Promise Me This (41 page)

He hated passing the nearly starving, frostbitten, and battered French soldiers, hated leaving them to trudge painfully up the steep mountain passes. He could have so easily picked them up, offered them a running board, or simply let them hang on and relieve the strain of lifting one weary foot in front of the other—at least one or two of them. But it was not permitted. He would lose his job and every opportunity of searching for Annie.

The French soldiers, good-naturedly called the
poilus
—the hairy ones—understood the rules, and though their eyes begged, their arms waved in grateful recognition and Godspeed to the men who trucked their jaunty little American ambulances to the snowy mountain peaks, retrieved their wounded French comrades, and sped them down again to casualty stations, field hospitals, and railheads bound for civilization.

Michael took every assignment he could beg or trade—the farther afield the better. In each encampment, field hospital, convalescent center, every private home and small community, he stopped, pulled Annie’s photograph from his coat pocket, and asked in broken French if they knew her, if they had seen her. Always the answer was
“Non, mon pote. Je regrette”
or a simple shake of the head and shrugging of shoulders.

All the while the great guns blasted faraway Verdun; Michael heard them rumbling softly in the distance. The earth trembled beneath the mountains, a constant reminder to the feet of soldiers, Red Cross workers, ambulance drivers, and the French poor who refused to leave their homes that their blighted lives could be worse. They could be one hundred miles north.

Michael wrote twice-monthly letters to the Spragues and Aunt Maggie and Uncle Daniel, urging them to pray, to take heart, reassuring them that he had only begun to search for their precious Annie.

By the middle of June, he began writing daily letters directly to A. Piatt Andrew, requesting reassignment anywhere in France—anywhere he had not yet searched for his Annie.

In Paris, Andrew grew exasperated with the growing pile of communication from the bold—and probably crazy, he decided—young Irishman. Reports, however, declared him the most daring and competent of drivers, with enough rescues to his name to earn a string of medals—if medals ever came to the American Ambulance Field Service. The courage Dunnagan inspired in his other drivers was no small thing.

But Andrew grieved bigger troubles. Funds donated by Americans sympathetic to and supportive of their emergency work in France never reached him. He desperately needed someone with political clout or substantial wealth to intervene for the sake of the ambulance service and the French they served. He could not be bothered with Michael Dunnagan and his fanatical search for a girl he barely knew, no matter what the young man’s connections.

Andrew tossed Michael’s latest letter—received that morning—into the trash bin, unopened; he knew what it said.

Annie had never known such bitter, relentless, bone-chilling cold as the remaining winter of 1916.

Wind-blasted tents were as common as old châteaus in housing medical personnel and patients year-round. Hot water bottles froze long before morning. Annie and the other VADs slept in woollies and nightclothes, then wrapped themselves in their VAD cloaks, topped by whatever blankets they could lay claim to.

But Annie bit her tongue each time complaints sprang to her lips. She knew the men fighting suffered worse. Frostbite and cramping rheumatism competed for the greatest misery among soldiers in the winter trenches with rats the size of cats and the need to sleep standing up. Weight fell from their bones through shivering as much as lack of rations. Puttees wound tight around their calves never dried. Shoes and socks, soaked and frozen in the mud and icy slosh, did little to protect their feet.

And spring brought its own agonies. Neither Annie nor her tentmates were prepared for the plague of lice presented by the French wounded with the spring thaw. The persistent parasites found the long, thick hair of the VADs—despite the nurses’ tidy, upswept buns—especially warm and comforting, the perfect place to thrive and multiply.

Night after night the young women fine-tooth-combed their long tresses to rid themselves of the itchy, nasty vermin. Night after night they scrubbed and, if someone from home had mailed bluing bottles, soaked their bloodied aprons, cuffs, and caps white in small basins of tepid water.

“I hate this war. I hate it!” Judy fumed. “What I wouldn’t give for a good hair wash and a steaming-hot bath!”

Annie closed her eyes.
Me, too!

Andee grunted. “That’s just where you’d be when the shelling started up again—quite a picture for the visiting
Boche
!”

“Andee!” Babs shouted. “That’s bold, even for you.”

“What is that supposed to mean—bold, even for me?” Andee retorted. “Crying about a hot bath is bold when there’s no chance in—”

“Girls!” Evelyn pushed wide the tent flap. “I can hear you fussing across the lane. The surgeons are snickering their heads off at you—the ones that aren’t fed up!”

“Our nerves are frayed,” Marge admitted. “We’ve been at each other’s throats all morning.”

“Well, you’d best take it down a notch or two. You’ll have Matron over here next.”

“I do wish they’d stop,” Liz whispered to Annie. “They make it worse with their shouting and bickering.”

But Annie did not know if it could be worse. At least their noise broke the tension of waiting for the next round of shells. “I can’t always tell the difference,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

Annie blinked, surprised the other girl had heard. “I’m sorry, Liz—I suppose I mean that one sort of bickering is with words and one is with shells.”

“Well, it’s not the same at all, you know,” Liz huffed.

The bombardment of Verdun continued, day and night. Whatever breath the Germans had taken because of winter blizzards was long gone. The only gift to the French war effort was the spring-thawed mud that sucked German tanks and lorries into great holes and craters blasted by their own guns. The German army moved forward slowly but unsupplied.

VADs, doctors, orderlies, and ambulance drivers worked round the clock in shifts, and still they could not keep up with the ever-increasing number of wounded.

Missing a shift was tantamount to desertion and permissible only if one lay unconscious or was suddenly killed by stray shrapnel. If ambulances poured in with great numbers of casualties or extraordinarily gruesome shells of men, sleep and timetables were forgotten; there was work to be done.

By June, Annie was an old hand at cutting away blood-soaked or burned uniforms of unconscious soldiers. More pitiable were those soldiers who lay conscious, screaming in pain beyond bearing. Annie did not look away while cleansing wounds of men who’d lain too long in the field before a stretcher bearer could reach them—men with wounds so putrid that the pus puddled thick and the stench of gangrene filled the marquee tent until it reeked.

Gently Annie sponged the eyes of men whose hair and faces and torsos had been set afire by the German flamethrowers. She learned the pressure points of arteries left exposed when limbs were blown away. And she, more than all the nurses, smiled softly into the eyes of men who no longer looked like men—men who had been gassed or whose noses or mouths were burned or blown away. “Lost souls,” the girls called them—men forever disfigured, unless they were lucky enough to be fitted for prosthetic limbs or sent to the tin-noses shop for artificial restructuring.

“Even then,” Babs whispered, “they’re not the same. Something inside them is gone—something that all the suturing and pasting in the world cannot bring back.”

Annie knew it was so. And yet looking at these men was an odd sort of comfort to her. She saw, in plain view, the ugliness thrust upon them through no fault of their own—the physical results of the evil of violence, one man pitted against another. She had known such evil from her aunt Eleanor, and yet Annie’s wounds could not be seen from the outside.

But Aunt Eleanor’s soul, reeking, putrid, and gangrenous from spite and wounds imagined, was hidden from the world, covered by a respectable, if empty, outer shell. Annie shuddered to think of the state of her aunt’s heart.

The other girls cringed and wondered aloud at the way Matron openly and unjustly criticized Annie. It was common knowledge that Matron consistently assigned Annie the most grueling shifts and cases. Still, Annie dared not complain.

In July, German zeppelins—overblown slivers of gray against a new-moon sky—dropped their bombs across the trenches, fields, and French forces of Verdun. Whether aimed directly at the field hospital or not, the surgical marquee tent in Annie’s section was blown to bits, along with two of their best surgeons, a VAD nurse, and two orderlies.

Explosion after explosion lit the night. Metal, glass, bones, and limbs shattered and severed, flying upward, shooting their own shrapnel through the tents. Patients unable to walk or lift themselves screamed for help, prayed aloud for help or merciful death, and clamped tight their eyes and mouths, certain the end had come.

When at last the shelling abated, gray-and-yellow morning dawned through smoke. Matron and the remaining VADs stumbled through rubble, pulling the injured and dead from the tents and debris. All day and into the night they toiled, fetching and carrying, dragging and lifting bodies, scrubbing new wounds and old, bringing as much comfort as they could to their remaining patients. Before they’d finished, another load of ambulances brought their newly maimed.

At the end of the second day, while the shelling of Verdun continued to rattle their nerves and instruments, Matron and Annie found themselves momentarily alone with a patient in the surgery, both having assisted in the removal of shrapnel from the man’s chest. Matron swabbed the skin around the sutured wound. Annie spoke softly, gently urging the man awake, assuring him that all was well, all would be well.

When at last the orderlies had come and carried the man away, Annie, who’d not slept for two days, collected the instruments and blood-soaked bandages and sponges. She felt, rather than saw, Matron’s cold eyes upon her and wished the woman would just go away. Shaken from the relentless bombardment, the days of toil without sleep, and the boring of Matron’s eyes, Annie’s fingers fumbled. She dropped her tray of instruments and sent them clattering into the dust.

Despite her determination to maintain control, Annie began to shake, to dig her nails into the palms of her hands to keep tears of nervous exhaustion from rolling down her cheeks. She breathed as steadily as she could, bent down, and retrieved her tray. By the time she’d found every instrument and begun the sterilization process once more, she had collected herself.
I’ll not give her the satisfaction of looking up.

At length Matron pulled her bloodied apron from her shoulders and rolled down her sleeves. “Whatever could such a slip of a girl have done to incur the wrath of Eleanor Hargrave?”

Annie felt the blood drain from her face. She stopped her work, straightened, confirmed at last in her suspicion that Matron Artrip was her aunt’s puppet and assigned monitor. No wonder she’d been cornered and hounded. No wonder she’d been given the worst tasks. The woman was her aunt’s paid spy.