Kate was awakened the next morning by someone nudging her arm, hard.
Rubbing sleep out of her eyes, Kate blinked up to see Marie-Rose, one of their most faithful milk customers, standing over her, poking Kate’s prone form with her foot, her baby held in one arm while her toddler peeped out at Kate from behind Marie-Rose’s skirt.
“I have come for my milk,” Marie-Rose said.
“Your milk,” said Kate groggily, pulling herself up to a sitting position.
She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she must have. She remembered getting to the hotel just after midnight and finding it locked and Julia banging on the door until Nurse Goodale came and opened it. She remembered Dr. Baldwin and Julia rushing off with Zélie and holding Zélie’s hand while they did something deeply awful to her leg and wrapped it with proper splints and bandages and gave her something to make her sleep, while Kate knelt next to her on the floor, holding her hand. She must have fallen asleep that way, because here she was, still in her dust-coated uniform, on the floor of the parlor of the hotel. Zélie, her leg propped on cushions, was asleep next to her.
“Yes, my milk,” said Marie-Rose as if it were the most natural thing in the world that the Smith Unit would go on with the business of supplying her baby. It didn’t seem to matter to Marie-Rose that they weren’t at Grécourt anymore. They were the Smith Unit and they were here, and that was what they did.
There was something strangely reassuring about that.
Kate hauled herself to her feet, wincing at bruises she hadn’t remembered she had. “I’ll just go find that for you,” she said.
Emmie was already up, opening tins of condensed milk, diluting them, and warming them to feed all the children in their care.
“Marie-Rose is here for her milk,” said Kate, and the next thing she knew, they were both giggling helplessly, like undergraduates again.
“I’d best bring it to her or she’ll wake the whole house,” said Emmie, expertly decanting warm milk into a bottle. “Dr. Devine of the Red Cross Refugee Bureau came by and wanted to know if someone could go help at the station. He says it’s an absolute scrum over there, worse than the New Haven Line on Yale-Harvard weekend, and they need someone to sort people out and get them on trains. Oh, and someone from the French Mission sent a note, asking if we could spare someone to evacuate Margny.”
Emmie stayed on at the hotel, running the refugee center with help from Mme Gouge, who declared herself in charge of the kitchen, washing dishes and sterilizing bottles and scolding them about having something to eat. Marie, deeply chastened, promised to watch Zélie—not that Zélie could possibly go anywhere now, with one leg entirely immobilized, but Kate appreciated the sentiment. Under the guidance of the French Mission, Florence and Alice went off with the trucks, to evacuate any villagers who couldn’t walk on their own, while Kate, Anne, and Nell went down to the station, which was just as much of a scrum as Dr. Devine had claimed, with people milling everywhere, looking for lost relations and lost luggage, yanking hungry, hollow-eyed children, elderly people sitting on their bags on street corners, looking lost and hopeless, frantic mothers searching for children who had become separated in the retreat.
Kate begged a stove and supplies from the Red Cross and got Anne started running a canteen at the station, with soup for the adults and milk for the children. Nell worked the platform, helping people onto trains, finding lost baggage and lost children, and generally cheering everyone up, while Kate found herself acting as a sort of general information bureau, taking notes on people who had been left behind and families that had been separated, directing the confused people wandering into the town toward the train station, and telling them to stop by the canteen for something to eat.
It was relentless, heartbreaking work. Some of them had been days walking on foot, from villages all the way past Ham. When Kate would ask where they were going, the answer was always the same: Je ne sais pas. I don’t know. They looked so lost, clinging to their little bits of baggage, torn from their homes for a second or even third time, with no idea where they were going or when they would be back.
But a strange thing happened. Some of their villagers started working alongside them. The blacksmith and his wife from Hombleux took over the task of feeding the refugees being herded onto trains, running up and down the platform, handing food through the windows. Mme Chevrier, the seamstress from Bacquencourt, became a one-woman lost-luggage bureau, hunting up misplaced baggage. The farrier from Canizy told stories to the children to keep them entertained. And when Kate directed old Mme Didier from Verlaines to the station, the woman pressed five francs into Kate’s hand.