The Story of Dr. Wassell

by James Hilton

  The doctor had not liked to hear of the attack on the airfield. He said to the Englishman: “Before you go to sleep, and I think you ought to go to sleep, tell me this…was anything hit at the airfield?”

  “Dunno, mate—because they ‘it me first, the bastards…But they’ll come again for another try, don’t you worry. Them bloody Nips don’t give up so easy…”

  “I know. Nov try to sleep.”

  “Don’t feel sleepy, some ‘ow…Excuse me, but you’re a Yank, ain’t you?”

  The man from Arkansas did not like to be called a Yank, but he said tolerantly: “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I got a cousin in America—place called Cleveland. Ever heard of it?”

  The doctor admitted he had heard of Cleveland, but said he had never been there.

  “Reckon you wouldn’t know ‘im then…Gimme another fag, will you?”

  “Sure, and after that you must sleep.” He lit one and placed it between the boy’s lips.

  “Thanks, mate. These American fags ain’t like the English fags.”

  “You don’t like them as well?”

  “I didn’t at first. Funny what you can get used to, though…and that’s a fact. Sellin’ tripe and trotters dahn the Mile End Road three years ago, I was, and then I lost me bloody job and joined the bloody army and now look at me…”

  He stopped talking rather suddenly, and the doctor did indeed look at him, wondering when the drug would begin to take effect. Two Jap bullets and a dose of morphine—really, the fellow could almost be called impervious. The doctor waited till his eyes closed, then gently took away the cigarette still burning between’s the man’s fingers.

  The doctor did not see this man again. An hour later, evidently on instructions from outside, he was whisked out of the ward and out of the hospital. He was still asleep, but the men stuck cigarettes in his pyjama pocket as the trolley rolled past them.

  Night fell, and the doctor found himself walking backwards and forwards along the corridor where the telephone was. He knew he was growing anxious about that call from the airfield. Towards nine o’clock he went into Wilson’s room for a chat, and was suddenly minded to take the commander into his confidence about the possibility of getting away by air. “But I haven’t told the men, and I won’t till the last minute—I’m afraid of another letdown.”

  Wilson said he thought that was very wise.

  The telephone rang in the corridor. “That’s probably for me,” said the doctor.

  When he came back a few moments later his face was rather pale and he carefully closed the door of Wilson’s room before speaking. “They can’t take us,” he said. “One of their planes was smashed up in the raid—that means they can’t make room. And they’ve just had orders to move at once with all their crowd. Doesn’t seem to be their fault. The fellow I talked to seemed very upset.”

  “Like hell he was, and like hell we should be,” retorted Wilson. “Live Air Force personnel is more important these days than wounded crocks like us. This is no women-and-children-first war—it’s fighters first, and no sentiment about it!”

  The doctor was grateful to him for the harsh words.

  But later that evening, under a bright moon, a great roaring filled the sky over the hospital. It woke some of the men, who stared through the windows, wondering at first if it were another air raid, until McGuffey cried out: “That’s one of ours—you can’t mistake those four motors—the Japs haven’t got anything like it!”

  The roaring died away in the distance and then another came across the sky, and then another. The men, all awake now, were suddenly exultant—thinking that long-awaited reinforcements had arrived at last, and that the planes they had heard were en route to bomb the enemy at sea or on adjacent islands. It was a tonic thought to them lying there—that overhead the tide was already turning, that monster weapons from Seattle and Santa Monica and Long Beach were racing at last to their rescue.

  The doctor, wandering in and out of the ward in a state of intense restlessness, said nothing to dampen this feeling.

  The roaring went on, plane after plane, until, when it seemed to end, an argument sprang up among the men as to how many had flown over altogether.

  “Twelve!” cried Hanrahan.

  “Thirteen!” retorted McGuffey. “I counted right from the beginning—you were asleep.”

  Somebody else joined in: “No, twelve. I’m sure it was only twelve.”

  “Thirteen, I tell you!”

  Renny, who was still in a good deal of pain, muttered from his bed: “Can’t you boys find anything better to argue about? Twelve or thirteen—what the hell does it matter?”

  The doctor thought that it had really mattered a great deal, but he backed up Renny and urged the men to go to sleep again. Then he went into Wilson’s room across the corridor. He did not speak for a long time. Wilson was awake and smoking.

  “Twelve it was,” said Wilson quietly. “I heard the men arguing.”

  “Yes, twelve,” agreed the doctor. “The thirteenth should have been ours.”

  After another long pause Wilson lit a fresh cigarette and added more quietly still: “Did you ever feel as bad about anything in your life?”

  “Yes, once.”

  “When?”

  “About fifteen years ago—in China.”

  “Anything similar to this?”

  “Hardly.”

  “What then? Or is it something private?”

  “Oh no. Don’t mind telling you if you’re interested. I’d been working for years tracking down the carrier of amoebic dysentery, and at last I found it just about a day before an article appeared in a medical journal announcing the same discovery by someone else.”

  “Tough luck.”

  “Well, maybe—in a sense—but after all it’s the discovery that counts, not who makes it. Don’t you think so?”

  Later the doctor could not sleep, and while he was lying awake he heard a tap on his door and went to open it. Dr. Voorhuys was standing in the corridor, fully dressed and apparently quite calm. But there was something a little odd about him that the doctor sensed immediately, though he could not exactly say what it was.

  “I’m glad you are awake,” said Dr. Voorhuys, “because there is something you ought to know at once. I did not think it would happen. The enemy has landed on Java.”

  The doctor from Arkansas nodded. It was a blow but he felt himself struck rather than surprised by it. And suddenly, at that singularly inappropriate moment, he began to smile, because he had just noticed what was particularly odd about the doctor. It was something he would not have mentioned, except that he felt he must explain the smile, and there was nothing, he could think of but the truth. Dr. Voorhuys was already walking away along the corridor when the Arkansas doctor overtook him. “Why, Doctor,” he exclaimed, “you’re smoking !”

  Dr. Voorhuys puffed the smoke of his long black cigar into the clean antiseptic air of the hospital corridor. Then he smiled also. “Perhaps, sir, it is a time for breaking the rule of a lifetime, since our lifetime may not be as long as we expect.”

  The doctor went back to his own room, dressed quickly and glanced into the ward where the men lay. All were asleep, and the Dutch nurse in charge was reading a book so comfortably that it was clear she had not heard the bad news. The doctor then glanced into Wilson’s room and saw that he too was asleep. Next he telephoned to Tjilatjap, waiting almost an hour before he could get through. After that he left the hospital and walked into the town. Evidently the news had reached there, for crowds were congregated at street corners, and the lobby of the Grand Hotel was as busy as—indeed, busier than—at a normal noon. There was no panic, but a tensely rising excitement, and just before dawn this excitement soared to fever pitch when the foremost vehicles of an apparently endless British convoy parked in front of the hotel, and its commanding officer, dressed in khaki pants and a brown sun helmet, entered to ask what he could buy in the way of food and supplies. This officer was not the kind of
man the doctor took to on sight. There was a sort of languid aloofness about the way he gave his orders to the hotel people and to his subordinates; yet the doctor had to admit that each order was perfectly clear, despite the languor, and perfectly reasonable, despite the air with which it was delivered. The doctor thought about this for a moment, but found it somewhat incomprehensible; so, shrugging off all feelings about it, he nerved himself to approach the fellow and say “Hello.” At this the Englishman’s manner instantly froze (the mere conditioned reflex of being accosted by a stranger), then unfroze very slightly at the sight of the uniform. “How do you do?” he mumbled as from a great distance.

  “Excuse me, but are you evacuating your men to Tjilatjap?” asked the doctor.

  “Rather,” answered the Englishman, almost yawning.

  A sergeant touched the officer’s elbow to deliver some message which elicited another expression of languid assent; after which the sergeant saluted and the officer turned again to the doctor. The latter was fidgeting.

  “Anything I can do for you by any chance?” continued the Englishman, his politeness now chilled with infinite boredom.

  Suddenly the doctor had it. He said abruptly: “Sure you can, if you will. I have nine wounded men in my charge—most of them stretcher cases. How about taking us with you?”

  The manager of the hotel was now at hand, proffering chits for the officer to sign. As he signed them he muttered: “Don’t mind—provided they can travel in trucks, and you have ‘em here in two hours…”

  This time the doctor did not fidget. He snapped out “Okay” and dashed off through the crowded lobby.

  The doctor woke each man as quietly as he could, then went to the end of the ward and leaned over the rail of McGuffey’s bed. “Boys,” he said, “we’ve another chance to get out of here and it’s a last chance. Get ready as quick as you can.”

  They tried to delay him with a chorus of questions, protests, and complaints. “Listen,” he shouted, over their voices, “don’t ask me for details. You don’t have to go, but I’m going and I’ll take anybody with me, and I hope it’ll be everybody. So hurry up…I’ll be back in half an hour for those who’ve made up their minds.” Then from the door he added: “If you want any reasons, I’ll give you just two. The Japs are in Java, and those planes we heard last night weren’t reinforcements—they were our own planes getting the hell out…”

  He woke Wilson and gave him more details. “There’s a British convoy in the town—the captain says he’ll take us to Tjilatjap. I know there are ships still there, because I telephoned this morning. So get ready…that is, if you want to go. I’m going.”

  “What, again? ” said Wilson, putting all his thoughts into that one word.

  “Yes, again,” answered the doctor. “And don’t pack all that stuff you took the last time—there won’t be room.”

  He knew that it had been a big bluff, talking like that to Wilson and to the men. He knew that if a single one of them refused, he could not leave him, would not leave him—and what would happen then he could lay no plans for. When the half hour had elapsed he hesitated for a second outside the door of the ward, as if aware that he was about to try the last possible key in the lock of fate.

  All the men were ready.

  He looked at them for a moment, unable to speak; then he made the thumbs- up sign and said: “Good for you, boys. Let’s get going.”

  * * * * *

  So the nine men from the Marblehead went down to Tjilatjap a second time.

  There had been second farewells at the hospital, but with a new and wilder note in them—the nurses kissed and embraced the men with a half- preoccupied air, for they were already constrained to think of other things, of what would happen to them and to their friends and families later. The men were derisive in an American way that the Dutch and Javanese could not properly understand—how could anyone joke at such a moment? But some of the men kept kidding about the whole situation. “Don’t worry, nurse—we’ll be back to-morrow. Have a nice meal ready for us, won’t you?…The doe’s just taking us for another day at the beach, that’s all…”

  The doctor heard but did not object to these remarks. They seemed to him as helpful as anything else that could have been said.

  The nine men from the Marblehead sorted themselves out (under the doctor’s supervision) into worse and better cases. The latter rode in a truck, lying down as best they could on the flat boards. The former climbed into the Ford car whose springs and cushions were kinder to their wounds; there were Sun, whose legs were not yet much recovered, and Francini, who had to sit upright. The doctor fixed Sun so that his legs stretched comfortably, over the back of the front seat. Wilson, whose wounds enabled him to sit and almost now to stand, took the seat next to the doctor.

  Muller, with the shattered leg, was given a lift in the British captain’s car.

  The doctor would not start until the entire convoy had passed, so that he knew for certain that his men had not been left behind. This entailed a considerable wait, for there were some two hundred trucks, containing ack-ack guns, field kitchens, traveling repair shops—the whole outfit of a modern mechanized force.

  The journey began before the sun was high, and continued slowly but without a pause until well into the afternoon. The doctor did not at first regret the slow pace, for it was years since he had driven a car before, and both the gear shift and the “keep-to-the-left” rule were new to him. It took him several hours to get really used to these novelties and relax a little. Wilson, in pain but not complaining, slept for long stretches. Sun was so quiet that it was hard to tell whether he were even in pain or not. Francini sat carefully upright, trying to minimize the jolts of the roadway by flexing his muscles in advance. The doctor tried as far as he could to avoid such jolts, but sometimes it was impossible and then he would half turn round and say “Sorry” to the boy behind. Somehow he knew there was no point in saying, “Sorry,” since the boy knew he couldn’t help it, but he still went on saying it.

  Towards noon he began to feel sleepy, but fortunately a British motorcyclist, red-faced and incredibly cheerful, rode alongside to shout a warning of possible air attack. The whole convoy was to be spaced out to minimize the risk of bomb hits, and everyone must be prepared to jump out at a moment’s notice and take shelter in the roadside ditches. The cyclist rode off in a cloud of dust, having delivered this message, leaving the doctor to wonder how Sun and Nilson and Francini could perform such acrobatic feats in any conceivable emergency. But there was nothing for it but just to drive on and hope for the best. At any rate, the incident had served to wake him up.

  But not some other drivers, apparently, for at several places he noticed trucks burning at the roadside, either from driving mishaps or because they had broken down irreparably and had been deliberately fired.

  He had to concentrate on his own driving for another reason: the Dutch officer who was leading the way began to pick out side roads which he knew were tree-shaded, so as to lessen the risk of Jap planes spotting the convoy. This meant longer, slower, and (unfortunately for Sun and Francini) much bumpier travel. And there was an increasing amount of opposite traffic—Dutch Army cars loaded with soldiers, Staatswacht troops in forest-green uniforms, Red Cross ambulances, gaudily decorated native oxcarts which were the worst peril of all. The doctor began to fear those oxcarts more than bombs.

  He did not talk much during the journey, except now and then a few sentences over his shoulder to Sun and Francini—to the former, of course, in Chinese. Whenever he spoke in Chinese, Wilson would rib him about it—“Aw, for heaven’s sake, what sort of a lingo is that? How long did it take you to learn it?”

  “About ten years,” answered the doctor quietly. “And I still don’t know it very well.”

  “I guess they could use you as an interpreter, though.”

  The doctor agreed. “I rather thought they would, but they sent me to look after you fellows instead. And what a job!” He laughed, fishing in his pocket
meanwhile for a cigarette.

  “Keep both your hands on the wheel, man,” Wilson shouted. “I’ll light one for you.”

  It was not easy for Wilson to use his hands, but at last he succeeded in getting a cigarette alight; then he leaned over and found the cigarette holder in the doctor’s breast pocket. “And don’t turn round and poke me in the eye with it,” he added.

  The more tired they became and the more arduous and perilous the journey the more they grumbled at each other, jokingly, meaninglessly, affectionately. It passed the time, and the doctor thought it probably helped to cheer up Francini behind. Once, when he had said “Sorry” after a particularly bad bump, and the boy had moaned slightly, the doctor continued: “It’s just luck that you’re here, Francini, and not in that British officer’s car instead of Muller. I’d be scared stiff if I was driving with that fellow for two hundred miles…Oh no, he’s all right—I’ve nothing against him—matter of fact, he was pretty good to take us—but he sort of looks at you as if you weren’t there.”

  “We won’t be there, either,” said ‘Wilson, “if you don’t keep your eye on the road.”

  And so they went on, throughout the long hot afternoon. Once they saw planes overhead that looked like a Jap reconnaissance, and for half and hour afterwards thought of nothing but bombers, but presently the very fear in their hearts grew bored with waiting. Then the doctor began to feel sleepy again, and the effort to keep awake drove everything else out of his mind. He would shut his eyes tight for a few seconds and then open them again sharply; he hit himself on the forehead to produce actual pain; and at every stretch of road where there was good shelter he hoped and even prayed that the convoy might decide on a halt. Surely they must stop soon; even soldiers could not keep up the strain indefinitely. Wilson, Francini, and Sun had all fallen asleep—Wilson was snoring, and at first the doctor had thought the snore was a lap bomber approaching over the roadside hedges. He laughed aloud when he found out what it really was, and the laugh kept him awake for another half mile. Then he resumed the struggle, and once—for perhaps ten seconds—he must have been absolutely asleep, for he found the car swerving way out to the right along the other lane. He pulled back sharply, thanking heaven there had been no oxcart. His three passengers were still asleep; no one would ever know how nearly he had come to meeting disaster. The thought nerved him to another effort of wakefulness, and just when this was about spent he saw arms waving from the truck a hundred yards in front. It was the signal for a halt.