by Helen Wells
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.
CHAPTER III
Island 14
CHERRY STOOD UP IN THE BOAT. RISING OUT OF THE tropic sea were three islands, fringed with tall palms and ablaze with flowers. Their boats sped toward the center island. From this distance, it looked to Cherry like a giant ant hill, with crawling movement everywhere. Nearer, she made out men in green fatigues working up and down the long beach.
The Higgins boats crawled right up on the sand. The girls jumped off and blinked in the intense sun and heat. Cherry did not know where to look first.
Seabees, the sailor-workmen, carried boxes of supplies on their shoulders. Other Seabees were hammering away on a half-finished wooden building under the trees. Engineers drove a noisy bulldozer, laying down rough roads. A big stout man, apparently a beachmaster, roared orders. Cherry’s trained eyes picked out several camouflaged fortifications.
What really made her catch her breath were signs of recent battle. In hollow ground stood a heavy mortar, the gun camouflaged with a net roof of leaves. She saw half a grass hut standing, the other half crumpled on the ground, sliced neatly away by a shell. She stood there and stared at the mute evidence of war that lay all around her.
Major Pierce and another officer, in green fatigues, came up the beach to the waiting nurses. “I think the first thing the unit had better do,” Major Pierce called out, “is get acquainted with the place. This is Captain May, the Intelligence Officer. Captain May’s headquarters, called G–2, is on Island 13, but you will see him around here on 14 once or twice a week. Captain May is going to take us on a tour and explain things.”
“Well, I’ll start at the beginning. Only about three weeks ago, these three small islands were the scene of combat. We took them from the Japs. That was the gunfire you heard on Janeway. Our troops are fighting on, trying to seize more islands to the northwest. That’s the gunfire you’ll hear occasionally on Island 14. We may be bombed,” he warned. “The Japs haven’t bombed for a long time, they must be saving up for something. Or our troops on the forward islands are keeping them too busy. You can’t see those islands, but they’re only thirty miles from here. So you see,” Captain May turned to the nurses, “you young women are as close to the fighting as the Army lets its nurses go.”
Cherry spoke up, “If we were in a field hospital, we could go within six miles of combat, couldn’t we?”
Captain May smiled. “Yes, in an emergency. But this ought to be dangerous enough to satisfy anybody. The Japs may make an attempt to retake these islands, or as I said before, they may bomb us. That is why we blackout every night.”
The medical unit listened with visible excitement. Captain May gave them a sharp look, and resumed, “As soon as Islands 13, 14, and 15 were ours, the Seabees and the Engineers came in. Three weeks ago this place was a wilderness. The Japs never make their islands habitable. Their troops live under the most primitive conditions—they built only some pillboxes. There was nothing at all here but jungle. Now—well, you’ll see!”
Jeeps and trucks rolled up. The entire unit climbed in and followed the Intelligence Officer’s jeep all around the island. Here, to their amazement, they found a small community hacked out of the jungle. There was a power plant, there were roads, electric lights strung on palm trees, running water for washing, and hanging on trees were Lister bags holding purified water for drinking. Cherry saw mesh hammocks suspended between palm trees in a grove where the Seabees slept, many hammocks but scattered for security, with foxholes dug directly underneath. They passed a column of infantrymen, who, despite the heat, wore heavy clothes and even gloves for protection against disease-bearing insects. The soldiers looked up in amazement and waved joyously when the jeeps full of girls passed.
“Now try to get this picture clear in your minds,” Captain May called to them. The jeeps and trucks halted in a sand cay and formed a circle at his signal. “This island is roughly oval in shape. Your hospital will be in the center, for secrecy and for safety. To protect you and your hundreds of patients, there are, scattered over this island, an Infantry Division—that’s three Infantry regiments; one regiment of Artillery; and an Antiaircraft detachment. That’s mighty good protection.
“Working with these riflemen and heavy gunners,” the Intelligence Officer continued, “are a Signal Corps company for communications; a Quartermaster company for supplies; and one platoon of Military Police. The Seabees, the workmen you saw on the beach, will be leaving soon, their work is almost finished. Colonel Pillsbee”—Cherry sighed at the name—“is in charge of everybody and everything. And then there’s one other thing——”
The Intelligence Officer hesitated and frowned. He held a whispered consultation with Major Pierce, seemingly doubtful about something. Finally, he turned to the medical people again.
“I am going to entrust you with some confidential information. You will see and hear certain activities going on, especially at night. You might as well know what they are—so you won’t be tempted to write anything in your letters home about this. Let me warn you that this is a closely guarded operation.”
Cherry and the other girls looked at one another. What was up?
Captain May pointed to the northern tip of their island. “Up there you will see Army Air Forces men unrolling steel mesh mats on the sand. Those are for plane runways. They are building a secret air base here. Short-range fighter planes will refuel here. Also, in order to supply our troops fighting up forward—and perhaps ourselves in case of emergency—Air Transport Command supply planes will land here at this halfway base.”
“Air Transport Command!” Cherry breathed to Ann and Gwen, beside her in the jeep. “That’s where my brother Charlie is now!”
She was so excited she hardly heard the rest of the Intelligence Officer’s remarks. Charlie might conceivably fly here! Cherry hoped hard that he would. And then she remembered the watchful enemy only thirty miles away, and she hoped just as hard that Charlie would not be flying into range of those enemy guns. It never occurred to her to be afraid for herself.
When the unit returned to the center of camp late in the afternoon, Cherry thought every soldier on the island must have hiked over to greet them. Young, lanky, casual, thin shoulders bent under heavy rifles, dirty worn fatigues and caked mud on their heavy shoes, but wide smiles on their drawn, tired faces. As the nurses climbed down from the jeeps and trucks, the soldiers surged forward. The Army rule forbidding enlisted men and nurses, who are officers, to fraternize, was momentarily laid aside as the soldiers cried out:
“Girls! Real live American girls! Gosh, are we glad to see you!”
“You’re the first American women we’ve seen in two years! Any of you nurses from Red Oaks, Kansas?”
“Girls from home! Nurses! And we thought Headquarters had picked us to be the Forgotten Men!”
“This is almost as good as having my mother show up!”
One of the soldiers seized Cherry’s hand and shook it. Every face she looked at was stunned and overjoyed. Cherry swallowed hard. So they had been cut off for two monotonous years in the nightmare jungle! These fighting men looked to her suspiciously like homesick small boys. They were pathetically eager for the nurses to make some sort of response.
Cherry impulsively stepped forward. “We’re just as glad to see you as you are to see us! We’re going to take good care of you! And—and—” She looked into the waiting, lonesome faces, and was so moved she forgot such things as rules “—and you’re all invited to a party! The nurses invite the whole island to a party!”
This time, her sixty nurses as well as the crowd of soldiers let out a delighted yell. General bedlam and joy broke loose. “A party!” “Oh, boy!” “We haven’t had any fun in months!”
“With refreshments!” Cherry shouted over the uproar.
“Ice cream?” several very young boys shouted back eagerly. “We sure do miss ice cream!”
“And ice cream,” Cherry promised blindly. “And entertainment!” she added in a shout. She could not stop herself. She impulsively promised, and the next moment wondered desperately how she could keep her promises. Well, she would make good on her promises if she got court-martialed for it!
At that moment, Colonel Pillsbee’s aide came hurrying down a little hill and approached Cherry. “The Commanding Officer wishes to speak to Lieutenant Ames!”
The soldiers scattered to their posts. Major Pierce rather hastily led the nurses away. Cherry was left alone to accompany the furiously silent aide up the hill.
The command tent and Colonel Pillsbee’s tent quarters had just been set up on a high cleared plot of ground, and some soldiers were building a wooden railing to enclose Headquarters. “Colonel Pillsbee would erect a railing between himself and the rest of us,” Cherry thought. That railing made her feel quakingly as if she were entering a jail, instead of the headquarters tent.
“What is this talk of parties?” Colonel Pillsbee demanded primly.
Cherry stood before him and explained, or at least she did her best to explain.
“Don’t you know the nurses are not to mingle socially with the enlisted men?” Colonel Pillsbee reproved her.
“Yes, sir, but this is a group party,” Cherry sought for tactful words. “The girls won’t be having dates, sir, they’ll just be acting as—well, sir, as Army hostesses to several regiments.”
Colonel Pills
bee considered this. The good Army word “regiments” and the phrase “Army hostesses” had an impersonal, formal ring; they satisfied him. “But,” the Commanding Officer said, his small eyes like chips of ice, “these men are fighting men. We must not coddle them. It softens them, and does them real harm when they have to face combat.”
Cherry thought anxiously that Colonel Pillsbee had an indisputable point there. Then she thought of those homesick faces. “Would just one party do them very much harm?” she pleaded. “After all, sir, these men have been stationed on islands like these for two years, and it seems, at least to me, sir,” she said gingerly and very respectfully, “that their morale is a little—discouraged.”
Colonel Pillsbee in his turn looked anxious. “Sit down, Lieutenant Ames.” Cherry sat down on the edge of a box, scarcely daring to breathe.
“Two years here is a long time,” Colonel Pillsbee admitted. A shadow crossed his face. Cherry realized that in his touch-me-not way, he cared deeply for his men.
“Well, Lieutenant Ames, suppose I gave permission. How would you propose to manage a party of that size, and furnish the ice cream and entertainment which I heard you indiscreetly promise?”
He was now at least considering the idea! “I haven’t the slightest idea where I’ll get those things, sir,” Cherry replied blithely, “but I’ll find them! I won’t let those men down!”
Colonel Pillsbee tapped a bony finger on his table. “I am opposed to this party. It sets a bad precedent. One thing leads to another—I fail to see the need for such a display of sentiment. If the men need relaxation, we will arrange something more suitable. For example, a swimming hour every day.”
Cherry’s hopes sank. “But, Colonel Pillsbee, I promised the men! I can’t go back on my word!”
“That,” the Commanding Officer observed coldly, “is the only reason I am troubling to discuss this matter with you, Lieutenant Ames. Ordinarily, I would summarily refuse permission. But an officer’s word is his bond, and you have—most impertinently, I must say—pledged your word. I cannot afford to sacrifice the confidence of the personnel in their Chief Nurse. Therefore——”
