Mercy Road

by Ann Howard Creel

  In between areas of devastation were some untouched farmhouses, fields, and signs of normal village life—old men gathered together talking, children playing, and women hoeing gardens—while not far away a desperate battle was likely being waged. Often the ground rumbled, and biplanes and monoplanes swooped over our heads. Soon we came to an area beyond the reach of German shells, a green pastoral land with copses of great spreading trees, patchwork fields, and small villages, charming if not modest and mostly poor.

  When we came upon an American company marching overland, Camille, looking over her shoulder, told me that the car carrying Dr. Logan had pulled over, so I braked and pulled over, too. Apparently our leader had decided we should witness this show of military might. Everyone got out of the vehicles.

  Ammunitions wagons, machine-gun battalions, a great artillery company, and long columns of infantrymen marched toward the front. Clean-cut officers rode astride on horses, and other men carried the flags and banners. Last came the ambulance and Red Cross groups.

  For the first time, I thought of our safety. The enemy wasn’t supposed to target ambulances and those in convoy with them, but we’d heard of casualties among medical teams.

  Soon, children with dirty faces appeared on the road, as if they had materialized from the ground, and gave us flowers. They asked us about America. We also saw a decrepit village woman carrying a baby and then more villagers on the move. Before we could become distracted, Dr. Logan ordered us on our way again.

  With our journey slowed considerably by the stop, road conditions, and my little accident, six hours had passed since we left Paris. At last we arrived in Neufmoutiers, a small village that consisted of a church and about fifteen houses set along the street running down from an obelisk. Assigned to a small château, we entered it through a lovely stone arch. A two-story building made of beige and gray stone, our new hospital had high ceilings, large rooms, a massive fireplace, and regularly spaced, heavily framed windows. Inside, it smelled of time gone by.

  Before we went to work, Dr. Logan gathered us together and told us that we would do our work without any consideration of gender, age, rank, nationality, or financial or social status. We would set up a hospital in this building, which had never been intended for that use. Food and water might be in short supply.

  “Let us not fail, my ladies. Let us do more, always do more than we think we’re capable of. As we embark on this journey, ask yourself now and every day—every bad day, every good day—if you have done your best.” She paused; then, as she slowly swept her gaze around our little assembled entourage again, she said, “Ask yourself even now—especially now—as in the words of the poet Edgar Guest, ‘Have you earned your tomorrow?’”

  No one moved; I think we all held our breath. For the first time, it completely sank in. A great honor had been bestowed upon me; I stood here with the likes of her.

  Never before had I done something this important.

  Although the village was small, families living there hosted about 60 refugees from the war zone in the Aisne, and within a twenty-mile radius of the village, 360 more refugees were spread about. With all the French doctors now at the front, no one had received any recent medical care.

  How had the French endured this for so long? No wonder the villagers were tired and irritated about having to house and feed refugees for so long now. It didn’t help that the refugees came from a more prosperous area in France, and the classes would not have otherwise mingled. Who could blame the villagers for the exhaustion and strain caused by this seemingly never-ending war?

  Every member of the AWH team pitched in to set up the hospital with the help of a squad of poilus loaned to us, and we emptied four large rooms of furniture and rugs and then set them up as wards, which would give us a capacity of fifty beds. The servants’ dining room, with its painted walls, tiled floors, and running water, would be the operating room. Some of our supplies, including the surgeons’ instruments, had not arrived. The Red Cross had no furnishings to spare, so Dr. Logan had purchased fifty regulation French Army hospital beds while in Paris. Thankfully these had been delivered, so we quickly set them up in the wards. We carried in the autoclave and many white enamel tables and worked late into the night to prepare a hospital for immediate use.

  Finally we had to stop to sleep.

  After a restless night, I awakened to a hospital already full of villagers and refugees needing medical care—some moving about on crutches or with their arms immobilized in slings, others sitting quietly holding babies and sick children too listless to move about or play. Cass and I received orders to drive to the surrounding villages in search of those who couldn’t get to the hospital on foot. Quickly we downed our coffee and stuffed our mouths with a few bites of bread and readied ourselves to leave, then we heard shouts from outside. We flew out of the building to find a villager shouting and pointing at smoke in the sky and a plane circling overhead.

  We were told that a German Gotha had dropped his load on a neighboring village, and the pilot cruelly continued to fly about, surveying his dirty work. We jumped in our ambulances and headed toward the wide plume of smoke. The winding and narrow road had room for only one ambulance to pass through at a time. As we drew nearer, my heart raced, I breathed in a burnt scent, and I sensed the imminence of death in the same way a horse can sense fear in a rider.

  I clenched the steering wheel, but I would not show weakness. Ever since I’d lost Papa, tears welled up easily, but now I had to prove myself worthy of Cass’s and Beryl’s faith in me. It was time for courage to come calling.

  Cass took the lead and drove to the edge of the bombed village, where dense black smoke billowed upward, and I had to squash the uncontrollable memory that flashed in my mind—our house burning.

  The air floated choking dust and filled with screams and shouts. I could see that the village had once been a dear place of poplars and small homes, with a stone bridge over a creek and a Catholic church. The bomb had scored a direct hit on a market area, where apparently many people had gathered. We had to dodge collapsed walls and lumps on the ground—dead men and women. Some people still crawled out of the ruins, covered in whitish dirt and dust, coughing and holding on to injured limbs or bleeding heads. Haggard, smoke-smudged, and stunned-looking villagers left standing quickly took note of our arrival and immediately began to ferry the injured, a few hastily wrapped in bandages, to our ambulances.

  They loaded mine with three people, among them a young girl of about thirteen with half her chest caved in. The stooped, white-haired man who placed her on my stretcher shook his head, signaling to me a sense of hopelessness. He said, “Vite.” Hurry. The girl, beautiful with a thick mane of silky black hair and dark eyes, gazed at me with fright, with pain.

  Cass waved me off. As I drove away, I noticed a village woman propped against a wall, her skin black with soot and her neck hitched to the side in an unnatural manner as though her spine had snapped. I doubted she was alive. And now we had to leave many more villagers behind. How many would cling to life until we could come back for them?

  I drove back as speedily as I could on the narrow, rough road, but the girl’s labored, raspy breathing, audible at the start, had stopped. I almost stopped breathing, too. Now she had joined les morts. The dead. I had to bite back a scream. No doubt someone’s loved and precious child, a girl on the cusp of womanhood with her life ahead of her only this morning, she was now dead. I had seen her alive, the last person to do so, and I hadn’t even known her or comforted her.

  Beyond the sound of my engine, a silence like no other and an unfamiliar scent made sure I’d never forget this moment. Death drifted in the air and forced me to inhale it, much the way I imagined the poisonous gas discharged in combat overcame its victims. It lay on my skin, but instead of an urge to brush it off, I knew this death-air would surround me in France and maybe forever.

  My other two passengers, still conscious and roughly bandaged with strips of cloth, held pressure on their
wounds. They said nothing I could hear, only occasionally crying out when we juddered over an especially rough patch in the road or when the ambulance lurched jerkily down an incline crosshatched with exposed tree roots that made for a dreadfully bumpy ride. I cringed all the way down.

  Cass pulled up at the château-turned-hospital a few moments after me. Dr. Logan had located and purchased an operating table in Paris, and luckily it had arrived. Our surgeons began operating on patients using the assembled pocket kits they’d brought with them. I’d just started to catch my breath when I received orders to embark on an urgent mission to the hospital in Tournan in order to borrow some desperately needed hemostatic clamps.

  With no time for chitchat, Cass said to me during a rare pause, “This makes ‘hitting the ground running’ seem like a stroll down a shady lane.”

  Even Lottie, Kitty, and Eve, with no ambulance to drive yet, worked in the hospital and assisted as something like nurses’ aides. They grew up overnight. Already we had to designate an area on the grass outside in the courtyard for bodies. We had yet to set up a morgue.

  After I picked up the clamps and brought them back, I continued to transport the injured and those who died on the way or soon after arrival, and I felt the same way as I had during Papa’s funeral, as though everything stood out in etched-line detail. Colors were too bright, and smells too overwhelming, but sounds were muffled as though my body had diminished one of my senses in some sort of protective means.

  Now I not only knew death; I knew the shade and scent of human blood and the charred appearance and stench of burnt human bodies. I knew the look of what lay beneath our skin. By the end of the day, we had transported thirty injured and six who had died. That night, a leaden exhaustion came over me, and I fell into bed and a bottomless sleep before the villagers had a chance to bring us food.

  The next day, it all began again. We brought in the less seriously injured from the bombed village and other sick refugees and locals. Before we left for the village, as we stuffed croissants in our mouths, we discovered that a new German offensive had reached Château-Thierry, only twenty miles from Paris. Due to a new round of nightly raids, Paris had been put back under military control. We also learned that the Spanish influenza had reared its ugly head all across France, including the front.

  Dr. Logan gathered us together at the end of the third day and said we must prepare for things to get worse. Already I’d seen a lovely young lady die because a Hun pilot, not able to land with a bomb aboard, had decided to drop it on a sleepy village away from the front, probably just for sport. I’d seen women and men too old to fight pulverized by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How much worse could it get?

  Warned not to drive unfamiliar roads after dark because we couldn’t use our headlights, we washed down the ambulances, inside and out, conducted maintenance checks, and procured gasoline in the village every night. No flirting required.

  I’d received a letter from Maman while in Paris, but I’d sent back only postcards showing the beautiful sights of the city and offering short, cheerful notes. I hadn’t written a letter yet. Now, as I finally readied for bed on that third night, I wondered what to write. What I’d experienced already felt like walking into a weird and awful underworld. I could tell Maman about our safe arrival in a village, but I couldn’t imagine telling her about the suffering of soldiers and civilians alike, so I closed my eyes and willed some peace of mind to arrive. In some ways Maman and Luc stood right there with me and had been doing so every day since I’d left Paris, Kentucky; but in other ways we walked in different worlds now, and they felt so far out of reach, it was like trying to hold fog in my hands.

  No one on our team had slept or eaten much for three days, and I wondered who, if anyone, would pack a bag and catch a ride away. It wouldn’t have surprised me if some found this more than they had bargained for and decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to continue.

  When I fell asleep at night, sheer exhaustion took over. Cass and I shared a bedroom on the second floor of the château, and during the night, at some strange hour, I heard her slip off the bed and almost silently dress. My nights of sound sleeping had forever ended; ever since the fire and Papa’s death, a feather falling in my room could awaken me.

  Although I wanted to ask what she was doing, it was obvious she didn’t want to wake me and have to offer an explanation. So in the end, I didn’t say a word.

  About two hours had passed when Cass tiptoed back into the room, undressed, and slid under the covers. But even after her breathing fell into a heavy, regular rhythm, I stayed awake. I couldn’t imagine that Cass had already fallen for one of the poilus in the village. So maybe she suffered from a delayed reaction to all we’d seen, perhaps nausea and vomiting, and wanted to go off to get past it alone. Maybe she sought solitude. But none of these possible explanations fit the Cass I knew.

  In the morning the villagers brought us more food, and as we wolfed it down before heading out, I yearned for Cass to tell me where she’d gone. Perhaps she’d eased away silently only to avoid disturbing my sleep, but then why didn’t she say something about it now? Something distant now roamed around in her eyes, and I had no idea how well I really knew Cass. Although I considered her the best friend I’d ever had, I knew almost nothing about her life before I met her. I thought hard about saying something or leaving it alone, and finally asked, “Are you tired?”

  Focused away on what looked like nothing, she gazed back at me in a way that saw past me. In the next instant she focused. “Why would you ask?”

  I shrugged.

  She sighed and said, “Don’t even think about getting tired.”

  “Yes, we should probably remove that word from our vocabulary.”

  She nodded but said nothing more. Cass, the most capable person I’d ever known, could stand out in a group. She had potent opinions, and she had no reservations about sharing them. But when it came to anything related to family or former beaus, even her past or present hopes and dreams, she kept herself behind a closed door. Why? And what in the world had caused her to slip away like a sleuth in the middle of the night?

  I didn’t know, and Cass didn’t say.

  Chapter Eleven

  MEAUX, FRANCE

  JULY 1918

  Later that morning, before we had a chance to head out in the ambulances toward other villages, Dr. Logan weaved among us and told us that our commanding officer in the French Sixth Army had ordered us to cut back on hospital operations in Neufmoutiers. The Allies had retaken the Aisne, and our refugees could return there to harvest wheat fields that had escaped ruin during the German retreat. We would relocate to a new village closer to recently devastated areas.

  A new offensive, the Allied counterdrive for the Marne, had begun. The operation would most likely decide the fate of the war. All the khaki- and blue-clad uniformed men in our village vanished in the face of orders to take up new positions, and we received instructions to send two teams, each with a surgeon and a nurse, to Meaux to treat wounded French soldiers brought in by ambulances from the front.

  Quickly Dr. Logan decided that Beryl Rayne and Nurse Helton would comprise one team, and Dr. Kitchens and Nurse Carpenter would make up the other. Cass and I would transport them and provide assistance with our ambulances as needed.

  The six of us gathered our belongings, left Neufmoutiers in less than an hour, and drove away as a flock of starlings arced their wings against a golden-purple morning over the village rooftops.

  It had happened so quickly. We would work at the front after all. The women surgeons had always wanted to use their skills in the war theater to help soldiers, but, turned away by the American military, they had eagerly accepted helping villagers instead. Now they would do both, and I was to be a part of it.

  I found it a little surprising that our leader and the person who had made everything happen so far chose to let others go. But I’d seen Dr. Logan defer to Beryl before, and one always had the sense around Dr. Log
an that she didn’t seek personal glory, that instead, some kind of faith guided her. I often bore witness to her selflessness.

  Dr. Logan had probably chosen Dr. Rayne because of Beryl’s sense of mission and air of self-assurance tempered by kindness. Probably Dr. Logan also knew that Beryl could lead our little team as needed. I supposed Dr. Logan had chosen Dr. Kitchens because our shy young doctor could speak some French, or else Dr. Logan wanted to boost the confidence of the most modest doctor on our team.

  In the lead today, I had the job because, if need be, I could ask for directions and gasoline in the language of the land. Beryl and Nurse Helton rode with me while the other team joined Cass in her ambulance behind us.

  With utmost care, I proceeded, following the directions given to me in the village. I’d studied them quickly as best I could before we left, but road markers were often missing and landmarks didn’t appear where I thought they would. Conveying precious cargo, I couldn’t allow myself to make any mistakes.

  Beryl sat in the front with me. She focused straight ahead, as though weighty thoughts had filled and stilled her.

  Despite the rough living conditions in the château, Beryl appeared to have bathed and washed her hair. Her silver-blond waves were combed away from her face and still damp. Her uniform couldn’t have been laundered yet, but it looked clean and pressed compared to mine. Her oval wire eyeglasses gleamed spotlessly. Maybe she’d always kept herself immaculate or maybe Dr. Logan had rubbed off on her. I’d put my hair up in a tucked bun and brushed my uniform, but it still looked dull due to the dust.

  Sitting in the back, Nurse Helton, a trim-waisted, pale brunette who viewed the world through straightforward, intelligent eyes, rarely engaged in conversation. In silence she peered out of a determined face with wary anticipation but never opened up to or shared herself with others. She and Cass could’ve had a silent friendship.