“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.”