Mercy Road

by Ann Howard Creel

  “He was just a boy!” Eve said, and, turning around again, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her trembling, rage-filled face.

  “Yes,” Dr. Logan replied calmly. “And many sick boys and girls await us in Château-Thierry.”

  Eve’s voice cracked as she squeaked out disbelievingly, “And you can’t make one exception? One day?”

  “No,” Dr. Logan eventually answered. “I won’t.”

  Eve stood there fiercely, her chin lifted, her arms crossed, then two fresh tears ran down her cheeks and she folded over, burying her face in the jacket.

  I turned back to Dr. Logan, whose composure hadn’t fractured, not even in the slimmest of slivers.

  In that moment I hated her so.

  Chapter Twenty

  LUZANCY, FRANCE

  SEPTEMBER 1918

  Château-Thierry lay snug in a valley along the meandering Marne, closed in by woods and overlooked by its ruined castle’s crumbling towers. Only a few months earlier, it had been a charming town of stone buildings, walled gardens, and roads that ran parallel to the river in a series of steep terraces lined with poplars. Famous for its beauty, it featured cathedrals, a fountain, and at the top, a panorama of the valley. The town was also the birthplace of the poet and fable author Jean de la Fontaine, and its hotels were named for animals in his honor—the Giraffe, Deer, Elephant, and Swan.

  The city, affectionately called Chatty Terry by American soldiers, had earlier that year suffered its second German occupation, when from late May through early June, it was the site of a great battle and a successful stand by the American machine gunners.

  Because of Château-Thierry’s railroad depot and vital bridges, almost all Americans engaged in the Marne battles had passed through the city. It had long been a center of action and a path to Paris.

  As we passed by, we could see the once-sparkling Marne, now clogged with tree corpses, oily scum, and war debris—broken rifles and helmets, rusted shells and artillery. From outside the city we caught sight of heaped masonry, piles of rubble, and barricades, but the town hall still stood guard, minus one tower, and residents continued to return. This, despite all the sacking and destruction.

  Before the Germans retreated, they stole and sent home whatever they could take and then destroyed everything they couldn’t take. They entered every home, broke every piece of ornately carved furniture, smashed every set of china and pottery, tore down every swath of drapery and ancient tapestry, and ripped apart every handwoven rug. Surprisingly, they’d bypassed the rock cellars that were older than Napoleon and held millions of bottles under the houses of wealthy wine merchants.

  Despite it all, we could see why the city had been considered so beautiful. The church of Saint-Crépin with its carved buttresses and rough-hewn tower still stood, and the sixteenth-century belfry of the Belhan Mansion remained intact, too.

  Passing through, we learned the good news that the Allies had made remarkable progress against the Germans, and the US First Army had pushed back the Saint-Mihiel salient, or “bulge,” as they called it, on September 12.

  The city was bisected by the river, once crossed by three lovely bridges. But one of these, an old triple-arched stone one, lay in pieces, and my throat tightened when I noticed that American engineers were at work here, clearing the blockage in the river and rebuilding the bridge, and they had already constructed two new pontoon bridges.

  Brohammer could be here with his engineers. That is, if he ever did his job instead of gallivanting around selling war contraband.

  Lottie had stayed behind in Neufmoutiers, and so Cass drove the ambulance directly behind us, escorting Dr. Logan. Beryl and I had not spoken of Dr. Logan, her unpopular decision, and the funeral that perhaps transpired at that very moment. Before we left, it looked as though Eve had pasted on a stiff paper face and forced herself to do as ordered.

  For Eve’s sake, I had to say to Beryl, “I wonder if the funeral is over by now.”

  My eyes focused ahead as I drove beyond the city. I could hear Beryl sigh. “It’s obvious you didn’t support leaving today.”

  “I was surprised you did.” I took a glance at her, nervous about her reaction, but I’d always spoken openly to Beryl. “At least you appeared supportive. You never said anything against her.”

  “No, I didn’t.” After a few heavy moments, she rubbed the back of her neck and said, “I do understand how many of you feel, but Herberta has to make difficult decisions every day.”

  I said nothing.

  “I don’t envy her,” Beryl said.

  I bit my lip, but then I responded: “I don’t envy her, either, but I would’ve made a different choice. It seemed a simple thing to leave Eve behind; it would’ve given her a chance to at least recover for a bit.”

  Beryl’s hair had grown longer, and she was trying to fashion it into some kind of bun. We’d had no time to seek haircuts, and most of us would’ve cringed if we’d done something that unnecessary and self-indulgent. “And why should Eve receive more consideration than the rest of us? Why would she receive special treatment?”

  “Because she’s the most devastated.”

  Beryl gave up on the bun and dropped her hands into her lap. “On the exterior. But we have no idea how others might suffer, too. Think of Cass and how you’ve worried about her. No one else knows besides you and me; is that correct?”

  “Yes, I haven’t told anyone else.”

  She sounded a bit bristly then. “That’s my point. We don’t know what others might be dealing with.”

  “Most of us would never tell.”

  “So, you’ve made my point again. With little information, Herberta has to make the best decisions she can for our group as a whole. Perhaps if Eve had come to her, however, Herberta might have left her behind.”

  “Eve was probably afraid to ask. Maybe she knew Dr. Logan wouldn’t honor her request.”

  “Do you call what Eve did in the meeting yesterday a request?”

  “Yes, a request from a distraught person holding herself together as best she could under the circumstances.”

  “Well . . . ,” Beryl said. “It’s done now, and now we enter a new area, a new phase.” She shifted a little in my direction and fixed her gaze on me. “Will you forgive our Dr. Logan?”

  “It’s not my place to forgive.” I paused. “But do I think as highly of her as I did before? I don’t know.” I coughed. “I understand she made some hard decisions, but as I said, I would’ve made different ones.”

  Beryl turned away and faced forward again. “Perhaps, then, that’s why you’re not a leader.”

  My heart staggered. Beryl had always treated me with kindness, we’d never disagreed, and she’d never said anything so full of disdain to me or anyone else, for all I knew. I had believed she valued my opinion, and her words bordered on cruel and sent a clear message: the doctors were in charge and didn’t welcome any questioning of their decisions. Or perhaps the war was getting to everyone by then.

  My mouth filled with retorts almost too ardent to contain. But contain them I did. I owed Beryl. I coughed again, and for a few moments feared I might have to pull over, halting our entire caravan, and we had already stopped for lunch. Instead I pushed on.

  Her harsh words echoed inside me—Perhaps, then, that’s why you’re not a leader.

  How hollow was my existence in that moment, the world empty and cold, far from human kindness, far from touch and love.

  Now I’d lost everyone.

  At last we arrived. Fifteen miles outside Château-Thierry stood our new facility, a stately old château located in the advanced frontline area of Luzancy, along a loop of the Marne and behind Belleau Wood. Palatial in size, this château sat back from a vast lawn and overgrown gardens that had probably flowered and flourished and looked lovely when tended to before the war. Inside we found enormous rooms with walls and floors that showed lots of wear and tear, but the chandeliers overhead still hung from unmarred ceilings decorated with murals, an
d remained intact. The facility held 150 beds and had a good water supply and a water-heating plant. While the doctors set up dispensaries to serve the vicinity’s five thousand residents, the rest of us whitewashed the walls, scrubbed floors, and polished windows to ready the hospital for patients again. Designated as both a military and civilian hospital, it would house separate areas for each.

  Luzancy turned out to be a woodsy place where fireflies filled the evening with dots of white light. Standing in the forest full of squirrels and birds, one might never guess that the surrounding area stood in ruin, heavily shelled and bombed. Most houses had suffered hits, and the first returning refugees scavenged what food they could, dealt with unsanitary conditions left behind by the military, and tried to take care of each other.

  Although the front had moved on, the Marne remained in a state of destruction. More hungry, listless, and often sick refugees returned, only to find nothing but roofless remains amid the rubble, and despite warnings about the conditions, they came back to save their wheat and oat fields, tend to vineyards, harvest grapes, and weed the graves of their buried dead, even if it meant sleeping on the floor. Without medical care for three and a half years, they had survived three epidemics. No wonder they welcomed us with open arms.

  After I’d spent only two days on the cleanup crew, Beryl summoned me, telling me we must leave for a nearby village, where a breakout of a potent typhoid strain had struck twelve souls. Beryl stood at the side of the ambulance as I cranked the engine to a start, and before we took our seats, she extended a hand and said, “No hard feelings?”

  I took her hand and breathed out, “No hard feelings.”

  Despite the devastation and hardships the French had endured, still they greeted us with glee, especially the young, who with cheerfulness and bravery made light of their problems. It seemed everyone had taken up the cry “Vive l’Amérique! Nos sauveurs sont arrivés!” Long live America! Our saviors have arrived!

  In the village, we started with the first ill family, who had holed up in one room of their house, two children to a bed, their windows closed and their courtyard reeking of garbage and manure buzzing with a horde of flies. The mother and father had nursed their children as best they could, helplessly watching as each of their two daughters worsened and died, then their infant son, who had succumbed just hours before our arrival. The villagers buried him while we treated the parents, then we transported those poor souls and their only remaining living child, a boy of about four, to the hospital. Even though our facility wasn’t ready, it was a far better place than the one they’d come from.

  On the way back to Luzancy, we had to pull over, give aid to our patients, and clean them. The smell so overwhelming, I had to keep myself from gagging. At the hospital we learned that several other Luzancy villagers, diagnosed with pneumonia and influenza, had been admitted, too.

  Our primary work was serving the destitute and seriously ill civilians of France, and although the horrors didn’t seem as dramatic as the injuries we’d seen in soldiers, now we bore witness to another kind of suffering—among families, the most seriously ill were often the children. Most of the villages had no drainage, and we had to move from filthy barnyards, to hovels where people tried to stay alive, to villages whose streets teemed with disease-breeding muck and debris.

  During dinner after our first day of driving in the surrounding area, few people spoke. Even the newly arrived team members who had joined our group kept their thoughts to themselves. Perhaps all humbled by the generosity of people who looked near to starving, we’d gratefully accepted their gifts—fowl, rabbits, butter, eggs, and even some flowers for the table. Those of us from the original team braced ourselves for the deaths of more children we would come to care for as we had for Poppy. I feared for Eve.

  But after witnessing what I’d seen that day in the typhoid area, I began to better understand Dr. Logan’s decision to come to Luzancy as quickly as possible.

  Instead of revealing her pain on that night, Eve talked more animatedly than anyone. She told jokes she’d heard from soldiers when we’d stopped for gasoline in Château-Thierry, and she pretended to be unaffected. In her eyes, however, I detected a sheen left behind from many shed tears, and the skin around her nose had turned red and raw. In contrast, Cass still seemed to improve every day.

  Later that night Cass slipped out of bed and disappeared again for a few hours, and I found myself in a state of complete bafflement. I’d almost convinced myself that Cass had become involved with a man from Neufmoutiers, but here she was, creeping out again. Could the man have followed her to Luzancy?

  A villager wouldn’t have been able to—he wouldn’t have had the means. Had a military man followed her and come to see her so often in the middle of the night? I doubted that. Brohammer had sought me out during the day, exhibiting more freedom than I’d ever imagined an officer would have, but even he hadn’t come to see me as often as Cass had gone out on her nighttime forays. Only a high-ranking officer could have moved about so much, and if that were the case, why would Cass need to slip away and meet him in secret?

  Cass had started going out in Neufmoutiers but never did so in Meaux, where only a few of us had worked. Her forays resumed in Neufmoutiers and continued here. Either Cass went outside alone, or she met someone who had not gone to Meaux but had moved with the team to Luzancy. One of the other women. And if one of the other women, why did they meet in secret?

  A slow dawning came over me then. Once, I’d heard that some people fell in love with another person of the same gender. The comment had stuck with me: someone had described it as a rare condition. My mind spun a complex web while I imagined that perhaps Cass was one of those afflicted people and that perhaps her shell shock had triggered the illness.

  But if she had fallen in love with another woman on our team, who was it? Cass had not gone out at night in Meaux, so it had to be someone who hadn’t served there with us. Immediately Eve came to mind. But it was difficult to believe that two of our team members suffered from the same condition.

  By the time Cass returned to our room, I’d convinced myself she went outside at night by herself and my earlier contemplations bordered on crazy.

  For the next several weeks, Beryl and I drove to the typhoid area every day. She treated those she could and inoculated everyone else. In one tiny hamlet the children screamed when they saw us. The villagers explained that anyone dressed in uniform brought on such fear because earlier in the year, German soldiers forced children at gunpoint to march in front of them as a protective shield.

  I helped move debris and dig drainage ditches in the village when Beryl didn’t need me. I continued to transport people to the hospital, many of whom had fallen into delirium. We held meetings during which we told the hastily assembled villagers that the Germans weren’t coming and typhoid was the thing to fear. Cut off from outside communications, we didn’t yet know how rapidly the influenza had spread and killed.

  After three weeks in Luzancy, we housed forty-nine patients in the hospital, among them our typhoid victims, those with pneumonia and influenza, and others with various infections and neglected surgical needs. Soon the influenza spread like a dense fog over our valley, and many children died. Infants died. Young adults and the elderly died.

  One of the new nurses sat down at the table one night holding a canteen, swigged what was most likely pinard, then toasted another new nurse who sat across from her, and said, “Another day at the deadside.”

  The other nurse took the canteen and replied, “Hear, hear.”

  Gallows humor had spread, even here.

  Our Dr. Kitchens became ill but made an almost miraculous recovery; two of the nurses became so ill we drove them to a hospital in Paris for care. We didn’t know yet if they’d survived or not.

  Once, Beryl and I were summoned to a village reduced to rubble, where we peeked into houses and found them empty. We finally walked in on a group of about twenty people living together in one room. They had
no food or heat, and autumn winds whined through the open broken windows. The villagers slept on straw pallets.

  We found a sick girl, eight years old, with auburn hair who could barely move but clutched a ragged and smudged doll to her chest. At first Beryl diagnosed pneumonia, so we took her to the hospital. Once rediagnosed as tubercular, however, she could no longer stay, as we had no provisions for those with such a contagious illness. We could find no other bed in any other facility, either. Therefore, with no other choice, we had to return her to the care of her family. We did the best we could to set her up with a bed, food, a stove, and instructions to the family on how to protect themselves, but it made me feel ill and awful to leave her there.

  Diphtheria and scarlet fever cases kept increasing, as did more and more victims of the influenza epidemic. As we moved between the hospitals, dispensaries, and villages in need, officials of different districts often stopped us on the road and pleaded for our assistance, and similar letters asking for help began to arrive at the château daily. I hated having to translate to people in such need that we would do what we could but were already stretched to the limits of our abilities. No one on the AWH team had taken a full day off, and no relief appeared in sight as no leave could be granted. Our ambulances ran day and night, serving over a hundred villages.

  Each day, we woke up hoping the war would end. In mid-October, after four weeks of doing what we could for the villages, we learned that the Allies had almost secured a victory to end this horrific war. US forces had broken through the Hindenburg Line at the end of September and had the enemy on the run in the Forest of Argonne. We knew the cease-fire would have little impact on what we did in Luzancy, but we nonetheless desperately hoped for an armistice.

  Time slowed. Only then did it hit me that I’d heard nothing from either Jimmy or Brohammer. We had stepped off the map. The AWH had reached the end of the line, tucked away in one of the hundreds of Marne loops, but we didn’t know our exact location along that famous river. And still it felt unfathomable that no one had taken care of these villagers for so long. I’d received no letters from home, either.