Two weeks after that, the French passenger ship Sussex was torpedoed, which brought it all up again. By then, the situation at the front had worsened, and almost four million people had died. The toll was mounting day by day. At times, it distracted them all from their studies and they could talk of nothing else. But they were all working hard. There were no slackers in the group, and with their classes so small, every student stood out.
Without actually meaning to, they had all relaxed about Annabelle by April, and by May many of them were actually willing to speak to her, have conversations with her, and even laugh with her. They had come to respect her quietly voiced intelligent questions, and her bedside manner with the patients was much better than theirs. Her professors had all noticed it, and Dr. Graumont had long since written to Dr. de Bré to assure him that he hadn’t made a mistake. He told him that Annabelle Worthington was an excellent student, and would make a fine physician one day. And to Annabelle, compared to the Abbey in Asnières, the hospital in Nice was extremely tame, but interesting anyway. And she finally got her wish. They had begun dissecting cadavers, and she found it as fascinating as she always thought she would.
News of the war continued to distract them, as they followed their classes through the summer. On July 1, the Battle of the Somme began, with the highest number of casualties in the war so far. By the time the day was over, there were sixty thousand dead and wounded. The numbers were horrifying. And as the summer went on, it just got worse. It was hard to concentrate on their studies at times as a result. There was such a shocking loss of life as the war wore on, seemingly with no end in sight. Europe had been at war for two years by then.
In August, she tried not to let herself think of her anniversary with Josiah. It would have been their third, and she had been in Europe for eleven months. It seemed hard to believe. Since she had come to the medical school in Nice, time had flown. They were doing so many things, and trying to learn so much. They were working with patients more frequently now, and spent three full days a week at the hospital in Nice. The war wounded were even finding their way there, as injured men who would not be returning to the front were being transferred closer to home. She even came across two men she had taken care of in Asnières. They were thrilled to see her, and she stopped by to visit them whenever she could.
By then, she and Marcel were good friends. They chatted every night after dinner, and often studied together. And the other students had finally accepted her in their midst. She was well thought of, liked, and respected by her peers. Some of her fellow students even laughed about how unpleasant they had been to her in the beginning, and Rupert, the pompous Englishman who had been the rudest to her, had slowly become her friend. It was hard for any of them to find fault with her work, and she was unfailingly pleasant to all of them. Marcel called her the godmother in their midst.
They were walking through the orchards one day, after classes, when he turned to her with a curious look.
“Why is a beautiful woman like you not married?” he asked her. She knew he wasn’t pursuing her, since he had just gotten engaged to a young woman in Nice. She had been a friend of his family’s for years. He was from Beaulieu, not far away, and went home for visits, or even dinner, as often as he could. His fiancée visited him at the school, and Annabelle liked her very much.
“I don’t think I can be married and be a doctor. Do you?” she responded, deflecting the question. In her opinion, it was different for a woman than a man. It took so much more sacrifice and commitment for a woman to be a physician.
“Why do I have the feeling that you came to Europe with a broken heart?” He was a wise man, and could see it in her eyes. “I’m not so sure this is so much about sacrificing your personal life for your profession, but perhaps because you’re afraid to have a personal life, and are hiding in medicine. I think you can have both,” he said gently as he looked into her eyes.
She avoided responding to him for a long moment and took a bite out of an apple. She had turned twenty-three that May. She was beautiful and alive, and terrified of being hurt again. Marcel was right. He knew her well.
“Underneath the laughter and gentle smiles,” he went on, “there is something very sad, and I don’t think it’s about your parents. Women only look that way when their heart is broken by a man.” He was sorry that had happened to her. She, more than anyone he knew, deserved a kind and loving man.
“You should have been a fortune-teller instead of a doctor,” she teased him with a grateful smile, and laughed. But he knew, even without her confirming it, that he was right. And she had no intention whatsoever of telling him that she was divorced. She wasn’t willing to admit that to anyone, not even Marcel, once they became friends. She was too ashamed.
She had had a letter from her bank the month before, advising her that her final divorce papers had come. She and Josiah were now divorced. She had had only one letter from him in the last year, at Christmas, telling her that he and Henry were still in Mexico. She had no idea now if he was still there, and she hoped that he was well. She could deduce from what he had written to her that they were both very ill. She had written back, concerned about him, and hadn’t heard from him since. Her letter got no response.
“Am I right?” Marcel persisted. He liked her, and often wished he knew more about her. She never spoke about her early childhood or her history at all. It was as though she didn’t have one. All she wanted now was a clean slate and to begin again. He could sense whenever he spoke to her that there were secrets in her past.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m here now, broken heart or not.”
“Do you think you’ll ever go back?” He was always curious about her.
She grew quiet as she thought about it, and answered him honestly. “I don’t know. I have nothing there, except a cottage in Rhode Island.” Her parents’ servants were still there, taking care of the house, and hoping she’d come back. She wrote to Blanche from time to time, and no one else. “My family is gone. I have no reason to go back.”
“You must have friends,” he said, looking at her sadly. He hated to think of her alone. She was such a warm, gentle, kind person that he couldn’t imagine her not having friends, even if she was shy. “You grew up with people. They must still be there.” What he said made her think of Hortie, and she shook her head. She had no friends left. However good his intentions, Josiah had seen to that. He had been naïve in thinking he was doing the right thing for her, in freeing her. All he had done was make her an outcast in her own world. The only friend she had now was Marcel.
“No. Everything in my life changed. That’s why I came here.” But even she wasn’t sure if she would stay. She belonged to no one and nowhere now. Her only life was medical school, and would be for the next five years. Her home was the château. Her only city Nice. And the men she was going to school with were the only friends she had, particularly him.
“I’m glad you did,” he said simply, not wanting to pry too much or revive old hurts.
“So am I.” She smiled at him, and they walked slowly back to the château. Marcel was amazed that none of their classmates had a romantic interest in her. But Annabelle put an unspoken message out that said “Don’t come too close.” There was a wall around her now. Marcel could sense it, but had no idea why, and he thought it was a shame. Keeping her distance as she did seemed to him the waste of a lovely woman. He thought she deserved to have a man, and hoped she would in time.
It was a long hot summer at the château, studying and visiting the hospital, and finally in August they got two weeks off to go home, or leave on vacation. Annabelle was the only student who stayed. She had nowhere else to go. She went on long walks, and shopped a little in Nice, although there wasn’t much in the stores because of the war. She bought a few things to replenish her wardrobe as so much of what she had brought was black, and she was no longer in mourning for her mother. And on an afternoon when she was able to borrow an old truck they kept at the school, she drove to
old Antibes and the areas around it, and found an ancient, beautiful eleventh-century church, and stood looking at the view from high above the town. It was a perfect afternoon and a spectacular view.
She stopped and had dinner at a small café, and that night she drove back to the school. Even Dr. Graumont was away, and Annabelle was alone in the château with the two maids. She had a peaceful two weeks, and she was happy when the others came back, particularly Marcel. They all said they’d had a good time, although her English friend who had tormented her in the beginning, Rupert, came back devastated that he had lost his brother to the war. Several of them already had lost brothers, cousins, friends. It was a harsh reminder of the turmoil and anguish that was devouring Europe and never seemed to end.
When they began classes again in September, the Battle of the Somme was still raging on, as it had been for over two months. And the casualties mounted every day. It finally ended in mid-November, which was a huge relief to all. For ten days, there was peace at the end of a terrible battle, with well over a million men dead and wounded in the end. And only ten days after it was over, the Germans attacked Britain with airplanes for the first time. A whole new aspect of the war had been introduced, which terrified them all. By Christmas, they were all demoralized by the losses and constant attacks. Two more of the students had lost brothers. At the end of the month, Dr. Graumont assembled them in the main hall, with a letter from the French government, that he wished to read to them. It was a call to all trained medical personnel to lend their assistance at the front. They were badly needed in field hospitals all over France. He was quiet after he read the letter, and said it was up to them what they chose to do. He said that the school would grant them leave, if they wished it, without prejudice, and would automatically take them back whenever they returned. They had been getting letters from hospitals for months, including a recent one organized by Elsie Inglis again, this time in Villers-Cotterêts, northeast of Paris, closer to the front than Asnières and the Abbaye de Royaumont where Annabelle had been. Once again all of the medical units at Villers-Cotterêts were female, and Annabelle would have been welcome there.
All of the students talked about it that night over dinner, and the conversation was intense. By morning, half of them had made a decision, and went to see Dr. Graumont one by one. They were leaving within the next few days. In addition, it had been a bitter winter at the front, and men were dying of their wounds, illness, and exposure all over Europe. Those who were leaving couldn’t resist the plea for help. In the end, all but four students went. Annabelle made her decision on the first day. She was sad to interrupt her medical training, but she felt there was really no other choice. It would have seemed selfish to stay.
“You’re leaving us too?” Dr. Graumont asked with a sad smile, but he wasn’t surprised. In the past year he had come to like and respect her enormously. She was going to make an excellent physician one day, and in many ways already was.
“I have to go,” she said wistfully. She hated to leave the school at the château. “I’ll come back.”
“I hope so,” he said, and meant it. “Where will you go?”
“To the Inglis hospital at Villers-Cotterêts, if they’ll have me.” With the training the students had, they could all be medics. It was more than she had been able to do in Asnières, and she would be more useful to the men.
“Be careful, Annabelle. Stay safe. We’ll be waiting for you here,” he reassured her.
“Thank you,” she said softly, and gave him a warm hug. She packed her bags that night, left two of them at the château, and planned to take only one valise with her. By the next day, almost all but the remaining four students were gone.
They all hugged each other, wished each other luck, and promised to return as they left. Their good-byes to Annabelle were particularly brotherly and affectionate, and all of them urged her to take good care, and she did the same with them.
Marcel took her to the train before he left. She was carrying her small bag as she walked along beside him. He was her only real friend, and had been kind to her right from the first. She was still grateful to him for that.
“Take care of yourself,” Marcel said, as he gave her a last hug and kissed her on both cheeks. “I hope we’ll all be back here soon,” he said fervently. He was leaving late that afternoon.
“Me too.” She waved to him for as long as she could see him, as he stood on the platform waving to her. She watched him until he was out of sight. It was the last time she ever saw him. Two weeks later, he was driving an ambulance that ran over a mine. He was the first casualty of Dr. Graumont’s school, and Annabelle had lost another friend.
Chapter 17
Annabelle arrived at the hospital Elsie Inglis had established at Villers-Cotterêts, some thirty miles northeast of Paris. It was roughly fifteen miles from the front. If you listened carefully, you could hear the explosions in the distance. The hospital had just opened, and was a larger and more intense operation than the one where she had worked in Asnières the year before. It was staffed and run by female medical units, as Dr. Inglis intended. Their nationalities represented many of the Allied nations, were almost equally divided between French and English, and Annabelle was one of three Americans there. This time, she had a proper room, although tiny, which she shared with another woman. And their patients were all brought in from the front. The carnage they were seeing was tremendous, shattered bodies, shattered minds, and a shocking number of lives lost.
Female ambulance drivers shuttled constantly back and forth to the front, where men were being dragged out of the trenches maimed, mangled, and dying. In every instance, a medic traveled with the ambulance and its driver, and they had to have enough training and knowledge to perform herculean feats on the way to save the men they were transporting. If too badly injured to move at all, they were left at the field hospitals set up near the trenches. But whenever possible, the injured soldiers were brought back to the hospital at Villers-Cotterêts for surgery and more intensive care.
With a year of medical school under her belt now, and with her years of volunteer work before that, Annabelle was assigned to the ambulance unit, and wore the official uniform of a medic. She worked eighteen hours a day, bumping over rough roads along the way, and sometimes holding the men in her arms, when there was nothing else she could do. She fought valiantly to save them with whatever materials she had on hand, and all the techniques that she had learned. Sometimes in spite of her best efforts, and a breakneck race back to the hospital, the men were just too damaged to survive and died on the road.
She had arrived at Villers-Cotterêts on New Year’s Day, which was just another work day to all of them. Over six million men had died in the war by then. In the two and a half years since the hostilities had begun, Europe had been decimated, and was losing its young men to the monster that was war, which devoured them by the thousands. Annabelle felt sometimes as though they were emptying the ocean with a teacup, or worse, a thimble. There were so many bodies to repair, so little left of some of them, so many minds that would never recover from the brutalities they’d seen. It was hard on the medical personnel as well, and all of them were exhausted and looked beaten by the end of every day. But no matter how difficult it was, or how discouraging at times, Annabelle was more confirmed than ever in her decision to be a doctor, and although it broke her heart in so many instances, she loved her work, and did it well.
In January, President Wilson was trying to orchestrate an end to the war, using the United States’s neutral status to encourage the Allies to state their objectives in obtaining peace. His efforts had not borne fruit, and he remained determined to keep the country out of the war. No one in Europe could understand how the Americans could not join the Allied forces, and no one believed by January 1917 that they would continue to stay out of the fray for long. And they weren’t wrong.
On February 1, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. Two days later the United States severed diplomatic
relations with Germany. Within three weeks the president requested permission from Congress to arm U.S. merchantmen in the event of an attack by German submarines. Congress denied the request, but on March 12, by executive order, Wilson announced that American merchantmen would be armed from then on. Eight days later, on March 20, his war cabinet voted unanimously in favor of declaring war on Germany.
The president delivered his war address to Congress on April 2. And four days later, on April 6, war on Germany was declared by the United States. America was finally entering the war, and the floundering Allies in Europe desperately needed their help. For the next weeks and months, American boys would be leaving home, saying good-bye to families, wives, and girlfriends, and going to be trained. They were to be shipped overseas within two months. Overnight, everything at home changed.
“It’s about goddamn time,” one of the other American women at Villers-Cotterêts said to Annabelle, as they met in the dining hall late one night. They had both been working for nineteen hours at their respective jobs. She and the other American women were nurses, and she knew that Annabelle was a medic.
“Were you training to be a nurse before the war?” she asked with interest. She was a pretty young woman from the South and had the heavy accent of Alabama. Her name was Georgianna and she had grown up as a southern belle, which no longer had any meaning here, just as Annabelle’s genteel upbringing in her family’s elegant mansion in New York no longer had any relationship whatsoever to her daily life. All it had given her was a decent education, good manners, and the ability to speak French. The rest no longer mattered.
“I’ve been in medical school in the South of France for the last year,” Annabelle said, sipping a cup of very thin soup. They tried to stretch their food rations as best they could, to benefit both medical personnel and patients. As a result, none of them had had a truly decent meal in months, but it was good enough. Annabelle had lost a considerable amount of weight in the four months since she had arrived. Even she could hardly believe that it was April 1917, and she had been in France for nineteen months.
A Good Woman Page 17
