He puffed his chest. “They have not entered French soil. I repeat—the Maginot Line has not been breached. As a precaution, I am deploying you to sectors of France’s border.”
The German military is on our doorstep! She drew a deep breath, attempting to quell her nerves.
The lieutenant looked at his clipboard. “Battier and Thibaut, you’re assigned to Maubeuge. Toutain and Dubos, your post will be in Fourmies.”
A sickening lump grew in the back of Ruth’s throat. She raised her eyes to the sky, smeared with gray clouds, and waited for her name to be called.
CHAPTER 12
SEDAN, FRANCE—MAY 13, 1940
On the day German forces emerged from the Ardennes Forest and crossed the river Meuse into France, Ruth was racing toward the battlefront to evacuate injured soldiers to a hospital, twelve kilometers away from France’s border with Belgium. Trailing behind her was an ambulance driven by Lucette. They navigated through a narrow, rural road that was clogged with fleeing French villagers. Many of the civilians scurried away on foot, while others fled by way of bicycles, trucks, or horse-drawn wagons that were loaded with luggage and family heirlooms.
A young woman, who was pushing a wheelbarrow that held a swaddled baby, passed within inches of Ruth’s vehicle, making her heart sink. She honked the ambulance’s horn and weaved through the throng, like a spawning salmon fighting a current.
As Ruth and Lucette neared the border, the crowd dwindled away and the air was filled with blasts, gunfire, and an acrid smell of expelled explosive. German Stuka dive bombers, accompanied by Messerschmitt fighters, darkened the afternoon sky like a swarm of black flies. French antiaircraft fire boomed. Black bursts exploded below the aerial armada.
Ruth, her pulse pounding in her eardrums, gripped the steering wheel and peered through the windshield at the battle unfolding on the horizon. High above, a squadron of Stuka dive bombers narrowed in on their target, the Meuse Line that contained over a hundred pillboxes—small concrete blockhouses with holes to fire machine guns—that were guarded by France’s 147th Fortress Infantry Regiment. Several hundred meters behind this line was a reserve group of the 55th Infantry Division, and far to the north were troops of the British Expeditionary Force. Despite the heavy barrage by French antiaircraft fire, as well as combat from Allied planes, the Luftwaffe continued their assault on the Meuse Line. Sirens, mounted to the Stukas, screamed as the German squadron released their bombs on a group of antiaircraft gunners that exploded in a mountainous fountain of earth, steel, and bodies.
Shock and anger surged through Ruth. God help us. She set aside her trepidation and pushed the accelerator, propelling her ambulance into the conflict.
Ruth and Lucette had initially been sent to a post in Hirson, France, but things changed when the German military rampaged through Belgium and cut through the dense Ardennes Forest, which was thought to be impassable for Germany’s Panzer tank divisions. They were reassigned to a sector outside of Sedan with the understanding that it would take at least four days for the Germans to cross the river Meuse. But German engineers completed bridgeheads at Monthermé, Dinant, and Sedan in under twenty-four hours.
Ruth’s eyes locked on an army medic, who darted from a clearing and waved his arms. She veered from the road and cut across a grass field, scarred with shell craters. Within seconds, she reached a makeshift triage site near a group of pine trees. Five medics, who were outnumbered tenfold by wounded soldiers, were struggling to administer first aid. She and Lucette jumped out of their ambulances and threw open the rear doors.
Two hundred meters away, French artillery guns and howitzers unleashed their fury on the advancing German troops.
Concussive blasts pierced Ruth’s ears, and the ground quaked beneath her feet. She fought back the fear rippling through her body and retrieved a stretcher. She ran to the medics, who were bandaging wounds and injecting morphine into wailing men.
“This one first!” a medic shouted, wrapping gauze around a man’s head wound.
Ruth and Lucette helped the medic, his hands covered in blood, lift the moaning soldier onto the stretcher. The trio carried the injured man and loaded him into Ruth’s ambulance. For several minutes, they transported maimed men, one by one, into the ambulances.
Lucette shut the rear doors of her vehicle, packed with soldiers. “Let’s go!”
“Wait!” Ruth shouted, sliding the legs of an injured man under a cot. “I can make room for one more!”
She and Lucette ran to the closest soldier, who was unconscious with gauze stuffed into a hole, the size of a plum, in his abdomen.
A bark of machine guns pierced the air. Bullets whizzed over their heads.
The medic crouched low to the ground. “Let’s get another man. That one has a severe stomach wound and likely won’t make it.”
Ruth kneeled to the injured man. His lungs wheezed as his chest rose and fell. “We’re taking him.”
Lucette placed the stretcher next to the man’s body.
The medic scanned the rows of injured soldiers, as if he was searching for someone more likely to survive the trip to the hospital.
A German artillery shell detonated, no more than thirty meters away.
Bits of earth rained onto Ruth’s head. “Help us—now!”
The medic joined Ruth and Lucette. They slid the soldier onto the cot and transferred him to Ruth’s ambulance. The women got into their vehicles and sped away, leaving the small corps of medics to tend to the growing number of wounded being carried to the tree line. Kilometers down the road, the rumble of bombs faded and was replaced by the groans of pain-filled men. Ruth, determined to get them to safety, shifted gears and pushed hard on the accelerator.
What should have been a twenty-minute trip to the hospital took over forty minutes because the main road was congested with villagers who were running away to the south. Ruth, remembering the map routes that she’d studied, led them through several detours on back roads, otherwise it would have taken over an hour. With the help of orderlies, they transported the injured men inside the hospital, its corridors lined with wounded soldiers. Anesthetic, sweat, and a metallic smell of blood filled the air. Nurses, overwhelmed by the influx of patients, struggled to sort through the men to determine who would get treated first.
Ruth approached the soldier with the stomach wound, who’d been placed on a gurney. His chest rose and fell in a shallow cadence. “Over here!”
An elderly nurse with crooked, arthritic fingers examined the man’s wound. “Can you hear me?” she asked, leaning to his left ear.
His eyelids twitched.
The nurse called for an orderly, who grabbed the gurney and wheeled the soldier toward an operating room.
Lucette turned to Ruth. “You may have saved his life.”
“I hope so,” she said.
They dashed to their vehicles and sped over rutted back roads to the front. Ruth, her hands gripping the steering wheel, prayed that Allied troops and aircraft had repelled the German forces. But, as the battleground came into view, she discovered that the Luftwaffe bombing raids had obliterated a narrow sector of the French line. Oh, dear God—they’ve broken through!
A Stuka siren drew Ruth’s eyes to the sky. Her breath stalled in her lungs at the sight of the German aircraft, diving toward their ambulances. She jammed on the accelerator and her foot slipped from the pedal. She shifted gears, grinding the clutch, and her vehicle picked up speed. The Stuka’s siren roared. She swerved onto a field, hoping that the enemy pilot would veer away at the sight of the large red cross emblem on the side of her vehicle. But the Stuka, flying at a high speed, closed in and fired its machine guns. Bullets blasted the ground in front of her vehicle, and a bomb fell from the belly of the aircraft.
Ruth turned sharply, nearly rolling the ambulance. An explosion jolted the vehicle, and her head struck the side window, sending a sharp pain through her neck. She steadied the wheel, regaining control of her ambulance, and glanced at her side mirror to see the Stuka pull up and Lucette’s ambulance crash into a smoldering crater.
“No!” Ruth slammed her foot on the brake and her vehicle skidded to a stop. She jumped out and sprinted toward the crater. “Lucette!”
The Stuka veered to the north. French antiaircraft guns fired but missed their target.