by Amy Stewart
“That’s only because you barked at them like a woman who wears a badge.” Norma thrust a hairbrush at her. “You’d best follow through on your threats. Pull yourself together and go.”
With that, Constance took charge.
12
“MRS. NASH WAS taken to the hospital,” Constance announced at breakfast the next morning. “Miss Miner is expected this afternoon with news of her condition. Classes are to proceed as usual.”
The girls took her orders unquestioningly. Constance had that effect on people, whether she intended it or not. She’d already deputized Sarah Middlebrook and Margaret Day to patrol the camp and make sure that stragglers were rousted from their tents and classes were conducted as usual.
If it was a momentous morning for Constance, having found herself unexpectedly employed in a role for which she possessed abundant qualifications but little interest (hadn’t she already turned down Miss Miner’s offer to serve as matron at a Plattsburg camp?), the day had even more import for Norma, who was to teach her first pigeon class. With some assurance that her deputies could keep the camp in order, Constance stepped out behind the barn to observe. There she found her sister, standing alongside her pigeon cart, her hands on her hips and a kind of glowering furrow to her brow. She addressed the forty or so girls seated before her on camp stools as a general addresses his troops.
“We face serious shortcomings in France when it comes to the dispatch of messages from the front,” Norma began. “What the Army lacks is a program to train pigeons to fly at great distances through gunfire to deliver messages from the trenches. A flock of pigeons can be raised inexpensively with nothing more than the ordinary equipment used to keep chickens or geese. You might not know it, but pigeon fanciers all over the country have been breeding pigeons that can fly at greater altitudes, at higher speeds, and over longer distances, than have ever been seen before.”
With that, she lifted a little door on the side of her pigeon cart and extracted a bird. It occurred to Constance that she didn’t know if Norma had any favorites among her birds, or if some were better suited for carrying out demonstrations of this sort than others. In fact, Constance knew as little about Norma’s birds as it would be possible to know and still live in the same house with her. As she stood at some distance and watched, she was struck by the authority with which Norma handled the opalescent gray creature. She heaved it just slightly into the air with its feet pinched between her fingers, so that it spread its wings and made an alarmed burble that elicited a murmur of sympathy from the onlookers.
A freckle-faced Virginian girl, her red hair in pigtails, raised her hand. “Don’t they go back to the place they were born? What good does it do us to send pigeons to the front if they’re only going to fly home to Maryland?”
The pigeon stretched out its neck and preened a long feather on its breast as if it knew itself to be the subject of discussion. That raised another ripple of interest as the girls sat up a bit taller to have a look at it.
Norma said, “They’ll be raised at Army headquarters, or at any encampment where communications are to be established. A flock will go from there to the front in a cart like this one”—and she turned to wave her arm in the direction of her cart—“so that our soldiers can send messages back to their commanders without any fear of interference from German spies or untrustworthy French telephone operators.”
Sarah, having finished her patrol, had come to stand next to Constance in the back. “Are the French operators terribly untrustworthy?” she whispered.
“Well, Norma doesn’t trust them,” Constance said.
“Then I won’t, either.”
“Couldn’t the Germans just shoot down the pigeons and read the messages?” another girl asked.
“We expect them to try,” Norma said grimly.
Constance wasn’t sure whom Norma was thinking of when she said “we,” but she spoke as if she had the concurrence of the entire United States Army behind her.
“A certain number of pigeons will give their lives in service to their country, just as a certain number of soldiers will,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important that we have a robust breeding program and send an ample supply to the front. As for the messages being read, they’ll naturally be in code.”
The red-headed girl asked, “Where is the Army raising its pigeons now?”
The bird in Norma’s hand was getting restless, so she put it back in the cart and said, “That’s just the problem. The Army hasn’t done a thing to prepare and behaves as if the telephone and telegraph are in any way sufficient to deliver messages in wartime. By the time they realize how many pigeons are needed, and the work involved in putting the entire program in place, it will be too late. That’s why we’re moving forward now, without waiting to be asked.”
That raised even more of a murmur from the crowd. A few girls rose to their feet. “Do you mean to say that the Army hasn’t any interest in messenger pigeons and hasn’t asked citizens to do anything concerning them? What about the Red Cross? Have they any need of them?”
None of this flustered Norma. “The Red Cross will need more pigeons than the Army does,” she said, as if it were a well-known fact. “They could use them to send back counts of the wounded and ask for supplies. Why, even doctors—”
Before she could finish, a girl from Philadelphia named Alice rose and said, rather self-righteously, Constance thought, “We’ve already been asked to knit mufflers and plant vegetables, and now we’ve come to learn first aid and convalescent cooking. Shouldn’t we do that before we take up bird-keeping, if no official request has been made?”
Something along the lines of a mutiny was under way, but Norma acted as if she hadn’t heard. “We’ll begin today with the basics of pigeon husbandry,” she announced. “Inside this cart is a perfectly outfitted pigeon loft, with everything you might need to start a flock at home. You may come and have a look. I can take in three at a time.”
That was enough to distract the students from the practical difficulties posed by Norma’s scheme. Everyone jumped up at once, and soon a line went around the cart to the little door at the back, where each girl was obliged to remove her hat and bend down to step inside and take a look at the miniature house Norma had built for her pigeons.
Alice and a few of the other girls decided that they would rather roll bandages, and drifted off in pairs toward the sewing tent.
Constance was glad Norma didn’t see them go. Sarah noticed her watching and said, “Don’t bother about them. Not everyone is suited for working on plans so secret that the Army doesn’t even know it has them.”
She winked at Constance and they took two empty stools in the back, where they waited for the rest of the girls to have a look inside the pigeon cart before they took their own turn.
It was there that Maude Miner found them.
“I’m just in from Washington,” she said quietly, putting a hand on Constance’s shoulder. “Come and walk with me.”
Miss Miner was dressed in a fine blue suit with a ruffled shirtwaist entirely unlike anything that had been seen at the camp in the last week.
“You look like you’ve come from some kind of affair,” Constance said, as they left the barn and strolled around the edge of the training field.
“Just another meeting at the War Department,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a mess. We couldn’t send fifty thousand troops today if we had to. Everyone thinks we can rely on British Navy ships, but why on earth would they send a ship all the way over to collect us? And they expect the French to arm us. The French can’t arm themselves!”
“At least Norma’s pigeons stand at the ready,” Constance offered.
“And now this camp has come undone,” Miss Miner continued, as if she hadn’t heard. “Mrs. Nash won’t be back. She managed to break her leg in that fall, and twisted the ankle on the other. She’ll be laid up for weeks.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Constance said. “I take it you’ve returned to run the camp?”
“No, I’ve returned to tell you that you’re to run the camp,” Miss Miner said crisply. “If I leave Washington, there’s not a single woman at the table as we ready for war. I’m needed there. You’re already here.”
“So are two hundred other women,” Constance said. “Couldn’t you find one of them to take Mrs. Nash’s place?”
“I couldn’t find one who’s worked as a deputy sheriff and knows about keeping girls out of trouble, and could haul a wounded woman out of a ditch if she had to. I don’t believe we have any others of those, Miss Kopp.”
“I’m no longer suited for matron work,” Constance said. “I’ve put it behind me.”
“Then you picked a terrible time to quit. You’ve prepared yourself for a life of service, and now you’re being called upon to serve. Just keep doing what you’ve already done. See to it that the girls follow a schedule. Maintain order. I’m told you’ve already appointed two deputies. You see, it comes naturally to you.”
“Couldn’t you bring someone in? Who’s been running all the other camps? There must be another Mrs. Nash somewhere.”
Miss Miner looked at her, puzzled. “I wouldn’t have thought of you as a shirker.”
“I’m not a shirker.” She said it quite forcefully. Constance could be fearsome when she wanted to. “Only the camp ought to be led by someone who is more in tune with its . . . well, its general intentions.”
Maude Miner said, “Why wouldn’t you be, unless you’re a pacifist and never bothered to tell me?”
“The war’s a terrible thing,” Constance said, “but that isn’t it. The marching exercises are treated as little more than a game. Yesterday we were given wooden rifles as if we were children. There’s talk about progressing to real firearms next, but we won’t, will we? There’s to be no serious military training.”
“Not with guns,” Miss Miner admitted. “I suppose it is a bit theatrical, with the marching and the uniforms and the wooden rifles.”
“That’s just the word for it,” Constance said. “It’s nothing but theater. I might as well audition for one of Fleurette’s plays.”
“But don’t you see? The reporters take photographs, and the generals come to watch our graduation exercises. Before women can be admitted to the military—before we can be trusted with a rifle, or put into a trench—the commanders must have a picture in their minds. They couldn’t even imagine it, before we started these camps. Now they see girls in khaki, marching in a straight line. Isn’t that a start?”
“A start toward what? Are you saying,” Constance asked, hardly believing it herself, “that your aim is to convince the Army to make soldiers of these women?”
“My aim is to plant the idea in the minds of the generals and the congressmen and the President that women are capable of military service. Right now there aren’t very many women who would join the Army, regardless. But perhaps we’re putting the idea into women’s minds, too.”
Constance looked out at the rows of drab tents, so like a military encampment. Could Miss Miner possibly be right? Was it first necessary to put on a performance, to sneak into the minds of generals through the back door of their imaginations, before they might someday take the notion seriously?
She couldn’t say with any certainty that she took it seriously, either. Only a few years earlier, she couldn’t have imagined herself as a police officer, much less as a soldier in the trenches. But perhaps that was because she’d never had an opportunity to imagine it. She’d never read about such a thing in a novel, or seen it performed on a stage, or even heard it sung about in a song.
Still she wasn’t convinced. “It’s too much like play-acting for my taste.”
“Then take charge over the week-end. Let me see who might be persuaded on short notice. It’s either that or we close down the camp this afternoon. I suppose you’re the one to decide about that. What’s it going to be?”
Constance didn’t like to hear it put that way. Norma would never forgive her: she’d only just started in with her pigeons. “There’s no need to close it down. I can run things until you find someone else.”
“If I can find someone else,” Miss Miner said.
“You will.”
13
“SARAH WENT OUT after curfew. Why haven’t you arrested her?” Fleurette was lolling on her cot, buffing her fingernails. She had the long, nimble fingers required of a seamstress.
“The one I’m going to arrest is you, if you make trouble while I’m gone.” It raised Constance’s spirits to even make the threat of an arrest. There might be something to this matron business after all.
Fleurette rolled her eyes over to Roxie, who was brushing her hair with the air of a girl preparing for a night out. “I’m not staying in. Even Norma’s out wandering around.”
“Norma has never wandered around in her life. I’ve allowed her to go look after her birds. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
With that, Constance went out into the gathering darkness and walked among the tents with Mrs. Nash’s walking-stick in her hand. The stick was useful for pushing open tent flaps, and for rapping on the ground to call an unruly crowd to attention. There was no doubt in Constance’s mind as to how a camp matron behaved. Having agreed to play the role (for only a few days, she reminded herself, until Miss Miner secured a replacement), she threw herself into the part.
The girls were fairly subdued following the announcement that Mrs. Nash wouldn’t be returning, and seemed willing to observe the rules and keep up appearances until some permanent arrangements could be made.
As she went between the tents, the campers asked her about those arrangements. “Couldn’t you stay on as matron, Miss Kopp? There’s nothing to it,” a freckle-faced Irish girl said.
“If there’s nothing to it, why don’t you volunteer?” Constance asked.
“Oh, I couldn’t get anyone to listen to me,” she protested. “But they’re all afraid of you.”
“I’m going to look for the compliment buried in that remark,” Constance said, but she knew what the girl meant. A woman either carried herself with authority or she didn’t. The girls responded to that: it was why Maude Miner put her in charge.
At the edge of camp resided a particularly noisy group, all with names that Constance couldn’t keep straight: Tizzy, Kitty, Mimi—frivolous names born from summer cottages along the beach in Cape Cod or Long Island, names that they’d carry with them long after they’d outgrown them. Constance had seen it among the friends of Sheriff Heath’s wife, Cordelia. A woman with stiff white hair and a sturdy tweed suit would nonetheless answer to Sissy or Bunny, as she had from childhood.
The difficulty tonight with these girls arose not from their names, but from their extravagant flaunting of the camp’s rules. Among their transgressions: they’d smuggled in a phonograph that they played at all hours, they were often seen in the evenings out of uniform, and they deposited enough confection wrappers and empty tins of smoked fish in the rubbish bins to let the entire camp know that they had treats no one else had.
There was a reason for rules against contraband, and it was one that Constance respected: No one should flaunt their wealth in wartime. They’d have to live together as equals.
Here was one advantage to taking command of the camp for a few days. She could right this particular wrong.
She poked her walking-stick inside the tent. Tizzy rushed to put out a cigarette and turn off the Victrola.
“Is it nine o’clock already? We wouldn’t want to miss lights-out. It’s so enchanting when the lanterns all go dim at once.”
Constance looked around at the lavish rugs and pillows, the half-hidden contraband, and the flimsy dresses tossed about like rags. She said, “You’re out here by yourselves, holding your own little party every night. You stay to yourselves in class. You eat every meal together at your own table.”
“Well . . . we don’t want to be in anyone’s way,” Ginny put in.
“Besides, we’ve known each other so lo
ng, we’re practically sisters,” Liddy added.
“And the others are so badly behaved,” Tizzy said. “The girls in tent eight are running a card game, and I assure you they’re not playing for buttons. That’s to say nothing of what goes on with the Tuesday-night kitchen crew. They’re a bad influence.”
“You have quite the eye for misbehavior,” Constance said. “Tomorrow morning I’m moving you to the tent next to mine. You’ll be right in the center of camp, so you can tell me all about the doings of the girls in tent eight. The Victrola goes into storage unless it’s to be played for everyone. And I’ll take whatever treats you have left and set them aside for our graduation party. I’m sure most everything you brought will keep for another month or so. If I see any of you out of uniform again, the entire tent goes on latrine duty for a week.”
The protests were loud and heartfelt, but it gave Constance a great deal of satisfaction. The entire camp would know what had happened. They’d know that she had been the one to lay down the law. Even if she was only to run the camp for a few more days, she wanted to see it run well and with authority. This ought to do it.
She left Tizzy and her friends to wail and moan over their diminished fortunes and went to take a walk along the perimeter fence. The front gate was locked at night. Hack and Clarence kept up a light patrol, stepping out from their tents a few times each night to watch for signs of trouble. There never were any. The camp sat on a peaceful and remote stretch of land, and the road was only ever traversed by farmers.
Nevertheless, she enjoyed an evening beat. Like an officer poking down alley-ways and beating his stick into the bushes at the perimeter of the city park, she walked along a little path next to the fence, taking note of the quiet of the woods beyond and the congenial hum from the campsite. The mess tent had only just been buttoned up for the night. The latrine saw a few visitors, girls picking their way through the grass along a path lit here and there with lanterns. An outburst of laughter rang out from one tent or another, but it was only just nine o’clock and Constance wasn’t going to hand out any warnings about noise so early.