By the time Mary got through packing, her luggage consisted of a mammoth trunk, her hatboxes, her fitted dressing case, and one suitcase. At the last minute before boarding, she dashed into a New York store and snatched up a fur coat, which she casually charged off to the Curtis Publishing Company. This coat turned out to be the most practical thing she took with her. Next most useful, as it turned out, would be her umbrella. The white velvet gown remains an enigma.
Getting a cabin on the steamer Franconia had been no problem. Mary’s biggest difficulty was in saying good-bye to her family. Maggie the cook presented her with a small religious medal to hang around her neck and never, never take off because she’d need all the divine protection she could get. Stanley Junior sent a telegram from school, demanding to be taken along as his mother’s bodyguard. Stanley Senior came to stow his wife safely aboard, his stiff upper lip much in evidence. He hoped she’d stay out of trouble, but he had a dark foreboding that she wouldn’t.
So prominent a figure as Mary Roberts Rinehart had naturally been getting a good deal of publicity about her projected visit to the war zone. Her stateroom was filled with the customary bon voyage telegrams, bouquets of flowers, baskets of fruit; she added to the accumulation a complete suit made of rubber that she’d bought herself. As soon as the ship got torpedoed, assuming that it did, she was supposed to put on the suit and inflate it by blowing into an attached rubber tube. Since the United States was at this time still a neutral country, its vessels were supposed to be inviolate, but Mary’s innate distrust of things in general was still operating at full force.
As it happened, the old Franconia did get torpedoed and sunk, but at a later time on a different run when Mary was not aboard. This was a break for her; that rubber suit, had she ever managed to get it on, might have proven no more reliable than those fragile inner tubes in the Premier’s tires. Later on, American ships would be convoyed; but the Franconia made this crossing without an escort, taking no more precautions against the German U-boats than to ban smoking or the lighting of matches on deck and to black out the cabin portholes with cardboard after dark.
As night came on, Mary began to feel shivery. She was traveling alone for the first time, she didn’t know a soul on board, there was not a single other woman on the passenger list. She’d never left her family for more than a few days; she was already worrying about the boys and about her own willful need to plunge into whatever she elected to do, no matter what the cost to herself and her loved ones. She worried that her life insurance, which was all she had in assets except the Bluff, didn’t cover mothers who went off to war. In London, she was to discover that Lloyd’s were willing for £2,000 to sell her a war-protection policy. She took advantage of the offer and, again, let Curtis Publishing pay.
Fortunately the crossing was uneventful, though hardly enjoyable. Mary did have one great stroke of luck, which proved to be the “open, sesame” to her great experience. Herself a notable, she was assigned a seat at the same table as an eminent English barrister. Once the ice had been broken, she told her tablemate why she was going abroad and asked what her chances were of getting to see any action. The barrister’s first reaction, like everybody else’s, was negative. He did, however, mention that his wife was Belgian and might be able to give Mrs. Rinehart some helpful suggestions once they reached London, assuming they didn’t get bombed or hopelessly snarled in red tape on the way.
The barrister’s wife could not have been more helpful. She steered Mary to the Belgian Red Cross headquarters at the Savoy Hotel. The persons in charge were puzzled by this American lady but they listened, and what she said made sense. All the world knew in a general way how appallingly Belgium had suffered at the hands of the Germans, but what did other countries, especially America, know about the Belgians’ daily life in wartime? What about those refugees who were keeping one jump ahead of the ruthless German war machine, trying to stay alive, to till the fields, to keep body and soul together however they could? What about the decimated Belgian army, still valiantly carrying on, ill-fed, ill-equipped, lacking hospitals, nurses, even dressings for their wounds?
The British and French were also fighting the Germans now, but what they were not doing was spreading the word abroad. How could Americans be expected to give all the help that was needed when they were not yet getting the whole, tragic story? Telling the truth was the one way Mary Roberts Rinehart could further their cause, and this was what she’d come to do. Would they not help her to get started?
The Belgian officials took a good deal of convincing that this elegant little lady from Pittsburgh could really do them any good, but gradually they came to understand the force of Mrs. Rinehart’s argument, her reputation, and her personality. She might go, and they would take care of her as best they could. They gave her a pink card. This was no hollow gesture. Only the king of the Belgians, his minister of war, and the premier held such cards. Hers would be the fourth, and the first ever issued to a non-Belgian.
Before she talked with the Belgians, Mary had already paid her duty call on Lord Northcliffe, as did every other U.S. correspondent. The famous newspaper tycoon was pleased enough to chat with an attractive, well-dressed American lady; he invited her back to tea more than once during her short stay in London. However, he either could not or would not lift a finger to help her across the channel.
Mary had no illusions about the famous publisher and political activist. She’d heard of his rapidly changing likes and dislikes, his violent reactions to being disagreed with about anything at all, but she did enjoy his sense of humor. When Northcliffe found out that, with no help from him, Mrs. Rinehart had managed to find a loophole to slither through and was really on her way, he sent young Valentine Williams, later to be known as a novelist, to escort her to the boat train with a quizzical (Mary’s word) note and a big bunch of roses.
Mary had dressed for the crossing in a black taffeta dress, her fur coat, and a money belt hidden under her petticoat. That armload of roses was just the touch an embryo war correspondent needed to equip her for the next phase of her hegira. She’d left her trunk and hatboxes in London, she traveled with just the suitcase containing her battle fatigues, a large notebook, a tidy little leather case containing a knife, fork, and spoon, a good pair of field glasses, and a trench periscope.
This last was a long, slender contraption of khaki-painted tin, something like a section of square drainpipe, with mirrors inside that reflected into a peephole at the bottom. The idea was to poke the top end up over the edge of the trench so that its holder could see what was happening across the battle lines without getting potted by a German. Judging from the numbers of these periscopes Mary had seen in London shop windows, they were de rigueur for every Tommy going to the front, but she never saw a single one of them being put to practical use. Hers was about as helpful as her inflatable rubber torpedo suit. Being a sensible woman, at least some of the time, she evidently mislaid them both somewhere. They were never mentioned again.
The full story of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s experiences during those two months she spent covering the war would require a book to itself. As soon as she’d got home and fulfilled her contract for short pieces with the Saturday Evening Post, she wrote that book. Kings, Queens, and Pawns, published in 1915 by George H. Doran, was, like her Post articles, based on the copious notes that she’d made under conditions ranging from uncomfortable to impossible in the big notebook she’d toted all the way from Pittsburgh to the war zone and back again. It is a fascinating account of an all-but-dauntless woman’s incredible journey. It is not a cozy read.
There is little in Kings, Queens, and Pawns of military strategy, of battles won and battles lost. Mary saw the enormities and iniquities of war through the eyes of a nurse and a mother. She wrote of the trainloads of wounded, dying, and dead soldiers she’d seen brought away from the front on stretchers, laid out like logs in ever-lengthening rows on bare station platforms when there was nowhere else to put them. She described their ofte
n ragged uniforms, stiffened to the texture of leather by dirt, sweat, and blood after weeks in the trenches without ever a chance to take them off, having to be cut away with surgeons’ shears when the surgeons had any such tools to work with. The bare bodies underneath would be black with lice, the open wounds green with gangrene. She wrote of the many who died, not from lack of caring but from the shortage of hospitals, doctors, nurses, medical supplies, of bandages and soap, of blankets and cots and warmth and clean water.
She told of the still-unvanquished remnant of the Belgian army, of the cheerful faces on soldiers drilling in thin uniforms with no warm underwear beneath them. She described how decrepit their boots were, when they had any, how some were wearing wooden sabots insulated with wisps of straw and some had on carpet slippers for want of anything better.
She told of their dismal food. Mary wished some of those women back home who were helping the war effort by knitting miles and miles of khaki scarves would put down their needles for a while and start making jam to vary the bleak monotony of unsweetened coffee, of black bread with no cheese to put on it, of tasteless messes of minced meat and potatoes, of stews made from whatever came to hand.
What came to hand might better not have been examined too closely. Belgian dogs had traditionally been trained to work for their living. Mary saw plenty of the big, heavyset Bouviers des Flandres harnessed three abreast, pulling the mitrailleuses, the small, deadly, quick-firing field guns that the Germans so greatly disliked, but she saw no little dogs. When she asked why, she was told that the soldiers had eaten them. She prayed for some philanthropist to send the Belgian army a shipful of good American baked beans.
Mary waxed eloquent on the subject of canned beans. They could be carried in a knapsack, heated and eaten right out of the can, eaten cold if there wasn’t any fire to warm them up. They were tasty, they were sustaining, they were the kind of food that fighting men needed. And the empty cans could be useful too. She thought it would be a good idea to put stones in them and hang them on the barbed wire entanglements so they could clank like cowbells and warn of approaching enemies. Food was so desperately important to health and morale. As the Belgians’ greatest needs, Mary put portable kitchens right up at the top of her list along with hospital equipment, surgical supplies, jam, rubber boots, and, most definitely, canned beans.
On her way over, Mary had expected to dock at Calais. Instead, for some reason she was never to know, the ferry wound up at Boulogne. She’d heard stories of other journalists going to jail for straying outside their assigned itineraries, and she’d had unhappy visions of languishing on a bed of straw in a dank cell. Apparently, however, it had been assumed that a handsome woman in an elegant hat, a fur coat, and a black taffeta gown could be no other than the wife, widow, or (this being France) the mistress of somebody rich and influential. She had been politely ignored. She’d bought a ticket to Calais and hung around hoping she’d get a chance to use it.
That was how she happened to see her first hospital train, its cars filled with improvised racks that held row upon row of iron stretchers, three tiers of them, one above the other, all filled with men who just lay there, not making a sound. One by one, through an open window in the car, the stretchers had been passed down to orderlies who laid them out on the unsheltered platform, exposed to a cutting wind. Mary had been able to do nothing but stand there watching the line of stretchers get longer and longer. She’d been relieved when the Calais train came along and she’d been put aboard without any hitch, but the three hours the train took to make the twenty-mile trip did little to raise her spirits.
She’d stayed one night in Calais, just long enough to lose her field glasses and spend a cheerless morning visiting field hospitals, then she’d been driven to Dunkirk. Here she was well situated for what she hoped to achieve. Dunkirk was (and still is, despite the pounding it took in World War II) on the Strait of Dover, just across from England and only a short drive from the Belgian border. Her Belgian hosts were putting her up there at the Hotel des Arcades, along with about fifty officers of various nations and two Russian grand dukes.
By this time Mary was used to being the only woman among a crowd of strange men, but she was not happy about being unable to find a single bath amid so much faded elegance. She made her toilette as best she could and went in to dinner. Little did Mary know that this was the kaiser’s son’s birthday and that the Germans were going to honor the occasion by staging a bombing raid on Dunkirk. She was seated next to the two grand dukes. She saw no point in consulting a menu—the only food available was stewed rabbit, which she detested but ate. It was just after the demitasse was served that the airplanes droned overhead and the bombs began to drop. Immediately every light in Dunkirk went out.
Mary hadn’t minded joining the upper classes in their villainous demitasses, but at this juncture she did become deeply concerned as to whether heaven would in truth protect the working girl. She could hear other diners making hasty exits, heading for the cellar or the downstairs lobby. One of the two grand dukes struck a match and Mary caught a glimpse of him and his companion nonchalantly picking up their coffee cups and sauntering toward the door.
What was good enough for a grand duke was good enough for Mrs. Rinehart. Mary had not quite enough sangfroid to take her coffee along; she left it on the table and followed the men. Outside the dining room was an open area with chairs and sofas; she settled herself there with the two dukes and a few others to wait out the raid, scared stiff but trying to maintain an outward appearance of calm in case the lights ever went on again. The following morning, crossing the lobby, Mary was aghast to notice that she and the grand dukes had been sitting directly beneath a clear glass skylight.
Being attacked from the air during a war in which it was still possible to get trampled underfoot by a cavalry charge must have been a bizarre experience for those Russian grand dukes, who would soon become as obsolete as the lancers. Hardly more than a decade had passed since Wilbur and Orville Wright had demonstrated that a gasoline-powered heavier-than-air machine could be a viable form of transportation, but World War I was already proving the airplane’s value as an engine of war. Aerial dogfights between ace pilots of opposing sides would bring a splash of lurid color to the gruesome monotony of war. The race to develop faster, sturdier planes accelerated the growth of aviation as perhaps no less grim set of circumstances could have done.
As yet, however, planes were hardly more than toys; tiny, slow, flimsily built machines with open cockpits, unable to deliver missiles big enough to make much of an effect. The sixty-six bombs that night were all dropped by hand. They killed a few civilians, including an old woman who had been in the act of saying her prayers; they broke some windows, blasted a few more holes in the street, and gave an embryo war correspondent a very bad night.
Mary took off her black taffeta gown but kept on her undergarments. She’d manage to snatch a few winks, then she’d wake up, open her door, and peek out to make sure the sentry who had been assigned to guard the two grand dukes was still on the job. He would stand to attention and salute, she would venture a feeble smile and shut her door, feeling a degree less panicky. As time went on, she learned to shrug off the bombs and go on about her business.
CHAPTER 20
On Active Duty
Now that they’d accepted her, the Belgians were obviously determined to take full advantage of their volunteer public relations agent’s proffered services. Mary’s indoctrination began the following day, and for the next three weeks she became a steady visitor to the Belgian front. While other overseas journalists, most of them men, were cooling their heels and fuming, Mrs. Rinehart was trotting around in her Tish suit, her hiking boots, and the impulsively acquired fur coat that had already proved its worth as a garment, a lap robe, and a blanket.
During this period, and for her entire stay, Mary had no trouble getting wherever she chose to go. She was never sure whether this was due to a special dispensation from higher up or whether, be
cause of the unorthodox way she’d wangled herself across the channel, she’d simply fallen through some bureaucratic chink and become an invisible woman.
There was, however, one man who did keep careful tabs on the ubiquitous American. Whether he was Secret Service or some kind of gentleman adventurer, Mary never knew. He could have been a cousin of Richard Hannay or King Alfred’s long-lost uncle; she was pretty sure that the name he gave her was not his own.
Anyway, he seemed to go wherever he wanted to, driving a car which in no way resembled the sleek limousines that Richard Hannay kept stealing in The Thirty-Nine Steps, but showed the dents and scars of many parlous adventures. Stories about this mysterious figure abounded: He spoke flawless Deutsch, he could pass through the enemy barbed wire like a wraith, he’d once put on a German uniform and goose-stepped a squad of Belgian spies safely through the lines into occupied Brussels.
Maybe the stories were true. A woman, particularly a mystery writer, could get to believing almost anything after she’d spent a week or two being picked up night after night in a staff car with no lights showing, driven miles over shell-pocked roads to an undisclosed destination with an escort whose face she couldn’t even see and a chauffeur who had to depend on luck as much as skill.
Once the going became too precarious, the driver would stop the car and her mysterious escort or an army officer would lead her forward toward the trenches. Often they would be within sight and sound of enemy shelling; sometimes the fusillade would brighten up the sky like sheet lightning. Startling as this was, it at least helped the walkers to dodge the many communication wires and the craters that had been dug by exploding shells and bombs. These potholes were often deep, always filled with icy, stagnant, horrible-smelling water, and hid things that Mary didn’t want to know about. She would plod on, keeping up as best she could with her fast-striding escort.
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