Ghost Talkers (34 page)

Authors: Mary Robinette Kowal

Many thanks to Leanna Renee Hieber, with whom I spent a delightful afternoon brainstorming how the conditioning worked. Dan Wells looked at my outline and pointed out where I was being stupid about the structure.

And then there are the folks who let me blather at them while I was developing the novel and generally made me feel safe and supported: Howard Tayler; Brandon Sanderson; Lynne Thomas; Wes Chu; my husband, Robert Kowal; Sandra Tayler; Donovan Beeson; and pretty much everyone else I know. Never underestimate how important this is for a writer.

Of course, my agent, Jennifer Jackson. First reader, Michael Curry. And my truly amazing editor, Liz Gorinsky.

Historical Note

My grandmother, Mary Elois Stephens Jackson, was born in 1905 and remembers WWI ending. She said that everyone ran out into the streets, crying and cheering. Later, she married Grandaddy, Luther H. Jackson, who was a veteran of the war. When she passed away in 2014, she was one of the last remaining widows of a WWI veteran.

With war, we tend to focus on the men, and a lot of people, including me, don't realize how integral women were to the war effort. Allow me to recommend that you go out and get a copy of Kate Adie's
Fighting on the Home Front,
which is about the role of women in the First World War.

Here in the United States, the Great War had less of an impact than it did in England and Europe, simply because we entered the war later. But in England, from the moment the war began, women were “doing their part” both at home and in the theater of war. They were nurses, ambulance drivers, doctors, motorcycle dispatch riders, and often right in the thick of it.

Much of what the mediums go through in terms of “shell shock” was based on the ambulance drivers, who saw death and horrific injuries every day. They were right there, in the battlefields amidst the same unrelenting shelling that the men experienced. They suffered from PTSD in ways that are largely ignored.

There are so many women that I wanted to work into the novel and just couldn't, so I hope you'll indulge me as I tell you about some of them. An amazing pair of women, Mairi Chisholm and Elsie Knocker, were motorcycle nurses. They set up a dressing station a hundred yards from the front lines so they could retrieve soldiers and patch them up enough to get them to the official hospitals. They saved thousands of lives.

Edith Cavell was a British nurse who kept treating people in Belgium and didn't evacuate when the Germans invaded. She helped sneak wounded Allied soldiers out of the country by obtaining false documents for them, or disguising them. She was executed by the Germans in 1915.

In many ways, Edith Appleton does appear in
Ghost Talkers
. She was a nurse at the front and kept extensive diaries which detail her life during the war. I read
A Nurse at the Front: The First World War Diaries of Sister Edith Appleton,
edited by Ruth Cowen, and it completely shaped how I wrote this book. In many ways, Edith was not extraordinary, in that she could have been any one of the thousands of women who served. In other ways, she truly is. In the same entry, she can write about receiving a train of wounded and then the beauty of a sunset. Her writing makes you feel the war in ways that pictures of the trenches cannot. (Also, I used their names for Ginger and Mrs. Richardson's aliases.)

The hospitality rooms were real things. Women recognized that tending to the soldiers' emotional health was as important as their physical health, so they set up rooms, huts, and tents in which soldiers could go for a cup of tea, a biscuit, or just music and conversation. There were many, many letters written about how grateful the men were for a reminder of normalcy.

“Now go, sit down and be quiet, and leave the war to the men.” This is paraphrased from the response that Dr. Elsie Inglis received when she offered a fully trained and staffed medical unit to the Royal Army Medical Offices. Their problem? It was all women. The French had no such qualms, and stationed her in Serbia. She came to be greatly admired, and the Scottish Women's Hospital units had higher survival rates than their male counterparts. They also were among the first to recognize and treat shell shock as a serious problem.

Life in the trenches was brutal, and J. R. R. Tolkien referred to it as an “animal horror.” He based the Battle of Helm's Deep on the Battle of the Somme, which he fought in as part of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. Fortunately, he was not in the first wave, which was nearly wiped out.

This was the first time that machine guns were in common use in war. The strategy of marching forward in a line was completely ill-suited to that offensive tactic. In
Forgotten Voices of the Somme
, which is a collection, edited by Joshua Levine, of first-person accounts of the war, soldier after soldier talk about how they were the only one in their platoon to live. One man said that he thought the soldiers in front of him had just lay down, and couldn't understand why, until he realized they were all dead. Other soldiers said they could not understand how they lived. One battalion went out, and less than twenty men returned.

It was during this time that a lot of people turned to Spiritualism. I have played fast and loose with the practice of Spiritualism, and mediums, for the purposes of the book. My rationale is that the way I describe it is how it “really” works, while the public awareness of Spiritualism is camouflage to protect sensitive information. Spiritualism is still an active religion, and if you're interested in more information, I would encourage reading about its actual beliefs. My primary source was Hereward Carrington's 1920 book,
Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them.

One last note, on spycraft. The British War Museum's WWI exhibit was invaluable in coming up with some of the details of how spies passed information in the First World War. Book codes were one of the most unbreakable ones, and the pages of numbers in this book really do work. I picked Rupert Burke's poems and
The Story of an African Farm
because they were both referenced in
Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends
, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge
.
Again, this was an invaluable resource. Vera and her fiancÃ© often discussed fiction in their letters, and these were their two favorite books. I wanted to honor their memory by incorporating them. They're also worth reading. Actually, all of the books I mentioned are.

There's more. So much more about the war and the men and women who were there. Reading their firsthand accounts made me realize that I had no understanding of what bravery really meant. Tolkien based Samwise Gamgee on the common men in the trench, and he believed that men like him were the bravest of them all.

TOR BOOKS BY
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL

THE GLAMOURIST HISTORIES

Shades of Milk and Honey

Mary Robinette Kowal
is the 2008 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, a multiple Hugo Award winner, winner of the
RT Book Reviews
Reviewers' Choice Best Book Award for best fantasy novel, and a frequent finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards. A professional puppeteer with a twenty-year career, Mary also performs as an audiobook narrator. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Rob, and more than a dozen manual typewriters. You can sign up for email updates
here
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