Long before the dawn had truly broken, the General called the entire camp to an assembly—the first of its kind to have taken place since the war began.
It had been several weeks since Marinette had seen General Bourgeois in person, but he looked older than she remembered—more haggard and preoccupied than ever she'd seen him—and his eyes darted constantly from side to side, his brow knit with worry, as though he was expecting the German army to come up over the hills at any moment and decimate the camp.
"It is my... solemn duty," he began, stepping up to the makeshift podium, and speaking into some manner of ancient sound system that had been jerry-rigged for the occasion, "to, ahem, "shed some light" on the rumors that have been floating about camp this morning."
Marinette felt her heart, which had previously been beating in her chest like a moth trapped in a glass jar, calm for only a split second at the word "rumors."
"The truth of the matter" continued General Bourgeois, "Is that these rumors are, unfortunately, true."
Her heart stopped.
"We've known for quite some time that France was in full retreat. The majority of our troops have already fled the country, but as our unit seemed to be making headway, we were instructed not to inform you of the overall situation. Now, it is too late."
Marinette looked around, and saw what he said was true. She'd had an inclination—based on some of the letters she had received from her mother and father—that their apparent progress was the exception to the general flow of the war, but from the looks on the faces of the men around her, she was quite certain she was one of the few who had any idea of the actual state of things.
"We will be evacuating," General Bourgeois informed them, "in two groups. The majority of you will be sent to Narvik to assist the allied forces there. A smaller unit will journey with me to England."
The general sighed, and after a great pause that made everyone uneasy, he spoke with such genuine emotion that Marinette felt each word like a rubber mallet striking at her chest.
"That being said…" and here he paused again, though not so long as the first time, "Although I cannot offer you any severance pay or benefits, and I cannot guarantee your safety and protection… should you choose to desert at this time—should you choose to return to your families and forget you ever had any part in this awful, awful war—we will not follow you… and I, personally, will not blame you."
With these words, he tapped his papers together, and closed his speech— retreating from the podium with even greater solemnity than when he had approached it.
The crowd was dead silent as the watched their fearless General hobble his way off the stage. As he walked, though, murmurs began to disperse through the air around them. What was going to happen now? Why had this information been kept from them? What would become of their unit? The concerns grew louder and louder until they had swelled into a great fervor of voices—pushing, shoving, and shouting—trying to attract the General's attention.
"How will we know where we are being sent?" a soldier cried out, loudly enough to be heard.
"You will receive notice tonight," one of the lieutenants shouted, as he struggled to keep the mass of bodies away from the retreating commander. "Back to your tents everyone! There will be no training until further notice. Everyone: back to your tents!"
That night, Marinette received a letter—little more than a slip of paper, really—detailing that she should be part of the company traveling to England with the General. Of the nurses, only she and Chloé, who had discussed the matter with her father personally and come to the conclusion that she would be safer there, were headed in that direction. Alya, and all of the others were being sent to Narvik along with the troops.
That night, the women of the camp crowded together under one roof, and talked and laughed and cried and hugged one another, as if for the last time. When dawn broke, and the order to pack up the camp came, none of them had slept even a wink, and they took turns napping in the back room to recover their strength.
Before the hospital tent was even fully disassembled, a solider informed Marinette that the English Company—as they were now called—was already in the process of leaving. She sprinted to grab her bags, and departed from her long time co-worker and best friend with little more than a quick squeeze of the hand, before loading into the last of the transport vehicles headed for the coast.
Once inside the carriage, she looked about her for someone she knew, but found not a familiar face in sight. Even Chloé, who was usually far less than the comfort she would have been at that moment, had likely boarded one of the earlier transports.
As the wagon rocked and swayed with the nurse and soldiers inside, Marinette felt a more overwhelming sense of "goodbye" than she had ever known she could feel—more overpowering, even, than when she had uttered those same words to her own parents when she first joined the army. Now, as she stepped out of the vehicle and onto the boat to England, she bid farewell to home, country, and familiarity all at once.
As it turned out, the soldiers of English Company was brought along for the express purpose of providing protection for the General on his journey to England, and Marinette had been brought along for the express purpose of providing medical attention, should the soldiers be tasked with fulfilling their purpose.
Because of the city's occupation, the unit departed from a tiny fishing village just east of the captured port of Dunkirk. They sailed under the cover of darkness, and though the air was thick with tension, the attack, which seemed to weigh heavy on everyone's thoughts, never came.
The boat arrived safely in England, and after a two-day acclimation period, the company was all-but dissolved. In this time, Marinette had not seen another familiar face—although she calmed herself with the reminder that she had not, at any point, viewed more than a third of the company all together, and had not even laid eyes on Chloé Bourgeois, whom she knew to look out for.
It was at this point that Marinette learned the intended fates of her company members. The General—lauded for his tiny victories far away from the front lines—had been called in to testify against Viscount Halifax's still somewhat supported assertion that the Allies should attempt to barter a peace treaty with the Axis forces in the face of unlikely victory. The soldiers, it turns out, had been specially chosen not just for their strength, but for their ability to speak English, and were to be folded into the British military or air force as quickly as possible. Because none of the nurses spoke fluent English, however, Marinette was chosen only for her medical skills, and no plans for her had been made hereafter.
At first she believed that perhaps she would be redirected to Narvik with the rest of her company, but when it became obvious that there were no units headed in that direction, and the army had no intention of providing transportation for a single nurse, Marinette resigned herself to working in one of the hospitals on the British Air Force Base.
It wasn't that the other nurses there were rude to her, or that she was in any way uncomfortable, but without any grasp of the language, things were difficult at best. She soon discovered, much to her relief, that several of the doctors were well acquainted with the Latin names of things, and so she was able to assist them in performing surgeries—albeit with the help of at least one other English-speaking nurse as her aide—and they occasionally acted as her translators, when time permitted.
One advantage of the hospital was that it existed in a permanent building, with multiple floors and an entire wing devoted to the housing of its staff, and was quite well stocked. Marinette took time to acquaint herself with a great number of new chemicals and ethers that her old company had never been able to afford. She tried her best to read the instructions, and where she had questions, she was able to ask the doctors, who usually made quite a show of miming the intended use of the product.
As to her relationship with the rest of her co-workers, moments of genuine affection were few and far between. She was able to convey her needs through a series of gestures and misplaced words which she had tried her hardest to pick up without a teacher, but when it came to dealing with patients Marinette was reduced to subsisting on only her famed nurse's smile and calming presence, without the assistance of any true form of conversation—which had always been the best tool in her arsenal.
To that end, though, the hospital served a slightly altered purpose to the one in which she had previously been employed. By this point in the war, the British had begun a series of bombings in Germany—especially around the Ruhr Area of the country—and what few fighters were able to make the entire the trip and return with injuries were treated at the hospital. Thus, it was that the daily number of patients was much fewer than it had been so close to the battlefield.
Instead, Marinette was usually asked to assist in the sick wing—where ailing soldiers, not yet deployed, were treated for mundane ailments—and though she had been trained in many forms of medicine, she had not been required to deal with illness in quite some time. She considered the work slightly beneath her—skilled as she was with treating injury—but as there was no other to be done, she made the best of it and approached each patient with a polite enthusiasm and intense focus, as though it had been a bullet wound to which she attended, and not a case of the common cold.
It was only at night, when the other nurses laughed and joked in that foreign tongue that so confounded her, and settled one by one into their bunks, that Marinette allowed herself to grieve for her situation. She had made true on her promise to Alya to write her as often as she could, and had even managed to send off a few letters to her parents informing them of her location, but she hadn't received a word in return.
Surrounded as she was by her sleeping co-workers, it was only in those long hours after the day's work had officially ceased and before following morning's had yet begun, that Marinette allowed herself to feel really and truly alone.