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