AN AWFUL CATERWAULING BROKE THE DAWN STILLNESS. Out of the door of the Commanding Officer’s hut, Colonel Pillsbee’s head emerged. He blinked in the early greenish light and shouted above the howling harmonies:
“Who is making those unearthly noises?”
The song, such as it was, petered out. There stood the nurses, ready to go, dressed in their stout olive drab trousers and blouses, complete with leggings, high field shoes, helmets, and packs on backs.
“It’s a serenade, sir,” came a muffled voice from the rear. The girls’ sleepy faces were perfectly innocent—except Cherry’s. Fortunately, she thought, Colonel Pillsbee did not yet know Gwen Jones’s voice. Unfortunately, he would blame any pranks of the nurses on the Chief Nurse.
“I don’t care to be serenaded,” Colonel Pillsbee snapped.
Another uncertain voice came from the ranks. “We were serenading Major Pierce, sir. Today is his birthday.”
Colonel Pillsbee stared at them icily, then stated, “In future, have some respect for rank! There will be no more of these undignified demonstrations! Be ready to stand inspection! We start in an hour,” and retreated into his hut.
And then, to their chagrin, an aide told them that Major Pierce had been at the other end of camp for the past hour.
Cherry scolded her nurses as they held out their mess gear for breakfast, on line at the cook tent.
“It’s your own fault,” Ann Evans said. Her dark blue eyes and smooth brown hair were as unruffled as herself. “You made us get up an hour too early.”
Plump, comfortable Bertha Larsen declared, “Colonel Pillsbee was not very nice; he just hasn’t a sense of humor.”
“We-ell,” said Gwen. She grinned, and even her short red hair and the sprinkling of freckles on her merry face seemed to laugh too. “If you had just let us sleep, boss——”
Cherry, who was so often late herself, had taken no chances on having her nurses late this all-important morning. For today the unit started out for Pacific Island 14. For four days, the newly arrived nurses had lived in a tented staging area, while they received special instruction for jungle duty. The diligent new Chief Nurse had seen to it that every girl had full equipment, and was properly warned to expect mosquitoes, mud, and no desserts.
They were going to march by a special plan, which Cherry called “leapfrog.” Colonel Pillsbee thought that, as long as the unit would be passing through lonely outposts on its long march across Janeway Island, they should stop and treat the soldiers stationed en route. Because these soldiers en route were in small temporary groups, as work battalions, and were moved around so often, no field hospital was set up for them. But they did need care. On the other hand, since the evacuation unit was too huge to act as a field hospital for these small groups of soldiers, the whole unit would not be needed at any one outpost. Chief Nurse Ames had thereupon invented her system of “leapfrog.” Cherry suggested that the medical unit start out together but split into three sections on the way. Each section would stop at only one outpost, then catch up with the others. Thus they could save time and still wind up the march together. It should take them three days, two days to march, one day to set up medical tents and work. Colonel Pillsbee gave Cherry the first approving look she had had from him, and adopted her “leapfrog” plan.
“Why couldn’t we sail around the island,” Vivian Warren wanted to know, “instead of hiking across it?”
Marie Swift sniffed. “Did you see those coral reefs around the island? You can’t sail anywhere near the island. And how’d you like to sail in open sea, with Jap fighter planes taking pot shots at you?”
“Besides,” Cherry added, “the men in Janeway jungle need our medical care.”
So on this cloudy morning, a long column of doctors, corpsmen, and nurses, all in olive drab work suits and helmets, were leaving civilization to start their long trek through the jungle.
The evacuation unit still lacked another X-ray man, another dentist, and—what worried Cherry—a specialized nurse-anaesthetist. The anaesthetist was the most important of the three, and Major Pierce had told Cherry that this special nurse would be flown to the jungle as soon as possible. The other two would follow the unit whenever Army guides next made this trip.
They started marching. Soon the roads and huts of Port Janeway were behind them, then the bare dirt plateau was left behind. One by one, in single file, following the Army men who guided them, the brown-clad figures slid down a crumbling coral hill and entered the thick tangle of jungle.
It was almost dark in here, damp and sweetish, with tropical trees and vines so thickly overgrown that the sun never penetrated. Cherry led the column of nurses. They moved down a narrow trail, advancing with painful slowness, pushing aside huge fantastic leaves, clinging to tough roots while they slid down the bank of a stream, crouching to avoid a bush which turned out to be only a strange pattern of shadows. There was a deathly hush. It was a relief to know that at least there were no Jap snipers in these palms. But birds and animals and snakes hid in this undergrowth, watching, listening.
Cherry looked back at her nurses. The girls’ faces, mottled in the dim greenish half-light, were frightened.
“This is it!” she called out cheerfully. “We’re really on our way to what we’ve been training for!” Her voice echoed and died in the tense stillness.
Behind her came Vivian Warren’s plaintive voice. “Nursing in the jungle—it’s an impossible assignment! How can we ever do it? How can we ever get through this maze to set up our hospital?” Other discouraged voices echoed her.
“We’ll do it,” Cherry called grimly. “We have to, and we will. Come on!”
The trail rose abruptly and they struggled, single file, up a muddy incline. Far back on the line, Cherry heard a splash. Word was relayed up to her, “Josie Franklin fell in the stream.” The girls could not help giggling.
“Anyone else dunked?” Cherry called out, sounding gay. “Will you kindly count noses?”
The giggles spread down the line. The report “All noses are accounted for!” was quickly relayed to Cherry, and she led them off again.
At midday they paused for food and rest. Then they wormed their way still deeper into the jungle. That night they bivouacked and slept on bedrolls beside a river.
Late the next morning they came to a clearing. Smoke from fires, then tents and an American flag, hove into view. Cherry felt a great tug of happiness. The first outpost! Those young infantrymen in worn green fatigues—gaunt, bearded, toughened young soldiers—were the ones she had trained to help, and now she had actually reached them!
“Girls!” the young men cried in disbelief. “Never mind the pants and helmets—they’re American girls! What are you girls doing wandering around in the jungle?”
“We’re nurses!” Cherry replied proudly. And the young men cheered them.
Cherry was so busy getting her own section set up here that she only half-noticed the other two sections of the medical unit march away, after a brief rest, under the commands of Major Pierce and of Colonel Pillsbee’s aide. Colonel Pillsbee himself remained with Cherry’s section. The medical tents and equipment were quickly unpacked by corpsmen. The tents, big and little, went up so fast it reminded Cherry of a traveling circus playing a one-day stand back home.
Then both sick and well soldiers slowly filtered into the medical tents. They were young men, but their faces showed the strain of war. Most of them had seen battle action. Now they had been sent back here, temporarily, to do some much-needed work. Cherry saw various equipment—they might have been building an air strip, or manning long-range artillery and antiaircraft, or clearing the jungle for transportation later on, or doing communications work. But whatever it was, many of these men showed exhaustion. Some wore bandages, where their own medical officer had given first aid.
As Cherry went from tent to tent, supervising her nurses and seeing that the doctors had everything they needed, the soldiers were stoically silent. Not one complained. A few had old, aching battle wounds. Twice as many had ordinary medical conditions, cuts and infections, and tropical ailments. All bore marks of a terrible struggle with the jungle.
“They not only have to fight the Japs,” Cherry reflected, “they have to fight this wild, disease-laden jungle as well! But, at least, we can help them!” When she remembered that these uncomplaining young men had said good-by to their families, given up promising careers in midstream, left safe comfortable homes to protect the rest of us, she thought, “Why, if we weren’t here to help them, it would be like—like abandoning them!”
None of the nurses complained, as they worked hard and long in those tents. Cherry worked hard, too, keeping things running smoothly, doing a difficult dressing when Mai Lee asked for help, bringing in medicines and vitamin capsules to leave behind for these men.
Another person who was everywhere, poking his nose into everything, was Commanding Officer Pillsbee. He stalked about on his short legs like a sawed-off stork, not adding a bit to Cherry’s self-confidence. She was already shaky about this brand-new executive duty. The stern realities of this camp certainly constituted her first test.
“I’m darned if I’m going to get grim about it,” Cherry told herself. “A good laugh never hurt anyone.”
All day she remembered to smile, to give her nurses not only instructions but a cheering word, and to brace the men by joking with them. The soldiers wanted sympathy but they would have been offended if Cherry had said, “You poor boy, let me take care of that arm,” or, “My, I’m sorry. You’re wonderfully brave.” But Cherry said, “Come over here, hero, let’s see if you’re brave enough to have that burn cleaned and dressed,” and they loved it.
“You medics are always pestering us,” the soldiers grouched good-naturedly, as Cherry lined them up before the doctors’ tent for a quick checkup.
“You’re next, soldier,” Cherry teased in another tent. “Now let the nurse hold your hand,” as a smiling Ann came up to take a fever-ridden soldier’s pulse and respiration. The soldier smiled wanly and almost affectionately in reply.
“You’re going to be fine and dandy,” Cherry told a hollow-eyed youngster, and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Honestly you are.” He looked so comforted that Cherry could have cried.
There was no doubt about it, the girls’ friendly smiles and warm-hearted encouragement were doing these tense, strained, half-forgotten infantrymen as much good as the medicines and treatments. Even the unit doctors commented on it.
Only Colonel Pillsbee disagreed. At suppertime when Cherry reported to headquarters, he raised his small, beady eyes from a map, and said:
“Lieutenant Ames, I would suggest that your nurses behave with a little more—er—formality. A little less, shall I say, a little less levity.”
Cherry’s mouth fell open. “The nurses are only being kind and friendly, sir!”
“I don’t understand what all the laughing is about,” Colonel Pillsbee puzzled.
“No,” Cherry thought in sudden realization, “you don’t understand laughter, do you? You understand responsibility and duty, luckily for the rest of us, but not laughter.” She was almost sorry for him. Aloud she said, “We’re trying to make the patients laugh and feel cheerful, sir. We feel it helps them to get well.”
He blinked his eyes at her. “Ah, yes. Of course I approve of your helping your patients to recover.” But Colonel Pillsbee was inflexible. “Aren’t your nurses being a bit—er—forward? Couldn’t their cheerfulness be a trifle more restrained?”
Cherry sighed hopelessly. “Yes, sir.” Colonel Pillsbee was a good and well-meaning man, she saw, but he was an iron-clad disciplinarian of the old school. Youth and high spirits had no place in the stiffly conscientious rules he lived by.
“As for your own behavior,” Colonel Pillsbee cocked his head at Cherry in his birdlike fashion, “you are the leader and your behavior should be exemplary.”
“But, sir, what did I do that was wrong?” Cherry felt her cheeks flaming redder than ever.
Colonel Pillsbee said disapprovingly, “Your laughter sounded to me—I believe the right words are, a little too flippant. A little more dignity and formality, Lieutenant Ames.”
“Yes, sir,” she muttered. It was useless to try to explain to him. “Here is my report of the day’s work, sir. We plan to work tonight, also. Will that be all, Colonel Pillsbee?”
“Yes, thank you, Lieutenant Ames. Have your nurses on the road at eight-thirty tomorrow morning, with all equipment packed. And I do not mean eight-thirty-one.”
“Yes, sir.” He dismissed Cherry, and she left, shaking her head.
Several of the girls were waiting for her under a tree. They had saved her her supper from the cook tent, and were keeping it warm under a helmet. When they saw Cherry’s dismayed face, they demanded:
“What did The Pill say to you?”
“You mean Mr. Sourpuss!”
“I guess we mean Colonel Icicle.”
Cherry sat down cross-legged beside them, and reached for her mess gear. “Never mind, little pitchers. You kids have outsize ears.” She was not going to relay Colonel Pillsbee’s “formality” order until she discussed it with the unit director. Cherry was reasonably sure that Major Pierce would not give them any such misguided order.
The tropical sky burned and suddenly darkened, as the girls spent their supper hour under the tree. Their talk turned to home.
“Boy, when this war is over,” Gwen declared, “I’m never going any farther than the corner drugstore! I’ll just stay in our mining town, where my Dad’s the doctor, and be his nurse.”
“You know what I’m homesick for?” Marie Swift said thoughtfully. Marie was a small, blonde girl, who found nursing more thrilling than anything her wealth had ever bought her. “I miss Spencer most of all!”
The girls’ thoughts turned to the great white hospital where they had had their nurses’ training. “Golly, we had fun there,” Vivian Warren said, laughing reminiscently. “Wonder if the student nurses there now have such a picnic?”
“Did you ever hear of a student nurse who didn’t have fun?” Cherry countered. “What I’m wondering is how many smart girls are taking advantage of that nursing education provided by the Government.”
“I just love the gray Cadet uniform,” Mai Lee said dreamily.
“I just love—” Cherry said, and started to fish in her big patch pockets. She always carried her letters with her. “You kids remember Mildred Burnham, the probationer I ‘adopted.’ Well, she’s a senior now. She’d only be a junior, except that she transferred to the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps in the middle of her training.”
“Huh!” said Bertha. “Instead of three years in nursing school, only two and a half years in school, and six months’ real practical experience with some Federal agency! That’s something!”
“It’s funny,” Cherry mused. “Mildred is a very good but not spectacular student, and her parents could afford to pay for her training. But here the Government is paying her whole nursing school tuition, plus her living expenses, plus an allowance, plus—”she grinned at Mai Lee “—that stunning gray uniform. If Mildred can qualify for the Cadet Nurse Corps, I should think lots of other smart girls could, too. They could even enter training direct from high school. Well, anyhow, here’s Mildred’s letter.”
Cherry opened the crumpled sheet. The sun had already set, since they were just south of the equator, and she read aloud by flashlight. Mildred had written:
“Here’s what I’m going to do when I graduate—ahem! I’m going to repay the Cadet Nurse Corps by giving six months’ nursing to the Government. Old Undecided (that’s me) still doesn’t know whether she’ll volunteer for civilian nursing or Army nursing. I’ve received so many offers of jobs, my head is spinning. I guess a nurse is never out of work. In the meantime, it’s scrumptious being a senior!”
“A senior!” Marie Swift groaned. “Now you’ve really made me homesick for Spencer!”
The girls were quiet, thinking, remembering.
“What I’m homesick for,” Vivian winked hugely at Cherry, “is one of those mysteries you specialize in.”
“Oh, we won’t find any mysteries out here,” Cherry scoffed. “Plenty of insects and fever, but no mysteries.”
“Don’t say that so fast!” Ann sat up one one elbow. “Nurses are always coming across medical mysteries and—and——”
“Strange wounds,” Gwen supplied eagerly. “Remember that case in the newspapers recently, where a man was found to be a spy because a strange bullet burn on his hand gave him away?”
“How about our portable X-ray?” Marie Swift offered. “Or the unit’s diathermy machine? You could flash short-wave signals with those!”
“My gosh, what notions you ladies have!” Cherry laughed. “Well, here’s hoping you find a mystery. I know I don’t expect to. Oh!” she exclaimed, as she glanced down at her watch. “Seven o’clock—and there’s lots to be done yet.”
The girls scrambled to their feet and hurried back to work.
Electric lights, belonging to the work battalion here, had been strung across trees and through tents. In the operating tent, the power was working. An operating table made of planks set upon sawhorses was set up. Captain Bennett, a surgeon, was preparing to operate on an emergency appendicitis case in this crude but sanitary tent. Cherry assigned one of her nurses as anaesthetist to aid the surgeon. She herself worked as operating nurse. After that, she checked on the work of all her other nurses. By midnight Cherry ached all over with fatigue. Almost everyone was asleep, except the sentries and conscientious Colonel Pillsbee, when Cherry still sat making out her night report by the light of a lantern. At last she crawled into the pup tent she shared with Gwen.
“A-a-a-h!” Gwen greeted her, and went right back to sleep.
Next morning the nurses were on the road at eight-thirty, “and not eight-thirty-one,” Cherry thought, breathless but triumphant. The medical tents had magically turned into big bundles on the corpsmen’s shoulders. Grateful soldiers waved good-by as the little band started off.
That day and the next were, as Ann said, “More of the same, only more so.” Pushing with slow difficulty all day through the silent, winding jungle, at evening they arrived at the next outpost to rejoin the second section of the unit. They camped overnight, pushed on again in the morning. By midmorning, the whole unit was together again.
Major Pierce congratulated Cherry. “Your leapfrog plan worked out as neatly as a hole in one,” he laughed. Cherry glowed at her unit director’s praise.
“You know, Major Pierce, we thought this assignment was impossible,” she confessed. “But we’ve done it!”
“Sure you did it,” Major Pierce said, an amused twinkle on his attractive face. “But if you nurses think this was difficult, then, in those classic words, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet!’”
Cherry’s excitement mounted at Major Pierce’s prediction, and at approaching so close now to their destination. The final lap of their trek turned out to be the hardest. The last outpost sent them part of the way, over a grassy plain, in two-and-a-half ton Army trucks. Cherry gasped, as she bounced in the truck, “If this is—riding, I’ll—oops!—walk!” But when the terrain grew so muddy and rutted that the trucks could no longer get through, and everyone took to his own two feet, even riding in a broken-down wheelbarrow would have been acceptable.
Laborious hours under heavy pack and through scratchy foliage brought groans, moans, and the nurses’ first real complaints. By afternoon, the girls were very tired, and Cherry realized that their spirits drooped along with their bodies.
“Onward, my sissies!” she called back to the long column she led. “It’s only about a million miles more!”
“I’ll bet we’re marching all the way to Asia!” someone shouted unhappily.
From farther back, Mai Lee lifted her quiet voice. “If we’re ever anywhere near Asia,” the little Chinese-American girl called, “there’s a certain village where I have work to do.” Cherry and the girls fell silent. They knew Mai Lee meant her family’s peaceful ancestral little town, which the Japs had destroyed.
Cherry saw that this turn of the conversation was depressing the girls still more. Footsteps lagged. In desperation, Cherry suggested, “Let’s sing,” and started rather quaveringly herself.
Vivian, the rather wistful girl Cherry had helped through a misguided romance, loyally joined in. Gwen made the duet a trio. “The rest of us will have to sing, if only to drown you three out,” Ann sighed, poked Marie, and they joined the chorus. Presently other girls sang too. Before long the whole column was singing. The steady rhythm, the heartening tunes, gave them a feeling of being warmly together and the remainder of the journey seemed less arduous.
Finally they came to a beach. At the water’s edge, Cherry and her nurses halted. This was the farthest tip of Janeway Island. They had reached the jumping-off point. Ahead stretched only blue sky and blue water. The far-off guns were louder here.
Colonel Pillsbee herded the big unit into the many Higgins boats, manned by Marines, waiting on the beach. Cherry and most of her nurses seated themselves in close formation in one boat, some of the nurses sat with corpsmen in another. These were square, stubby, wooden boats, with a front wall that dropped down for a gangplank. Cherry declared they all looked like so many bundles of groceries packed tightly in a square grocery box. Sitting down like this, their heads came neatly to the top of the boat walls, so they could see exactly nothing, nothing but blazing blue sky over them. Just when they were bursting with curiosity!
Suddenly the boats roared, rapidly turned around, and they were skimming across the water—headed like swift sea birds for Pacific Island 14.