“In the stable cellars, not these. I’ll take you to them in a moment. In addition to being in our charge, they are an invaluable source of information about the other villages. Marie tells me there’s a little Boche baby that was born in Canizy just last week, Ava,” added Mrs. Rutherford as an aside to Dr. Stringfellow as they all struggled up out of the cellars, bumping into each other in their eagerness to get up into the clear air, away from the stench and despair. “You’ll want to visit the mother and the child.”
“A Boche baby?” asked Alice, trying to hold her skirt out of the muck.
“A German father,” explained Mrs. Rutherford. “The mother is little more than a child—she was one of the spoils of war.”
“A Boche baby sounds like it ought to be born with horns and a tail,” mused Liza, tromping up the stairs behind.
“It’s half-French,” pointed out Kate with some asperity. She was a mutt herself and hadn’t enjoyed hearing her stepfather’s relations shaking their heads over her Bohemian blood, as if being her father’s daughter made her somehow prone to fits or howling at the moon.
“Only the horns, then,” said Fran, deadpan.
“Poor baby,” said Emmie. “And that poor mother too. We must make sure we go to her straightaway.”
“All of them need us straightaway. That’s the challenge of it,” said Mrs. Rutherford, waiting for everyone to join her by the ruined Orangerie that was to be their center of operations.
Once someone had swept it. And painted it. And put oilcloth on it.
The magnitude of it all pressed down upon Kate, and she found herself frustrated beyond measure by everyone and everything, by Mrs. Rutherford’s blind optimism and Emmie’s romanticism and those looks Maud kept giving Liza, those “I told you so” looks, all the more annoying because Kate tended to agree with her.
“Then we’ll just have to be organized about it,” said Kate sharply. “If we just run around scattershot, we’ll never get anywhere. We’ll need to go through the villages one by one and make lists of the people in them, who they are, and what they need from us in terms of supplies and medical care.”
“Oh, is that all?” said Maud, rolling her eyes at Liza.
“That’s a great deal,” said Mrs. Rutherford soberly. “You have no idea what a very great deal.”
Neither had Kate.
They set out after breakfast, two to a truck, taking with them piles of baby clothes and linens, what milk they had, and some small assorted medical supplies they’d been able to cobble together by going through their personal possessions for plasters and headache powders.
They visited with the villagers first, in the stable cellars, and no one made the obvious comments about mangers because the reality of it was too grim for joking. Twenty-three women, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty, one teenage boy, and three children, all living in the remains of a stable, water pooling in places on the floor.
Twenty-seven people grateful to have any roof at all, even a broken one.
Kate had a vague notion that things would get better the farther they got from Grécourt, that the more remote the hamlet, the more it might have been spared. They left Miss Dawlish behind to minister to the castle folk and set out to begin their inspections. The idea was that they would start with a social worker, a doctor, and a driver in each car, but they had three trucks and only two doctors, so Kate and Emmie made their way east on their own, across roads rutted by army trucks, bearing the scars of old military movements.
The first town they stopped at made Grécourt look like a thriving metropolis. There was only one house left standing; the rest had been deliberately destroyed.
Emmie consulted Mrs. Rutherford’s list. “There are fifty children living here.”
“Where?” asked Kate, looking around the ruins. The Germans had been thorough; she’d give them that. The houses were rubble, only bits of wall still standing.
“Wherever they can, I imagine. You’ll take notes for me, won’t you?” asked Emmie, wiggling down from the White.
“Of course.” Kate guiltily swung her own legs over the side. No point in telling Emmie that she’d hoped her job ended with the driving. What was she to say to a French villager? I’m so sorry? The words stuck on her tongue.
“It makes it easier to talk if they don’t see me writing things down,” Emmie explained, as though she had done this a hundred times before. “It’s easier if it’s someone else taking notes. If I were by myself, I’d try to do it by memory, but since your French is better than mine anyway . . . Bonjour! Madame? Nous sommes les Collégiennes Américaines. . . .”