Kopp Sisters on the March

by Amy Stewart

  What bothered her the most was not the curfew violation, of course, but the prospect of their getting hold of real weapons. The very least that anyone expected of a camp matron was to return the girls to their families alive, entirely unbesmirched by gunshot wounds. The prospect of untrained hands on a rifle, a misfire in the dark woods—it was unthinkable.

  And it was always the most unthinkable dread that visited in the middle of the night and demanded to be thought about. Such was the case for Constance that night, who was visited repeatedly by images of rifles slipping to the ground, of pistols carelessly handled, of a bullet tearing through one of her own charges, before they even laid eyes on the fighting in France. She made it her first order of business the following morning to find out why, exactly, Sarah believed it would be so easy to put her hands on a gun.

  This did not prove at all difficult, and required almost none of Constance’s ability (however rusty it had become over the winter) as an inquisitor and investigator. Sarah believed Constance to be sympathetic to her cause—and she was, even if she disapproved of the methods proposed—and told her with very little prompting exactly where the rifles could be found.

  “I can’t believe you don’t know about them already,” Sarah said, “now that you’re the camp matron. They’re kept in the supply shed behind the mess hall. I spotted the case myself, the last time I was on kitchen duty.”

  Constance wasted no time. During supper that night, when everyone was gathered together in the mess hall, she slipped outside to the supply shed and rummaged around to see the guns for herself. The shed was by this time nearly filled to capacity with unused and discarded equipment: oilcloth tarps and tent stakes, a broken chair, a row of lanterns missing wicks, and shovels and axes in varying sizes. Ellie Duval’s portable Victrola was stored there, at Constance’s insistence, perched atop an empty wooden barrel. There were crates of potatoes, too, and tinned milk, which she was obliged to move in order to step inside.

  Finally, feeling her way in the near-dark, her fingers struck a wooden case. It was under a heavy and unwieldy canvas tent, but she was able to shove enough of that aside to take a closer look. What she had before her was certainly a gun case, and it was Army-issued. It looked only large enough to hold two or three weapons, but as the case was locked, Constance couldn’t see what was inside.

  If anyone had a key, it would be Hack or Clarence. She could ask them about it directly, but to do so would only raise their suspicions. One gun case in a supply shed was easy enough to keep an eye on, she told herself. Let them train in the woods. What harm could come from it?

  “I DIDN’T THINK we’d see you again,” Margaret said, when Constance burst in on them later that night. It had taken her longer than expected to settle the camp down after curfew, owing to the coincidence of three different girls celebrating their birthdays, and festivities popping up between the tents like small fires. Constance went around extinguishing them as gently as she could—birthdays, after all, were worthy of commemoration and merited a little rule-breaking, especially when the girls were so far from home. She paced around the camp twice after everyone had gone to bed, just to make sure they stayed put. It was almost ten o’clock before she stole into the woods.

  “You shouldn’t be seeing me again out here, and I shouldn’t see you,” Constance said, brushing pine needles from the hem of her skirt. “I was on the verge of handing out demerits to girls who were only celebrating their birthdays, and here are all of you, carrying on in secret.”

  “It isn’t a secret now that you know about it,” Sarah said.

  “What I mean to say,” said Constance, “is that it’s my obligation as matron to put a stop to this. If there’s to be any trouble at the camp, it mustn’t happen under my watch.” She thought it best to begin sternly, to put a little fear into them.

  Sarah had been bunking with Constance long enough to have some idea when she wasn’t being entirely sincere. “But you enjoy it, don’t you? You’ve been waiting all day to come out in the woods with us.”

  This was, of course, correct. The truth was that it gave Constance a fine feeling of adventure to sneak out at night. She’d been thinking all day about teaching her band of outlaws (already they were her outlaws) a little jiu-jitsu, just the simple moves that every deputy who worked inside a jail had to know. If she could only show them how to step up decisively and strike a blow, she’d give them a weapon almost as powerful as a gun. No one could protect them from bullets, but Constance could, at least, teach them to fend off attacks of the kind any woman might face in wartime.

  Nonetheless, the rules were the rules.

  “Couldn’t we train in the daytime?” Constance proposed. “We have a half-hour before supper, and if you don’t mind being last into the mess hall, you’d have a little more time than that.”

  “Do you really want us to practice our rifle work in the middle of the training field?” Sarah said. “Or hand-to-hand fighting?”

  “There won’t be any rifles,” Constance put in quickly.

  “But what about the rest of it? Learning French and German phrases? I don’t think Miss Miner would approve of German being taught at an American military camp. You’d be booted out of the country for espionage.”

  “But how are you to fight the enemy if you don’t speak a word of his language?” Constance argued, furious now, but nonetheless falling very neatly into Sarah’s line of reasoning. “Never mind about the training field. Someone would write home and complain that we’re not following the approved curriculum. These girls love to write to their mothers and air their grievances.”

  With that, she surrendered to the inevitability of this secret night school. How could she refuse? Nothing about camp interested her but this. In fact, nothing at all had interested her for months, but at that moment, out in a field on a clear and chilly night with five women eager for a bit of trouble, she felt like her old self again—or, even better, like her new self. She wasn’t going backwards in time, retreating to better days long past. She was moving ahead, and that felt exhilarating.

  The five of them were watching her, and waiting. They were as eager for adventure as any boy in a khaki uniform. Why not give it to them?

  “I’ll start by showing you how to throw a man down to the ground,” she said. “Hilda, we’ll begin with you.”

  Hilda was a dark-haired girl with a pleasingly prominent nose and front teeth that sat out over her lower lip when she smiled. She stepped forward and spread out her arms. “Is someone going to catch me when I fall?”

  “I’m the one who’s going to fall,” Constance said.

  “But I could never put you on the ground! You’re so much bigger—no offense, ma’am.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with sizing up your opponent,” Constance said. “Knowing his size tells you what to do. If he’s so much larger than you, you’ll take his strength and use it against him.”

  She grabbed Hilda’s wrist, roughly, and pulled. Hilda resisted and tried to back away, but she couldn’t, and allowed herself to be dragged along, her heels in the dirt.

  “You see? I’m no match for you,” Hilda said.

  “But look at what happens if I pull on you forcefully, and you use all that force to come toward me,” Constance said. “Now I’m going to yank on your arm, and you’re going to fling yourself at me. I’ll even be helping you do it, although I don’t yet realize that I’m pulling a lethal weapon toward me.”

  They all giggled at that and grouped themselves in a half-circle behind Hilda to watch the action. Constance took her wrist again and pulled. This time, Hilda flung herself right at Constance’s chest, knocking her back a step.

  “There, you see?” Constance said.

  “But I didn’t push you over,” Hilda said. “I couldn’t.”

  “I haven’t shown you how yet. This time, when you come in close, put your right leg between mine, like so. When you fling yourself at me, I’ll be unsteady on my feet, and you’ll kick my leg out from unde
r me. Be prepared to fall with me. I might still be holding on to you.”

  There was quite a bit more nervous laughter and uncertainty from the spectators, but Hilda was engrossed in the problem. She practiced it once or twice, taking a run at Constance and putting one leg between hers and just behind, so that Constance would stumble over it when she went backwards. Hilda wore a fine look of concentration as she worked it out in her mind. It pleased Constance enormously to see her study the problem.

  When she was ready, she said, “But I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Only a minute ago you didn’t think you could do it at all,” Constance said. “The trick is that we’re going to go down slowly. I know what to expect, and you’re going to do it gently. It’s only practice, remember.”

  Hilda did remember, but just barely. When Constance took her arm and gave a good hard pull, Hilda flew at her, planted a leg behind her, and only at the last minute remembered to kick softly when Constance stumbled backwards. The two of them went down into the damp grass, panting, to the carefully muffled applause of their spectators.

  Hilda stood up first, and offered a hand to Constance. “I never would’ve thought of a maneuver like that.”

  “Of course not,” Constance said. “It has to be taught.”

  “And if it hasn’t been taught to you,” Fern said, “something else happens when you get grabbed.”

  Everyone turned at once to look at her. Fern was the smallest of them. Constance was reminded again of Fleurette—they were the same size and had to be about the same age. A man would have no trouble in overpowering her. Constance shuddered to think of it.

  In the silence that followed, Fern looked around defiantly. “Surely I’m not the only one.”

  “You’re not,” Constance hastened to say. “And you’re entirely correct. If you don’t know what to do, something else could happen—but it won’t tonight. You’re next, Fern.”

  18

  IT WAS FIVE days before Miss Miner returned with news of Constance’s replacement. In that time, Constance had made a few changes at camp, with an eye toward simplifying her responsibilities.

  Some of the girls tended to wander and get up their own entertainments. Some of them would, if permitted, spend the entire day in bed, reading magazines and napping on and off, as if all of life was simply too exhausting to contend with. In spite of a full schedule of classes and training exercises, a few of those girls did manage to wander off, so that Constance had to go around and poke Mrs. Nash’s walking-stick into tents all day long to look for shirkers.

  When she took over the supervision of chores, she realized that the girls would expand any job to fill the time available. In response, she split two shifts into four, which meant that chores occupied double the time on the schedule that they had previously. If the girls were willing to spend thirty minutes scrubbing pots when fifteen would’ve sufficed, she reasoned, why not allot the entire thirty minutes and keep them occupied?

  With this modification, kitchen duty took place four times daily now, and latrine duty twice. Tents and uniforms were inspected more often, drills and setting-up exercises ran longer than before, and she instituted a strict prohibition on releasing students from class early, which the instructors tended to do in fair weather.

  None of these changes, Constance supposed, were a great deal of fun for the campers, but it was easier on her if everyone was kept busy. She found that there were fewer goings-on at night if they were exhausted by the end of the day.

  And if they didn’t like it, she told herself, they could complain to Maude Miner, who had it within her power to find another matron.

  On the night Miss Miner reappeared, Constance had kept the girls in the mess hall after dinner to write letters home, and was walking among the tables, making sure her charges were applying themselves to the task.

  “You’re quite the mother hen,” Margaret Day said. Constance flinched at that. She used to know a policewoman in Paterson who described her role that way: a mother hen watching over errant chicks. It didn’t sound like any kind of law enforcement that Constance wanted to do back then, and it didn’t sound any better now.

  “It keeps them occupied,” Constance said. “I don’t suppose you’re writing to your mother?”

  “I’m writing to my husband,” she said. “His last letter hardly made it past the censor at all. He’s a mechanically minded man, so he likes to tell me all about his location and his training and the kind of aeroplane he’s flying, none of which is allowed. I have to teach him how to write about all the little things—the dinner rations, the friends he’s making, the weather.”

  “But he doesn’t enjoy the art of small talk?” Constance asked.

  “He never did. He’s just like his daddy. That man hardly said a word to me the first three years we were married.”

  Sarah was writing to her brother, as she did almost every day. “I’m telling him about our training,” she whispered as Constance walked by. “He doesn’t want me learning to shoot, but I told him I wouldn’t go overseas unless I could look after myself, and look after him.”

  “You’re too fond of those guns,” Constance whispered back.

  “I’m not at all fond of guns,” said Sarah, “but I am coming to like some of those holds. I hope I didn’t leave a bruise.”

  Sarah had been a little rough with her the night before, forgetting that she was supposed to merely pantomime an elbow jab to the gut. Her aim was off, and Constance took a blow to the ribs.

  “I’ve had worse,” Constance said, smiling down at her, and walked on.

  She was standing at the back of the mess hall, surveying the faces bowed over their letters, when Maude Miner walked in. She watched the heads lift and turn toward her, then go back to their work. Miss Miner was heading straight for her.

  “Have you come to introduce my replacement?” Constance asked.

  “Step outside and I’ll tell you,” Maude said. They went out the back way and rousted a couple of girls sneaking cigarettes.

  “Two out of two hundred isn’t bad,” Maude said.

  “If I had to confiscate every cigarette, I’d never get anything else done,” Constance said.

  Maude waved that subject away. “I’m not worried about it. But you know I can’t find a replacement on short notice.”

  “I wonder if you even tried.”

  “Not particularly. I just gave you a few days to get used to the job. It looks to me like you have everything in hand.”

  Constance was prepared to offer up her usual protests: She hadn’t come to camp looking for a matron job. It wasn’t her aim to chaperone society girls. The camp was (by Miss Miner’s own admission) a bit of theater anyway, not seriously engaged in teaching its enlisted much beyond a slightly more militaristic version of domestic work.

  But now there was subterfuge afoot. Five women training after dark in the woods didn’t make for much of an insurrection, but it was enough. She had something to offer these women, and she found that even a few stolen moments after dark satisfied her greatly.

  Besides, there was Norma to consider. She was still marching her students through her pigeon curriculum, convinced that a general would drop by at any moment and conclude that the Army simply couldn’t function without her and her birds. If the camp closed for want of a matron, she would hear about it from Norma for the rest of her days.

  For all those reasons, she found herself saying to Miss Miner: “It wasn’t what I came here to do, but you’re right. We all have our duties.”

  Maude clapped her hands together. “I knew you’d come around! Just keep them in line for a month. Turn the camp back over to me without a scandal attached to it, can you do that?”

  She said it lightly, as a kind of a joke, but it gave Constance pause. Maude would never trust her with the job if she knew that Constance was sneaking out at night and teaching her campers to fight. The mere possibility of women wearing trousers at this camp had raised an outcry in the papers. Hand-to-hand f
ighting—much less those rifles Sarah had her eye on—would ruin them.

  Maude seemed not to notice Constance’s hesitation and went on in the same airy tone. “Do that, and you will have acquitted yourself as well as anyone could. I’ll look for another posting for you after this, and I promise it’ll be more interesting than camp matron. I’m in the thick of it in Washington right now. Something will turn up.”

  “That’s good of you,” Constance said. Having already been rejected by two prospective employers, she felt herself to be in no position to turn down any post Miss Miner might have on offer.

  “Then it’s settled. You’ll be paid the balance of Mrs. Nash’s wages, of course.” Maude marched back inside the tent before Constance could say another word. She stood on a chair—even in a skirt and high boots, she didn’t waver but jumped right up as if she did it every day—and clapped her hands together.

  “Ladies, I’m pleased to announce that Miss Constance Kopp has agreed to stay on and serve as camp matron for the duration. Mrs. Nash is expected to recover, and we hope to see her at graduation. Miss Kopp has my wholehearted support and I know she’ll have yours as well.”

  There were a few good-natured groans—Constance already had a reputation for being harder to fool than Mrs. Nash—but Norma and Fleurette stood up and led the applause, and everyone soon followed.

  Constance had nothing prepared in the way of a speech and decided to set the tone with a straightforward order. “Finish your letters, and be back in your tents by nine.”

  Miss Miner had an auto waiting. Before she left, she said to Constance, “There’s something else, now that you have charge of the camp. I have a letter from the manager of a vaudeville act, a Mr. Freeman Bernstein. It seems he’s been sending his performers around to the Plattsburg camps, and someone with the last name of Kopp wrote to him and suggested he bring them here.”

  It was too late to keep the news from Fleurette: she’d been making her way through the crowd to Constance since the applause died down, and she heard what Maude said.