Mercy Road

by Ann Howard Creel

  After some time Beryl glanced my way. “I’m sure you’re wondering why we want to do it, why we want to enter the theater of war under such grim circumstances. Perhaps you think we’re bloodthirsty thrill-seekers.”

  Stunned, I said, “Not in the least!” But then I pondered what else to say, because no one had explained the doctors’ determination and desires to us. “I suppose you want to prove yourselves.”

  “Yes,” she said pensively. “But it’s more than that. We want to do what most of us know we can do and what we think we were born to do. The old order”—she turned a bit in my direction—“and I mean the old order dominated by men, wants to contain us within certain situations and believes that war is too tough for us women to endure. When one’s personal fortitude and skills are discounted, it can be so very discouraging. But we never faltered in our quest to help.”

  “I can see that.”

  She continued as though she really wanted me to understand: “The military almost kept us out of this. They came much too close to succeeding.”

  I’d noticed her grasping her hands together in her lap, then releasing them, only to grasp them again a few moments later.

  “Are you ever nervous?” I asked.

  “Of course. We’re confident, but also still human.” She raked her hair back and rubbed her neck.

  Her openness, her willingness to share her fears, moved me. I found myself speechless, amazed that a woman of Beryl’s stature would admit to doubts and fears. But everything about Dr. Rayne had surprised me. I saw her as crossing her own version of a no-man’s-land; on one side, the limitations and expectations put on women, and on the other side, her drive to do what she knew she could and must do. I viewed her as charting a new course through a changed world.

  She asked, “Are you nervous?”

  “Without a doubt,” I answered. “But I’ve already seen some terrible things.”

  “I expect it will get worse. More death, more suffering . . .”

  At least Beryl didn’t mince words.

  As we made progress toward our destination, we had to cross an area of razed earth that looked as if a meteor shower had scarred and pitted it, and I had the feeling this place could swallow us without anyone noticing. Dust covered the ambulance as though it had sprouted gray mold. Streams had become muddy channels. Allied air squadrons heading to the front flew overhead in grand V-shaped formations consisting of twenty-five to thirty planes.

  War felt closer. I could sense it like the electricity that remains in the air after a lightning strike. In the midst of this brutally altered landscape, something tightly wound within me started to unravel. Beryl continued: “I suppose I’m afraid of what I can’t even imagine. I’m not religious like my husband was, thus I gather little strength from faith.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, I asked, “When did you . . . lose him?”

  “Interesting you put it that way. He died seven years ago, and then my daughter died two years later. She was like him, artistic and spiritual. I was too scientific for her. I believe I lost both of them before they died. I tried to change, but I didn’t.”

  I had no idea why she’d chosen me as a confidante. I wanted to know more, but then thought better of asking her. “I’m so sorry—”

  She said, “Don’t worry, Arlene. You’ll do well here, I know it.”

  I wanted to believe her, but a shudder moved through me then. “How did you meet Dr. Logan?”

  Although she kept her gaze ahead, she answered me without hesitation, “At a conference of the American Medical Women’s Association. We shared the belief that women shouldn’t be excluded from the war zone, or anything else for that matter, and I joined her force trying to make it over here. Otherwise we probably would have never met. She’s from a wealthy, prominent eastern family. Very conservative and resistant to change, although I did hear that they supported her medical career. Still, she probably had to fight her way into medical school. I grew up in California with very little.”

  “That makes your journey even more impressive.”

  “Not so. I was raised with very little of anything, including restrictions.”

  “But with more difficulties.”

  “Oh, I doubt that. Herberta hasn’t had an easy life. She lost her husband and only child, too. Her parents lived long lives, and she had no one else. She once told me they praised her accomplishments, but they would’ve forbidden her to come over here during the war.”

  “Would that have kept her away?”

  “Oh yes; had her parents not eventually succumbed to old age, she wouldn’t have come to France. She would’ve been too torn. I’m sure of it.”

  Had this war made everyone cross over into someone else?

  I asked, “And it’s clearer for you?”

  She half laughed. “Despite my inner resolve, everything seems to be getting less clear. But here we are.”

  We approached an area of forest that stood alongside ancient villages, charming châteaux, and country farms still trying to feed Paris. Every mile or so a small copse of woods stood between wheat fields dotted by occasional large stone farm buildings with courtyards.

  As sunset turned the grit in the air to pink and gold, we arrived in Meaux, a pleasant old market town of ancient mills along the Marne. We entered the town center with its Gothic cathedral that dated from the twelfth century, having passed the Pont du Marché—the Market Bridge, which the British blew up in 1914 along with Meaux’s famous floating baths during the First Battle of the Marne.

  Now again, the large town had become a concentration area for the military forces, having fought another battle for the Marne here. Several German bombardments had left craters in the town square and near the railroad station, and a cathedral in the center of town was lined on one side by headless statues—this damage had not been done by the Germans but by the French during the Revolution. It seemed a warning or a prediction.

  I navigated the ambulance along streets clogged with uniformed troops marching toward the front. Mobs of mostly silent refugees, their faces folded and sagging, moved in the opposite direction. Many of them pushed farm carts piled high with their most prized possessions—mattresses, pots and pans, tools, clothing, and chickens in crates. Some pushed baby carriages and wheelbarrows and drove sheep and hogs.

  We pulled up to the French Evacuation Hospital No. 18. Around a large tree-bordered courtyard stood various buildings converted for medical use from their former occupations as cavalry barracks. The entire area teemed with the comings and goings of ambulances and military jeeps, with nurses and volunteers giving aid to some patients outside on the spot or shuttling others inside. Ambulance drivers unloaded stretchers, supply trucks backed in for unloading, and village women bustled about offering help.

  A steady stream of ambulances kept flowing even as dusk settled in. A nurse said to me, “We hoped you were the supply wagon. All the booze is gone,” and I quickly came to see that balancing the horrors of war with humor could help one survive. Laughter, at the very least, let you know you were alive.

  The drivers efficiently delivered white-bandaged and blue-clad French blessés—the wounded—to the compound. Bloodied men, some with missing limbs, cried out in pain. If any morphine had been administered at the front, it had apparently worn off. Some soldiers looked to have hemorrhaged during the long haul to Meaux. Some wore dressings over their eyes. Some smelled of sulfur; others of death. The injured men had received their treatment at one of the frontline dressing stations or advance field hospitals, where they’d also received anti-tetanic serum and had been tagged with a card stating the nature of their wounds, tied to a buttonhole on their uniforms.

  One of the English-speaking nurses gave us a fast tour to show us how things worked. Upon arrival, the wounded went from the ambulance into the swarming grand triage, where many received emergency treatment or, if likely to die soon, were made as comfortable as possible. The more severely injured but still hopeful cases were carried into o
ne of the hospital buildings for surgery. The largest contingency went to the petit triage, where less serious wounds could be speedily diagnosed and redressed before the men embarked on the long journey to Paris.

  Between 1,000 and 1,800 patients passed through the triage daily, and the French medical officers had worked themselves to exhaustion. We watched many drained-looking French nurses running to and fro in blue chiffon veils, and through windows we could see doctors in blood-splattered white surgical aprons leaning over tables to tend to wounded soldiers. The French doctors gratefully welcomed our female doctors’ arrival but ordered them to get some rest and report for duty at six the next morning.

  My eyes latched on to the ambulances and their drivers. Both American and French male drivers worked with an air of calm efficiency, as if they’d seen it all and nothing could shock them now. With wan faces, they moved the dead, dying, and injured. Their movements smooth, they seemed unpanicked and expedient. Blood, gore, and suffering had become a natural backdrop. None of them acknowledged our arrival.

  Cass had already adopted the rather blasé sense of gallows humor here and whispered, “Perhaps if we shot a gun in the air . . . ?”

  And I followed with “Maybe if we stripped naked . . . ?”

  Of course we didn’t really want to distract them from their work. But despite our attempts to make light of it, we were lost, like pieces of dust blown about, then landed on this one small spot of earth by happenstance. It became clear that if Cass and I wanted to help, we’d have to find our own way.

  Chapter Twelve

  In the morning, as soon as dawn broke, Cass and I stood outside ready to drive to the advance field hospitals, where surgeons and nurses sorted the dead and dying, administered the most urgent care, washed gas burns, retained those soldiers who couldn’t survive transportation, and sent the savable and movable away in ambulances. Under some circumstances, drivers might also journey closer to the front to retrieve the wounded from the advance dressing stations. The same nurse who’d given us a tour the day before informed us of all of this.

  As she left us, she said over her shoulder, “Be careful. They all have cooties.”

  Cass and I stood and stared at each other in confusion until we figured out that by cooties, she probably meant lice. But when she said “they,” had she referred to the other ambulance drivers or the men from the trenches we’d most likely transport that day?

  We shrugged to each other. I supposed we’d soon find out.

  A French driver gave us helmets and gas masks as casually as if handing out tablets and pencils to students in a classroom.

  Cass looked apprehensive for the first time, and I mirrored her anxiety. Most likely nothing could have prepared us for the front lines, even after what we’d seen in the countryside around Neufmoutiers. Both of us had expected to transport civilian patients behind the lines, not military men at the front. But they needed us, and we couldn’t back out now.

  Attached to the French Army, we received orders to follow two of the French drivers. One of them shook his head before allowing Cass and me to join the convoy. I could sense doubt in the way he looked at us, this despite the fact that British women—most of them aristocrats, I’d heard—had driven ambulances in France almost since the war’s beginning.

  We shadowed the French drivers and troop trucks into a land scored by abandoned trenches, tangled by barbed wire, and strewn with blackened gravel and dirt. A rotten-egg odor permeated the air, and heavy dust dimmed the sun like a lighthouse blurred by a socked-in shore. The narrow road, pulverized by shell hits, thronged with fleeing refugees who seemed shocked that trucks carried troops to the front and not away from it.

  A man called out, “La guerre est finie!” The war is finished! He gestured for us to turn around and go back.

  The first driver in the line shouted, “Non, c’est pas fini!” Not finished!

  The sounds of war roared in close, and fear twisted in my gut. The rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire, an eerie whistling of shells, and the rumbling, trembling earth reminded us that the front lay perhaps only a thousand yards away as we pulled into a pickup area adjacent to a makeshift field hospital.

  The stretcher-bearers, brancardiers, with their clenched jaws and glassy eyes, brought in the wounded from the battlefield or frontline dressing stations. Within the tented hospital, one doctor performed a hasty emergency operation. The blood-splattered surgeon bent over a table, trimming and dumping things into some kind of bucket, and I began to feel sick. A nurse took the bloody instruments from his hands, and a stretcher-bearer offered the surgeon a quick draw on what was left of his cigarette. A line of men in various states of consciousness sat propped up against the side of a smaller tent, waiting for treatment, I supposed. One man cried while gripping a dressing on the stump of his leg. Another had fallen over to his side, his eyes open but devoid of any light.

  I wondered if I should go to him, but then a few aides brought out more wounded soldiers from inside the surgical tent. The aides loaded three couchés, the nonambulatory, in the back and one assis, the ambulatory, in the cab beside me. Beneath a light dressing on my passenger’s left arm, blood seeped from his shredded skin, and I couldn’t imagine how he could sit and remain stoic as I drove away, following one of the French drivers.

  A tall, thin man with a grizzled face, the driver had told me we would take another route back, as the latest reports indicated the road we’d taken to get here had been belted with new fire since we’d passed through. He also said that Germans had gassed the valley, which meant we best stay high. He explained quickly that he would lead me down a back road, a narrow, winding scar along a ridge that he hoped would take us high enough to avoid the gas but low enough to stay beneath the arc of artillery fire.

  I’d lost track of Cass already. Her ambulance had left my sight. I looked about before I left but couldn’t spot her in the surrounding commotion. Of course she couldn’t understand directions given by French drivers, who rarely spoke any English, but I couldn’t wait; my orders came, and I had to move.

  My hands trembled as I grasped the steering wheel. I glanced back at the collapsed soldier beside the tent, his eyes still open, his chest not moving, flies beginning to circle.

  As I followed the driver along the exposed ridge, the Boche artillery offense intensified, and shrapnel scuttled and thrashed on the ground around us in some kind of evil gravelly dance set to the sound of louder and closer booms. So the shells could reach us after all. Smoke and dust and heat and a gaseous odor everywhere. I heard a bloodcurdling shrill, and instinctively I ducked.

  The French ambulance stopped dead in front of me. The engine hissing and steaming, it had to have suffered a hit. The driver helped his assis to my vehicle, telling me, “I took a whizz-bang in the radiator,” and urging the soldier to cling to the right running board. Then he pushed his car aside and told me to keep driving. Calmly, as if we had met on a lovely road and had just pulled over for a chat.

  “What about your couchés?” I asked in French in a voice that could not have been mine. It sounded almost composed.

  He peered inside for a half second. “I’ll flag down an ambulance on the way in and transfer them over. Now go,” he said.

  Something jagged lodged in my chest. “Will someone come along here?”

  “That’s my problem. Now leave.”

  Was I leaving them to die? I gripped the wheel and scarcely breathed as I squeezed past his ambulance and continued on my way, not sure how I would ever find Meaux again. It wouldn’t matter, however, if we got hit. Somehow I blocked out the earth-shattering blasts and high-pitched screeches and concentrated only on the road ahead. I could hear shells whining in to make landfall, and I braced my body for the worst. Whenever I came to a fork in the road, I chose one path and hoped that an internal compass would lead me the right way.

  Images of Maman and Luc flashed before my eyes. Now that I had come across an ocean and found myself in the midst of war, the rest of the world fe
lt huge, and my life felt small. But to my mother and brother, my life meant everything. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here. If I died, Maman and Luc would be left destitute. I couldn’t imagine where they would go and what they would do.

  At last I descended into a shallow valley away from the fighting, and it became apparent that I’d chosen correctly. The road, although heavily congested with service vehicles headed toward the front and more refugees escaping the area, looked familiar. My heart left my throat. When I encountered oncoming ambulances, I stopped and told one of the drivers about the man and his passengers I’d left behind. He nodded and waved me past. I didn’t know if he went after his comrade or decided the rescue posed too big of a risk.

  A terrible ache in my stomach convinced me I’d never eat again. I drove onward, and it seemed impossible that a flock of birds took flight over the road and soared above us, black wings against a blue sky, oblivious to the ugliness below. After a drive of almost thirty miles, I pulled into Meaux, where others unloaded my couchés, and the other two men could walk inside for assistance.

  A French village woman shoved a cup of tea in my hands. I said “Merci” and gulped it down, but did not linger.

  If I stopped for a moment’s rest, I might not start again. Another French ambulance pulled out, so I followed it as it took a different route, which seemed quieter but took longer.

  Reaching the front, we pulled up to an advance dressing station tucked into a cave. We found an ambulance driver and a stretcher-bearer standing nonchalantly under a tree outside the poste smoking cigarettes. I wondered what we were supposed to do. The French driver told us an artillery battle was raging in the valley below, and the brancardiers had probably crouched under cover trying to save their own necks. But they would come, he said, as soon as it quieted somewhat.

  The men offered us a smoke, and I took one, but after a few puffs I began to feel dizzy and turned mine over to the stretcher-bearer, who had just ground his butt into the dirt at his feet.