Still, all this was to think about after the war . . .
Of course, I’d given up guessing how much longer the war would last, now that the Allies were beating the Huns in the trenches, crippling their naval yards, and smashing their air force. Since the arrival of the bulk of American troops, Maxime wrote, The advance is now so swift I sometimes sleep uncovered on the cold ground, there being no time to pitch a tent and take it down again.
He was predicting the war really could be over by year’s end.
In the meantime, we were overrun by displaced children—starving, wounded, diseased, seemingly from all corners of the earth. Unable to build fast enough, we’d rented space in structurally sound but abandoned buildings not too far from Chavaniac. We delivered ten little girls to a nunnery in Le Puy before taking four boys back with us to Chavaniac.
All sons of fallen soldiers. Among them a brown-skinned French-Algerian boy named Samir Bensa?d, who couldn’t sleep without his gas mask. A roguish little Auvergnat named Henri, whose widowed mother was too sick to care for him. And a pale, freckle-faced English boy named Victor, who had fallen ill on the journey, coughing up blood.
Tuberculosis, the doctoresse said, warning me away. The Red Cross personnel should have caught such an infectious disease and prevented him from coming here, where we had only rudimentary medical care. Now it was too late to send him back, and soon we despaired of his life.
I couldn’t bear that this little Victor should suffer the way my nephew had, without comforting arms around him. I couldn’t bear to lose another Victor to this war. Thus, in our makeshift hospital, I sat by his bedside in the days that followed.
With gasping breaths—before it became too difficult to speak—the boy told me how the Germans had forced him to drive cattle for them, making him sleep in the stable without a blanket and promising to shoot him if he ran away. But he ran away anyway, and said he was happier to die in Lafayette’s castle.
Which is what he did not long after.
I held his body for a long time, sobbing, and Emily had to gently coax me away. “He needed you before, but now he must be buried . . .”
He needed me. But I couldn’t save him. And now other children needed me too. It was the worst time to find myself overcome with exhaustion, unable to rise from bed. Sick and sad like a blackness had descended over my soul. Emily feared I’d contracted tuberculosis from the dying boy. But when I complained of aching joints, weakness, and lost appetite, our doctoresse feared it was the deadly Spanish flu, which was now sweeping across continents, heaping more misery and grief upon a world already filled with it.
It was only when she discovered my lowered heart rate that I revealed my lingering illness, the thyroid and cardiovascular abnormalities. Ailments that reminded me of my mortality and how much I still wanted to accomplish in a life that might meet an early close.
* * *
—
It was Emily who tended me until I was well enough to sketch again in my turret. I drew the dead boy because I felt that some memorial ought to be made for him. Meanwhile, Emily was trying to soothe her eighteen-month-old daughter, who wailed inconsolably in her mother’s arms. “I’m afraid Anna is happier with her nurse than with me. Either that, or she’s determined to make me pay such a price for my neglect that I never leave her again.”
Emily said this in a humorous vein, but it was true that Anna was as sunny a child as ever lived except in her mother’s arms. Why, I’d even seen her playing happily in the courtyard with pigtailed Marthe, who tugged her around in a red wagon. Still, Emily’s sigh was so disconsolate that I hurried forth to reassure her, “That just goes to show you that you’re going to have a spirited daughter—the only kind any mother should want.”
Emily only sighed again. “I missed Anna’s first words. Her first steps. We know now that gas from the trenches leaked into Motte-aux-bois—my mother-in-law is being treated. What if Anna has poison in her lungs too?”
“Then she wouldn’t be wailing with such vigor,” I said, wishing to put a halt to this litany of self-recrimination. “No more of this. Last year, we both did what we felt must be done.”
It was a good thing too. Thanks to Emily and Amaury de LaGrange, America now had an incipient air force that was bombing the Germans to bits. Still, my friend simply could not reconcile her good service with the fact that she’d left her infant daughter. I’d seen Emily hold up in blood-soaked infirmaries, in air raids and hard winters. She’d never complained of being a pilot’s wife or the hardship of leaving her family and country behind. No adversity of this war had broken her, but guilt at having left her baby was smashing her stout heart to pieces.