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 cafe, and that night she drove back to the school. Even Dr. Graumont was away, and Annabelle was alone in the chateau 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-Cotterets, northeast of Paris, closer to the front than Asnieres and the Abbaye de Royaumont where Annabelle had been. Once again all of the medical units at Villers- Cotterets 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 chateau. “I’ll come back.”
“I hope so,” he said, and meant it. “Where will you go?”
“To the Inglis hospital at Villers-Cotterets, 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 Asnieres, 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 chateau, 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-Cotterets, 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 Asnieres 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-Cotterets 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-Cotterets 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
