With a cry of relief, I abandoned my sketchbook, leapt up, and threw my arms around his neck, kissing his cheek. He didn’t seem to mind. In fact, his smile was wry. “Maybe there’s still some point in being me, after all.”
The next day the ambassador’s town car was put at my disposal—Stars and Stripes fluttering on the front fenders as the driver took me up the coast. I’ll never forget my anxiety as we tried to get past the horse-drawn supply wagons that clopped along behind the allied British Expeditionary Force. When we finally pulled up to the cottage where my boys were staying, I called to them frantically, and they came tumbling down the sand-swept stairs, leaping into my embrace. I kissed their little heads, and they tasted like salt from the sea. I stroked their sunburnt cheeks and squeezed them as if I could never get my fill.
We returned to Paris just long enough for the boys to see their father—oh, let Willie rail against me for bringing them to the hospital, there was no time to argue, for the kaiser’s forces were now within sixteen miles of Paris, and I meant for us all to leave France as a family. Once the boys had kissed their father, I sent them to wait in the hall and whispered, “This war is a disaster! The Allies are losing.”
“Yes, and I don’t want you caught in it,” Willie said. “I’ve arranged for the family to take the last civilian train out of Paris.”
I nodded gratefully. “Where can we get you some crutches? Or will you have to be carried?”
“I’m not going with you.”
I startled. “Are you too ill to be moved?”
Willie sat upright on the hospital bed. “To the contrary. I’m almost good as new. In fact, as soon as this cage is off my leg, I’m going to the front to take a look at the fighting for myself.”
“Willie, there are rules against civilians doing that.”
He grinned. “You know that rules don’t apply to me.”
I didn’t grin, because as usual, my husband did whatever he wanted, and all family responsibilities were left to me. I wanted to break his other leg to keep him from going to play at the front lines while leaving me to get our children to safety, but I didn’t argue, because the barbarians were at the gate and our marital problems seemed small in a world at war.
It was my nephew who escorted me and my little entourage onto the crowded train. We were a party of five, including the governess. And I was incredibly relieved to see Miss Sloane waiting on the platform with her lady’s maid, a single suitcase between them.
“Thank you for getting word to Miss Sloane,” I told Victor. “You’ve put my mind at ease and increased your romantic prospects.”
“I doubt there’s going to be anything romantic about this trip,” he said. With passengers packed like sardines, it was to be a grueling journey—one made worse when we realized that we were going north. Not away from the fighting, but toward it.
When I learned this, I asked, “Good heavens, why?”
“The conductor says it’s military reasons,” Victor replied. “The train has government officials on board and must make a flying trip to Amiens before returning south again to Bordeaux.”
Something about the sight of so many blue-uniformed soldiers and grim public officials put Victor in a melancholy mood. “To think that at school, I frittered away extra hours with no-account pastimes . . . but with the war on, every single one of these Frenchmen seems to have a real sense of purpose.”
Miss Sloane nodded sympathetically, though she had the no-nonsense bearing of a woman who had never frittered away an extra hour in her life. “I suppose a terrible clarity must descend when your country and loved ones are in danger.”
Terrible clarity indeed, I thought as I fashioned a bed for my exhausted children on a train bench, making a pillow with my traveling coat. This was the first hardship my sleepy little darlings had ever endured, and I felt miserably guilty for having exposed them to it. Much more so when, after many hours, we witnessed a scene straight out of hell.
The train station in Amiens was overrun with wounded soldiers fresh from the battlefield. Some screamed on stretchers; others lay unmoving, possibly dead. And I realized with growing horror that many weren’t soldiers at all, but civilians. Our train car had to be swapped out, so we were forced onto the platform, where soldiers rushed past, some limping, some collapsing in a heap of blood-soaked bandages.
The governess and I did our best to shield my boys. I pulled their little faces against me while Victor used our luggage to build them a little fortress that blocked their view. “Now, keep guard, boys, stay at your posts,” he said.