Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

Mary might have been the queen bee but the camp cook was, and always would be, the kingpin of every mountain trek. He had to be astir before anybody else, set up his makeshift stove, get the coffee water boiling, fetch supplies out of the chuck wagon, and start cooking gigantic amounts of food in too few pots and pans, crouching over an open fire, squinting through the smoke, dodging flying cinders, catering to everybody else’s ravenous appetite before he got to satisfy his own. These chores done, he had to clean up, wash up, pack up, and jolt off in his wagon toward the next meal.

  This was a job for a good-natured man. The Rineharts were dreadfully upset to realize after only a few days on the trail that their cook didn’t like them. He didn’t say so, and he did his work well enough, but cooks have ways of making their feelings known. They tried praising his cooking, they offered to help with the dishes. He hung on doggedly to his grouch.

  Perhaps the cook resented the camera crew, perhaps he was sick of the “Lorelei.” Whatever the reason, one day after a long, difficult trek the party stopped, took care of the animals, and waited for the chuck wagon to roll up. They were all starving, of course; they hailed its late appearance with joy. Then joy turned to dismay, for the cook wasn’t there. According to the teamster, the cook had told him to pull up a few miles back, had picked up his bedroll, got out of the wagon, and started walking back over the trail.

  But what had the cook said? they demanded.

  He’d said “so long,” the teamster replied.

  Here indeed was a predicament. Mary was a good cook, but she wasn’t crazy enough to take on the task of feeding all those hungry males in the wilds. Surrounded by clouds of gloom and foreboding, they scrambled together a lunch of sorts and got back on their horses. Great then was their surprise to come upon a man all alone, sitting beside the trail doing nothing and apparently quite content to be idle. The Head pulled up and, in desperation, asked whether the contented man had any idea where they might be able to locate a cook. He said they need look no further. His name was Norman Lee and he’d be glad to cook for them.

  Mary took Lee’s appearance as an act of Providence but apparently this was just something that happened along the trail. They would find another cook later in an even unlikelier spot; the new chap was friendly enough but had a terrible singing voice, so they left him and went on.

  They were quite satisfied with their first find, and well they might be. Norman Lee was a soldier of fortune. He’d been in Cuba, in the Philippines, he’d fought in the Boxer Rebellion. Lately he’d taken to trapping marten and lynx, which presumably ranked with skunk as fashion furs. One of the packers had told Mary that there were just two kinds of camp cooks, those who made great biscuits but hated the people who ate them, and the jolly souls whose culinary skills stopped short at opening a can of beans. Fortunately for the success of the Rinehart expedition, Lee was both affable and able.

  The farther they rode, the wilder became the terrain, as did their idea man’s suggestions. In those early days of moving pictures, actors were expected to perform their own stunts. Joe thought it would make a nice sequence for the famous Mrs. Rinehart to shoot the rapids for a hundred miles or so in one of the boats they’d brought along.

  “No way!” cried the outraged male Rineharts. If Mrs. Rinehart went, they all went. So they all did in fact go, taking turns riding with Mary and an experienced boatman, changing shifts when the first man got too exhausted from dodging rocks and trying to keep the boat right side up. Mary, who had to make the entire trip, did manage to get in some good fishing in the quieter parts and even to enjoy the rapids, some of the time.

  A while later, Joe got a taste of his own medicine. He went mountain climbing with a couple of the other hired men, lost his footing on a snowfield, slid anywhere from a hundred yards to a mile and a half, depending on who was telling the story, and had to hang in midair over a crevasse until his companions managed to haul him back. Joe’s face was whiter than the snow when they brought him back to camp. A full twenty-four hours elapsed before he began bewailing the fact that nobody had taken any movies of his slide.

  The worst time for all hands came when they climbed to Doubtful Lake, 3,000 feet in the air, and found nothing there but rock and ice. A snowfall that shouldn’t have happened made it impossible for the horses to find any grazing. After Stanley Senior’s mount had gone hungry for almost two days in a freezing rain, the ever-compassionate doctor fed him a rain-soaked biscuit, an apple, two lumps of sugar, and a raw egg, all of which the horse accepted gratefully. Fortunately, sundown found them in a lush valley where the horses could eat their fill. For the Rineharts, this was the end of the trail. It was time to go home.

  CHAPTER 24

  Mary Goes Back to War

  Strenuous as they’d been, those two months in the Rockies had put Mary back on her feet. As tensions about the war grew more intense throughout the country, she settled back to work, finishing Tenting Tonight, writing short stories for some quick cash. She started a play called The Bat. She’d meant this to be a dramatization of her first great success, The Circular Staircase, but got a better idea. When Mary asked Edgar Selwyn whether a mystery play that kept the audience in suspense until almost the final curtain would work, he told her it would be worth a million dollars.

  A million dollars sounded fine, but the play would have to wait. Woodrow Wilson had spoken the fateful words, America was at war with Germany. Stanley Junior had taken ROTC training at Harvard but was only eighteen, too young to be given a commission; he telephoned his parents for permission to enlist as a private. What could they say but yes?

  Almost the next day, Mary’s editors at the Saturday Evening Post were begging her for a piece that would encourage other parents to release their sons for duty. Having learned the hideous truths of warfare, Mary was appalled by what they were asking. She wrote the piece, however, in one twelve-hour stint, crying all the time. She called it “The Altar of Freedom”; she had already made one sacrifice of her own, and knew there would be more to come.

  Olive Roberts Barton’s husband had enlisted. Mary’s sister was going to teach school to support herself and their two small children until her husband came home. Mercifully, he did come back, one of the few survivors of a machine-gun company that had seen heavy action from the time they got overseas until the end of the war.

  Dr. Rinehart applied for a commission in the Army Medical Corps. While waiting to hear from Washington, he was assigned by the state governor to serve on a three-man draft registration board. Immediately he closed his private practice, delegated the work of the dispensary to his associates, and joined in the gigantic task of helping to pull an army together at short notice.

  Mary had tried to register as an army nurse. She was not accepted but soon got a government assignment of a far different nature. After the declaration of war, the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet had been mobilized; Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels wanted Mrs. Rinehart to write up a story about it for propaganda purposes.

  Daniels sounds from Mary’s description rather like Sir Joseph from H.M.S. Pinafore. He’d stuck close to his desk and never gone to sea, which of course explained his being made the ruler of the U.S. Navy. Daniels would later become an effective administrator, but in these beginning stages, Mary said, he seemed to know nothing of navy protocol and was innocently wreaking terrible damage on tradition and morale. He even invited Mrs. Rinehart to sit in on one of the General Board of the Navy’s sessions in Washington before he sent her to review the fleet.

  Daniels evidently didn’t realize what a gaffe he was committing, but Mary did. She ought not to have been allowed either at the session or on board the ships, she knew these upper-echelon officers resented her presence although they were gentlemen enough not to show their ire. Daniels must have caught on, but he could hardly back down. He sent his own carriage to pick Mrs. Rinehart up at the Shoreham Hotel and put her on the boat to Norfolk.

  Mary’s ignorance of battleships was total. She hadn’t even known what clo
thes to bring; when she learned that she’d be expected to go clambering all over the ships, she had to borrow a pair of tennis shoes from an officer’s wife. Unfortunately, the other woman’s feet were quite a lot bigger than hers. Less unfortunately, she didn’t have to wear the sneakers for her first meeting with the admiral of the Atlantic Fleet. Regardless of whatever personal feelings he entertained about females being allowed to infiltrate the fleet’s all-male purlieus, Admiral Mayo had Mary piped aboard the flagship Pennsylvania with due pomp and circumstance, and greeted her in person. Almost his first question, however, was, “How long are you staying?”

  Mary didn’t know, she thought maybe a week. She further assumed she’d be billetted on the Pennsylvania, she could not have been more wrong. The admiral explained, no doubt with inner relief, that it would take an act of Congress to let her bunk aboard for even one night.

  He did provide what hospitality was within his powers. Mary was Admiral Mayo’s guest for lunch and dinner all during her five-day stay. He made sure Mrs. Rinehart got all the facts she needed, and no doubt some that she didn’t. Mary walked, she climbed, she even crawled through narrow openings, praying that she wouldn’t get stuck. As always, she made notes. One item she tried to decipher later claimed that “Every part is duplicated so that if one is shot away another takes up its function. If the after-end is shot away, the ship can still steam ahead.” She sensed something not quite right here; it had been her impression that propellers were only on the after-parts.

  Barring such glitches, Mary learned a good deal about the fleet’s many components: battleships, destroyers, cruisers, minelayers, colliers, oilers, supply ships, each with its own job to do. She watched an experiment in which an airplane was catapulted from the deck of a battleship and was astounded to see that it worked.

  The grand finale came when the presidential yacht Mayflower sailed in bearing Mary’s champion, Secretary Daniels of the navy, along with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and their entire staffs. They were to spend a day with the fleet. All the admirals and high-ranking officers would be lunching together; Mary was quietly sent to inspect some onshore installations and keep out of sight. Daniels, however, noticed his protégée’s absence and insisted that Mrs. Rinehart be among those present. For a fashion plate like Mary, given no time to change, having to flop aboard in those too-big tennis shoes must have been agony. She’d just got settled among the dignitaries when a gaggle of newspapermen were allowed to board and feast their eyes on so much assembled glory and one small woman with feet like a circus clown.

  Daniels further invited Mrs. Rinehart to sail back to Washington on the Mayflower. Regrettably, after dinner Mary began to feel sick. As the only female aboard, she’d been given the cabin assigned to the president’s wife; by midnight she was convinced that she would soon breathe her last in these exalted surroundings. Mary finally got a cabin boy to understand that he’d better assemble all the dignitaries to witness her death throes. He sensibly brought a doctor who took her diagnosis of food poisoning as a personal insult but gave her something to quiet her stomach.

  By morning, Mary felt well enough to go in search of toast and tea. Mr. Daniels was in the dining room eating a boiled egg; she took one look at that egg and rushed for the deck. Before an august assemblage of rank and glitter and in full view of a crowd that had been waiting on the wharf to watch the dignitaries come in, Mary Roberts Rinehart doubled up over the rail and gave the Potomac all she had.

  Secretary Baker was a true gentleman. He drove Mary back to the Shoreham, helped her up the stairs, and made sure she was properly looked after. Little did she know then that her upset stomach was about to get her a new job for the War Department.

  All unaware, she went home and wrote up the article she’d come to research for Secretary Daniels. “The Gray Mailed Fist” ran in the Saturday Evening Post June 23, 1917. It explained to American parents exactly what their sailor sons were doing, it excoriated the penny-pinchers who had forced the U.S. Navy to battle for its very existence and were now clamoring for its protection. By the time the piece she’d done for Secretary Daniels appeared in the Post, Mary was already starting to carry out her new assignment for Secretary Baker.

  Although Newton D. Baker had been hand-picked by President Wilson, he was hardly the man in the street’s notion of what a secretary of war ought to be. Baker made no pretense of being a fire-eater; he despised war and had no wish to become involved with the logistics of fighting. That was the generals’ job. The secretary’s position was that of a lawyer and an administrator.

  Baker also realized that this new U.S. Army was going to be, for the first time, a true cross section of America. The draft was gathering up young boys and grown men of every social level, every sort of background, factory workers and college professors, bank clerks and cowhands. So heterogeneous a congeries of recruits would not all fit meekly into the rigid old army traditions of discipline and training.

  What Secretary Baker wanted from Mary Roberts Rinehart was not just a quick overview of the new army but detailed observations, starting with the officers’ training schools and working through to the cantonments where raw recruits took their first marching steps toward becoming soldiers. He wanted to know about conditions in the camps and in the towns nearby, the morale of the men, the kinds of meals they were getting—details that a woman would notice and a man might not catch. Mrs. Rinehart was to be in no sense considered a spy: the camp commanders would be told exactly what she was there for. Some of the officers in charge would soon find her a useful go-between with the War Department concerning problems that might not otherwise have got a hearing.

  Baker had made it plain that his new emissary must not expect the same red-carpet treatment from him as she’d got from Secretary Daniels. He couldn’t even give her any expense money. That was all right with Mary; the Post had paid its usual rate for her navy article, and she knew her editors would be glad enough to buy whatever might come of this new assignment. In the end, what came would turn out to be quite a lot.

  During the summer of 1917, in the midst of her extensive travels, Mary finally got around to awarding herself a qualified encomium. She was, she said, a bad novelist but a good reporter, relying heavily on her knack for retaining clear visual memories and describing things as she’d seen them. Like Mark Twain, Mary had written some fairly wretched stuff to keep the home fires burning. All in all, though, she was not a bad novelist and knew perfectly well she wasn’t. We have to assume this demurrer was a hangover from her early indoctrination. She still retained an uneasy feeling that it wasn’t quite nice to write the kind of fiction readers could enjoy.

  Long and arduous as it was, Mary’s American tour of inspection offered certain advantages that her European investigations had lacked. Nobody was shooting at her, nor was she in any great danger of being torpedoed. She could take baths when she chose, she got enough to eat, she had no worries about not having the right visa. Better still, she was able to get home between trips. During June and July, Dr. Rinehart was still in Pittsburgh. The couple would manage to snatch a few evenings and weekends together after he’d processed his quota of recruits and she had made some progress in writing up her reports for Secretary Baker, plus another article for the Post. Then it would be back to the draft board for him and back on the road for her.

  Not unexpectedly, Mary soon discovered that one army camp tended to look much like the rest: an elderly brick building or two, a too-small parade ground, new wooden barracks that had been flimsily thrown up, often without adequate ventilation, some of them dangerous firetraps. At one camp she visited, she saw the sentries making their nightly rounds with fire extinguishers at the ready. Some camps were scrupulously maintained, others ranged from untidy to chaotic; Mary couldn’t see that the housekeeping had any discernible effect on the quality of training or the morale of the recruits. She found the floor in one camp kitchen greased like a skating rink with scraps of raw meat and the sinks too revolting to describe, but sh
e did say the food that came out of that hovel was first-rate and morale was correspondingly high.

  As Secretary Baker had anticipated, camp commanders were of two distinct breeds. There were those who understood that the widely assorted recruits they were getting now must be handled differently from the submissive rookies they’d dealt with before the war. Then there were the diehards, who thought they could go along in the old autocratic way where the officer’s word was law and the lower ranks had no choice but to obey without question. Mary was surprised to note that the older officers, particularly the generals, understood the need for flexibility better than the young ones did.

  Mary herself felt the need of some basic training, and took to carrying around a manual called Studies in Minor Tactics. After some hard plugging, she felt reasonably confident that she could, in a pinch, order out a batallion and destroy an army hiding behind a barn. Perhaps batallions were smaller then, or barns were larger. Or possibly, like so many new recruits, Mary hadn’t quite grasped the logistics. In My Story, she told how, during a sham battle, one rookie threw a sham grenade (i.e. a rock) into a clump of real bushes. A second rookie rolled out of the clump yowling a most unmilitary “What the h—?” (Well, that’s how Mary wrote it down.)

  “Your machine gun’s jammed and you’re out of commission,” yelled rookie number one. “Roll back in there and die.”

  Mary saw a good many things that she didn’t dare publish. Some of these neophytes were finding the heat, the bodily discomfort, the unrelenting hard work, the strangeness, the loneliness just too much to handle; there were more suicides than ever got reported. It was a terrible time for Mary, hard for all those mothers who kept writing her letters, perhaps hardest of all for President Wilson, who had to contend not only with the horrendous burden of the war but also with the profiteering and one-upmanship in his own administration.

  Now that mobilization had begun, America’s earlier foot-dragging about preparing for war was showing its bad effects: too much friction, too much waste, too much delay, and far too few soldiers ready to fight. In May 1917, Gen. John J. Pershing had gone to France with just 2,000 fighting men at his command. At the end of that year, he would still have fewer than 200,000, of whom 7,000 were marines. It would take a full year, until May 1918, for the American army to come up to full strength.