to sand, and I squeeze Evelyn’s tiny hand in order to remain upright.
Samuel Fitzwilliam.
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,”
