Page 2 of A Mind of Her Own
Alex was happy staying with her grandmother, although she missed her parents.
They had little time to do so, but they both wrote short notes to her, which arrived haphazardly.
Their letters took weeks to reach Paris, sometimes a month, and Alex loved getting them.
She answered them with accounts of what she was doing.
Marie-Thérèse did everything to keep her distracted and entertained and safe.
But Alex was well aware of the fierce battles that were being fought, elsewhere in France, all over Europe, and in Russia.
Trained by her father, Victoria read the newspapers every day, and Alex had learned to do so at an early age.
She followed the war news diligently, and knew where the worst battles were.
Marie-Thérèse tried not to dwell on it with her.
By the end of the year, the field hospital had changed locations.
They relocated to Ypres in October, to be closer to the battle to keep the Germans from reaching Calais.
The fighting appeared to increase in intensity with each battle, the number of wounded greater, with the death toll rising.
Alex’s parents came to Paris on a two-day pass at Christmas.
It was a huge relief to see them.
Tristan and Victoria had both lost a shocking amount of weight, working around the clock sometimes, with no time to eat, and rations that frequently gave them dysentery.
Medicine was in short supply, and Tristan’s mother could see in their eyes the tragedies they’d experienced at close range.
Nothing consoled the medical staff for the senseless waste of life they were seeing.
It made Victoria and Tristan more grateful than ever to spend two days with their family at Christmas.
They were shocked to notice how much more grown-up Alex looked.
She had lost weight too, and her face was serious when she wasn’t hugging and kissing them.
She missed being able to confide in her mother.
They had always been so close.
Mamie-Thérèse knew she couldn’t replace Victoria and didn’t try, but she was a staunch support for her granddaughter, and a protector.
She had no problems with Alexandra.
She was well behaved and respectful and followed the rules.
She had shown no great interest in boys so far, and spent all her spare time writing in her journal, or deep in a book.
She enjoyed reading in both French and English.
Victoria had taught her to speak English, and Alex spoke it with hardly a trace of a French accent.
She was comfortable in both languages, and informed her grandmother of the war news she read in the newspapers.
The news made Marie-Thérèse worry even more about her son.
She was afraid that at some point the Germans would either bomb or overtake the field hospital where Tristan and Victoria were working, and take them prisoner.
But she didn’t share her worst fears with Alex, and maintained a cheerful outward appearance.
On New Year’s Day, they went to a restaurant for lunch, although rationing had impacted the quality of food all over France.
The night before, Marie-Thérèse had opened a bottle of champagne, and given Alex a glass.
She was almost fifteen, old enough to have a glass of wine.
Marie-Thérèse was conservative in most of her views, and a traditionalist.
She didn’t have Victoria and Tristan’s advanced modern views about women, and she shared with Alex another view of the role of women in France in the past, to serve and obey their husbands with respect and tenderness.
She had been deeply in love with her husband, married to him for more than forty years, and still missed him.
She had taken care of him herself once he got sick, and held him in her arms when he took his last breath.
Marie-Thérèse admired some of her son’s ideas, though not all of them, and she agreed that Alex should attend university when she finished her education with the nuns at a private girls’ school in Paris.
Alex was too bright not to go further.
But Marie-Thérèse also worried that too much education might frighten off the men Alex might want to marry, and she didn’t think a career was necessary.
She accepted her daughter-in-law as the exception, admired her courage and independent spirit, and forgave her an excess of liberal ideas, because she was American.
The American women she had read about always seemed particularly bold to her.
Victoria never seemed offensive, but Marie-Thérèse tried to add some balance to Alex’s upbringing while she was with her.
Her parents had allowed her to express her most independent views as freely as she wanted, and she occasionally shocked the nuns and the lay teachers at school.
Alex’s American grandfather had written to her all about the demonstrations and parades of the National Women’s Party in New York, whose goal was to obtain the vote for women.
He thought it a worthy cause, even when the demonstrations occasionally turned violent.
Alexandra and her mother agreed with him about the vote for women, and Alex voiced her opinions freely at school, and was sent home for the rest of the day by one of her teachers who found her point of view inappropriate, and revolutionary for a well-brought-up young girl.
Alex thought women should be college-educated, allowed to vote, and hold any job a man could, for equal pay.
She was far ahead of the few freedoms enjoyed by women in France, who lived in the Dark Ages, according to Alex.
She assured her grandmother that no man would ever tell her what to do, which was why she had no desire to marry.
She had no intention of becoming anyone’s slave.
“That’s a little extreme, don’t you think, my dear?”
her grandmother said gently, in the very polite, genteel way she had of speaking.
She had strong ideas and opinions herself, even about politics, but she was never aggressive in the way she expressed them.
Alex occasionally spoke too strongly when she was passionate about a subject.
“No, Mamie-Thérèse, I don’t think my ideas are extreme.
It’s unacceptable to turn your wife into a puppet, and not let her have her own opinion.”
“I wasn’t a slave or a puppet to your grandfather.
I took care of him because I loved him, and he loved me too.”
“Didn’t you ever want to have a job, Mamie, or go to university?”
Alex asked, curious about her grandmother.
Now that they were living together, she was getting to know her at a deeper, more adult level.
Alex loved her, but she didn’t agree with everything she said.
And she thought some of her ideas old-fashioned, which wasn’t surprising at her age.
Her grandmother considered the question for a moment before she answered.
“I took some classes at the Sorbonne, while your father went to medical school.
It was very interesting, and I might have enjoyed a longer education.
I took a class in Italian literature of the eighteenth century.
It was fascinating.
But I never had a burning desire for a job.
I wasn’t brought up that way.
And what work would I have done? I’ve never wanted to be a nurse like your mother.
All that blood and dirt now.
She thrives on that.
And I wouldn’t have wanted to be a doctor, if that were possible.
I have no desire to be a teacher, and what else could I do? Work in a shop? I have no interest in that either.
Women who work in shops always seem so envious and greedy.
I was quite content to stay at home, take care of your father, run a beautiful home, and help your grandfather relax after a hard day at the hospital.
And I believe he was quite satisfied with that too.
He didn’t expect more than that from me, and we loved and respected each other.
He would have been amazed if I’d wanted a job. I didn’t need to work. He took good care of me.”
It was an interesting view of marriage for Alexandra, and very different from the relationship her parents shared.
They were more equals than Tristan’s parents had been.
Marie-Thérèse wasn’t seeking equality with her husband when she was married.
And he protected her.
She was quite content to be the tranquil haven he came home to at night after a hard day.
That was her role, as she saw it, with occasional special moments.
She had no desire or need for glory, or acclaim, and she preferred to stand behind her man, in her gentle bourgeois way.
Marie-Thérèse wondered at times if she was having any impact on Alex, and if she would remember her grandmother’s ways in the future, and discover that her grandmother was wiser than Alex knew at fourteen.
She was almost sure that Alex’s mother wouldn’t approve of what she was saying, but she thought Alex should know both sides of the story, the doctrine of the ardent feminists of the day on the one hand, which was familiar to Alex because of her mother, and the less familiar, subtler role of a traditional woman in France.
Alex knew many of them, among her friends’ mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, but she couldn’t ask them the questions she could ask Mamie-Thérèse.
Alex still couldn’t see why she should want to hide in the shadows, and let her husband tell her what to think and do.
Alex was much braver than that, and never wanted to be subservient to a man.
If that were the case, she was sure she would prefer to be alone.
She remembered her paternal grandfather, and he had always spoken to his wife as though he was smarter and knew better.
He didn’t want to hear what she had to say, and Alex didn’t like it.
It seemed demeaning to her.
Her grandmother didn’t seem to mind it, but Alex didn’t want a marriage or relationship like that.
She preferred her parents’ more modern model.
“I don’t want to marry,”
Alex informed her grandmother.
“It seems too complicated to me.”
“Your parents are happy and it’s not complicated,”
Mamie-Thérèse reminded her, intrigued by her granddaughter’s point of view, unusual for someone so young.
“They’re different,”
Alex said, and Mamie-Thérèse didn’t disagree with her.
Her son and daughter-in-law were special.
She had felt it from the first.
They got along famously and viewed each other as equals, which was unheard of between a man and a woman.
Alexandra and Mamie-Thérèse had many discussions like it.
And Alex’s grandfather in Illinois wrote to her from time to time.
He was very intelligent and more modern in his views than her grandmother, although they were of the same generation.
Alex had only seen him a handful of times in her life.
She had told him about the journal she wrote in faithfully, and he said he thought it was an excellent idea.
And whatever their divergence of views and cultures, both her grandparents and parents were proud of her.
She was allowed to speak her mind and she wasn’t afraid to express her views, and had clear justifications for them that were coherent and lucid, even if Mamie-Thérèse didn’t understand them all or concur.
A wide range of opinions was acceptable in Alexandra’s family, which was different from the girls she knew.
—
In April, at the front, the damage to the men Victoria and Tristan were seeing was worse than ever.
The injuries were atrocious at the second battle of Ypres, where the Germans were using poison gas for the first time, with horrifying results for its victims.
Many of them would never recover from the damage it inflicted.
They were blinded and suffered agonizing internal injuries and horrendous deaths.
In some cases, it seemed almost worse to Victoria when they survived, and death was a blessing.
The doctors and nurses tried to save as many as they could, but the death toll was shocking.
The condition of the men they treated demoralized the medical personnel as they made careful notes of what they were seeing in the men.
And along with appalling injuries, the psychological consequences were intense.
Alex was fifteen by then, and noticed that her mother’s letters were shorter and less frequent.
She hadn’t seen her in several months, since Christmas.
The entire world was shocked by the news of the sinking of the Lusitania in May, torpedoed by a German U-boat.
One thousand nine hundred and fifty-nine passengers and crew were on board, and one thousand one hundred and ninety-eight lives were lost—British, French, American, and fifteen other nationalities.
It was a civilian ship, and the Germans claimed that it was carrying military supplies, which the Americans denied.
They had managed to stay neutral so far.
The photographs of dead children lying on the dock, retrieved from the waters of the Atlantic, were heartbreaking.
Alex was deeply affected by them.
Three weeks later, in June, her world caved in when she and Marie-Thérèse received the news of her mother’s death from tuberculosis.
Nothing had prepared her for it.
She didn’t even know her mother had been sick, her parents hadn’t warned her.
Tristan came home with her body in a simple pine casket.
She had been ill for several months, and the doctors had been unable to save her.
And she refused to leave the front, she wanted to be near her husband.
Tristan was devastated, as was their daughter.
When he was able to, once on leave, he had sent his father-in-law a telegram, who was equally crushed by the news.
Victoria was forty years old, and her body was ravaged by the time she died.
She was barely more than flesh and bones.
Victoria had never mentioned being ill in her letters and had tried to sound cheerful for Alex’s sake.
They buried her at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, at a simple service Marie-Thérèse arranged, and Tristan left for the front again three days later.
He barely had time to comfort Alex, who was inconsolable.
Her mother had been her hero, and the role model she tried to live up to.
She worried even more about her father now.
He looked tired and worn when he went back.
It was a summer of deep grief for Alex as she mourned her mother, and there was little her grandmother could do to cheer her up.
The war news got steadily worse for the next several months.
The Germans sank the SS Arabic in August, with Americans on board.
It was a grim Christmas for Alex, without her mother.
Her father didn’t come home on leave that year.
After Christmas, the Battle of Verdun began in February, and the field hospital where he worked had relocated again.
It was a bitter cold winter, and the men were suffering in the trenches.
His world had become very dark when he lost his wife eight months before, and he hadn’t recovered.
His letters to Alex were short and infrequent.
He had no good news to share with her.
He felt dead himself.
—
Alex had her first flirtation that winter with a boy who was the brother of a girl she knew at school.
It was innocent and chaste, and raised her spirits.
It was the first thing that had made her happy since her mother’s death.
She had only seen her father a few times since.
He didn’t come home on leave anymore and worked all the time.
Marie-Thérèse was worried about him too.
His eyes looked vacant when she saw him, from too much anguish he was seeing at the front, with the continuing use of nerve gas and its devastating effects.
The men who were surviving would be impaired forever physically and emotionally.
It was the most vicious fighting the world had seen thus far in wartime, with cruelty beyond belief in an allegedly civilized world.
Disease was rampant among those who weren’t wounded—dysentery, typhus, tuberculosis.
Men were dying from a multitude of causes the doctors had no resources to cure.
Their medicinal supplies were limited to aspirin, quinine, arsenic, strychnine, and iodine, and were inadequate to combat the diseases they were up against.
They had lost several nurses and some of the doctors too.
—
Julien Marceau, the boy that Alex liked, took her for walks in the Bois de Boulogne and the Jardins du Luxembourg.
He was seventeen and Alex sixteen, and he was the first boy who had ever kissed her.
He was serious and shy, and kind to her.
His sister, Vivienne, Alex’s classmate, joined them sometimes and they went out for ice cream.
He visited Alex at her grandmother’s apartment, and brought her small bouquets of flowers.
He was polite and from a nice family, and seemed harmless to her grandmother.
He was a sweet boy.
He turned eighteen in August, and was drafted a month later, and sent to the Battle of the Somme after a brief training period.
Before he left for the front in October, he told her he loved her.
They had serious conversations about the meaning of life, and he was impressed that she intended to go to university.
He was going to apply to Sciences Po after the war, an excellent school, and wanted to join the diplomatic corps one day.
They had talked a lot about their plans and dreams, and everything they wanted to do after the war.
He had never been to America, and wanted to go.
She had told him about her grandfather in Illinois.
She promised to write to Julien when he left, although letters to and from soldiers took a long time to arrive, weeks and sometimes months, and were erratic, like the letters from her father.
—
The Battle of the Somme had begun in July, and her father’s field hospital moved there in August, to care for the relentless waves of injured men arriving daily and hourly from the battle lines.
Alex knew her father was there, and she hoped that Julien would have no reason to meet him or need his medical services once he arrived.
It was only a week after Julien left that the dreaded telegram arrived from the War Department that Alex’s father had been the victim of a bomb.
One of his orderlies wrote to tell them that a German patrol had stealthily planted the bomb near the surgical ward where Tristan was operating.
It had been placed by a spy in a French uniform, they deduced later.
It killed six men—two doctors, three patients, and an orderly.
Alex’s father was one of the ill-fated surgeons.
Three nurses had been injured in the blast, but none had died.
It was counter to all the rules of warfare to attack a medical facility, but the damage was done.
Tristan was buried locally—there were too many bodies to send home now.
When Marie-Thérèse opened the telegram and learned of her son’s death, she was as shattered as though the bomb that had killed him had hit her too.
She had to compose herself to tell Alex the terrible news, and Alex let out a horrible wail of grief when her grandmother told her.
She took it as hard as Marie-Thérèse had feared.
She sobbed all day on her bed, clinging to her grandmother until she fell asleep.
And there wasn’t even a funeral to honor him this time.
The idea that she would never see him again left her breathless, and she began crying again as soon as she woke up the next morning.
Marie-Thérèse was seriously worried about her, but there was nothing she could do for her, except be there.
Alex had lost both her parents in the space of a year.
All she had left was her grandmother, and a grandfather in America she hadn’t seen in years, and barely knew.
She sat mournfully at breakfast, staring into space, unable to eat, as her breath caught in hiccups from crying.
“I’m an orphan now,”
she said in a broken voice.
The look on her face brought tears to Marie-Thérèse’s eyes again too.
“No, you’re not,”
she said in a soft voice as she gently touched Alex’s hand, “you have me.”
But it wasn’t the same.
Tristan was forty-eight when he was killed.
She couldn’t believe it either.
She had lost her only child, and the only relative she had in the world now was Alex.
She was seventy-six years old, and felt a hundred that day.
Marie-Thérèse took Alex out for a walk that afternoon, and they went to the nearby church to light candles for her parents, and Alex cried all the way home.
She fell asleep on the couch when they got back, and Marie-Thérèse gently covered her with a blanket and let her sleep.
Her every waking moment was an agony.
Alex didn’t go to school for several days, until her grandmother finally insisted and walked her there herself.
It was brutal getting through the days.
Alex couldn’t imagine how she would live without both her parents.
They were more than her parents.
They had been her best friends.
The days ticked by slowly, and the following week, Alex noticed that Julien’s sister Vivienne wasn’t in school, and she realized she hadn’t seen her for several days.
She was so distraught about her father that she hadn’t noticed anything around her since the news of his death.
She asked one of their classmates in passing if Vivienne was sick.
The girl shook her head.
“Her brother was killed at the Somme last week.
She hasn’t been back since.
I visited her yesterday.”
“Julien?”
Alex asked in a whisper, and the girl nodded.
Vivienne only had one brother, and he was it.
He had only been gone for a few weeks.
He hadn’t even written to her yet.
And now he was gone too.
She walked straight out of the school, without speaking to anyone, and went home.
Marie-Thérèse was surprised to see her so early in the day.
Alex was sheet white and stared at her when she walked in.
She looked dazed.
“Are you all right?”
her grandmother asked her.
She looked like she was about to faint, she was close to it.
It was one blow too many.
Now Julien was gone too.
“Julien was killed last week, at the Somme,”
she said in a choked voice.
Marie-Thérèse shook her head, speechless for a minute, and began to cry as she took Alex in her arms and held her, as they both sobbed for Alex’s first beau.
It was a cruel way for the budding romance to end, and he was such a sweet boy, barely more than a child.
They sat down on the couch together, holding hands, and were silent for a long time, as Marie-Thérèse dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and Alex stared straight ahead, as though seeing ghosts.
She was still deathly pale.
—
Alex felt as though she was moving underwater for the weeks after her father’s death.
A month after he died, the Battle of the Somme was declared an Allied victory for the British and the French, with tremendous losses.
And another month later, in December, the Battle of Verdun ended with enormous losses on both sides.
It was hard to tell what was a victory and what was a defeat anymore.
There were too many deaths at every battle.
Alex wondered sometimes where her father’s field hospital was now, but it didn’t matter anymore.
She had no one left to pray for or mourn.
Marie-Thérèse discreetly wrote Paul Peterson a letter to advise him of Tristan’s death, in case he wanted to write to Alex, which he did immediately, listing all of her father’s virtues and qualities, and saying how much he had admired him, and what a fine human being he was.
It gave Alex some small comfort to hear from him, and she thanked him, but nothing dulled the pain, so soon after her father’s death.
She and her grandmother didn’t celebrate Christmas that year.
There was nothing to celebrate.
They went to church on Christmas Eve, came home, and went to bed.
They ignored the holiday the next day, and treated it like an ordinary day.
But nothing was ordinary anymore.
Horror, heartbreak, and loss had become commonplace.
She thought of Julien frequently too, and cried for him as well.
—
The war became increasingly brutal in the early months of 1917.
U-boats sank Allied ships whenever possible.
German submarines were combing the Atlantic for prey, even sinking passenger ships occasionally, though nothing as shocking as the Lusitania two years before.
In March, there was unrest in Russia, which ultimately led to revolution.
The czar abdicated and his family were placed under house arrest in their palace.
China severed relations with Germany in March.
And in April, the United States declared war on Germany, followed by Cuba and Panama.
All the European countries had entered the war three years before, but finally, despite President Wilson’s attempts to remain neutral, at last America was in the war too.
American troops were drafted, trained, and readied to be sent to the front in Europe.
Brazil and Bolivia severed relations with Germany in April, and the Ottoman Empire severed relations with the United States and allied with Germany.
The battles were too numerous to keep track of, and Alex continued to read the newspaper carefully every day.
Her mother had gotten her into the habit as a child and said it was important to be informed.
The Americans landed in France in June.
The third battle of Ypres began a month later in July.
China declared war on Germany in August.
By the end of the year, all of South America had declared war on Germany.
Alex’s father had been gone for more than a year by then.
The war had a viselike grip on everyone.
Alex had gotten a letter from Julien a year before, a month after his death.
He’d written it the day he died.
She cried when she read it.
He told her he loved her and couldn’t wait to see her again, and hoped that one day they could visit the United States together.
The world as they knew it had continued to fall apart after that.
Somewhere in the vicinity of seventeen million men and women had died by the end of 1917, among them three people Alex loved.
And twenty million had been wounded.
She couldn’t imagine ever being happy again.
The whole world, and her world, had become a very sad place, with no end of the war in sight.
Alex could not imagine the world ever being normal again.
And her dreams had died with her parents and Julien.