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In Montdidier, Kate found that Emmie had taken over a hotel. “The owner has been splendid,” said Emmie. “She’s let us have the whole building and found us straw for pallets. Julia’s taken over a room for a children’s infirmary. Mrs. Goodale—she’s one of Dr. Baldwin’s nurses—got onto someone she knew and came back with a regular bonanza of condensed milk for us, so we’ve been able to feed the babies now that we don’t have our cows anymore.”

“Emmie—” Kate looked around, dazed and amazed. There was a full canteen running in the courtyard, and rooms lined with pallets like dormitories. “How on earth did you do all this in one day?”

Emmie flushed, looking pleased and flustered. “It wasn’t just me. Some of our Quakers from Ham came by and have been helping. We managed to find enough stoves to make sure everyone’s had some warm food—there’s a schoolmistress who let us have the stove from her school and someone else donated tables and chairs for a canteen in the courtyard. . . .”

“Is that Marie?” One of the groups clustered around a table in the courtyard looked awfully familiar.

“Yes! Florence brought our basse-cour people in just an hour ago. . . . Oh dear, yes? What is it?”

One of the Quakers needed Emmie. She gave an apologetic wave and bustled away, leaving Kate to Marie, who embraced and scolded her all at once, wanting to know what Kate had been doing to get her uniform into such a state, and after Marie had washed it so nicely for her too.

“But weren’t you—you left on Friday,” said Kate dazedly. It belatedly dawned on her that Friday had been yesterday. It couldn’t possibly have been only yesterday. Yesterday morning, they had still been going about their business. That couldn’t be right. But it was. “You ought to have been here ages ago. What happened?”

They hadn’t really thought the Germans would come, so they’d gone only as far as Moyencourt. But then with the morning, they’d been told they had to go, so they had joined the other refugees on the road, and might have made it faster, but there had been that trouble with Zélie—

“What trouble?” Kate wasn’t tired anymore. She was suddenly, desperately scared. She could see all the other basse-cour residents eating in the courtyard, but not Zélie. “Where’s Zélie?”

“It was that goat,” said Marie defensively. “My son brought the animals to Moyencourt, but we couldn’t bring them farther, so we went on without them, but that Zélie, she ran off when no one was looking.”

“Ran off. After the goat?”

Marie stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. “I always told you that goat would be trouble, treating it like a pet. Now you see what happened.”

“Where did she go? Back to Moyencourt?” Kate could see the map of their villages in her head with horrible clarity. Moyencourt was farther from the front than Grécourt, but not by much. Not nearly enough.

“She’s probably sleeping in a barn somewhere with that goat,” said Marie, but she didn’t sound sure.

“Alone, in Moyencourt.” Kate didn’t stop to think. She grabbed a piece of bread from the table. She had water in a thermos in the truck. “If anyone asks, I’ve just gone on one last run.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In the dark, with our roosters to crow us on our way, we rolled out of the gate and headed to Roye with the other refugees.

All along the road we kept meeting men we knew, men who had come to dinner or tea with us. They were retreating steadily, and it did all look a bit black. They told us what was ahead of us on the road, where the Germans were, what risks we took, and then left it to our judgment. We were one of them now. I can’t tell you—I could never in a lifetime show you—how fine people are when all the external, superficial barriers are stripped away by a great emergency.

We went back and forth all morning, carrying refugees. It was heartbreaking to see the babies one and two days old, the sick and the old, and always the soldiers and the guns and the planes. For the rest of the day, Nell directed traffic for the Great Retreat, and I did my best to “match up” families. Nell and I stayed on at the crossroads until Dr. Baldwin came to bring us into Montdidier to join the rest and we discovered Kate was missing. . . .

—Miss Anne Dawlish, ’07, to Miss Ruth Minster

March 1918

Montdidier, France

Emmie had left Will’s letters at Grécourt.

It was such a stupid thing to be thinking about. There were so many things to be done. There were blankets to be stuffed with straw to make makeshift beds, milk to be warmed for the babies, and tin after tin of sardines to be opened.

But as Emmie hurried around the hotel in Montdidier, making sure all of their refugees were fed and had places to sleep for the night, she found herself slowing and thinking of that packet of letters in her trunk in Grécourt with a sharp pang of grief that hit her right in the center of her chest.

Emmie paused with her arms full of blankets, hugging them to herself as hard as she could, reminding herself that she needed to be strong for the Unit, for all their people who needed them. They’d been finding their own people all day; there were families she knew from Canizy and Courcelles, and it had been a solace to have the children run to her and hug her and know that seeing her there eased their fear a little, that if their Mlle Aimée was there, then everything couldn’t be all bad.

The grown-ups were harder. Some of their questions were relatively simple ones: finding missing baggage or, worse, missing family members. Emmie could say, “Well, the cars are still coming in, we’ll see who Alice brings,” or “Where exactly was it that you left your sack of linge?” It was the other questions that were harder, the big questions, the ones who wanted to know when they could go back again, what the Unit would do to replace what had been lost, when they could rebuild again, would they be back in time to finish the spring planting.

I don’t know, she wanted to say. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

But part of her job was to give people hope, to make them feel like there was some certainty, some safety, in this horrible, mixed-up madhouse of a world into which they had plummeted, so she smiled and said things like, “As soon as we know more, we’ll be sure to tell everyone,” which meant the same thing, really, but sounded so much better, because it made it sound like the Unit had some control over the situation when they hadn’t really, not at all. All they had was this hotel, for which they were paying a rather alarming amount, and one duffel each—and Alice didn’t even have that, because her duffel had got lost in the transfer from Roye to Montdidier, goodness only knew where or how, so she would have to borrow clothes from Emmie and Anne, because she was too tall for Kate’s or Florence’s or Nell’s, and Julia hadn’t bothered to bring much in the way of personal possessions, instead cramming her bag with all the medical supplies they could manage. Alice, of course, was pretending this was all very well, but Emmie knew she minded horribly, that her frills were her armor and she was as cut up about it as Emmie was about leaving Will’s letters.

Will. Somewhere on the front lines. It didn’t mean he was lost. People survived, they did, she’d seen it. She’d seen them survive in all sorts of ways, some almost worse than not surviving at all. Emmie pushed back that horrible thought, hating herself for it. Nothing could be worse than Will not surviving.