She couldn’t lie down on that foul bed. She curled in the corner on the stones, shaking with cold, waiting for morning. Dawn arrived in the company of a hard-faced guard marching in with a stack of clothes—rough blue stockings, dirty white frock with a great prisoners’ cross on the chest—and the endless string of captive days began.
Hunger. Cold. Lice. Slaps from the guards. The daily labor: rough sewing with pricked fingers, polishing latches with abrasive cleansers, pushing together little caps of metal. Whispered conversations with the other women: Was it true there had been a battle at Mont Sorrel? The Somme? Was it true the British had captured La Boisselle? Contalmaison? Even more than food, the prisoners craved news. All they heard from the guards was that the Germans were winning.
“Liars,” Lili snorted. “Such liars! They’re losing and they know it. All we need do is endure.”
Endure, Eve thought. A year slipped by—more foul gray days, more slaps, more lice, more screams in the night. Lili’s serene confidence, burning brighter even as her body whittled down to stark bone. Black dreamless nights on that foul-smelling cot. Seeing women sweat to death from yellowing fevers, waste away under the twin grinding stones of cold and hunger. Seeing them stagger to the infirmary, that huge room with its ugly green shades that stank of shit and blood—some called it the Lazaretto, some just called it hell. You didn’t go to the infirmary to be treated; you went there to die. The Germans didn’t need to waste bullets killing their female prisoners when neglect and disease could do it for them. A sound strategy, Eve thought remotely. Women dying in hospital beds resulted in far less international outcry than women dying before firing squads.
And what women these were. Identical skeletons wearing the same prisoners’ cross, dirty-haired, hollow-eyed fleurs du mal every one: fiery Louise Thuliez who had smuggled soldiers across borders for Edith Cavell; Belgian-born Madame Ramet whose son had been shot and whose two daughters had accompanied her to prison; the stoic Princesse de Croy who had organized a spy network in Belgium . . . Before Siegburg, Eve had never known just how many women there were who had risked all for the war. Even now, in their way, they continued to fight.
“Madame Blankaert says those little steel caps we have been given to assemble are grenade heads,” Lili whispered. “Shall we do something about it?”
“Lili,” Violette said wearily, “don’t provoke them.”
“Ta gueule. It’s inconceivable that we be put to work on ammunition to be used against our countrymen.” And the following day the words were shouted out: In the name of England, of France, of Belgium, and of all Allied countries, I implore my companions to adamantly refuse to work on munitions. Germany does not have the right to demand from us this work of death against our homelands, to force us to ourselves make the engines which, in battle, will strike our fathers, our brothers, our husbands, our sons. We all here continue to fight and suffer courageously for king, for our flags, for our homelands—
And all over Siegburg, the gray-faced female skeletons were suddenly alight, screaming like Valkyries, even as guards ran back and forth shoving, slapping, shouting. Eve screamed until her throat stung, even when she got a clenched fist across the cheekbone that snapped her head back like a whip. The world for a moment was bright, screaming color rather than soul-leaching gray. Eve screamed until she was bundled back into her cell, and Lili laughed even as the guards hauled her and Mme. Blankaert away to solitary confinement for inciting the strike. “Well worth it,” she said when they finally let her out a month later.
Eve wasn’t sure—Lili was just a handful of bones, insubstantial as a shadow. Eve dropped her own blanket around the other woman’s shoulders. Endure. All we need do is endure.
Another endless gray year. A freezing spring coming late in 1918, and with it a cautious hope feathering its way through the prisoners. “The Boches are losing,” the whisper went around as the year advanced. “They’re beaten, falling back everywhere along the front—” It wasn’t just the whispered rumors that made their way inside prison walls, rumors of English victories and French encroachments on German territory. Everyone could see the slump in the shoulders of the guards, hear the increasing shrillness in the assertions of German victory. It hovered in the air: the bloody slog of war might finally be coming to an end.
If it had ended sooner, Eve later thought on the long nights when she was staring down the barrel of a Luger. If it had ended just a few short months sooner.
September 1918
Thank you for coming, little daisy.”
Lili lay in the cold infirmary, her body hardly making an impression below the grubby blankets. Eve perched on the cot’s edge, shivering in her prison smock. She should have been with the other women working, but there had been a typhus epidemic not long ago and when Eve reported feeling feverish and headachy, they were quick to send her to the infirmary. Easy then to sneak from her own cot to Lili’s. “How are you feeling?” she managed to ask.
“Not so terrible.” Lili patted her side: for a while now she’d suffered from a pleural abscess between two of her ribs, but had made light of it. “The surgeon will lance the thing, and it will be done.” The surgery was scheduled for four in the afternoon. Not long now.
“They’re bringing a surgeon from Bonn?” Eve tried to quell her apprehension. Lancing an abscess was surely minor surgery. But in this understaffed hellhole, on a half-starved woman . . .
Lili is not afraid, Eve reminded herself. Don’t you be either.
But perhaps Lili was afraid, because she fixed Eve with an unusually sober gaze. Her lively eyes were sunk into a face that was little more than a skull. “Take care of Violette for me, if . . .” An expressive shrug.
“You’re going to be fine.” Eve cut her off before she could go further. “You have to be.”
It was what she’d clung to for more than two years. Evelyn Gardiner had betrayed her friends, had broken down and brought them to this foul place. If she could bring them out again safely, some part of that betrayal could be forgotten, if not ever forgiven. It was what she thought every day when she pushed half her bread ration into Lili’s hands, when she tried to give her blankets to Violette even though Violette still looked at her with stony eyes. Bring them out safely, and you will have atoned.
And she’d almost done it—surely the war could not go on much longer. We are almost there. Almost home.
Perhaps Lili saw some of that desperation in Eve’s eyes, because she reached out and laid her emaciated fingers over Eve’s misshapen ones. “Take care of yourself, little daisy. If I’m not here to haul you out of trouble—”
“Don’t say that.” Eve gripped Lili’s hand, panic choking her. She was not going to lose Lili, not over an abscess. Not now. Not after more than two years of imprisonment, not so close to the end. “It’s just a lance-and-drain operation. Of course you’ll survive!”