“What is it?” Kate noticed, for the first time, that the captain looked decidedly disheveled, as if he hadn’t slept and certainly hadn’t bathed. There was dirt on his face and mud on his uniform. “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve broken through,” he said. “We can’t hold them. They’re coming on, thousands of them.”
Kate could feel all the blood draining from her face. “Broken through. The Germans?”
Captain DeWitt gave a curt nod. “Get your Unit and get them out.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Right after breakfast on the twenty-first, Emmie Van Alden and I started out in the jitney for Verlaines, where she was holding classes and I was visiting. As we got close, we began to meet refugees fleeing from Ham. You can’t imagine the state of those roads. The army retreating, the infantry so tired it hurt to look at them, great guns, wagons full of supplies and equipment, ambulances evacuating hospitals, and, along with them all, hundreds and hundreds of refugees, pushing wheelbarrows or leading a mule with a wagon if they were lucky enough to have one.
In spite of all the racket, it never entered our heads that the Boche could possibly break through. . . .
—Miss Alice Patton, ’10, to her sister, Mrs. Gilbert Thomas
March 1918
Grécourt, France
Emmie knew something was wrong even before they got to Verlaines.
The road from Ham to Verlaines was crowded with people, dozens of them, hundreds of them, heads down, shoulders bent, old women pushing wheelbarrows piled high with linens, agitated mothers pulling children by the hand, trying to keep out of the way of the military trucks bumping toward the front, the dispatch riders on their motorbikes whizzing to and fro.
“What’s happened?” Emmie called out, leaning out the side of the truck.
No one really seemed to know. All they knew was that the Boche were coming and they were getting out, as far as the road would take them.
“Have you been evacuated?” asked Emmie, exchanging an alarmed look with Alice, who had pulled the jitney to a stop by the side of the road.
They hadn’t been evacuated. They were just leaving. The army was too busy to bother with them, and why should they bother waiting for the British Army? It was safer just to go.
Alice’s lips were very white. “Do you think it’s serious?” she whispered.
“I don’t hear the guns.” Emmie looked at the people with their bundles, all their worldly possessions piled on their backs. “It might just be an excess of caution—but maybe we ought to go to Ham and find out. So we can tell our people what to do.”
If Ham was in danger . . . but it probably wasn’t, Emmie told herself hastily. Will was there holding the line. Will and all those brave boys whom they’d had to tea and impromptu dances with a temperamental Victrola and rubber boots for dancing slippers.
“If you go on to Verlaines,” Emmie told the woman she’d been talking to, “you can get something to eat and drink—and we’ll take you on after if you need to go on.”
A camion honked sharply at them.
“All right, all right,” muttered Alice, her hands trembling on the wheel.
She’d had a harder time than any of them with the bombardment; Emmie had found her resorting more than once to her little silver flask of sherry, writing endless letters home that she always crumpled up again.
Alice managed to get them back on the road, weaving her way between the refugees going one way and trucks going the other. They were all of a quarter of a mile from Ham, but at this rate it would take them an hour. It was worse than Fifth Avenue on an opera night.
“What’s taking so long?”
“Ambulances,” said Alice, her lips barely moving. “Can’t you see them? Up there.”
The jitney inched forward and Emmie saw it, the steady line of ambulances bumping into Ham, battle-scarred, shell-marked, mud-smeared ambulances, tires shot out, riding on their rims, pulling forward one by one to a makeshift casualty clearing station. Alice swung the jitney to the side so they could go around, past the row of ambulances, into the town. As they passed, Emmie could see stretchers being unloaded, endless, endless rows of men on stretchers, men in pain, moaning and calling out, men with limbs twisted at strange angles, faces covered with mud and gore, as the stretcher bearers worked stolidly on, carrying more and more and more.
Emmie heard someone make a noise and realized it was her. In all their time in the war zone, she had never seen anything like this. The copper stench of blood clung to the back of her throat. Thick black flies buzzed around them, their sound horrible in her ears.