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-Cotterets 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.
Georgianna was impressed that Annabelle had been training to be a doctor, and they talked about it for a few minutes. Both were bone tired. The nurse was a pretty girl with big green eyes and bright red hair, and she laughed when she admitted that after two years here, she spoke execrable French, but Annabelle knew, from what she’d heard of her, that in spite of that she did her job well. She had never known so many conscientious, competent, dedicated people in her life. They gave it their all.
“Do you think you’ll finish med school?” Georgianna asked her, and Annabelle nodded, looking pensive.
“I hope so.” She couldn’t imagine what would stop her, other than being killed.
“Don’t you want to go home when this is over?” Georgianna couldn’t imagine staying there. She had family in Alabama, three younger sisters, and a brother. Annabelle didn’t want to go back to New York. She had nothing there, except punishment and pain.
“Not really. I don’t have much there. I think I’m going to stay.” She had thought about it a lot recently, and made up her mind. She had five more years of medical school ahead of her, and after that she wanted to go to Paris, and work there. With luck, maybe even with Dr. de Bre. There was nothing she wanted now in New York. And she would have had to train for another year there. She was almost convinced now that her life in the States was history for her. The only future she had was here. It was a whole new life, where no one knew her past, or the shame of her divorce. In France, as far as everyone knew, she had never been married. She was turning twenty-four in a few weeks. And one day, with hard work and some luck, she’d be a doctor. All she would ever be in New York was a disgrace, through no fault of her own.
The two women went their separate ways outside the dining hall and went back to their respective barracks, promising to get together sometime, if they ever got a day off, which even if they did, they never took. Annabelle hadn’t taken a day off from her duties as a medic since she’d arrived.
The Third Battle of Champagne ended in disaster for the French in late April and brought them a flood of new patients, which kept them all busy. Annabelle was ferrying men constantly from the front. The only encouragement they had was a Canadian victory at the Battle of Vilmy Ridge. And due to enormous discouragement among their ranks, there were outbreaks of mutiny among the French all through the early weeks of May. There were also ongoing reports of the Russian Revolution-the czar had abdicated in March. But anything that was happening farther than the trenches and the front nearby seemed very remote to all of them at Villers-Cotterets. They were far too deeply involved in the business at hand to care about much else.
Annabelle forgot about her birthday completely. One day bled into another, and she had no idea what day it was. She only realized a week later, when she saw a newspaper someone had brought from Paris, that she had turned twenty-four. A month later in June, everyone was excited to learn that the first American troops had landed in France.
It was three weeks later, in mid-July, when a battalion of them came to Villers-Cotterets and set up camp on the outskirts of the city. They were joined within a week by British forces, all of whom were preparing for an offensive at Ypres. It livened up the area considerably to have British and American troops roaming around everywhere. They were happily seducing all the local women, and military police were constantly dragging them out of bars and off the streets drunk, and delivering them back to their camps. If nothing else, it provided a little distraction, and despite the inevitable rowdy soldiers, some of them were very nice. Annabelle saw a group of American soldiers one day, walking along with some very young French girls, as she rode back with the ambulance from a field hospital nearby. She was in no mood to banter with them, as the man they were carrying back to the hospital in Villers-Cotterets had died on the way. But as the ambulance drove past the Americans, they shouted and waved, having seen two pretty women in the front. And for an aching moment, she had an intense longing to hear American voices. She waved back and smiled. One of the men in uniform ran along beside them, and she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Hi.”
“Are you American?” he asked in amazement, and the driver of the ambulance stopped and smiled. She thought he was cute. She was French.
“Yes,” Annabelle said, looking tired.
“When did you get here? I thought the nurses weren’t coming over till next month.” It had taken them longer to organize the women’s volunteer units than the conscripted men.
She laughed at the question. There was the sound of Boston in his voice, and she had to admit, it was nice to hear it. It felt like home. “I’ve been here for two years,” she said, smiling broadly. “You guys are late.”
“Like hell we are. We’re going to kick the Krauts right back to where they came from. They saved the best for last.” He looked like a kid and was, and as Boston Irish as they came, and it reminded her of her visits to Boston, and summers in Newport. She was suddenly homesick for only the first or second time in twenty-two months. She couldn’t even remember the last time she felt that way.
“Where are you from?” he asked her, as one of his friends chatted up the ambulance driver, on the other side of the truck, but they both knew they had to get back. It wasn’t right to hang around talking with them, with a dead man in the back, although others had done worse. At some point, the horrors of war no longer shocked you as they once did.
“New York,” Annabelle said quietly.
“I’m from Boston,” and as he said it, she could smell the alcohol on his breath. As soon as they left the camps where they were billeted, most of them drank a lot. They had good reason to. They drank, and chased every girl that crossed their path.
“I could tell,” she said, referring to his Boston accent, as she gave her colleague the signal to get started again. “Good luck,” she said to him and the others.
“Yeah, you too!” he said, and stepped back, and as they drove back to the hospital, a wave of nostalgia for her own country washed over her, and she had never been so homesick in her life. She missed everything familiar that she hadn’t seen or allowed herself to think about in two years. She sighed as the two of them carried the dead man on the gurney into the morgue. He would be buried on the hills with countless others, and his family notified. There was no way to send the bodies home. There were just too many of them. And makeshift cemeteries covered the countryside now.
Thinking of the Americans they had seen that afternoon, Annabelle went for a short walk that night, when she got off duty, before she went back to her room. They had lost every man they had driven back from the field hospitals that day. It had been depressing, and although it was a common occurrence, it upset her anyway. The boys were all so young, many of them years younger than she was. Even many of the nurses were younger than she was now. At twenty-four, with a year of medical school behind her, she didn’t feel like a young girl anymore. Too many difficult things had happened to her in the past few years, and she had seen far too much pain.
She was wandering along, thinking about her lost life in the States, with her head down, not far from her barracks, on the way back from her walk. It was after midnight, and she had been working since six o’clock that morning. She was tired and not paying attention, and she gave a start when she heard a British voice behind her.
“Hey, pretty girl,” he said softly. “What are you doing out alone?” She turned and was startled to see a British officer walking along the same path on his own. He had obviously been drinking, and had left a nearby bar without his companions. He looked very dashing in his uniform, and very drunk. He was a good-looking young man, about
