June 6, 1918
Dear Constance (and Fleurette, if she can be found),
I suppose you’re feeling puny down there in the parlor at night, when the others are reading their letters. I hate to think what sort of people you’re living among, but if a letter from France is all they have to prop themselves up, I suggest you let them cling to their small triumphs and get on with your own work, or have you run out of saboteurs to chase?
I’m in a village in France that I cannot name, doing work I’m not allowed to describe, with the aim of defeating the Germans, which you already knew. What more is there to say?
Food is nourishing, bed is clean and dry, the war goes on.
As ever,
Norma
P.S. Aggie has read your letter and my reply. She became quite stern and demanded that I write a minimum of three pages next week. She’s like a schoolmistress, only more fearsome.
P.P.S. Now I suppose you’ll be wanting to know who Aggie is.
Norma to Constance
June 15, 1918
Dear Constance,
Your package of May 5 arrived in good condition. Aggie wants to write the thank-you letter herself and I will let her, but she says that I must do the introductions first, and make some sort of improvement on my previous correspondence.
Agnes Bell (Aggie, she insists on it) is a nurse stationed at the American hospital here. She comes from Columbus, Ohio, where, after her parents died, she was raised by a grandfather who is now quite elderly and has no interest in her (and didn’t take much interest when she was younger). Her older brothers, who are known to her only by rumor, were placed in care elsewhere, most likely reformatories, and cannot be found. She hasn’t any family to write to herself, which is why she takes such interest in your letters.
Aggie and I are billeted at a hotel that has been entirely requisitioned for women. It offers thirty rooms, which means sixty women, and if you think that sounds cozy and cheerful, you would be mistaken. What little the hotel had in the way of plumbing and lighting is excessively burdened by the demands of sixty Ame
rican women, plus a few Canadians. (The British have made their own arrangements at the other end of town.) There’s nothing in the way of a hot bath, only a bucket of water and a bar of soap in a frigid water closet. Even that is only to be enjoyed once a week according to a schedule posted on the door.
We have no parlor in which to gather as you do (not that I would gather in a parlor, with a war on), as even the lobby has been sectioned off and turned into lodging.
Aggie and I share a room, if you can call it that. It’s really the corner of an attic with a few boards knocked together to serve as walls, so cold in winter that we often thought we’d be better off outside under a nice soft blanket of snow. With summer coming on, it’s already stifling up here.
You might wonder why we’re living at a hotel, and you would not be the only one. The Army made no provisions whatsoever for the women who have been called into service. I suppose it never occurred to them that hospitals would have need of nurses. Even in the Signal Corps, with women running the switchboards, no one thought to build a female barracks or provide anything in the way of uniforms or supplies. It’s fallen to the YWCA to simply turn up wherever we happen to be sent, and to do for us in any way they can. Otherwise it seems to have been the Army’s idea that we’d simply live on air.
This is why women tend to be billeted at hotels or tucked into a widow’s spare room while the men are far more usefully housed in barracks alongside their place of work. In another village “somewhere in France,” the girls on the switchboard are walking a mile and a half to work. Here in my particular “somewhere,” the men are quartered at the fort while I live three miles away, in town, which makes for a walk of an hour if one strolls along as if to a picnic, or forty minutes at a good march. I arrive in thirty-five.
About my own duties I can say almost nothing. Aggie wants me to tell you about the village instead. I hardly think a Baedeker’s guide makes for suitable war-time correspondence, but she’s quite vocal on this point, and we do live in close quarters.
In spite of my best efforts to be sent to the front, I’m stationed in a village well away from the fighting. It isn’t because I’m a woman, or it isn’t only that: the canteen girls, after all, come through town with stories of hiding in a cave all night with the German shells whistling and bursting overhead. Somehow it’s all right for them but I’m ordered to stay behind. The trouble is that it’s impossible for me, being so far removed from the action, to have any idea if our program is seeing any success at all. But this is where they’ve put us and this is where we shall stay.
By “we” I mean about ten thousand Americans. Almost every training school of any consequence is here, including mine. We’ve doubled if not tripled the population of the place, and that doesn’t count the refugees, the British and Canadian units, or the endless train-loads of injured men arriving at one of the hospitals here.
As you can imagine, we have quite overwhelmed this tiny village. I’m sure you can picture the sort of place it is: one of those old hilltop settlements with a stone wall around it, first established by the Gauls but then—inevitably—seized by the Romans, who made those improvements for which they are rightfully famous: bridges and buttresses, a system of water-ways, and carved channels for sewage. Such marvels of the ancient world are still enjoyed by the villagers today—or they were, until our boys came in and put a stop to it.
This was, in other words, quite a primitive place before the war. Now, courtesy of the United States Army, the sewers have been put underground where they belong, the entire village electrified, and the roads macadamized, so that our automobiles (whose tires are far more delicate than horses’ hooves, yet for reasons never adequately explained we send the autos into war) may pass over them.
Village life remains as unchanged as can be under the circumstances. A man comes once a week and drops a load of coal into the town square, which the villagers scurry out to collect according to some system never explained to me. Amid the rationing there is still a market day on Thursday, where one can find turnips in abundance, mounds of a soft round cheese covered in mold, and rabbits for stewing, that being the only meat not in short supply. Church services run more often than the trains in Pennsylvania Station, owing to the number of saints and so forth whose days must be observed. For this they gather in a drafty and dark cathedral that has served them in this manner for some eight hundred years.
Otherwise, the villagers live very much indoors, behind walls of ochre-colored stone and heavy wooden doors with enormous iron hinges forged during the Crusades. Their windows are similarly shuttered, as they abhor the outdoor air and fear it is poisonous. The mustard gas coming off the soldiers’ uniforms does nothing to dissuade them of this notion. For roofing material they prefer chestnut shingles, weathered white, or red clay tiles in the tradition of the Spanish, held together with moss, lichen, and coal-dust.
There, now you have it. The candle is nearly gone, so I must close. If you’re going to continue to insist on letters of this length, send some of those good tallow candles—but wait until summer is over or I’ll get nothing but a puddle at the bottom of the box.
As ever,
Norma
P.S. I’ve had a letter from one of the girls at the Sicomac Dairy, written as a school assignment, I gather. (Is every child in America being told to write a letter to someone in France?) It sounds as though the dairy is being run entirely by the girls now, and that they have it well in hand and are making good use of our barn and fields while we’re away. Have you been out to have a look at the house itself? It isn’t good to let it remain boarded and locked. You ought to go out once a month to give it an airing and make sure the roof and gutters are in good repair.
P.P.S. Of course I don’t keep a diary, it’s strictly forbidden as it could fall into Boche hands. I do, however, maintain a log-book, which consists only of records of our activities and minutes of meetings. I write the minutes myself to avoid the sorts of mishaps and misunderstandings that occur with alarming frequency around here. The notes will be helpful as I’ve just had a letter from General Murray, who is stuck stateside and wants to know how our program is being run without him. I intend to give him an earful.
(enclosed) Aggie to Constance
Dear Constance,
Norma shared your package with me and I absolutely begged to write a note to thank you. We appreciate the hand cream more than you can possibly know. My fingers get horribly chapped and raw by the end of the day. We will use tallow, petroleum jelly, anything! That it smells of roses is reason enough to keep it under lock and key—no one here has anything so fine. And please don’t apologize for the stockings—the sturdier and woollier, the better. Silk wouldn’t last an hour.
I want you to know how much your gifts mean to us, so if you’ll pardon the gruesome details, I’ll tell you that your package arrived at the end of an absolutely murderous day at the hospital. A fresh wave of wounded came in just yesterday, many of them gassed so badly that they’d been coughing uncontrollably for days. Some of them can’t eat on account of their throats being absolutely ruined, and they arrive shockingly malnourished as a result.
The worst, though, are the men with truly devastating wounds that have received no attention beyond a hasty field dressing. Those bandages are, of course, muddy and soaked through in blood by the time they get here. Changing them is an ordeal that nothing in nursing school could’ve prepared me for. Three times yesterday I had to sit on a man’s chest to stop him from bucking and fighting while the doctors peeled away the old bandages. To have to wrestle with a grown man like that, while he’s in such screaming agony—well, a year ago, I never could’ve imagined I’d have the nerve.
But we must summon up the nerve! And then, when we go home at night (if we are able to go home at night, often we stay on duty for a day or two at a time), we are an absolute puddle, every one of us. That’s why it means so much to see a friendly face waiting for us—your sister’s face, in my case—and to have a package from home. T
hat you are able to find any small luxury at all to send—well, I just can’t tell you how it lifts me up. Norma left your dear parcel on my pillow last night, and when I finally crawled into bed after midnight, I admit that the tenderness of her gesture—and yours—made me cry a little. It’s all right, though—a good cry settles me down, and after that I went right to sleep, and clutched your gifts all night long.
Most of all, though, I wanted to thank you for loaning me your sister. It is a hardship and a sacrifice to send our loved ones overseas. The war is unbearable, but Norma helps me to bear it.
She told me that your sister-in-law, Bessie, knows how to make everything better with a cake. Now, when I have a difficult day at the hospital, Norma does the same for me. (Well, she doesn’t bake a cake, but she can procure one from the baker down the street. Not an entire cake—those go to the generals!—but a slice.)
What a blessing she is! A bit of cake works wonders, but so does she.
I suppose you know that Norma is having her own difficulties with her work. I asked her if I couldn’t just say a little about what has been happening at the fort, and what a trying time she’s having with that awful Captain Buscall, but she won’t allow it.
I told her that we ought to write it down and let the censor cross it out if he must. She insists, however, that it isn’t just the censor—it’s Army regulations. Her work is of a secretive nature, and she fears the worst if the Huns find out what she’s up to. Still, I know she wishes she had her sisters here to lend a sympathetic ear. I’m a poor substitute, but I do my best. Fortunately, she’s now corresponding with her former commander, General Murray, who sounds like a much more sensible man than the fellow in charge here. Perhaps he’ll know what to do.
I have my own work tonight, as we have an Army auditor visiting the hospital in a few weeks and I’m poring over my record-books to make sure they’re in order. Please give my best to Fleurette, Francis, Bessie, and the children. I feel as though I know each and every one of you through your letters.