Michael Hodder and Q. David Bowers
Her opportunity came at the end of October, quite soon after she started work in Paris. She was given the chance of driving an ambulance, but, despite her father's passion for automobiles, she had never learned how to drive one well. She failed her first driving test. A week later, after much practice, she passed her test and began driving heavy trucks that had been converted to ambulances. She did not drive at the front, but ferried ambulances from several garages to various depots around Paris. Most of the time the ambulances were empty. Sometimes she transported supplies to American sponsored "canteens" with names like Cincinnati, Chicago, and Boston. The driving could be long and hard, especially when the weather was bad and she was carrying a heavy load. As far as her diaries indicate, she did not transport battle casualties.
Emery May's volunteer work at this time was a combination of some secretarial duties, which she did not entirely give up, and ambulance driving in Paris. Much of her time was her own, however, and her diary records many shopping and sightseeing trips around the city. She went to cabarets popular at the time, some of which she found had "disgusting" reviews, such as the Aphrodite's; attended the opera; and visited American friends living in the city. Life in Paris was interesting, but not particularly challenging.
R. Henry Norweb was on the staff of the American Embassy in Paris, and with his help Emery May obtained an interview with the French Red Cross, the Croix Rouge Francaise. As a result of the interview, she was offered a posting to a French base hospital which received casualties from the northern Somme front. In January 1917 she decided to accept the posting, with her guardians consent, and by early February she was working in the hospital as a nurse's assistant. Before she left Paris she made two entries in her diary. The first, dated January 11, 1917, reads: "Zeppelin scare. Not exciting" The second, dated February 4, 1917, noted: "Diplomatic relations broken with Germany" Air raids would become somewhat more exciting later, in 1918.
The hospital Emery May joined was Hopital Auxiliare 43bis of the Croix Rouge Francaise, located in St.Valery-sur-Somme (Departement de Somme), on the river northwest of Abbeville. In early 1917, St-Valery was far enough behind the front to be a quiet and secure area. Eight months later German troops were only 12 miles away, their furthest penetration during the Ludendorff Offensive. However, during her service with the Croix Rouge the northern Somme front was inactive, at least in the French sector the hospital served. The brunt of the 1917 fighting fell on the Canadians at Vimy Ridge and the British at Paschendaele. French forces were demoralized by the severe losses of 1916, and 1917 saw mutinies in 16 French army corps. Emery May's service was with soldiers who had already received treatment in forward area hospitals and had been sent to St.Valery for convalescence.
Hopital Auxiliare 43bis had been founded by a Frenchman, M. Haurille, but the doctors and nurses were mostly Americans. Emery May was an amateur photographer, like her father, and she recorded her stay in St-Valery in an album she made from a nurse's notebook. Some of the pictures from this period in her album show a happy and friendly life, and she must have enjoyed herself, especially as she could finally say that she was passing the "test" she had set for herself. Many of the doctors' names were recorded in her notebook, among them, Doctors Fitch, Hoyle, and Donnelly. No photographs of Miss Upton, her chaperone, were included, and it is possible that she did not accompany Emery May so far from Paris.
There are no entries in her diary for the period she worked at St-Valery, from February 5 to July 16, 1917. Her photographic album probably served as her diary for this time. The pictures she took show wounded French soldiers arriving by train at the town station, with ambulances drawn up at the platform to receive them. There are rather graphic photographs of the operating room in action. Her friends among the nurses and doctors were faithfully recorded, as well as some among the patients whose wounds were severe enough to require long stays in hospital. She seems to have received no visits from family members or outside friends, so during her work at St. Valery Emery May was largely on her own, exactly as she had hoped she would be. The hospital was to be the arena where she could find out if she were capable of standing on her own two feet. Her experiences there made a lasting impression on her, and we can be sure she felt that she had passed her own test.
On July 17, 1917 Emery May left St-Valery and with some other nurses from the hospital drove to Compiegne about 100 miles away. She loved what she called "motoring!" Her diary, which resumes now, records her trip this way: "Spent morning at barrack getting started. Left about four o'clock. First puncture fifteen minutes later. Second within the hour. Reached Cornpiegne about 9 o'clock!" Motoring was not something that was done by the faint-hearted at the best of times. Driving along roads clogged with troop transports required some courage.
From Compiegne, she drove north to Noyon, where the train to Paris could be caught. The countryside over which she drove included the towns of Amiens, Ham, Montdidier, and Peronne, sites of great battles early in the war and scenes of battles yet to be fought. The landscape would have been shell shattered and pocked in places. The roads would have been heavily rutted. In places there would have been no trees left standing after a bombardment, and broken trenches would have criss-crossed her way. The smell of cordite and death would have been strong when their road paralleled the old front lines. The experience must have been sobering, even to one who had cared for the war's casualties in a hospital.
From Noyon she caught the first available train to Paris, traveling in a train filled with French and British soldiers. She arrived at her rooms in the Hotel Brighton late in the evening three days after starting out from St-Valery, Diary entries for the remainder of 1917 are scant. Reference to some will be found later, but her life in Paris at this time cannot be described in detail until her diary resumes in 1918.
Early in January 1918 Emery May joined the Women's War Relief Corps, organized to assist the American troops who were arriving in France at this time. The fall of the Romanov dynasty in Russia went unnoticed in her diary, as did Russia's withdrawal from the war on March 3. Their effects, however, did not. Freed from a war on two fronts, the German High Command transported their armies from Russia and massed them along the center of the northern front. On March 21 the Germans launched the Ludendorff Offensive along a 50-mile sector of the Somme front. In a series of three coordinated attacks, lasting from March 21 until August 6, the German armies recaptured most of the ground they had lost in the years following the start of the war. By July 18 they had taken the very ground Emery May had driven across exactly a year earlier. At its height, the Ludendorff Offensive reached to within 50 miles of Paris.
From the start of the campaign in March, the Germans began shelling Paris with their long-range guns. Heavy Gotha bombers also participated by raiding the city at night. In contrast to what she had written a year earlier, the raids were now more exciting than Emery May might have wished. Her diary for the remainder of the war is filled with accounts of the effects the shelling and air raids had on the city.
She noted the start of the Ludendorff Offensive on March 21, writing; "Offensive began and shelling of Paris by long-range guns!" The German attack along the Montdidier-Noyon front was noted on June 10, but the U.S. Marines action at Belleau Wood, which helped blunt this attack, went unnoticed. Five days later the war came closer. Her diary for June 15 notes: "Raid began about 12. Lasted until 1:30 a.m. Rather lively. Bad fire seen back of Ecole Militaire," Two days later she notes: "Embassy advises all Americans to leave Paris because of danger of bombardment!" A week later she was told to pack her things and be ready at a moment's notice to leave the city, as there was no sign of where the Germans would attack next.