Finding their way to the trenches was all too easy. The closer they got, the worse the stink. It wasn’t only the dead bodies that fouled the air but the natural odors that resulted from many men being stuck for days and weeks in a muddy ditch with no way to get clean or even to deal with their bodily functions. These soldiers, the surviving third of the Belgian army, had gotten used to living under worse conditions than beasts in a filthy byre; Mary seethed with rage at the German military bigwigs who had brought decent human beings to such an inhuman pass.
If the shelling came too close, Mary’s bodyguards would take her away from the danger zone. Sometimes, however, they cut it rather fine. She told of sitting in a staff car, watching the village that she and her escort had been on their way to visit being methodically knocked down by enemy bombardment. Another time they entered a shelled town just a blast too soon. One final shell dropped through the roof of the only house left on the street and killed the last inhabitant, an old woman who must have been either too slow or too war-weary to flee. Or perhaps she simply hadn’t wanted to leave the warmth of her kitchen—she had been bending over the stove when she was hit. There wasn’t enough of her left to bury.
As Mary and her escort approached the house, they could watch the stairs slowly collapsing. A wall was still standing. On it hung an ebony crucifix with an ivory Christ that had lost an arm, and somebody had painstakingly carved a replacement out of wood. The officer she was with took down the crucifix and presented it to Mary. Its former owner, he told her, would not be needing it any longer.
Wherever she went, Mary looked for corroboration of the gruesome reports about German atrocities against Belgian women and children that had been rife in American newspapers before she’d left Pittsburgh. One of these described a little girl who had lost both hands. The allegation was that, as she had held them over her head in a gesture of surrender, they had been wantonly slashed off by a saber-wielding uhlan. The child had been taken to England. When Mary got back there, she tracked down the woman who had taken care of the girl and learned that in fact the hands had been surgically amputated after being mutilated beyond saving by a shell that had fallen in a convent garden.
Mary never did find even a hint of corroborative evidence with regard to this sort of sensational propaganda. The realities were damnable enough, though, and it was the truth, the whole truth, that her inscrutable mentor wanted her to take back to America. After a few forays into trenches, ruined towns, and hamlets, once even into the blood-soaked morass called no-man’s-land that divided the German barbed wire from the Belgian, where the shell-holes hid so many bodies of soldiers from both sides who had fallen under fire and couldn’t be rescued, she would report to her inscrutable mentor. He would read Mary’s notes, amplify and explain, help her to understand what in fact she had seen and how best to write it up for the American public without passing on any useful information to the Axis.
He made no bones of the fact that he was using Mrs. Rinehart as his messenger to the West only because he had nobody else available to carry the message as he wanted it carried. It was not until after Mary got home that an official liaison representative was accredited to the Allies and news began to get through on a regular basis.
Whoever had said it often rained on the battlefields had been right on the mark. Mary’s umbrella served her well on these tours of inspection. She would be driven back to the Hotel des Arcades sometime before dawn, go up to her room, struggle out of her mud-caked boots and soggy trench suit, and write up her notes. Only then was she free to crawl into her clammy, chilly bed and grab what sleep she could before the traffic noises of rumbling lorries and dispatch riders on motorcycles made further rest impossible.
Gone were the amenities that had once made the Hotel des Arcades a luxurious haven for pleasure-seekers. The food was bearable but only just, and the harried staff had no time to cope with a foreign lady’s laundry needs. Mary washed out her own stockings and lingerie in her basin, dried them as best she could, and shrugged off any hope of ironing her petticoats. Then came the ultimate blow. Through the medium of a fine-toothed comb, she became wretchedly aware that she was running what the flip young things of the pompadour period had been wont to refer to as a cootie garage.
Head lice among the long-haired women in a war zone were probably no great rarity. Nevertheless, though Mary Rinehart could stand a good deal in the way of tribulation, she found this particular indignity one too many. She was visiting Red Cross hospitals every day, and one of them managed to spare her enough disinfectant to cope with the situation. The stuff smelled to high heaven, as she faithfully reported, but at least she was no longer lousy.
These visits to field hospitals were as painful as Mary’s battlefield experiences. Her trained nurse’s eye could too easily pick out which of the sick and wounded would soon be dead, which were going to get better. But what did “better” mean? Better than what? How would they function as civilians, these soldiers who had lost feet, arms, legs, hands, had been deafened permanently by exploding bombs, blinded by flying shrapnel, had had their nerves ruined by shell shock, their constitutions undermined by disease, lack of treatment, lack of food? Where would they live, now that the Germans had wrought such devastation? How would they find work, if they were able to work? Who would have money left to pay them?
And what of the noncombatants? Civilians had suffered as well as the troops. Mary saw many of them in the hospitals, sick, maimed, stunned by the horrors of war. One was a tiny baby with both legs gone. What sort of life was in store for that baby, for all these unfortunates caught up willy-nilly in this hellish ongoing nightmare?
Mary wanted very much to be granted an audience with the king of the Belgians. She held no great hope of getting one, for King Albert had more important matters on his mind than chatting with foreign reporters. But she’d felt there was no harm in asking. Great was her surprise one morning when, standing by the dresser in deshabille, brushing her smelly but cootie-free hair, she got a visitor.
She assumed it was the boy with the hot water and told him to come in; she was jolted to see in her mirror a tall, lavishly bearded man in uniform bowing himself through the door. As she clutched her dressing gown about her and prepared to sell her virtue dearly, he bowed again and proffered an envelope. The king’s chamberlain informed Mrs. Rinehart that His Majesty was expecting her in La Panne at three o’clock that same afternoon.
Here was a howdy-do! Mary searched frantically through her meager traveling wardrobe for the white gloves without which, somebody or other had assured her, she’d never get within curtsying distance of a royal personage. She combed Dunkirk for buttons to fill the gaps on her cloth-topped shoes. She experienced the miracle of finding a hairdresser and getting a proper shampoo; it was reassuring to know that her clean tresses would not offend His Majesty’s nostrils.
By two o’clock, comparatively resplendent in her taffeta gown and white gloves, carrying her handbag and fur muff, wearing her one chic traveling hat with its veil adjusted to the acme of perfection, Mary descended. A general with a dreadful cold met her, and immediately commanded her to remove the veil. It was, she gathered, not the done thing to impose even a wisp of netting between the common visage and the regal gaze. Or perhaps the general feared she might be a spy.
Mary needed an authoritative report to give the American people through the Saturday Evening Post. She had inserted in her petition a hope that King Albert would allow her to take notes of their meeting. She would write them up and present them for his approval before sending them back to her publisher. Permission was granted. This turned out to be the only piece that Mary was actually able to write, send to the Post, and have published while she was still abroad.
Those interested in reading the official report will find it in Kings, Queens, and Pawns. The one in My Story, written long after she’d ceased to worry about censorship, draws a more intimate picture. The Belgian general’s driver was a redheaded Flemish maniac (possibly an exaggerati
on—Mary was prone to them) with a ferocious mustache. He bounced her and the general over mended roads lined with earthen redoubts and barbed wire, alongside canals filled with barges. They passed a file of dark-skinned, bearded spahis in burnooses riding shaggy, tough-looking horses. These were Algerian cavalrymen, fighting bravely in the French army even as they cursed the chilly, rainy French climate. They passed a pig that had escaped from a slaughterhouse; it was being pursued by a small gang of soldiers clearly bent on an impromptu barbecue.
Between sneezes, the general made a brave stab at giving Mary a crash course in protocol. Madame Rinehart must not speak before His Majesty had spoken, nor sit down unless His Majesty invited her to. She must not get too close to the king, about two meters would be near enough. Mary wished to goodness the general would open the car window and let out some of his germs so she wouldn’t infect the king.
King Albert and Queen Elisabeth were an attractive young couple. They had sent their two small children to England for safety’s sake, and were living modestly in a villa not far from the hospital that the Bavarian-born queen had established in La Panne. Mary had already visited Queen Elisabeth’s Hospital and found it by far the best-planned and -equipped she had seen, nor would she discover a better one during the entire tour of inspection.
At last the car stopped. So did Mary’s heart. It was time to meet the king! A butler opened the door, the king’s equerry came forward and shook the visitor’s hand. The general, to Mary’s surprise, stayed outside in the wind, still sneezing. The equerry opened an inside door and announced to a screen that was blocking Mary’s view of the room ahead, “Mrs. Rinehart.”
Then he stepped back and shut the door. Mary was alone. She took a deep breath and crept around the screen. A tall, blond man came toward her. While she was trying to remember how to curtsy, he held out his hand for her to shake. She waited for him to speak. He didn’t. This was not the American way; Mary was horrified to hear her own voice admonishing the king.
“You know, Sire, you’re supposed to speak first.”
Obligingly, King Albert spoke, he suggested they sit down. She waited for him to sit first, instead he was holding a chair for her. Through the window Mary could see the general’s military cape being blown up over his head. Obviously her mentor was in no position to put the king straight, so she might as well sit.
So this amiable young giant was the man who had turned down Kaiser Wilhelm’s magnanimous offer to leave little Belgium unharmed on condition that the German army be allowed to march scatheless across her land on its way to conquer France and England. This was the man who had sat down beside his ministers and, with them, determined to buy no shameful immunity at the expense of Belgium’s neighbors and allies. Albert’s careworn face was testimony to the unimaginable strains to which he had already been subjected, to his awareness that there would be more and maybe even worse fighting to come. Yet here he was, being courteous to an American woman who’d been so flustered by the suddenness of his invitation that she’d forgotten to bring along her notebook and pen.
Albert wasn’t much better equipped than Mary, but he rummaged around among some papers on a table and managed to come up with a pencil and an empty manila envelope addressed to Son Majeste le Roi des Belges. Mary turned it over to the blank side and began taking notes, using her lap for a desk, scattering her possessions one after the other: her handbag, her muff, the white gloves that she’d taken off as soon as she’d realized His Majesty wouldn’t mind. Neither did he mind stooping to pick them up for her, even when she dropped them again. Mary herself was dreadfully embarrassed but not too flustered to keep on asking questions.
Inevitably, they talked about atrocities. The king was a fair-minded man, he tried to answer objectively. Not all the Germans had flaming red eyeballs and extralong eyeteeth, as some of the posters had shown them. But, yes, bad things had happened, mostly during the invasion when German resentment against the puny nation that had dared to defy their giant might was at its highest. The king and his brave ministers had been scrupulous not to credit stories that could not be verified. Madame Rinehart must understand that victims of torture did not often survive to testify against their persecutors; the most reliable sources of verification had been written journals kept by the German soldiers themselves. And yes, it was true that the invaders had protected their advance by driving Belgian civilians before them so that, when Belgian troops opened fire, they had perforce killed some of their own people.
There was more to tell, too much more. Mary and the king talked for an hour. Then he helped her reassemble her belongings one last time, walked her out to the car, and paused to chat with the sneezing general, heedless of the wind that was tousling his fair hair. Finally King Albert shut the car door and went back into the house. Mary was left to inhale some more cold germs and gloat over her coup.
She knew that every journalist in Europe would have given much to have been in her properly buttoned shoes this day. She hastened to write up her account of the interview, made three copies, and sent them by different routes to make sure at least one copy got through to America. The Saturday Evening Post did run Mary’s interview with King Albert but turned down her cabled report that the Germans were using poison gas against Allied troops, for fear that the news would inflame public opinion enough to disrupt America’s position of neutrality. The New York Tribune had no such scruples and Mary got scooped by their overseas reporter, Will Irwin. After she got home, Mary would be terribly disappointed to find out how small an impact her reportage made, how little her own countrymen cared about what was happening over here.
But she didn’t know, and there were still many more hospitals to visit. Neither France nor Belgium had as yet developed the concept of training women to be professional nurses; their long-established custom had been for the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic religious order, to serve in the hospitals. Some of the sisters had been transferred out of the war zone; far too few were left to handle the workload and these, according to Mary’s standards, were deplorably untrained, particularly in the importance of surgical cleanliness. This was dramatically evident at a hospital in Calais where French nuns in—and with—their medieval habits worked on one side of the building while well-trained, crisply uniformed British nurses practiced modern methods on the other.
However deficient some hospitals might be, at least their patients got care of a sort and usually a cot to sleep on. Too often, Mary saw a train stop at some little hamlet to drop off a load of casualties, perhaps with a few hours’ advance notice, perhaps with no warning at all. Then the train would move on, leaving the wounded for the local authorities to cope with as best they could.
Usually the men were moved to some kind of shelter, a church, or a schoolhouse. Women of the village were willing to nurse them, but what did they have to work with? Food was none too plentiful, medicines were often limited to local folk remedies. Poor peasants could hardly be expected to supply spare mattresses, blankets, or even clean rags to be ripped up for dressings. Mary saw wounded men lying on straw for want of anything better, suffering agonies for lack of a single morphia pill to dull their pain. She saw convalescent patients on the bank of a stream, rinsing out their dressings to be dried and reused with no attempt at sterilization.
Now she knew about war. There was no glory in it, no romance. War was nothing but privation, discomfort, and boredom, punctuated by bursts of deadly fighting that brought only greater agony, worse shortages, more bodies to be wept over and buried. Nobody ever won. Whatever the generals might claim after the last gun had been fired and the smoke cleared away, wars could only be lost. Mary hated it all. She was getting closer and closer to a burnout.
CHAPTER 21
A Long, Long Trail A-winding
It was high time for a break, and Mary could hardly believe the one she got. She was going to London to visit the queen! She thought it must have been Lord Northcliffe who’d wangled the unexpected invitation for her, since she herself had made
no move to do so. It seems not to have occurred to Mary Rinehart that an intelligent, energetic, well-informed royal personage with a highly developed bump of curiosity might herself have been curious to meet this nice American of whom she’d heard such remarkable things.
Being related to most of the crowned heads of Europe, Queen Mary could not but have heard through the family grapevine about Mrs. Rinehart’s amusing audience with darling Albert, not to mention the sensible and informed interest Mrs. Rinehart had shown in dear Elisabeth’s hospital. Born Princess Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes, Her Majesty was the only daughter of England’s beloved, fun-loving Princess Mary Adelaide, affectionately known as Fat Alice and renowned not only for her ability to throw money around on beautiful objects and lavish entertainments, but also for her keen, well-furnished mind and her diligence in helping the Crown’s less fortunate subjects.
A direct descendant of George III, Mary Adelaide had married Francis, Duke of Teck, son of the duke of Württemberg. Their only daughter might too easily have wound up at one of the stuffy little German courts, wasting a sharp mind and a near-genius for doing good on the grand scale; the story of how young Princess May got to be queen and empress of Britain is a romance in itself.
Princess Mary of Teck had originally been intended to marry the eldest son of Edward VII, also named Edward. He died while their wedding was being planned and Mary, so superbly qualified to be queen, was passed on to the second son, George, Duke of York. Oddly enough, and luckily for them both, their marriage turned into a genuine, lifelong love match. As George V and Queen Mary, this conscientious, dedicated couple did their duty by their subjects at home and abroad to the limits of their abilities. Now that their easily influenced Cousin Willy Hohenzollern had allowed his own folie de grandeur and his ambitious generals to push him into this dreadful war, they were sparing themselves no labor, however distasteful or even dangerous, that might help to win the war.
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