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France, February 1917

HUNKA TIN

… But when the night is black,

And there’s blessés to take back,

And they hardly give you time to take a smoke;

It’s mighty good to feel,

When you’re sitting at the wheel,

She’ll be running when the bigger cars are broke.

Yes, Tin, Tin, Tin!

You exasperating puzzle, Hunka Tin!

I’ve abused you and I’ve flayed you

But by Henry Ford who made you,

You are better than a Packard, Hunka Tin!

—from the American Field Service Bulletin, 1917

(IN THE SPIRIT OF KIPLING’S “GUNGA DIN”)

I met my husband in the least romantic setting possible: a casualty clearing station in northern France in the middle of February. A cold drizzle fell and the air stank of human rot. I suppose this constituted a warning from Providence, though Providence needn’t have bothered. I had always known better than to fall in love. I had always known love was something you would later regret.

The CCS occupied the barn of an ancient farm, and by the time I reached it, late in the afternoon, the sky was dark and the ambulance wheels had choked with thawed mud. For weeks the winter had frozen the saturated ground; today, on the first day of a new offensive, the roads had turned to sludge. That was the war for you.

I brought the motor to a grinding halt in what had once been a stable yard and yanked back the brake. No other vehicles inhabited the swamp around me, and for a moment I thought I’d got the directions wrong. It was all just a hunch, after all: Hazel bursting back from the village, rushing down the empty ward, calling out that there was a battle on! A new attack into some salient or another, and if we wanted patients we should take the ambulance down to the nearest CCS, they’d be lousy with casualties! We were all rolling bandages at the time, there was nothing else to do. No patients to care for. Everyone turned to me. And what could I say? Take the ambulance, Hazel had said: the ambulance just brought down from Paris, our precious Hunka Tin, a bastard born of much wheedling and carrying-on with the American Red Cross Ambulance Service. A tattered, battered Model T that, in our entire sisterhood of accomplished Manhattan ladies, only I could drive.

Take the ambulance, Virginia, do! It’s not as if you have anything better to do.

She was right, of course. The rain was crackling on the great windows overlooking the courtyard. An infinite roll of lint lay in my lap like a death sentence. What else could I have said? Yes. I dumped that damned lint back into the basket and said yes.

A reckless act. Impetuous, my father would have said, shaking his head, and an hour later I’d regretted it passionately, but now that I’d arrived at my destination, the regret was gone. I rubbed my sleeve against the windshield fog—my breath kept clouding the glass—and spied the grim, erratic movements of a stretcher party lurching through the field beyond, half-obscured by mist. Above my head, a delicate whine pierced the air, high and gliding, ending in a percussive crump that rattled my bones. I reached for the door handle and forced myself out.

Four hours ago, as I left the hospital, Hazel suggested I borrow her rubber boots—The mud’s just awful, Virginia—but I hadn’t listened. I had my leather shoes, and from there I’d wrapped army-style puttees around my trousers, all the way to the knee, like a pair of gaiters, and I thought that was enough. Smart and efficient. That was all the soldiers wore, wasn’t it? In those days, newly freed from my father’s house, I thought I didn’t have to follow anyone’s advice if I didn’t want to. I thought I was free. From the moment of departure, from the instant the gray-sided ocean liner cast off into the Hudson River, I had soaked up the knowledge of my independence. I had reveled in reliance on my own common sense.

And that was all very well, except that the mud of northern France didn’t give a damn for my independence and my common sense. The mud didn’t give a damn for anything. I stuck my left leg out of the cab of the ambulance and into the wet French earth, and the muck swallowed up my neat leather shoe right past the ankle. You can’t imagine the greedy, sucking noises it made as I staggered across that stable yard, foot by foot, while the drizzle struck my helmet in metallic pings and the shells screamed and popped at some worryingly unknown distance. The front-line trenches were supposed to be miles away, but you couldn’t tell that to your ears, or to your heart that crashed every time those screaming whistles pierced the air in twos and threes, inhuman and relentless, followed by those acoustic crumps that meant someone had just gotten hell. Shellfire had a way of sounding as if it was going to drop directly on the crown of your head, every time.

I was making for the stretcher party, not the barn. I don’t know why. I think I just wanted to help, right that second, after so many weeks and months of preparation. Like the rest of us American volunteers, I was simply dying for a real live patient. Two men carried the wounded soldier, who was covered by a blanket and nothing else, and my God, how I wondered that he hadn’t fallen off the canvas altogether as the stretcher-bearers staggered through the mud, drunken and exhausted. The rain dripped from their helmets. “Need a hand?” I called out, and their heads jerked hopefully upward at the sound of my voice.

“Jesus,” the first one swore, “who the devil are you?”

“I’m from the American Red Cross,” I said. “I was sent out to bring patients to a hospital nearby. They said you were overloaded.”

“You’re a driver?”

Of the two, the second man looked the worst, whey-faced and vertiginous, as if the next step might kill him. I leapt across a puddle and reached for the handles of the stretcher. “Yes,” I said. “What have we got?”

The man was too tired—or else too astonished—to dispute the stretcher with me. He fell away, rubbing his blistered palms against his trousers, and I took the load in my own hands. It was lighter than I expected, a strange living weight, like a child instead of a man. The wounded soldier’s face was pale and wet; I couldn’t tell where he was hit, beneath the blanket.

“Right leg,” said the second man. “Sent back straightaway for amputation.”

“Can they amputate here?”

“Got no choice, have they?”

The soldier moved his head and groaned. Still wore his helmet, slipped to one side, covering his ear and part of his jaw while his face and young brow remained exposed to the drizzle. His pack lay next to him on the stretcher, shielded by the gray blanket.

“Almost there,” I told him, and his startled eyelids swooped open and his eyes met mine, very briefly, before a patch of mud sent me wallowing for balance.

“Blimey,” he said, blinking, “am I dead already?”

“You ain’t dead, mate,” the second man said. “It’s the American Red Cross, innit.”

“Blimey.” The soldier closed his eyes. “God bless America.”

Ahead of us a door swung open on the face of the barn, and a man’s shoulders appeared in silhouette against the electric light within. “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “I told the last party we haven’t got room!”

“Well, they ain’t told us back up the line, sir,” the first man said.

“We can’t bloody well take him!”

“He needs the leg off, sir, on the double.”

The other man pounded his fist against the side of the doorway. He took a step toward us, into the soggy remains of the daylight. Stopped, frowned. He wore a dilapidated khaki tunic, officer’s stripes. The rain struck his bare head. “Who the devil’s this?”

“The American Red Cross, sir,” said the first man.

“How in the hell did she get here?”

I nodded toward the Model T. “I drove, sir.”

“You drove that? From where?”

“From Marieux, sir. We’ve set up a private hospital there, only we weren’t getting any patients, so I went back to Paris and found a Model T from the American Ambulance—” The stretcher handle slipped in my wet right hand.

“Never mind.” The doctor stepped forward and yanked the stretcher handles from my fingers. “Carry on, for God’s sake. Get the poor sod out of the rain. Now!”

He had the kind of manner you couldn’t refuse, the kind of resolve you couldn’t just turn. I think I admired him right then, whether or not I realized it. I couldn’t help it. After all, I was used to a strong masculine will. His authority seemed natural and just, derived from the consent of those governed. I scampered like a damned puppy at his heels. Followed him into the barn, refusing to be shunted. “We’ve got plenty of beds at the hospital,” I said. “I can take three stretchers or six sitting in the ambulance.”

“I don’t know this hospital of yours.”

“We’re fully staffed, sir. Eight nurses, two doctors. Both experienced surgeons. You said you’re full.”

“All Americans, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

We ducked through the doorway of the barn, into a shower of electric light that stung my eyes. Around us stretched a ward of perhaps fifty beds, all of them occupied; a number of cots seemed to have been put up along the walls, staffed by a thin swarm of orderlies and a few nursing sisters in gray dresses and white pinafores. The smell of disinfectant saturated the damp air, swirling with the primeval odors of blood and earth. And not just any earth: this was the mud of France, battlefield mud, in which living things had died and decayed, and even now—years later—the stench still rots in the cavities of my nose like the memory of death. There is not enough disinfectant in the world to cleanse that smell.

The doctor didn’t pause. I don’t think he even heard me, any more than he would have heard an actual puppy scampering at his heels. He called out commands to a series of orderlies—Prepare the theater, Pass the word for Captain Winston—and only when he handed off the stretcher to the men assisting in the operating theater did he turn and fix his full attention upon me, like the next item on a long list of daily tasks, to be checked off and disposed of.

But the funny thing was—the really momentous thing, when I look back on the entire episode, trying to pinpoint this or that instant that might have constituted a turning point, a point of flexion at which my life might have taken an entirely different course—the funny thing was that his expression then changed. Transformed, like a man engaged in an obsessive quest, who had just parted a final pair of jungle branches and made the discovery for which he’d longed all his life.

His face, as I later learned, had that natural capability for transformation.

Where I had expected sternness, and frowns, and orders crossly delivered, I received something else. A smile, quite gentle. A movement of eyebrows that suggested understanding, and a little wonder. A bit of crinkling around a pair of eyes that had to be called hazel, though they tended, in certain light, toward green; surely that signified admiration?

My face turned warm.

“Miss—?”

“Fortescue.”

“Miss Fortescue. You’re the only evacuation ambulance to get through the roads today, did you know that? Either from the dressing station or the railway depot. How the devil did you do it?”

“I—I just drove, sir. Pushed her out when she got stuck.”

He drove a hand through his hair, which was sparkling with gray and cropped short, so that the bones of his face thrust out with additional clout. I thought he looked as if he came from the countryside, from some sort of vast outdoors; there was something a little rough-hewn about his cheeks and jaw, blunt, like a gamekeeper or else a poacher, although his creased skin was pale and sunless. His fingers, by contrast, contained all the delicate, tensile strength of a surgeon. I thought he must be exotically old, thirty-five at least. “Well, well. I’ll be damned,” he said. “You’re a heroine.”

“Not at all, sir. Just doing my best.”

“As are we all, Miss Fortescue, but you’re the only driver who actually made it through. That’s heroism.”

My cheeks burned. Of course. My chest, too, I think, while everything else went a little cold. At that point in my life—aged only twenty, sheltered for most of those years by a few square miles of tough Manhattan Island and a grim, reclusive father—I’d never received a compliment like that. Certainly not from a grown man, a man of mating age. I didn’t even know that kind of man, other than that he existed, a separate and untamed species, kept in another cage from mine on the opposite end of the zoo. And that was well enough with me. I had no interest in mating. Having survived such a childhood, I thought myself practical and resourceful—and I was, by God!—but not tender. Not susceptible to blandishment, and not susceptible to that particular kind of charm, the kind of charm you’re warned about in all the magazines: hazel eyes and a huntsman’s bones and an angel’s smile.

But now, at this instant, it turned out that I wasn’t immune at all. I was only innocent. Like a child who had never been exposed to measles, I thought I couldn’t catch them. That I was somehow stronger than all those weak, febrile children who had gotten sick.

I didn’t know how to answer him. I mumbled something. I forget what.

His smile, if possible, grew warmer. Incandescent, if I had to choose a word for it, which I did only at a much later hour, when I had the time and the composure to think rationally about him. He said, looking fearlessly into my eyes, “All right, then, Miss Fortescue. Heroine of the hour. If you want patients so badly.”

“Yes, we do,” I said, but he had already turned and barked out something to someone, and down we went along the rows of cots, selecting patients for transport. He gave me six, along with their paperwork, and asked me again for the name of the hospital.

“It’s a château, really,” I said. “Near Marieux. It belongs to the de Créouville family. Mrs. DeForest arranged to lease it—”

“Who the devil’s Mrs. DeForest?”

“Our chapter president.”

“Your chapter president,” he said, mock wearily, shaking his head. He was filling out the transfer papers with a beaten enamel fountain pen, using a medical dictionary as a desk. A small, sharp widow’s peak marked the exact center of his forehead. “What would we do without ladies’ committees?”

“A great deal less, I think.”

He looked up and handed me the papers. “You’re right, of course. God bless them all. I don’t suppose you have an orderly with you?”

“No.”

“Nurse?”

“There’s just me.”

“Just you. Of course.” He turned and called out to the nearest man, who straightened away from a bandage and looked afraid. “Miss Fortescue … is that right?”

“Yes. Fortescue.”

“Miss Fortescue from the American Red Cross has driven an ambulance all the way here from Marieux without an orderly, hell for leather, through mud and shellfire, in order to relieve us of some of our patients. Is Pritchard on duty?”

“No, sir. He’s on rest.”

“Fetch him up on the double and tell him we’ve got to escort six wounded men to the Château de Créouville, in Marieux.” Then, to me: “You’ll bring us back in the morning, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

Back to the orderly. “And find Miss Fortescue a cup of coffee and a sandwich, while you’re passing the mess. She looks like death. Perfectly charming death, but death nonetheless. We shall have no further harm come to her, do you hear me? She is absolutely essential.”

“Yes, sir.”

I tucked the papers under my arm. “If I may say so, sir, you should get some rest. You look like death yourself.”

“It’s Captain Fitzwilliam, Miss Fortescue. As well I should. But I’m afraid I shall have to make do with a ride in an American ambulance instead. You’ll be ready to shove off in twenty minutes?”

“Of course.”

That was all. A final smile, and he turned away and headed off into the maze of rubber curtains that partitioned the far end of the barn, while I stood there, dripping and bewildered, scintillating, waiting for my coffee and sandwich, for Corporal Pritchard. For my six wounded British soldiers.

For Captain Fitzwilliam, in his greatcoat and gum boots, who wanted to inspect us personally.