The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

when I’d disembarked the ocean liner, I’d noticed the shelled look of the houses on the wharf, like gaping teeth in a pretty smile.

“One college sophomore minus one small encumbrance, divided by six months’ passage of time, multiplied by ten Paris frocks and a new haircut will not magically equal one restored reputation.” “Life is not a math problem, Charlotte.” If it was, I’d have been a lot better at it.

Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple.

It was why she’d been hired, her pure French and her pure English. Native of both countries, at home in neither.

No one lets girls do anything at all. Not spend our own money, sell our own things, or plan our own lives.

“To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that’s why women are good at it. Our lives are already boring.

“Life is shit here,” Lili said. “It will likely go on being shit until we drive the Germans out.”

Eve could see why the Germans came to dine here. It was a civilized place to relax after a long day of stamping on your conquered populace.

“How she manages not to get shot, I don’t know. Those border searchlights would show a flea cowering on the floor of hell, but she always slips through.”

I couldn’t out-silent him at the game of let’s see who says less. All I could do was pretend not to care.

When life could end at any moment on the point of a German bayonet, never allow middle-class morality to get in the way of a good romp with a married ex-convict in tweed.”

But those two battle-axes just stood there with the counter between them, calm as if they were discussing china spoons. Such different women, one tall and gaunt and wrecked, the other sturdy and neat and respectable. But they faced each other erect and granite hard as pillars, and hatred boiled off them in black waves like smoke.

Her silence didn’t distinguish her. Most of Lille was similarly withdrawn, bemused into apathy by hunger and boredom, monotony and fear.

“I lost my brother,” I said hoarsely. “I failed him. If I’d just been able to help when he was falling to pieces, maybe he wouldn’t have died like that.

“Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld, so the classics tell us, and there is nothing more potent than forgetfulness.

I knew absolutely nothing about babies. They were little and helpless, greedy and breakable, and they terrified me.

There was the past and the now. Nothing else was certain. Nothing else was real.

I was in a car with an ex-convict and an ex-spy, barreling down on an unknown future—if that wasn’t a set of mathematical variables that equaled adventure, I didn’t know what was.

“You want revenge for Violette and Lili, because you love them. You want revenge, and if you can’t get it, you just want to die trying. Believe me, I know that feeling very well.”

Rose and me, Finn and his Gypsy girl, Eve and Lili. Were we all three hunting ghosts from the past, women lost in a maelstrom of war?

Does anyone get over it? I looked at the chair where Eve had sat. Three of us chasing painful memories across the wreckage of two wars; no one appeared to be over much of anything.

My feet might be heavy now, but maybe someday I could dance my way out from under the cloud.

Do not forgive me, she wanted to cry. Please, do not forgive me! Forgiveness hurt so much more than hatred.

an idea pricked me there, an insistent little thought I’d had last night as well—an equation that didn’t balance out—but I pushed that aside for now

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.

Excerpt from La Guerre des Femmes, memoir of Louise de Bettignies’s war work by Antoine Redier, as told to him by his wife Léonie van Houtte, code name Violette Lameron: She finished as she had lived, a soldier.

But his life wasn’t worth trading for Eve’s future—he’d already eaten too much of her past.

Excerpt of a letter, 1919 Antoine Le Four after the liberation of Lille, to his sister This is a haunted city now and its people are the living ghosts. We live, we breathe, we go about our daily routines, but the color is gone, perhaps forever. For we who have seen so much, how can the world appear in other than mourning hues of grays and black?

War changes everything, this we know. Change is inevitable, but where does it say change must be eternal? We can never recover our innocence, but we can rebuild. No, we owe this to our dead: we must rebuild and this can only be done by those who knew what our city was before the war.

The French survived not one but two brutal occupations in a span of less than forty years, and deserve more credit for their flinty endurance than they receive. “Those who have never suffered an enemy invasion in their own land,” wrote another Lille citizen, “can never understand what war truly is.”

The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane’s inhabitants is a well-known tragedy in France thanks to the eerie surviving ghost town with its burned clocks and abandoned Peugeot and bullet-pocked walls—but

Madame Rouffanche’s words as she recounted her rosary of horrors make for a haunting voice from the past.