The snipe is small, odd-looking, marvelous wading bird not often seen, though various species in the family range the whole world. Secretive by nature and about 10 inches long, weighing only about 7 ounces, its brown and buff coloration helps its hiding in or near marshland. Eyes placed high on its head, it has a very long, slender bill which it uses to search for invertebrates in the mud with a "sewing-machine" motion. Hunters have difficulty finding them; they are highly alert and startle easily. In flight, hunters have difficulty wing-shooting due to the erratic flight pattern. In fact, the word sniper originally meant a hunter highly skilled enough to bring down this bird, only later acquiring the present meaning.
Virginia had hunted snipe in Maryland, but hunting them in Turkey would be a new experience, at a bog about 15 miles from the consulate, together with four co-workers. This was as much about camaraderie as about birds, and since snipe are most active during the late afternoon, the plan was to bring lunches and enjoy the outdoors before setting off to hunt. Her friends begged her to tell stories of her family; Virginia obliged with the tale of her grandfather, who at age nine stowed away on one of his father's clipper ships and ultimately became so successful at sea-going that he was able to buy his own ship and profit handsomely in the China trade.
All were in hunting clothes. Virginia was using her favorite, a twelve-gauge shotgun, originally her father’s. He had died unexpectedly two years before. Virginia was still telling stories when they came to a wire fence in bad condition. Three climbed over, and then it was her turn. She tucked her shotgun under her arm, leaving her hands free to deal with the slack top wire. As she lifted her right leg to climb, her left skidded slightly in the damp earth. The gun slipped, its trigger catching on a fold in her hunting coat. The gun went off and destroyed her left foot, “her blood staining the tawny field grass beneath where she lay.” None of her friends were trained in first-aid, but they knew that a tourniquet was needed, so tore at their clothing to fashion one. They created a stretcher out of their hunting coats and their unloaded guns and got her to the car.
Infection quickly set in, so much so that gangrene began to appear. The head doctor from the Istanbul American Hospital was rushed to Smyrna, and he determined that amputation below the knee was the only option. Red-hot burning pain and delirium followed (her father appeared before her and lifted her out of her bed and put her on his knee). Following her father’s advice to be a fighter, her recovery was amazingly rapid. By the end of February, she was able to return to the family estate in Maryland.
There was a delay there while her swelling abated and the skin that would adjoin the artificial leg toughened sufficiently to make using the prosthesis possible -- a hollowed out piece of wood with a hole into which she inserted her leg, covered by a sock for padding. A leather corset was affixed where wood and flesh join, one which laced up her thigh, containing also elastic straps that attached to a belt. It took several months to become proficient in using this apparatus, but by the fall she was seeking a return to work and on December 10, she was on her way to Venice.
Mussolini conquered Ethiopia by the end of 1936. In the following year, Virginia was renewing her attempts to pass the civil service examinations for entry into the Foreign Service. But of 1500 foreign service officials only six were women. In her case, an obscure provision disallowing amputees was invoked. In June 1938 she transferred to Estonia. In May 1939 she threw up her hands, resigned from the Consular Service, and moved to Paris.
When Hitler attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Virginia was 33 years old. France and Britain declared war on Germany. Poland surrendered on the 27th. Russia had also declared war on Poland, on the 17th. Virginia’s new and very close friend, Claire de La Tour, told her that her brother was stationed on the impregnable Maginot Line. The two friends joined an ambulance corps and received basic medical training. They lived in a barracks, but not until spring did French-German skirmishes accelerate. Sent to live in a cottage near the Maginot, Virginia had to drive a vehicle which required her to use her artificial leg to depress the clutch. In May, Hitler invaded the Low Countries, both of which surrendered before the month was out, and his armies crossed the raging Meuse and penetrated the impenetrable Ardennes Forest, out flanking the Maginot.
Ambulance driving was hell. When not transporting wounded men, they slept where they could, ate almost nothing but bread and potatoes.

Startled by this, Virginia was even more startled when the medic found a photo in his boot. Virginia took the picture from the medic’s outstretched hand.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes:
A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
by Jason Fagone (2017)

“He entered and stormed toward her, a huge man with blazing blue eyes. His clothes were more haggard than Elizebeth would have expected for a person of his apparent wealth    . . . he dwarfed her across every dimension . . . She had the impression of a windmill or a pyramid being tipped over her.” Fabyan’s first question to Smith was, “Will you come to Riverbank and spend the night with me?” Such charisma. What girl could resist! She responded, “Oh, sir, I don’t have anything with me to spend the night away from my room.” “That’s alright. We’ll furnish you anything you want.” He ushered her out of the Newberry Library, on Washington Square in Chicago, and then into his chauffeur-driven limousine.
Elizebeth Smith, from Huntington, IN, who wanted to be distinctive and who hated her “odious” last name, spelled her first name with an “e” because her mother wanted her 9th child, born in 1892, to never have to answer to “Eliza.” Elizebeth wanted to go to college, something of which her father disapproved -- but he later relented and loaned her some money, at four percent interest. Wooster College, in OH, for starters, though she completed her degree later at Hillsdale College in MI (Class of 1915). Poetry -- and philosophy, including Erasmus, who, she wrote, “believed in one aristocracy -- the aristocracy of intellect”. “He had one faith -- faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas.”
She was a remarkably insightful diarist. Round-cornered pages in that diary, on which she wrote with a quill pen about things like the importance of choosing the right words for things (she did not like the phrase “passed away”) and the importance of being honest.
In 1916 Elizebeth Smith left Huntington and moved to Chicago in search of a job. When she found that Newberry had one of very few copies in the world of the First Folio, the first printing of the works of Shakespeare, she went to see it. She told the librarian that she was looking for something “unusual, something in literature or research.” Elizabeth was 23, 5’3” tall, weighing not much over 100 lbs.
Enter George Fabyan, heavy-set, gruff, cigar-smoking Chicago businessman. Riverbank was George Fabyan’s creation, on the west bank of the Fox River in Geneva, IL. He founded it on his 240 acre estate there, in part to hire scientists, in part to prove that Francis Bacon wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare. It was all there in First Folio, tiny clues that once detected, mounted up and mounted up and proved it really was Bacon. Fabyan assigned Elizebeth to the Bacon project under the supervision of Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who ran the Riverbank Cipher School.

Everyone lived at Riverbank. Rooms were provided. Meals were taken in common. Elizebeth met William Friedman, four years her senior, from a Jewish family in Pittsburgh who had gone to Cornell, was one of the scientists (had an interest in genetics), parted his hair in the middle. They toured Riverbank on bicycles together. He loved her.
The two came to doubt the Bacon project, the project which provided Elizebeth’s bread and butter. For one thing, the claim was that Bacon had written not just the works of the Bard, but of Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and others. For another, the hidden messages Gallup was finding, apart from “his” works of literature, were simplistic and inelegant, hardly the work of a great author.

[An aside: Norman Lewis, one of the great writers of the 20th (see Naples 44), a Welshman, had parents who became spiritualists. As a young man, Norman doubted. When his father, a failed chemist on hard times, was channeling messages people wanted from deceased relatives, Norman found that even though the departed had been distinguished intellectuals, the message they conveyed was never more profound than something like, “It’s lovely here.”]

Continued here.

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