“STEP ON IT!” SERGEANT DEAKE SHOUTED OVER THE heavy tramp of feet and rumble of gun caissons. “Only one little mile more! Then we bivouac! Ladies, you can’t fail me now!”
Cherry sighed, shifted her heavy musette bag and her heavy helmet to more comfortable positions, and kept on plodding. They had been marching all morning and it was now early afternoon. All around her marched her fellow nurses, and ahead of them and behind them, endless columns of infantrymen and artillerymen. This was the long-awaited bivouac, grand wind-up of Cherry’s training. Everyone wore a tan arm band. These warriors were the Tans; the eight hundred enemy Blues were advancing on another road. They were going to fight a simulated battle.
Some tank boys went roaring by on their enormous steel monster, which they had affectionately named Baby, raising clouds of dust. Cherry swallowed the dust, wet her dry lips, and looked longingly at a roadside stand before a farmhouse. It was piled high with glass jugs of rosy liquid and the sign read: “Ice cold cherry cider—All you can drink—Ten cents.” Right in front of the stand, Sergeant Deake, in response to a hand signal from up the line, yelled, “Detail, halt!” Up and down the road, the order was signaled and repeated, and the long winding line came to a stop.
“Yoo-hoo, Sergeant Deake!” Cherry yelled, as respectfully as is possible at the top of one’s lungs.
He fell behind to Cherry’s column. “You want something, Miss Ames?”
“Yes!” Cherry said. She shook dust off her field coveralls. “I want a drink. Over there.”
Sergeant Deake looked at her reproachfully. “D’you think the Commanding Officer’s going to let you break ranks for refreshments? Maybe you’d like a taxi? Honestly, Lieutenant Ames, I’m surprised at you.” Cherry had to smile at his softened manner. “Don’t let me catch you taking a drink out of your canteen, either. Not after all this sun and exercise.”
Cherry was about to mutter that she did not want lukewarm water anyhow, when Captain Endicott rode up beside the nurses’ ranks. He halted his jeep and spoke at length to Sergeant Deake.
Just then the farmhouse door flew open and a little girl of about ten, with fair sunburned hair, came running out. She was crying and there was a bloodstain on her faded cotton dress. She stumbled as she ran toward the road. Suddenly she stopped and stared at the Red Cross arm band.
“You’re nurses, aren’t you?” she cried in a thin little voice. “You are nurses—please somebody help my little brother——”
Cherry and the other nurses looked at the frightened child in concern. But Cherry, like the others, hesitated to act outside of her Army duties—especially with Captain Endicott watching coldly. “Oh, please!” the little girl begged. “Can’t you help my little brother?”
“What’s wrong?” Cherry asked her gently.
“Jack—he—we were out by the silo playing on the corn cutter—and Jack, he’s only four, he didn’t know any better—he got his arm cut! And he’s—” the child’s face screwed up as she wordlessly held out her stained dress. “Please come! Somebody come!”
Cherry looked around for Sergeant Deake. This was a ten-minute break and Sergeant Deake would be generous enough to relax the rules and let her go for five minutes. But Sergeant Deake had gone up the line. Only Paul Endicott was here, sitting stiffly in his jeep.
“May I leave for five minutes, sir?” Cherry asked him.
“But this child needs——”
“I heard her, Lieutenant Ames. Let her call a doctor.”
The child, clinging to Cherry’s side, cried. “We—we haven’t any telephone! And anyway, our Dr. Gillis in Milltown is in the Army and went away. And Pop hasn’t enough gasoline to drive all the way to Center City to——”
“That’s too bad, but it’s not our concern,” Paul Endicott interrupted. “This is not a civilian nursing corps.”
Cherry managed to keep her voice calm. “Captain Endicott, I could give first aid in five minutes—three minutes!”
“No.”
Cherry blew out an angry breath, then looked down at the anxious child.
“What’s your name, dear?”
“Sally. And my mother’s in the hospital!”
“Well, Sally, you tell me about Jack’s arm.”
Sally described her brother’s wound as well as she was able.
“All right,” Cherry said soothingly. “Here is what you must do.” And she explained, very clearly and carefully, how to stop the bleeding, how to clean the wound and bandage it. “Do you understand now? Good, you’re a brave girl. I know you can take care of your brother,” she reassured her.
But Sally, though calmer now, was still badly frightened. Cherry glanced at the name on the mailbox: Johnson. They were farmers, without a phone or gasoline or much money. Cherry realized that no distant doctor would be summoned to treat the boy. The sister’s first aid would not be adequate. She made an instant, reckless decision, not with her mind but with her heart. Dropping her voice very low because Paul was suspiciously listening, she said, “You do what I said and I’ll come back tonight and take care of Jack.”
“You will do nothing of the sort!” Captain Endicott snapped out. So he had heard! “I expressly forbid you to leave the Army area for any such purpose!”
Sally’s worried face clouded again and she looked up at Cherry with unhappy eyes. Cherry’s fingers tightened around the small shoulder. She determined, Endicott or no Endicott, broken rules or no broken rules, to get back to these children tonight! The little boy needed help! Especially with his mother away. And Cherry was not going to let that four-year-old risk a serious infection for the sake of a petty taskmaster like Paul Endicott!
The column started off again, and Cherry marched away reluctantly with her platoon of nurses. She felt Sally’s pleading eyes following her. But she had to trudge on, a part of that long, winding, tramping column of soldiers under full pack.
“I’d better think of something cheerful,” Cherry decided, “and stop this useless brooding about those children.” She looked at Gwen and Ann at either side of her to see if they felt like talking. But the nurses had long since given up chattering and singing to save breath. “Let’s see. What’s cheering, besides cherry cider?” Lex might be cheering, except that she had been too busy to see him since the dance. Lex was along today, and Captain Endicott was present as Liaison Officer to the Commanding Officer, she had heard, whatever that meant. Her monthly pay was cheering—one hundred and fifty dollars base pay plus all living expenses paid for her. Tonight’s “battle” with her own Tans fighting the Blues might prove pretty exciting. Cherry was a little vague as to the military techniques involved, except that there was going to be a lot of shooting and spying and secrecy, but she loyally wanted the Tans to win.
They were marching up a hill. Cherry noticed that when the column of nurses ahead of her reached the top of the hill, it veered right and entered the shadowy woods. This probably was where they would make camp. When Cherry reached the top of the hill, she looked back. The distant ruby jugs winked at her in the sun, making the location of the Johnson house clear as a map to Cherry. “I must get back there tonight,” she thought. “It’s only a mile back from here. That isn’t too far.” She prayed that they wouldn’t go too deep into the woods but, come what may, she had to get back to the little injured boy. Her decision made, Cherry cut short her worrying and entered the chill shadowy woods.
In a cleared space, under arching treetops, jeeps, tanks, and trucks were already bustling around. Men in green fatigues hastily and softly unloaded supplies; other men set up gun emplacements; still others gathered for a low-voiced assembly. Cherry went on with her own group deeper into the woods.
Here, in a comparatively protected and camouflaged spot, some more fatigue-clad soldiers were putting up hospital tents. Bunce and the other corpsmen were unpacking medical supplies and instruments, with “Ding” Jackson and Lex directing them. Cherry saw Paul Endicott slowly ride by in his jeep, one of the few men not in fatigues, checking the medical group with his list.
Paul saw Cherry, and he saw Lex. But he made no sign of recognition, preferring to preserve strict military discipline. Cherry’s chief concern now, though, was to get that thirty-pound pack and mess kit off her back. She did not dare remove her gas mask, nor her three-pound helmet, nor her pistol belt with its first-aid packet.
The pack off, she stood looking around in amazement at the field hospital which was mushrooming into existence. One heavy tent, shaped like a pyramid, for surgery, was going up at Colonel Wylie’s orders. Gwen called her to come pitch their own shelter tent. Suddenly there was a heavy, deafening, pounding roar. The earth shook and Cherry clung wildly to a tree trunk. Ann threw herself flat at Cherry’s feet.
“That’s our firing batteries at the other end of the bivouac area!” Sergeant Deake shouted over the uproar. “You’d better get used to the sound of a barrage of big guns!”
The pounding of heavy artillery went on, firing blank ammunition over their heads toward the oncoming Blues. The nurses hastily remembered to camouflage their net-covered helmets with leaves and black their faces. “Look out!” Sergeant Deake signaled them. Cherry whirled to see the sergeant tossing practice grenades at them. Surprise drill! The nurses instantly threw themselves flat.
“Never a dull moment,” Cherry panted as the puffs of white sulphur smoke cleared away, and the girls gingerly got back on their feet.
The wiry little sergeant called through his hands, “Okay. Nurses. Now set up your tents!”
Pitching pup tents was fun. It did not take long for Cherry and Gwen, working together, to put up theirs. Each girl put up the half of the tiny tent she had carried. “Real homelike,” was Gwen’s tongue-in-cheek verdict.
“Homelike for a pup,” Cherry said, crawling in and promptly backing out again. “Nice in there if you like to suffocate. Come on, I see patients… already!”
Although a rough dispensary was just shaping up and the cots barely had been set up under the trees, five soldiers hobbled in for treatment. These “casualties,” even before the “action” began, consisted of a sprained ankle, an enormous bee bite, and three upset stomachs. But a little later, Cherry was startled to see Bunce and another corpsman carrying a young man on a litter toward the hospital tents. This soldier was unconscious and badly hurt. Cherry was at his side in an instant.
“He was thrown from a jeep,” Bunce blurted out. His young face was anxious and strained, but he reported clearly, “Looks like he’s sustained a fracture of the left hip and leg. He had a lot of pain, sir, so I gave him a sedative.” Cherry had not seen Lex come up. They looked at each other quickly. “George and I went back half a mile for him when we heard about it. Thought we’d better carry him than drive him… not so rough,” Bunce finished.
“Good work,” Lex commented. “You know a lot for a corpsman.” Cherry smiled proudly at her corpsmen. Lex added, “We’d better get to work on that leg.”
Before they could start to the hospital tent, Captain Endicott drove up again in his jeep, slowed, and glanced into the litter.
“I’d like a report,” he said curtly to Lex.
“First we’ll take care of the patient, then you’ll get your report,” Lex replied, equally curt. He said to Bunce and George, “Take the patient in at once.”
“Just a minute, Smith!” Paul Endicott unexpectedly turned on Bunce. “On bivouac, you take your orders from me, not Upham. You’ll take that patient in after you’ve given me a report.”
Bunce looked uncertain. Cherry sprang forward, anxious for the patient’s safety. She knew Bunce was more concerned about that than for the details of military regulations.
“We can’t report until we’ve examined the man!” she tried to put Paul off with tact. “You understand that it’s necessary to——”
Lex impatiently brushed her aside. “I’ll get Captain Endicott out of the way myself, Nurse!”
“Watch your tongue, Captain Upham!”
There would have been a nasty quarrel if Colonel Wylie had not called out from a tent doorway:
“What’s going on out there? Why are you letting that patient wait?”
Instantly the group broke up, and the patient was carried into the tent. In the tent Cherry watched Lex set the leg, quickly and skillfully. Bunce and another corpsman came and carried the patient out to a cot. Bunce would watch him constantly.
Lex was grumbling to himself. Cherry took a deep uncertain breath. Cherry knew, and Lex knew, that Paul Endicott was either waiting outside or would come back soon for the report.
“But, after all, getting the report is Paul’s job,” Cherry said to Lex.
“That’s not what I’m griping about,” Lex said. His tawny eyes searched her face. “I’m annoyed with you!”
“Me! What did I do?”
“Why did you have to make excuses to Endicott?” Lex demanded. “Don’t you know the patient comes first?”
“Certainly. I was thinking of the patient! But I was also trying to save Bunce from another scrape!”
Lex turned on his heel and strode out.
Cherry leaned against the tent pole, wondering. Why had she and Lex quarreled over this Endicott incident? She felt wretched about quarreling with Lex, and she suspected he felt just as miserable. She noticed that Paul Endicott did not come back for his report. And Bunce wag missing. Paul must have called the boy to headquarters. Cherry did not like that. She lined up on the chow line for supper with a heavy heart.
Supper made Cherry feel better. Food had been cooked in camp and brought here in trucks. Shallow slit trenches, covered with grates, served as stoves to reheat the food. Cherry moved down the line, her leafy helmet slung over her shoulder now, holding out her mess gear to the boys dishing out food, and received a piping hot supper. It tasted marvelous out in the open air. Then they washed their metal mess kits, and Cherry washed her face in cold spring water out of a bucket hung on a tree. The first brilliant stars reminded her it was nearing time to go back to the Johnson farmhouse. But first, she was on duty until bedtime at ten.
She found the evening irritatingly poky. Back at the hospital tents, everyone was overcome with yawns but Cherry. Two boys came in with poison ivy, and a third soldier seemed to be on the verge of appendicitis. But after these emergencies were taken care of, the evening dragged. The firing had died away, even the birds were quiet. Cherry was impatient to finish her duty and go to the Johnson’s. She sat in a tent with Ann and Gwen, folding bandages by carefully dimmed lantern light, and tried to stir those two sleepyheads to conversation.
“If you must talk,” Gwen protested drowsily, “I did hear one thing. It seems the Blues have learned our location… from our artillery fire, of course… and they’ve split their troops in two to encircle us.”
“Ah-h-h-h,” said Ann, rubbing her eyes.
“Well,” Cherry demanded briskly, “that means we Tans have to do something to prevent encirclement and getting captured. What do you suppose we’ll do?”
But none of the girls were precisely military strategists. After a few wild guesses, Ann leaned back and frankly closed her eyes. Cherry turned desperately to Gwen. She wanted to talk about Sally and Jack Johnson and what she was going to do. Still, she had better not tell the girls she was going… that would make them guilty, too. Anyway, the redhead, though her eyes were still open, was asleep for all practical purposes.
Half an hour later, Cherry had to rouse them and help them stumble across tree roots to the nurses’ shelter tents. Ann dropped into the tent she was sharing with Vivian. Gwen dumped herself into the little tent, half indistinguishable from the bushes, farther down. Fortunately Gwen was sound asleep on her bedroll when Cherry crawled in beside her to leave her gas mask behind.
Through the triangular opening of the tent, Cherry saw a million stars glittering above the treetops. Were Sally and Jack and Mr. Johnson waiting for her? Cherry listened to Gwen’s soft, regular breathing. She looked at the luminous radium dial of her wrist watch. Only a little after ten. She knew she should not leave camp. None of the nurses knew she was leaving. But she had promised Sally she would come!
Impulsively, Cherry wiggled out of the tent and slipped away. She could hardly see the toy-size tents, scattered and camouflaged as they were, under the dark concealing cover of trees. Tiptoeing away, she gained the sentry’s post under a tree some fifty yards ahead. He was a corpsman patrolling the nurses’ area.
As she came up, he said, “ ’Evening, Lieutenant!”
“Good evening. I want to leave bivouac on urgent business.”
“Well, ma’am, an officer doesn’t usually need permission to leave, if he or she is going within ten miles and will return in four hours. But it’s different on bivouac.”
“Oh, I’m not going that far!” Cherry said. Hastily and rather guiltily, she signed the officers’ book. She had to get to Sally and Jack. Mr. Johnson probably was anxiously awaiting the nurse, too.
The sentry looked worried. “We’re on bivouac, remember. You’d better not go. It might be dangerous.”
“What could happen?” she demanded.
“Nothing is certain in the Army but the uncertainty,” he warned her.
Cherry hesitated, then thought of the little girl’s stricken face. The corpsman sentry watched her doubtfully as she left him. Cherry picked her way through the sleeping camp. Outside the nurses’ area, another sentry, posted by H.Q., stopped her again. When Cherry insisted on going on, this sentry hailed the next sentry. Again and again, Cherry was challenged by sentries. Persistently, stubbornly, she argued her way through to the main sentry.
But the main sentry barred her way with his rifle. “You shouldn’t go, Lieutenant. The Blues are approaching. They might pick you up and hold you prisoner. Or you might get lost.”
Cherry pleaded, “It’s an emergency. I’m urgently needed. I’m only going down to that roadside stand. I couldn’t get lost, that little walk, and if I should, there are soldier lookouts along the road to direct me. Besides, the Blues couldn’t be here in the next hour, and,” she promised earnestly, “I’ll surely be back by then! I wouldn’t leave the area if it weren’t a real emergency!”
The sentry lowered his rifle, but he said warningly, “I don’t know what the Commanding Officer would say if he heard about this. I’m only a private, I can’t stop an officer. You’re going at your own risk.”
Cherry started off doubtful but determined. She carefully noted the two tall pines at the camp’s entrance to the woods. Knowing that the children were counting on her, her earlier fatigue seemed to melt away. Cherry hurried along the night road in the frosty country air. The road was quite bright, full of blue moonlight. Here and there a jeep or soldiers in two’s passed her. No one stopped her, her nurse’s coveralls were her guarantee. If the Blues were really on their way, she certainly could not see or hear them. She memorized landmarks so that she could find her way back—a big oak, a bend in the road, a broken fence. She was worried about leaving bivouac and she was worried lest four-year-old Jack might have suffered seriously from this delay. She must treat him quickly and get right back. The last quarter mile, she ran.
When Cherry knocked on the farmhouse door, Sally opened it. “I knew you’d come!” she cried. Behind her was a tall, worn-looking man in blue jeans, the children’s father.
“I sure am glad you came, Nurse,” Mr. Johnson said, shaking her hand for a long time. “My wife’s in the hospital and I just don’t know how to——”
Cherry released her hand and glanced quickly around the farm kitchen. “Well, don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll have Jack fixed up in no time.”
But when they led her upstairs into a little dormer room and Cherry saw the limp, towheaded little boy, she knew he could not be “fixed up in no time.” He had a nasty cut, and there was danger of infection. Cherry would have to work long and carefully to get the boy out of danger.
She sent Sally downstairs to boil water, and sent Mr. Johnson to sterilize seissors and pliers, in place of any other equipment, and spread the contents of her first-aid kit on a table. Meanwhile, she talked softly and reassuringly to little Jack. It seemed forever until his father and Sally returned with the things Cherry had requested. Then, with their assistance, she set to work. But they were slow and fumbling and upset, and made Cherry’s work harder instead of easier. She had to work slowly, too, to spare Jack pain.
With the wound treated and dressed, Cherry realized that her work was only half done. She sat down and explained to Mr. Johnson, and to Sally too, how to take care of Jack and how to change the dressing. “And now,” Cherry said, with a distressed look at her wrist watch, “I must be going. It’s very late.” She had been here all of two hours!
“Thank you, thank you!” Mr. Johnson and Sally cried, as she hurried downstairs and out the door. And the little girl called, “I knew you’d come!”
Cherry smiled and waved. She felt almost as relieved as they did. But… two hours! She anxiously turned into the road.
She hurried along as fast as she could. It was darker now, for the moon was behind the clouds. She did not meet even one soldier on her way back. That gave her a pang. Was she on the right road? Yes, there was the big oak, and here was the broken fence. She had taken the right turning, all right. But it was curious that the road was so empty. There were no sounds, either, from her own camp nor from the “enemy,” only faint night rustlings.
It was a relief to climb the last shadowy incline and see the tall pines that flanked the entrance to camp. This was the spot—those pines were unmistakable!
But where was the sentry?
And where were the rows of tents?
Cherry fearfully peered into the woods. There was not a sign of a living creature, not a tent, not even the most guarded flicker of light, nor a sound in these dense shadows. There was nothing but tree trunks and a black roof of leaves. She must have picked the wrong spot to enter this far-flung wood, she thought, her heart sinking.
She stepped back and surveyed the pines again. No, these were the same two pines. She remembered them clearly, one with its top like a steeple. This road was the right road, too. But how could it be? Where was everyone? She must be dreaming! The camp had vanished!
Cherry shivered. “How could so many men and tons of equipment and heavy field mortars and tanks and jeeps all just… just disappear in a puff of smoke? In only two hours? Surely I must be in the wrong spot!”
She ventured a little way into the tangled forest. There she dimly made out tire and tank tracks in the earth, many footprints, and fresh holes where tent stakes had been. This was the place, all right! She was not dreaming. The camp had been here and gone!
Trembling all over, Cherry tried to figure out what must have taken place. They had broken camp, in secrecy and haste and silence, and moved on. Why? She remembered the advancing Blues. Her own Tans must have evacuated to avoid being encircled. They had moved to a spot the Blues would not guess. “And a location I can’t guess, either,” Cherry thought desperately.
She ran to the road and peered in all directions. But she could see little on the night-clouded roads and misty fields. Certainly she could not see, nor hear, any troops moving, whether Tans or Blues.
Suddenly she was terribly frightened. She was lost in the woods, alone, at night!
“Oh, what am I to do?” Cherry gasped. She sank down on a big stone, nearly crying. She never could find her own unit in the dark, in unknown countryside! Maybe the Blues would not come by this way, either, to pick her up. She could not stay alone in the woods all night! Cherry shuddered. She tried hard to think.
She might go back to the Johnson’s and ask the family to let her stay overnight. But by now, the road back was deserted and very dark… not a safe place to go walking alone. “Besides, I’m a soldier now,” Cherry thought. “If I went to the farmhouse, it would be desertion or something really had like that. Oh, heavens! How foolhardy I was! Those sentries told me not to go!”
She got up off the stone and started walking aimlessly around and around in the dark, before the two tall pines. She had not the faintest idea of what to do next. Slight animal noises from the woods, a crackle of a twig, the wind’s sudden sigh, stretched her nerves taut. The night was growing colder. She shivered under her coveralls.
Out of the weedy moaning of the wind, she thought she heard a voice. She backed in fright into a dense shadow. Whatever it was, she did not want to face it alone!
The voice went on, calling, calling. Cherry thought of all the dread possibilities that voice might mean and felt her own voice die in her fear-tightened throat. Gradually, as the voice grew nearer, she made out that it called her own name.
Then on a little hillock, silhouetted against the chilly moon, she saw a tall, wild figure, hitching up his trousers with a well-known gesture. Bunce!
She ran forward, voiceless, but waving her arms wildly. Bunce saw her and came running too.
“You crazy idiot!” he yelled at her. They abruptly halted face to face. “Beg your pardon, Lieutenant—gee whiz, I was worried! You all right, Miss Cherry?”
Cherry gasped and found her voice. “Yes… I’m… all right. What are you doing here?”
“Waited for you, of course!”
“But you shouldn’t have. An enlisted man has no right to go off on his own. Bunce, you’ll be in trouble.”
He took off his jacket and put it around her. “You’re not in trouble, I s’pose? Why, Miss Cherry, when the girls found out you weren’t there and they had to go on without you… why, they cried! Miss Jones and Miss Evans and Miss Warren came running and told me. They were scared to report it to anyone else, I guess.”
Cherry was slowly gathering her wits together. “Does Captain Upham know? Or Colonel Wylie?” Bunce shook his head. That was a relief! “Does Captain Endicott know?”
The boy managed a laugh, “Gosh, I hope not! ’Specially after that little tussle I had with him this afternoon. Say, where were you, anyhow?”
Cherry confessed.
“Well, it sounds like those kids needed help,” Bunce sympathized. “Come on now. I know where they went. We can catch up if we walk fast!”
They started down the road at a fast trot. Suddenly they heard a jeep’s motor. Around the bend of the road, the vehicle whirled toward them, and Cherry exclaimed, “Thank goodness! They’ve sent someone back for us!”
“You think that’s good, do you?” Bunce muttered.
The jeep bounced up, throwing dust and pin points of blackout lights on them, and screeched to a sharp stop. Beside the expressionless driver was Captain Endicott. He got out. He was too disgusted for a moment to speak.
“Lieutenant Ames! Are you all right?”
“Yes, sir,” Cherry quavered. She added in a whisper, “I went back to those children.”
“You broke my specific order, Lieutenant Ames,” Captain Endicott said sharply. His handsome face was coldly official. He might never have seen Cherry before. “As for you, Smith,” he said with icy dislike, “leaving your post against orders constitutes insubordination. Your motive has nothing to do with breaking discipline. You should have reported Lieutenant Ames’s being missing at once, instead of taking matters into your own hands.”
Cherry started to defend him, “But Private Smith only meant to——”
Captain Endicott silenced her. “And I’ll thank you not to interfere! Now get into that jeep, both of you.”
Cherry and Bunce mournfully climbed into the back seat. As the jeep jounced along, they looked at one another but decided against talking. First she had a quarrel with Lex and now she had further antagonized Endicott! And poor Bunce probably was on his way to the guardhouse—on her account!