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“It’s John Donne,” said Emmie, her throat scratchy. “‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.’ The two points of the compass always come together in the end, so true lovers can never really be parted, even when they run around in circles.”
Except in the poem, the author was speaking about death. Emmie didn’t want to think about death. It was all very well to talk about not loving as sublunary lovers love and expansion of souls and all that, but she’d really rather not have to commune with a soul. She wanted the whole person back.
He’d been alive this morning, which meant he’d survived the dawn assault, but if he’d gone back to the line . . .
“There’s been no word since?”
Kate shook her head. “No one really seems to know anything. Only that there was heavy fighting. You were closer to it than we were.”
Emmie thought about the ambulances, those endless ambulances, bearing their gruesome burden.
“I’m sorry,” said Kate.
She couldn’t let herself cry now. Not when there was so much to be done. Will was away somewhere, but these men were still alive and needed her. Emmie blinked hard. “What can I do?”
“You’ve done so much today already. . . .” Kate saw the expression on Emmie’s face and quickly changed whatever she had been about to say to “Anne could use the help—she’s in the kitchen.”
“We’ve been making gallons of tea,” said Anne distractedly, pushing a strand of ginger hair back behind her ear as Emmie poked through the canvas flap. Every pot they owned appeared to be in use, the big old stove smoking like anything. “They’ve been without rations for twenty-four hours, these poor boys. We’ve been cooking and cooking for them since three o’clock. We’ve opened every can of beans in the place and boiled every scrap of macaroni we could find. But mostly it’s tea they want, poor men. One nearly cried when I asked him if he wanted milk. He says he hasn’t seen milk for months.”
Emmie sliced bread and brewed tea and sliced more bread and brewed more tea, going back and forth to the dining room with tray after tray after tray as one group was fed and another came in.
Work helped. It was easier not to think of Will out there in the mist with the Germans coming upon them when her hands were busy making up beds or carrying trays. They were so grateful, those men. Emmie, Anne, and Nell went back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, cooking, collecting dishes, washing dishes, and filling them up again, while Florence saw to the animals, and Kate and Alice turned the dining room and the Orangerie into makeshift dormitories, stripping the mattresses and blankets off their beds to make pallets for the soldiers.
“Was that really the last of them?” asked Anne, sitting down heavily on a stool, her feet sticking out in front of her. It was two in the morning and everyone had been fed and put to bed except the seven remaining members of the Smith Unit, who were collapsed in the kitchen, among a stack of dirty pots and dishes.
“Merciful heavens, I hope so,” said Nell, yawning. “If I never see another tin of beans, it will be too soon.”
Kate rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “They’ll need breakfast.”
Julia pushed herself off the wall against which she’d been leaning, half-asleep on her feet. “We’d best get started, then, hadn’t we?”
“Noooo . . .” said Nell, but Julia gave her a light shove.
“If I can make oatmeal,” said Julia, “so can you.”
Emmie had no idea what had happened between Julia and Kate in Paris, but whatever it was, she had never seen Julia pitch in like this before, like she was actually part of the Unit and not just there for medical experience. Julia tucked up her sleeves and boiled and scoured with the rest of them. Her sharp-tongued jibes galvanized them into moving when they needed it, and Emmie didn’t even mind the sting.
Oatmeal. Cauldrons of oatmeal. Lakes of coffee. They left it all sitting in buffet form in the Orangerie and staggered down the duckwalk to their barracks, only remembering just in time that they’d given up one barrack to officers, shoving Alice’s and Florence’s cots into Kate and Emmie’s room. There was barely room to move between the cots and their bulging duffel bags.
“You packed my duffel?” said Emmie, looking at Kate.
“Just in case.” Kate paused for a moment and then added, reluctantly, “The major said we should be ready to go if needed.”
Their eyes met. They both knew what that meant.
“They meant us to evacuate this morning,” said Emmie. “Alice and I just ignored them and carried on.”
“So did we—and then we weakened their resolve with tea and beans,” said Kate. “They were hardly going to insist once we started feeding them. But I doubt that will work again if the Germans come closer. We should get what sleep we can. While we can. Alice, what on earth are you doing?”
Alice shoved another paper into the fire. “I’m burning my letters so the Germans won’t get them.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Kate, nobly refraining from pointing out that the German infantry probably wasn’t terribly concerned with Alice’s private correspondence. Emmie had to tamp down an entirely ridiculous fit of the giggles at the thought of the Boche puzzling over Alice’s letters from her sister, looking for codes in crochet patterns.
“I’ve got the chickens in their crates,” said Florence heartily as she plumped down on her own bed. “And I’ve sent the cows and goats on to Moyencourt in care of Marie’s son. We don’t want the Boche to get them. Just a precaution, of course.”
All just a precaution. They knew it wasn’t, though. They’d moved past precaution somewhere around nine that morning.
Emmie lay down on the bare springs of her bed, pulling her coat over herself in lieu of a blanket. The mattress was currently on the floor of the dining room, as was the blanket, both being used by exhausted British soldiers who needed them far more than she did. She was still wearing the shirtwaist and uniform she had put on to teach a hygiene class in Verlaines a lifetime ago, before the world had exploded in blood and ash.
