Annabelle arrived at the hospital Elsie Inglis had established at Villers-Cotterêts, some thirty miles northeast of Paris. It was roughly fifteen miles from the front. If you listened carefully, you could hear the explosions in the distance. The hospital had just opened, and was a larger and more intense operation than the one where she had worked in Asnières the year before. It was staffed and run by female medical units, as Dr. Inglis intended. Their nationalities represented many of the Allied nations, were almost equally divided between French and English, and Annabelle was one of three Americans there. This time, she had a proper room, although tiny, which she shared with another woman. And their patients were all brought in from the front. The carnage they were seeing was tremendous, shattered bodies, shattered minds, and a shocking number of lives lost.

Female ambulance drivers shuttled constantly back and forth to the front, where men were being dragged out of the trenches maimed, mangled, and dying. In every instance, a medic traveled with the ambulance and its driver, and they had to have enough training and knowledge to perform herculean feats on the way to save the men they were transporting. If too badly injured to move at all, they were left at the field hospitals set up near the trenches. But whenever possible, the injured soldiers were brought back to the hospital at Villers-Cotterêts for surgery and more intensive care.

With a year of medical school under her belt now, and with her years of volunteer work before that, Annabelle was assigned to the ambulance unit, and wore the official uniform of a medic. She worked eighteen hours a day, bumping over rough roads along the way, and sometimes holding the men in her arms, when there was nothing else she could do. She fought valiantly to save them with whatever materials she had on hand, and all the techniques that she had learned. Sometimes in spite of her best efforts, and a breakneck race back to the hospital, the men were just too damaged to survive and died on the road.

She had arrived at Villers-Cotterêts on New Year’s Day, which was just another work day to all of them. Over six million men had died in the war by then. In the two and a half years since the hostilities had begun, Europe had been decimated, and was losing its young men to the monster that was war, which devoured them by the thousands. Annabelle felt sometimes as though they were emptying the ocean with a teacup, or worse, a thimble. There were so many bodies to repair, so little left of some of them, so many minds that would never recover from the brutalities they’d seen. It was hard on the medical personnel as well, and all of them were exhausted and looked beaten by the end of every day. But no matter how difficult it was, or how discouraging at times, Annabelle was more confirmed than ever in her decision to be a doctor, and although it broke her heart in so many instances, she loved her work, and did it well.

In January, President Wilson was trying to orchestrate an end to the war, using the United States’s neutral status to encourage the Allies to state their objectives in obtaining peace. His efforts had not borne fruit, and he remained determined to keep the country out of the war. No one in Europe could understand how the Americans could not join the Allied forces, and no one believed by January 1917 that they would continue to stay out of the fray for long. And they weren’t wrong.

On February 1, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. Two days later the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany. Within three weeks the president requested permission from Congress to arm U.S. merchantmen in the event of an attack by German submarines. Congress denied the request, but on March 12, by executive order, Wilson announced that American merchantmen would be armed from then on. Eight days later, on March 20, his war cabinet voted unanimously in favor of declaring war on Germany.

The president delivered his war address to Congress on April 2. And four days later, on April 6, war on Germany was declared by the United States. America was finally entering the war, and the floundering Allies in Europe desperately needed their help. For the next weeks and months, American boys would be leaving home, saying good-bye to families, wives, and girlfriends, and going to be trained. They were to be shipped overseas within two months. Overnight, everything at home changed.

“It’s about goddamn time,” one of the other American women at Villers-Cotterêts said to Annabelle, as they met in the dining hall late one night. They had both been working for nineteen hours at their respective jobs. She and the other American women were nurses, and she knew that Annabelle was a medic.

“Were you training to be a nurse before the war?” she asked with interest. She was a pretty young woman from the South and had the heavy accent of Alabama. Her name was Georgianna and she had grown up as a southern belle, which no longer had any meaning here, just as Annabelle’s genteel upbringing in her family’s elegant mansion in New York no longer had any relationship whatsoever to her daily life. All it had given her was a decent education, good manners, and the ability to speak French. The rest no longer mattered.

“I’ve been in medical school in the South of France for the last year,” Annabelle said, sipping a cup of very thin soup. They tried to stretch their food rations as best they could, to benefit both medical personnel and patients. As a result, none of them had had a truly decent meal in months, but it was good enough. Annabelle had lost a considerable amount of weight in the four months since she had arrived. Even she could hardly believe that it was April 1917, and she had been in France for nineteen months.

Georgianna was impressed that Annabelle had been training to be a doctor, and they talked about it for a few minutes. Both were bone tired. The nurse was a pretty girl with big green eyes and bright red hair, and she laughed when she admitted that after two years here, she spoke execrable French, but Annabelle knew, from what she’d heard of her, that in spite of that she did her job well. She had never known so many conscientious, competent, dedicated people in her life. They gave it their all.

“Do you think you’ll finish med school?” Georgianna asked her, and Annabelle nodded, looking pensive.

“I hope so.” She couldn’t imagine what would stop her, other than being killed.

“Don’t you want to go home when this is over?” Georgianna couldn’t imagine staying there. She had family in Alabama, three younger sisters, and a brother. Annabelle didn’t want to go back to New York. She had nothing there, except punishment and pain.

“Not really. I don’t have much there. I think I’m going to stay.” She had thought about it a lot recently, and made up her mind. She had five more years of medical school ahead of her, and after that she wanted to go to Paris, and work there. With luck, maybe even with Dr. de Bré. There was nothing she wanted now in New York. And she would have had to train for another year there. She was almost convinced now that her life in the States was history for her. The only future she had was here. It was a whole new life, where no one knew her past, or the shame of her divorce. In France, as far as everyone knew, she had never been married. She was turning twenty-four in a few weeks. And one day, with hard work and some luck, she’d be a doctor. All she would ever be in New York was a disgrace, through no fault of her own.

The two women went their separate ways outside the dining hall and went back to their respective barracks, promising to get together sometime, if they ever got a day off, which even if they did, they never took. Annabelle hadn’t taken a day off from her duties as a medic since she’d arrived.

The Third Battle of Champagne ended in disaster for the French in late April and brought them a flood of new patients, which kept them all busy. Annabelle was ferrying men constantly from the front. The only encouragement they had was a Canadian victory at the Battle of Vilmy Ridge. And due to enormous discouragement among their ranks, there were outbreaks of mutiny among the French all through the early weeks of May. There were also ongoing reports of the Russian Revolution-the czar had abdicated in March. But anything that was happening farther than the trenches and the front nearby seemed very remote to all of them at Villers-Cotterêts. They were far too deeply involved in the business at hand to care about much else.

Annabelle forgot about her birthday completely. One day bled into another, and she had no idea what day it was. She only realized a week later, when she saw a newspaper someone had brought from Paris, that she had turned twenty-four. A month later in June, everyone was excited to learn that the first American troops had landed in France.

It was three weeks later, in mid-July, when a battalion of them came to Villers-Cotterêts and set up camp on the outskirts of the city. They were joined within a week by British forces, all of whom were preparing for an offensive at Ypres. It livened up the area considerably to have British and American troops roaming around everywhere. They were happily seducing all the local women, and military police were constantly dragging them out of bars and off the streets drunk, and delivering them back to their camps. If nothing else, it provided a little distraction, and despite the inevitable rowdy soldiers, some of them were very nice. Annabelle saw a group of American soldiers one day, walking along with some very young French girls, as she rode back with the ambulance from a field hospital nearby. She was in no mood to banter with them, as the man they were carrying back to the hospital in Villers-Cotterêts had died on the way. But as the ambulance drove past the Americans, they shouted and waved, having seen two pretty women in the front. And for an aching moment, she had an intense longing to hear American voices. She waved back and smiled. One of the men in uniform ran along beside them, and she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “Hi.”