I was never afraid before I met you. But now I am. I know we said we wouldn’t speak of the war, but the war is here, the war is coming for us, and I’m afraid as I was never afraid before, when there was only my own miserable life at stake. I’m afraid for you. I’m afraid for myself. I’m afraid I’ll never see you again, never hear your voice again, never have the chance to tell you, in my own weak, miserable words, how much I love you.
I’ve been trying to take solace in others’ words. I have my John Donne here with me (not Shakespeare, I promise), reminding me that our souls are joined even if our bodies are parted, circling like the points of a compass. I never told you that you are all the points of the compass to me: my east, my north, my south, my west. My America. My newfound land. My Emmie.
I’m babbling now. I can’t seem to think clearly in the midst of all this, and time is short. So if you can hear only one thing through the rubble and the noise, I hope you hear the echo of this:
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
—From a letter, unsent, found among the things of Captain Fitzwilliam DeWitt, 2nd Battalion, Durham Light Infantry
March 1918
Grécourt, France
They’d scarcely been asleep an hour when the guns started again.
Kate struggled up, trying to make sense of where she was and what was happening. It was Grécourt, but she was in her clothes, the room was jammed with extra cots, and the guns were rumbling nearer than she’d like.
Feeling hot and cold all at once, Kate sat up, reaching for the coat-covered lump that was Emmie. Alice and Florence were already stirring, rubbing their eyes and pinning up their hair, but Kate knew from college that Emmie could sleep through just about anything. Even, apparently, a machine-gun barrage.
“Emmie—Emmie.”
Emmie grumbled, trying to stick her head under her pillow.
There was a rat-a-tat-tat on the door, and the major entered, manfully averting his eyes, even though it was pitch-dark and they were all fully clothed. “I’m awfully sorry,” he said. “But the Boche seem to be on the move again.”
“Then I guess we ought to be too.” Kate’s voice felt scratchy. It hurt to even think of leaving. But the guns—they were close. Closer than she had ever heard them. Three miles away. Five if they were lucky. She wondered what had fallen in the night, which of their friends were dead. “We’re already packed. We can be out in fifteen minutes.”
Alice stuffed her knuckles into her mouth, making a muffled sound of distress.
Kate fished in her pocket, digging out a set of heavy keys. “Here.” She thrust them at the major. “These are the keys to the cellar. You’ll find our supplies down there. Take anything you can use. Give any blankets and food to the soldiers, and medical supplies to the hospital corps. As for anything that’s left . . . if you have to retreat, burn it. Burn it all.”
“The seeds—” said Alice faintly, and stopped. They’d all spent weeks sifting seeds into tiny little packets, thousands and thousands of them. Weeks of effort, gone. All their hard-won supplies, all their Hague parcels, all the extras they’d wrangled from the Red Cross, gone.
“What Kate said,” said Emmie, heroically coming to Kate’s aid. Her hair was out of its pins and half-down around one shoulder. “We’d rather lose everything than have it fall into the hands of the Boche.”
“I suppose so,” said Alice, hugging her duffel to her chest. “It does seem a shame, though. Think of all those nubias the Bangor Committee collected for us.”
“Oh heavens, not the nubias,” said Florence. “Even the Boche couldn’t possibly want the nubias.”
“What’s a nubia?” asked the major, sounding so politely bewildered that Kate had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Or possibly crying.
“I’m just going to take my duffel to the truck,” Kate said in a muffled voice, and staggered out before she could disgrace herself.
Behind her, she could hear Alice explaining, “A nubia is a sort of woolen hood—they’re not worn very much anymore.”
“Ah, I see,” said the major gravely, as if she were explaining a military tactic of utmost importance.
Kate paused just outside the barrack, her shoulders shaking, her chest tight. She was about to cry over the blasted nubias, and she couldn’t, not now, not when they needed her to be strong, even though she had no idea what she was doing, what she was meant to be doing.
She wanted Mrs. Barrett; she wanted Dr. Stringfellow; she wanted anyone who could tell them what to do and where to go. Grécourt looked different already, the anemones churned up by the tread of two hundred soldiers, tents dotted around the lawn. Maybe, if she closed her eyes and wished hard enough, she could make it a week ago: the ground bright with flowers; slipping into story time and holding Zélie on her lap while Nell read to the basse-cour children in French about Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf; joking with the Unit around the supper table about their amazing ability to differentiate between types of guns.
But it wasn’t a week ago. The Big Bad Wolf was here, he was on the march, with his big, big teeth and big, big guns, and maybe she wasn’t the best the Unit could have, but she was what they had right now.
“Is it too heavy?” asked Emmie, coming out, lugging her own duffel.
Kate fumbled for the bag, grateful for the predawn dark that hid her face. “N-no. Just awkward. I can’t seem to get a good grip.”
Outside the Orangerie, a surprise was waiting for her, all three trucks as spick-and-span as could be, the mud and dust of the previous day scrubbed off, everything oiled and greased and shining.
“Did the Tommies do this for us?” asked Kate wonderingly.
“I did,” said Alice, heaving her duffel into the White truck, with the hard tires they had acquired at such cost. “Last night, while you were all cooking oatmeal. They’re all greased and oiled and filled with essence. And there’s extra essence in cans in each machine.”
Kate goggled at her. “How on earth did you get the gasoline?”
Alice gave a little half shrug. “They were packing up the supply dump in Ham yesterday, so Emmie and I went along and asked them. They were really quite nice about it.”
Nice didn’t even begin to describe it. Kate hadn’t even thought about fuel. There was so much she hadn’t thought about. “Alice, you’re a wonder.”
Florence staggered up, holding a large crate in each hand. “I’ve got the hens.”
“I thought we might need food for the people on the road,” said Emmie breathlessly, bent nearly double lugging two five-gallon drums of milk. “I’ve packed our entire supply of milk and all the bread, biscuits, and chocolate I could find. The major has some Tommies carrying the rest of it over for us. I told him to put it in the jitney.”
“I’ve got first-aid supplies and gas masks,” said Julia briskly, swinging her doctor’s bag into the back of the jitney.
“I brought blankets,” said Nell, balancing a large pile of the aforementioned item on her head. “Someone is bound to need blankets.”
“And I’ve brought a portable stove,” said Anne. “And my tools. Just in case we need them.”
Kate felt her throat close up. “You’re all wonders,” she said.
She looked at the six other remaining members of the Unit, huddled together around the trucks, each and every one of them a wonder, each and every one of them her sister. They had been strangers to each other when they arrived seven months ago, but now she knew each of them down to the bones, just as they knew her, better than she had ever known anyone.
The Tommies were loading the trucks, piling in the food and duffel bags and crates of hens. It felt horribly, dreadfully final.
Kate drew herself up to her full five foot one, looking at all that remained of their Unit. “They won’t drive us away,” she said fiercely. “We’re not leaving, not really. We’re just stepping away for a bit. The Boche have no idea what they’re up against in us.”
One of Florence’s roosters stuck his head out through the slats of his crate and let out a loud, defiant crow. It pierced the dawn, resounding over the guns and the thrum of the motors.
Nell let out a shout of laughter. “Chanticleer agrees. Take that, Boche!”
“Even the Unit’s hens don’t admit defeat,” said Alice nobly. “Nell, you’re with me in the White truck?”
“That one’s a rooster, actually,” said Florence, swinging up behind the wheel of the Ford truck. She grinned at Kate. “Mr. Buff Orpington himself.”
“You’ll never let me forget that, will you?” asked Kate, settling herself behind the wheel of the jitney, Emmie next to her and Julia behind.
The major touched his hand to his cap. “Good luck. Godspeed.”
“And you,” said Kate. She had no idea what awaited him or them; all she knew was that all of them needed all the luck they could get. Luck and—what had Mrs. Rutherford called it?—grim determination. She nodded curtly at the major. “Kick those Boche back to Berlin for us.”
The small procession of trucks bumped over the moat, through the great gates, down the long alley of fallen trees. Kate was glad she was driving; it kept her from craning her head back to look, to try to memorize it all: the ruin of the castle in the mist; the Orangerie, where they had kept their trucks and held classes and their clinic and their parties; Marie’s tumbledown house, where she had cooked for them on her trusty stove before they had set up the kitchen; the church where they had sung their canticles and celebrated mass.
Just a few days, Kate told herself. The British never let go of anything. And there were the foresters and the engineers and the aviators—all the men who had danced and come to supper and drunk soup out of their tooth mugs—all those brave men holding the line.
But then they hit the road to Ercheu and saw the soldiers, companies upon companies of them, dragging their way wearily down the road, away from the front. There was a Scots band, their drums silent against their chests, their bagpipes furled, and somehow that struck Kate as the most haunting thing of all, their silence, when they had last seen them marching bravely toward the front with kilts swirling and bagpipes screeching.
And alongside the retreat came the refugees, villagers from their own villages, villagers from farther on, family groupings and people on their own, big sisters minding little siblings, an old woman clutching her cat, stumbling down the road in the pitiless light of the rising sun.
“Stop! We have to do something for them! Can’t we take them up?” Emmie pulled on Kate’s sleeve. The sun was rising, burning off the mist, revealing all the horrors that had been softened by the dawn.
“We’ll have to drop our things and come back.” Kate didn’t want to tell Emmie that she didn’t like the noises the jitney had been making. “But we can give them something to eat at least.”
They paused by the side of the road, handing out milk and bread and eggs to hungry children and soldiers, promising again and again that they would be back to take people up.
Behind them, Florence honked. “We’re blocking the road!” she shouted. “We need to get moving.”
“She’s right,” Kate said as Emmie twisted to stare back at the new waves of villagers, more and more, trailing out of the war zone. “We can set up in Roye at the Red Cross hospital and ferry people back. We can do more that way.”
It felt good to have a plan. They weren’t running away, Kate decided; they were doing their job, and would go on doing it. It made her feel less like a refugee herself.
But when they got to Roye, a little after six in the morning, Dr. Baldwin was packing up the hospital. “We’re evacuating,” he said, in between giving orders to harried orderlies. “We’ve been told to go on to Montdidier. It’s not safe here anymore.”
“But—surely—they can’t just be retreating,” said Alice. “They must mean to take a stand somewhere?”
Dr. Baldwin paused, turning to face them. “The best I’ve heard is that the English have been forced out of their last trench. It’s hand-to-hand combat now, in the open. The Germans are mowing down everything in their path.”
“Everything?” said Emmie, her face chalk white. “But surely some of the men in the front lines—not everyone can have been—”
“If they do take a stand,” said the doctor, misunderstanding her concerns, “it will be at the line of the old Battle of the Somme—which means we’re on the wrong side of it. Let’s hope there are enough left to hold the Germans there. In the meantime, we need to move our sick. We’ve mainly children here.”
Kate turned to the rest of the Unit. “We have two choices. We can take our things and move on. Or we can stay and help.”
Emmie was still pale, but resolute. “There’s no question. We stay.”
“I always wanted a good story to tell my children,” said Nell bravely.
Alice looked like she strongly wanted to disagree, but controlled herself.
“Is it unanimous, then?” asked Kate. Even Alice nodded. “All right. We have three trucks and seven of us. If we empty the trucks and leave all our bags here, we can use one truck to take the children from the hospital to Montdidier, and the other two to go back and pick up as many people as we can.”
“I’ll take the children,” volunteered Alice quickly, taking the job that involved driving away from the active fighting.
“If they’re evacuating Roye, we won’t be able to use this as a base. We’ll need some sort of refugee center in Montdidier.” Kate was struck by sudden inspiration. “Emmie, could you go with Alice and take charge of setting up a refugee center?”
“Y-yes. Of course.” Emmie lifted her head, some color returning to her face. “If we can find a hotel to take us, we could use Nell’s blankets for pallets and Anne’s stove to heat milk for babies.”
“Brilliant. If you can organize that, Florence and I can take the other two trucks and ferry people from the villages between here and Ercheu. Nell can come with me and Anne with Florence.”
Alice was twisting her lace-edged handkerchief back and forth between her fingers, fear warring with conscience. Conscience won out. “It’s a long way from Ercheu to Montdidier. If you bring people here, I can run back and forth between Montdidier and Roye.”
“That will double the number of people we’re able to move,” said Kate gratefully. “Shall we?”
The Unit dispersed to their tasks, dumping their belongings in the courtyard of the hospital, distributing their remaining foodstuffs between the three trucks to share out among the refugees. Florence looked mournfully at her chickens but agreed there was no way to take them; they would have to be donated.
“Trust me, I mind as much as you,” said Kate. “After the trouble we had getting those horrible hens from Paris! I thought I was going to be pecked to death!”
“They can tell you don’t like them,” said Florence seriously.
“I like them in soup,” said Kate.
But that was the last moment of levity they had for a long time. The day stretched on, endless, getting brighter and hotter. It felt like July on the road, and the dust rose in a choking cloud, coating their clothes and hair, sticking in the backs of their throats, mixing with sweat to make tracks of mud down their faces.
Kate had never imagined anything like what they saw on the road that day, as they stopped and stopped and stopped again, loading as many people as they could into the truck, giving milk until the milk ran out, distributing every last scrap of bread they could find in their haversacks. There was an old man wheeling his paralyzed wife in a wheelbarrow. They made a pallet for her out of someone’s mattress and got her into the truck, her husband next to her. Dispatch riders on motorbikes zoomed past them in both directions, raising more dust. Army camions lumbered past, and above it all, the guns thundered on, closer and closer.
A colonel they knew honked from his truck, going the other way. “Don’t stay too long!” he shouted. “We’re going to blow the bridges up!”
“How long?” Nell shouted back, clinging to the side of the truck, but they couldn’t hear the answer.
“As long as we can,” Kate said grimly, and they went on, back toward the guns, back against the wave of people flowing in the opposite direction.
Back and forth they went, back and forth along the road, picking up the people they had told to wait for them before, going into the villages past Roye and collecting anyone who looked like they might need help, which amounted to roughly everyone. It made Kate furious to think that these were the survivors. These were the few who had managed to remain after the first German invasion, to cling to their homes, to stay together, and here they were, on the road in the dust and confusion with the Germans bearing down again, losing one another, losing everything.
One woman was hysterical over a sack of clothing she had misplaced, all her smocks for her children, everything she had for them in the world.
“We’ll look for them,” Kate promised, because she knew the woman had to hear it, had to have something that was hers, even if the world was exploding into ash mile by mile, and they had bigger problems than baby clothes.
“It’s one thing seeing the aftermath months later,” said Kate soberly as they dropped another group off at the hospital at Roye to be ferried on to Montdidier by Alice, “and quite another to watch it in progress, all these people being wrenched from their homes.”
“It’s such a waste,” said Nell, and climbed into the back to see how much food they had left to distribute.
Half the people on the road were people they knew, people from their villages. All they’d done to make them comfortable again, lost. They’d tried so hard to give them some security, some hope—and now the best they could do was try to help them find a place where they could sleep on a floor for the night before being sent off to goodness knew where.
Kate wondered how Emmie was getting on with the refugee center in Montdidier. She wished with all her soul that Emmie were here—Emmie was so much better than she was with people. She’d know what to say to a mother who had nine children on nine separate gun carriages, frantic with trying to collect them. She’d know what to say to the woman who refused to leave without her cat, which had run off.
Nell was unflaggingly cheerful, a brittle sort of cheerfulness that might shatter any second, but the children responded to it and followed her, and Kate was insanely grateful to have her along, jollying the children and comforting the adults as Kate drove the truck.
They picked up an eleven-year-old girl, a loaf of bread sticking out from under each arm, her hands holding tight to two little sisters, one on each side. She refused to be parted from either bread or sisters until they promised they only meant to help them up into the truck, together. They’d lost their mother, who was blind, and two little brothers, who were with their mother, in the confusion of the evacuation.
“We’ll see what we can do about finding her for you,” said Nell cheerfully, and then crawled over the baggage piled high in the back of the jitney to Kate in the front. “Kate, we have to find some way of getting families back together. We have no idea who Florence and Anne have picked up—these girls’ mother might be in her load.”
“What about the crossroads? We’re dropping them there to wait for Alice anyway. We can set up a reunification center.” Kate scrubbed her forehead with a dusty hand. Most of them knew only the people in their assigned villages, but Anne, with her special carpentry and sewing classes, knew pretty much every child in all of them. “If Florence can spare Anne, she can do it—she knows more of these children than anyone.”
The next time the two trucks met outside Roye, Kate shouted her plans across. Anne began sorting families by the crossroads and Florence went off alone, down the road to Margny.
“Be careful!” Kate shouted after her, and Florence waved her hat at her in response as the dust rose in her wake.
Kate was putting the jitney into gear when a sentry hailed them.
“Is something wrong?” asked Kate, and then realized what an idiot question it was. Of course something was wrong. Everything was wrong.
“It’s Albert, isn’t it?” Nell called down. “You directed the traffic for us in Ham!”
“Yes, miss,” said the sentry, showing crooked teeth as he grinned at Nell. “Well, you see, it’s like this. They want me to guard the Nesle–Roye road, but someone’s needed to direct traffic here.”
“I’ve always wanted to direct traffic,” said Nell, putting on her old ebullience like a cloak. She stood up in the jitney, shaking out her dusty skirt. “It’s a lifelong ambition of mine. You’ll be all right without me, Kate?”
“Right as rain,” lied Kate in the same cheerful tone, and left Nell standing at the crossroads, moving her arms left and right, shouting at camions and scolding cart drivers.
Kate’s shoulders were stiff and aching from fighting with the jitney. There was something wrong with it; she’d have to get Alice to look at it later. But there wasn’t time now. Every minute counted, every minute meant another person saved. It was harder without Nell, so much harder, and she was painfully aware of time passing, of the sun moving and the shadows gathering and the Germans coming on and on, unstoppable.
Mme Chevrier, from Bacquencourt, wanted her to tell Emmie that she had saved the curtains she was making for the social center in Canizy. Kate congratulated her and tried not to think that there probably wasn’t a social center left for curtains; she couldn’t let herself think like that.
A British soldier blocked her on the road to Ercheu. “It’s not safe anymore, miss—you can’t go that way. The Boche.”
Had they got everyone out? Kate hoped so. Her cheeks stung with sunburn and her eyes with dust as she drove the last load back to the crossroads.
She found Alice there, helping Anne get families into the White truck. “They say it’s not safe to keep going back,” said Alice anxiously. “Florence has gone on to Montdidier with the truck.”
“Does anyone know what’s going on?” asked Kate in frustration.
Alice shook her head. “Only that they’re closer.”
How much closer? What did that even mean? Kate was sick of rumors and half news, of not knowing what was going on. She felt as if she were in a snow globe, being shaken about, while someone was peering in from outside, watching her dance.
“All right,” said Kate hoarsely. She was stiff and grimy and, she hadn’t realized it before, sick with hunger. Her watch said it was past seven. She had been driving for thirteen hours straight. “We’ll regroup in Montdidier.”
They left Anne and Nell—Nell still directing traffic, Anne staying to keep her company. “It’s all right,” Anne promised them, as Kate took up her last load of refugees. “Dr. Baldwin says he’ll take us to Montdidier with him when he finishes closing down the hospital.”
In Montdidier, Kate found that Emmie had taken over a hotel. “The owner has been splendid,” said Emmie. “She’s let us have the whole building and found us straw for pallets. Julia’s taken over a room for a children’s infirmary. Mrs. Goodale—she’s one of Dr. Baldwin’s nurses—got onto someone she knew and came back with a regular bonanza of condensed milk for us, so we’ve been able to feed the babies now that we don’t have our cows anymore.”
“Emmie—” Kate looked around, dazed and amazed. There was a full canteen running in the courtyard, and rooms lined with pallets like dormitories. “How on earth did you do all this in one day?”
Emmie flushed, looking pleased and flustered. “It wasn’t just me. Some of our Quakers from Ham came by and have been helping. We managed to find enough stoves to make sure everyone’s had some warm food—there’s a schoolmistress who let us have the stove from her school and someone else donated tables and chairs for a canteen in the courtyard. . . .”
“Is that Marie?” One of the groups clustered around a table in the courtyard looked awfully familiar.
“Yes! Florence brought our basse-cour people in just an hour ago. . . . Oh dear, yes? What is it?”
One of the Quakers needed Emmie. She gave an apologetic wave and bustled away, leaving Kate to Marie, who embraced and scolded her all at once, wanting to know what Kate had been doing to get her uniform into such a state, and after Marie had washed it so nicely for her too.
“But weren’t you—you left on Friday,” said Kate dazedly. It belatedly dawned on her that Friday had been yesterday. It couldn’t possibly have been only yesterday. Yesterday morning, they had still been going about their business. That couldn’t be right. But it was. “You ought to have been here ages ago. What happened?”
They hadn’t really thought the Germans would come, so they’d gone only as far as Moyencourt. But then with the morning, they’d been told they had to go, so they had joined the other refugees on the road, and might have made it faster, but there had been that trouble with Zélie—
“What trouble?” Kate wasn’t tired anymore. She was suddenly, desperately scared. She could see all the other basse-cour residents eating in the courtyard, but not Zélie. “Where’s Zélie?”
“It was that goat,” said Marie defensively. “My son brought the animals to Moyencourt, but we couldn’t bring them farther, so we went on without them, but that Zélie, she ran off when no one was looking.”
“Ran off. After the goat?”
Marie stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. “I always told you that goat would be trouble, treating it like a pet. Now you see what happened.”
“Where did she go? Back to Moyencourt?” Kate could see the map of their villages in her head with horrible clarity. Moyencourt was farther from the front than Grécourt, but not by much. Not nearly enough.
“She’s probably sleeping in a barn somewhere with that goat,” said Marie, but she didn’t sound sure.
“Alone, in Moyencourt.” Kate didn’t stop to think. She grabbed a piece of bread from the table. She had water in a thermos in the truck. “If anyone asks, I’ve just gone on one last run.”