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Sighing, Kate flapped her jacket a few times for some cool air, shook a stone out of her boot, and trudged forward, through what once had been woods and was now mostly scrub. The mist was so thick she could scarcely see a yard ahead of her, making her flounder and trip over things. She had just stubbed her toe on yet another felled tree—another thing she could hold against the Germans—when she heard the incredibly welcome sound of hoofbeats.
“Well, thank goodness for that,” she muttered.
It was certainly coming on very fast for a plow horse. Out of the mist not a yard in front of her emerged a magnificent beast, all heaving flanks and glossy withers.
Kate had a healthy dislike for horses—one tended to when one’s father was kicked in the head and died—but even she could tell that this was a beauty of its kind.
The horse’s rider reined in sharply at the sight of her.
“What are you doing out here?” demanded Emmie’s captain without preamble. “Didn’t you get our message? The colonel sent a groom an hour ago.”
Kate put her hands on her hips, sweaty, disgruntled, and generally not in the mood to deal with high-handed Englishmen. “I’ve been chasing horses,” she said sharply. “So I have no idea what your colonel wants. If it’s tea, he’ll have to call another day.”
The horse sidled. Captain DeWitt got it back to where he wanted it to be. “Where is—the rest of your Unit?”
“If you mean Emmie,” said Kate, “she’s gone to Verlaines to teach a class.”
The captain said something he really ought not to be saying in front of a lady, even if that lady was covered in mud and sweat.
“What is it?” Kate noticed, for the first time, that the captain looked decidedly disheveled, as if he hadn’t slept and certainly hadn’t bathed. There was dirt on his face and mud on his uniform. “What’s wrong?”
“They’ve broken through,” he said. “We can’t hold them. They’re coming on, thousands of them.”
Kate could feel all the blood draining from her face. “Broken through. The Germans?”
Captain DeWitt gave a curt nod. “Get your Unit and get them out.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Right after breakfast on the twenty-first, Emmie Van Alden and I started out in the jitney for Verlaines, where she was holding classes and I was visiting. As we got close, we began to meet refugees fleeing from Ham. You can’t imagine the state of those roads. The army retreating, the infantry so tired it hurt to look at them, great guns, wagons full of supplies and equipment, ambulances evacuating hospitals, and, along with them all, hundreds and hundreds of refugees, pushing wheelbarrows or leading a mule with a wagon if they were lucky enough to have one.
In spite of all the racket, it never entered our heads that the Boche could possibly break through. . . .
—Miss Alice Patton, ’10, to her sister, Mrs. Gilbert Thomas
March 1918
Grécourt, France
Emmie knew something was wrong even before they got to Verlaines.
The road from Ham to Verlaines was crowded with people, dozens of them, hundreds of them, heads down, shoulders bent, old women pushing wheelbarrows piled high with linens, agitated mothers pulling children by the hand, trying to keep out of the way of the military trucks bumping toward the front, the dispatch riders on their motorbikes whizzing to and fro.
“What’s happened?” Emmie called out, leaning out the side of the truck.
No one really seemed to know. All they knew was that the Boche were coming and they were getting out, as far as the road would take them.
“Have you been evacuated?” asked Emmie, exchanging an alarmed look with Alice, who had pulled the jitney to a stop by the side of the road.
They hadn’t been evacuated. They were just leaving. The army was too busy to bother with them, and why should they bother waiting for the British Army? It was safer just to go.
Alice’s lips were very white. “Do you think it’s serious?” she whispered.
“I don’t hear the guns.” Emmie looked at the people with their bundles, all their worldly possessions piled on their backs. “It might just be an excess of caution—but maybe we ought to go to Ham and find out. So we can tell our people what to do.”
If Ham was in danger . . . but it probably wasn’t, Emmie told herself hastily. Will was there holding the line. Will and all those brave boys whom they’d had to tea and impromptu dances with a temperamental Victrola and rubber boots for dancing slippers.
“If you go on to Verlaines,” Emmie told the woman she’d been talking to, “you can get something to eat and drink—and we’ll take you on after if you need to go on.”
