General Foch was a martinet, an austere man who ate little and drank water barely flavored with claret. He’d trained his staff to speak only when they were spoken to, he had no time for social graces, but he was tremendously kind and they loved him anyway. The general was particularly solicitous of his guest and anxious for Madame Rinehart to understand France’s situation before he sent her to the front. He told Mary that the Germans were in fact already defeated but would not surrender. The war might drag on a long time, perhaps for years. He amazed her by revealing that the French troops were holding more than 400 miles of front. Didn’t America realize that?
Mary knew the drill by now. After her chat with the general, she was sent off in a staff car with an officer in attendance; her first view of the front left her with some strange impressions. Paris buses and taxicabs were still being used to move troops. The poilus were, by and large, a jolly lot; even those whose uniforms were in rags could still cheer and smile when they caught sight of a woman. Most of the men she saw en route were carrying huge, round loaves of bread. Mary would see some of them in rest billets, sleeping in barns on beds of straw, using the loaf of bread as a pillow.
Her experiences at the French front were mostly undramatic. Work was proceeding on a new system of trenches; these had become a vital part of this new kind of warfare that had developed into a double siege. Things didn’t liven up until Mary visited the salient beyond Ypres, and that was only inadvertently. Her French escort had taken her to see a battery situated at a fair distance from the German lines. The gunnery officer in charge was desolated—here was a lady come to call and nothing to entertain her. It did happen that a German battery had been located; was Madame interested?
Madame found it necessary to maintain her neutrality. These gallant soldiers must not shell the Germans on an American woman’s say-so. Of course, she insinuated gently, if they were planning to fire anyhow, that was no business of hers. This was all the gunners needed. They began ripping away the camouflage while their visitor walked closer to see the big guns shoot. On the way, an officer picked up a horseshoe and handed it to Madame, for luck. He showed her what they called their cyclone cellar, just in case the enemy failed to take the upcoming demonstration in good part. Since the hole was full of murky, stinking water, Mary decided she’d prefer to risk the barrage.
She was told to open her mouth in order to relieve the pressure on her eardrums. The gray throats of the great guns opened as well, the barrels recoiled one by one, then roared together. The noise was horrendous. That part of the entertainment over, the soldiers invited their unexpected guest to inaugurate a small bridge they had just finished building. As Mary began the impromptu ceremony, a German shell burst high overhead, then another, and another. Nobody else seemed to mind much. If the men could be calm, so could she. Mary walked firmly across, the first woman to set foot on that brand-new bridge and quite likely the last.
The Germans were still shelling. Perhaps it was time for Madame to depart. Unfortunately, Madame’s car got stuck in the mud. Mary had to sit in the back seat clutching her horseshoe until the soldiers had dug her free.
Next it was on to Saint-Omer and the British lines. Mary’s hotel accommodations here were fully as wretched as those she’d had at Cassel, lacking adequate heat, toilet facilities, or comforts of any kind. She went to bed to keep warm, spreading her trusty fur coat over the inadequate covers. As she lay there wondering if she was going to get any sleep, somebody knocked at the door. Hoping it might be the chambermaid with a hot-water bottle, she said, “Entrez.”
In walked General Huguet, head of liaison between the French and British armies. Mary sat up, drew her fur coat up to hide her nightgown, and played the grande dame as well as the circumstances allowed. She suggested graciously that the general sit close to the small fire, he accepted the invitation with equal aplomb, they discussed Mary’s coming itinerary with all the politesse and gentilesse available at the moment.
On the following day, General Huguet took Mrs. Rinehart to meet Field Marshal Sir John French at British headquarters. She would never imagine that her very brief and wholly chaste visit, added to that of a duchess who’d come to dedicate a hospital, would be used by some of Sir John’s political enemies to spark an inquiry in Parliament. French must have known what was in the wind; he got rid of his attractive visitor as fast as he decently could, passing her along to young Lord Claude Hamilton, stuffing them both into a staff car, handing them packets of sandwiches prepared by the headquarters cook, and warning Mrs. Rinehart, as he must have been warning himself, to stay out of trouble.
Over the next few days Mary saw more of the British front than she was by now in any shape to assimilate. She was too tired even to go through her usual nightly routine of writing up her notes. She tried to get some sleep in the damp, uncomfortable bed, thinking how much worse off were the men in the muddy, filthy trenches.
There were a few bright moments. Once Lord Claude Hamilton and she lunched at the officers’ mess at General Haldane’s headquarters on the Scherpenberg Hill. A tall young officer with a quirky smile asked her to sign their visitors’ book. They’d collected pathetically few signatures so far, only those of King George, the prince of Wales, Prince Alexander of Teck (a brother of Queen Mary), and Sir John French. At least Mary was in distinguished company.
The young man turned out to have been the son of a Lady Congreve from whom, fifteen years later, Mary got a card. Lady Congreve had read a book of Mrs. Rinehart’s. Did the author know that Billy Congreve had mentioned her in his published diary?
Mary got hold of the book. She learned that the young writer had won many honors, including the Victoria Cross, and had been killed in action only a few months after their one and only meeting. He’d written in his diary on February 25, 1915:
We were just sitting down to lunch today when suddenly Hamilton turned up with a lovely lady, the first woman other than natives I have seen out here. A simultaneous exclamation of “Good Lord!” broke from us. She turned out to be Mrs. or Miss Mary Roberts Rinehart, an American who had come out to look around in her capacity as journalist. She was very amusing, and we gave her lunch. I don’t think she very much appreciated our sour wine of the country. “Reminds me of eating a persimmon,” she said. (Whatever that may be!)
Billy Congreve added that Mrs. Rinehart talked about twice as fast as most people and with a strong “twang.” She would be leaving for America on the following day, if the submarines would let her.
CHAPTER 22
Home Fires and Campfires
Afire to get back to her family, papers all in order, Mary boarded the steamer Arabic for New York. Her stateroom, with its private bath, was sheer luxury after those gloomy, dank French provincial hotels. Chubby Captain Finch was an affable man, the U-boats left them alone. The crossing could not have gone better. Soon afterward, Mary learned that the Arabic had been torpedoed and sunk. Captain Finch, true to the law of the sea, had gone down with his ship but, thanks to all that good cooking under his belt, he’d bounced right up again and got hauled into a lifeboat by members of his thankful crew. There were some casualties, but Mary mourned less for the drowned men than for her lovely tiled bathroom, now on the ocean floor and accessible only to mermaids.
It was a happy homecoming. Her men were all well. Alan and Ted were fascinated by the souvenirs she’d brought back: some shell casings, a Gurkha knife, her gas mask (really nothing more than a strip of chemically treated gauze), one of the needle-pointed steel darts that had been dropped in bundles from German airplanes at the very beginning of the war. Stanley Junior, on the other hand, hid his new wristwatch in a bureau drawer. While wristwatches were proving invaluable to soldiers overseas, they were still considered effeminate by Americans.
This was the least of the prejudices that Mary found herself running into. Many of her countrymen were still either pro-German or desperately neutral, still refusing to believe that the Germans were actually using poison gas against the All
ies, ignoring her protests that she’d sat beside men in the field hospitals and watched them die from its effects.
Writing up her hastily taken and sometimes almost illegible notes helped Mary over the transition period but gave her some extra problems. She’d learned too much, and she was forced to become her own censor, making sure she didn’t reveal any facts that might be helpful to the enemy. Her neighbors might not want to believe that there were spies and saboteurs in the United States, but Mary had plenty of cause to know better.
She had signed approval to write about her two official royal interviews but was not sure how to treat the informal visit she’d had at La Panne with Queen Elisabeth. Grieving for her Bavarian homeland, sickened by what the Germans had done to Belgium, Elisabeth had expressed herself all too freely about Kaiser Wilhelm and his ruthless myrmidons. Mary decided she’d better not quote any of this, and settled for writing an innocuous personal impression of this unaffected, friendly, dauntlessly merciful royal young personage.
In this piece, at least, she struck a chord to which readers feeling the stir of conscience could respond in a practical way. And respond they did; all of a sudden Mary found herself being forced to organize a clearinghouse for the avalanche of supplies and money being donated to Belgian war relief. Even more astonishing was the Medal of Queen Elisabeth that turned up in her personal mail. This was not the sort of decoration one put on to play bridge in Sewickley, but Mary did get asked once to wear it for a photograph. Never shy about seizing the chance of a little extra publicity, she sent a maid to get her medal. The picture was duly taken and published; too late, Mary noticed that the medal she was shown wearing was inscribed Harvard Athletic Association.
Another mixup occurred when Mary tried to straighten out her expense account with the Post. Even counting the fur coat and the suite at Claridge’s, she’d come back with $1,200 of her traveling allowance left over. Her publishers didn’t know how to handle the refund—none of their writers had ever returned any money before.
Mary was working at home because she couldn’t bear to leave the family even for her downtown office. Two months away had been far too long; she needed her big, safe house and the peace of her garden. By putting in a full day, every day, she managed to finish all her articles in good time. Correcting the proofs was harder. She was exhausted from her labor and dispirited by the way her editors had emasculated her work. She complained that the writings she’d hoped would awaken America to the desperate situation abroad sounded in their final form like “the piping of small birds in a hurricane.”
Summer brought a new, more personal tragedy. Uncle John Roberts, the family’s rock of Gibraltar during those early years, was dead.
John had taken Sade’s death hard but in due course he had married again and, to his great joy, begotten a son. Determined to provide handsomely for his boy, he’d got rid of his wallpaper business and set about making a fortune in the stock market. Perhaps John’s Calvinist upbringing had worked against his efforts to get rich by gambling, for he’d thrown away money on one wrong guess after another. Common sense had asserted itself at last, though. He’d pulled out of the market and used what few assets he had left to buy a small farm.
This was what in truth John Roberts had always wanted, a place for his horses, some chickens, a few cows. He didn’t know much about farming but he was happy in his new life. His wife was not. She took the boy and moved out. John was alone again. One morning, driving into the barn, he felt a terrible pain in his side. Mary went out to the farm. Seeing her beloved uncle stretched out on that same bed where Sade had lain with her delicate shawls around her was almost more than the bereft niece could handle.
John’s death and her own frustration about her neighbors’ willful blindness to the war, though not to the huge profits that they were making from armaments manufactured right there in Pittsburgh, were turning Mary increasingly morbid. Dr. Rinehart was worried about her unsuccessful attempts to pull herself out of her depression. Then one day a man named Howard Eaton strolled into the downtown office and the clouds began to lift.
As a big-game hunter and guide, Howard Eaton had become something of a legend. Back in the 1870s, he and his two brothers had taken up ranching in the Dakota Badlands, and made good at it. Eastern friends had flocked to enjoy the Eatons’ hospitality. Howard had been happy to guide them where the grizzlies and bighorns could be found. After a while, the visitors had begun to insist on paying their way; and thus, as Mary observed, was established the first dude ranch in the American West.
Howard Eaton had come to Pittsburgh, the Rineharts soon learned, to talk them into joining a riding party that he was planning to lead through newly opened Glacier National Park. He was particularly eager for Mrs. Rinehart to come along, probably hoping that the famous writer would generate publicity for the park. Dr. Rinehart thought the trip might do her good. Mary wasn’t so sure. She was still dreadfully tired, and she had her mother and the family to consider.
But Howard wasn’t the man to take no for an answer. It was finally settled that Mary would go ahead. Stanley and the boys would meet her later at the Eaton ranch. The plan didn’t go off quite the way it was intended; what it did do was give Mary a taste for western living and camping that would change the Rinehart family’s vacationing habits for years to come.
It would also pave the way for a dramatic change in Mary’s wardrobe. Her first long trek on horseback convinced her that there was much room for improvement in women’s equestrian attire. Cowboys were prudes, it appeared; breeches on females would offend their delicate sensibilities. Mary bowed to convention and settled for a long, divided gray skirt with a matching coat over it. That skirt was a hateful thing, it made mounting and dismounting awkward and had a nasty habit of creeping up and wadding itself between the wearer and the saddle. In deference to the easily embarrassed cowhands, it also had elastic bands at the hem to be slipped over her boots lest some vagrant breeze sneak up from underneath and afford a shocking glimpse of a nether limb. The other women in Eaton’s party were similarly accoutered; their first move on dismounting was to duck down behind their horses and do up the buttons that turned the splits back into skirts.
To eastern eyes, the West looks depressingly barren at first sight; then its austere hugeness begins to grow on the viewer. Stanley had prescribed the right medicine after all. Mary was feeling the lure of the wild country. Imagining herself surrounded by herds of buffalo and painted tepees, she’d nudge her pony into a lope and take another brisk trot around the old corral.
After a short break-in period at the ranch, the party—twenty or thirty, Mary estimated—was taken to Glacier Park. Their mounts were saddled for them, the camping gear strapped to the pack animals, and they hit the trail. Mary was more frightened by those mountain passes than she’d been by the big guns in France; she slid off her horse and led him along, wincing when he stepped on her feet, afraid to look down. But that was only the first day, and she soon learned to stick to her saddle and trust her mount. She also learned how hard and cold a mountain could feel at night when there was nothing between her and the bedrock except a ground sheet and a couple of blankets.
Howard Eaton was a no-nonsense guide. He’d roust out his far-from-dauntless band of Glacier pioneers at five every morning, rain or shine, feed them huge western-style breakfasts, and set them on the trail again, up and up till they could go no higher. The well-known western artist Charles Russell, another of the celebrities in Eaton’s party, moaned that he was right tired of standing in a cloud up to his waist.
Lack of visibility might be tough on a painter, but it didn’t stop Mary Rinehart. Wherever they went, she was quick on the draw with notebook and camera. Out of this first trip west would come a little travel book called Through Glacier Park that would bring the Eatons hordes of new visitors and be a catalyst in developing the concept of dude ranching into a major industry.
The West was calorie country, no question about that. Breakfast was strong black coffe
e, bacon, eggs, and flapjacks doused with molasses. Lunch was strong black coffee and sandwiches. Supper was fried beef, fried potatoes, and strong black coffee. Mary wolfed down whatever was put in front of her and throve on it; the cure was definitely working.
Never one to miss a trick, Howard Eaton had arranged a small extra attraction for his band of riders. A few Blackfoot Indians were brought into camp. They beat their drums and sang strange, almost eerie songs that somehow evoked the aura of this vast, lonely country. Once they learned that Mrs. Rinehart had been to the Great War, they made her a member of the Blackfoot tribe in a solemn rite, giving her the Indian name Pitamakin after a great woman warrior of their own tribe.
On a later occasion, the tribe presented their adopted heroine with a long pictograph that had Pitamakin’s history. This was when Mary first realized that the original Pitamakin had won glory not in battle but through her consummate skill as a horsethief, and that her most celebrated geste had been the theft of a mule. The likelihood here is that the mule had belonged to the U.S. Army; the Blackfeet might well have considered it a noble deed for an Indian woman to put them one-up on the government for a change.
By the time Mary met them, this remnant of a once great tribe was in desperate straits. The Blackfeet had been Plains Indians, not farmers but hunters. The white men had slaughtered their buffalo, driven their people to a far northern reservation on a high plateau where the few crops they tried to raise were often killed by frost. Their chief told Mary through a translator how many of their children had died during a famine the previous winter.
They blamed the previous federal agent for making them drive their large herd of beef cattle to the eastern side of the reservation and leave them there to be run off by rustlers. A half-blood managed to find his way to Chicago and trace some of the hides by the tribal brand but, even with their case proved, the Blackfeet could get no redress. The culpable agent was still on the reservation, and he came to see Mary. They disliked each other on sight but he did write her a letter later, excoriating Cato Sells, who was then commissioner of Indian affairs. If he thought the Blackfeet’s new recruit might be persuaded to help him get his job back, he thought wrong; but when it came to helping the people he’d betrayed, Mary was ready.
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