by Helen Wells
When Cherry awoke in her berth, the third morning, she missed the rocking sensation she had become used to. The train was standing still. She peeked out from behind the green blind and saw porters wheeling crates of luggage, soldiers standing on a platform smoking, people hurrying to a waiting train.
She tumbled out of her berth and woke the other nurses.
“We’re here!” she announced excitedly, brushing her black curls out of her eyes. “Get up! We’re here!”
“We’re where?” practical Bertha Larsen wanted to know.
“I don’t know where, but we’re here!” Cherry wiggled into her clothes, ran into the tiny washroom, gave her face and teeth a lick and a promise, and raced out onto the station platform. The other nurses quickly followed her, and they all climbed into special busses. Riding, she saw something so beautiful and so telltale that she gasped.
There, tossing and sparkling in the southern sun, lay a tropical blue sea, seemingly strewn with diamonds.
“What is that body of water?” she asked the soldier bus driver. The man said in a soft Southern drawl, “Why, chile, that’s the Gulf of Mexico! Ain’t she pretty?”
“She certainly is,” said Gwen from the seat ahead.
“Beautiful!” exclaimed Ann beside her. “The Gulf of Mexico can take us a lot of places,” she said thoughtfully. “South America, Mexico or into the Pacific via the Panama Canal.”
“If you know so much geography,” Cherry teased, “what town are we in?”
They found out later, after they had been comfortably installed in a big hotel and rigidly signed in. The hotel had been taken over by the Army. This southern city, where they exchanged near-winter for summer, dripped with lacy black iron balconies, flowering palm trees, and hospitality. The most hospitable of all was the Nurse Major, to whose administrative office near the docks they were promptly taken.
Major Dorothy Deane was lively and pretty and sympathetic. This pert lady, who made them all comfortable the moment they came in and who did not sit behind her big desk, had served with the Army in France in 1918, had worked in South America, in the Philippines, in the Orient. Now, she said with a laugh, she was “chained to that desk” while her several thousand charges did the traveling.
Then she proceeded to give them full instructions to govern their activities while in the port city. “You must be in rooms at 11:00 P.M., unless given a pass … no long distance calls … no telegrams or postcards are to be used in communicating with friends or families … you must not hint to anyone that you are leaving the port.”
The nurses looked at her expectantly, wondering if they were going to learn their destination.
Major Deane smiled. “No, I am not the itinerary department. All I can tell you is that a certain general asked me for a certain number of nurses in a certain place at a certain time. Now that you know your destination,” the girls’ laughter interrupted her, “you can complain to me about training or equipment or the clothes you wear. I help plan ’em. And please do speak up, if you want to gripe or ask questions or advice. That’s what I’m here for.”
After some informal talk back and forth with the girls, Major Deane grinned and said, “That’s fine. I hope you’ll write to me from overseas, or drop into my office whenever you’re in town again. You’d be proud of some of the letters I get from our Army nurses. Those girls are brave, and how they use their heads!”
She told them about an emergency in North Africa, when the wounded were brought in before a hospital was set up for them. “On top of that, the supplies had been sunk, there weren’t even bandages,” Major Deane told them. “So our nurses tore up G.I. underwear and made bandages! Incidentally, you’d better buy plenty of underwear and stockings to take along. I’ll give you a list of recommended purchases, and you can shop within the next few days. You’re going to find,” she warned them laughingly, “that the natives will want your lieutenant’s bars for souvenirs, and you’ll discover yourself in mud up to your knees sometimes, or facing a real emergency of no bobby pins and no cold cream! So off with you! Get processed and go shopping!
She shooed them out, with instructions to come back tomorrow. In the meantime, they had this whole golden, summery day before them, and a million things to do. First came “processing.”
This complicated and somewhat tedious business took place in what Cherry learned was called a staging area. It was dramatically near the docks and the sea. Led by a Chief Nurse, they marched around from Army Nurse Corps buildings to Army depots to Army sheds, having things done to them. They were given “shots” to immunize them against yellow fever. Then they were blood typed, a process familiar to these nurses. Then Cherry and her friends received their metal identification tags. Cherry’s tag bore her name, rank, serial number and blood type, nearest relative and address, religion, tetanus inoculation date. The few who had not already done so at Herold before their training began, now took out Army insurance. They received their pay; they would receive twenty per cent more than base pay as soon as they were overseas.
Cherry decided to sign an allotment sending home half of her future pay to her mother. There’d be little to spend it on, wherever she was going. Cherry also arranged to have some of her pay deducted and invested in War Bonds for herself.
Getting their field equipment was lots of fun. The girls received an olive drab herringbone work suit, consisting of blouse, well cut trousers, high field shoes, leggings, and helmet. They looked at these garments dubiously.
“It’s funny about this particular uniform,” the Chief Nurse said, laughing. “Nurses are about the best dressed group in uniform, but this work suit … well! One of the enlisted men in Sicily came into the Army doctor’s tent and asked to have his eyes examined. He said ‘I see a lot of soldiers coming up the road, but they all have girls’ heads!’ ”
The girls laughed and felt refreshed. They were getting tired, but not too tired to be excited over the field equipment issued them. A mute promise of adventure was issued along with the bedroll, mattress covers, blanket, tent, tent poles and pins. “You won’t have to carry this,” the Chief Nurse told them. “It will be packed for you and the corpsmen will put up your tents for you.” Next came a tropical cork-lined helmet, which set Cherry to guessing, field bag, first-aid kit, more and more things. They also received, for overseas ward duty, a brown and white seersucker dress with a matching jacket for street wear. Her eyes began to feel heavy as the processing went on.
Cherry was glad to get back to the hotel that warm, southern evening. She even treated herself to a nap before dinner. Processing was quite a process! But after a pleasant dinner, she perked up when Vivian suggested that they all go sightseeing.
“I have an idea,” Cherry said.
“You always have ideas,” Josie Franklin said enviously.
“Not always such good ones, either,” Ann put in. “For instance—–”
“Quiet! This idea is guaranteed harmless.” Cherry thought it would be fun to hire two or three of the old-fashioned, horse-drawn hansoms she had seen on the cobblestoned streets. Eight of them hired cabs, and drove leisurely down moonlit streets under giant moss-hung trees, breathing in freesia and tuberose. There were red poinsettias growing everywhere, looking oddly Christmasy in this land of summer. Much as Cherry loved this lush, languorous place, she was impatient to finish with waiting … restless to plunge ahead to her final destination.
In the following days, they saw delightful Major Deane again, filled out papers, addressed safe arrival cards which would later be forwarded to their families, and best of all went shopping. Cherry already had bought a foot locker, which served as a small trunk but could stand unobtrusively at the foot of a bed or cot. Now she shopped for all kinds of everyday personal supplies, like needles and thread, sunburn lotion, and flashlight batteries. She was fortunate enough to find a tiny portable radio, which she purchased on sight.
Besides their strange assortment of necessary articles, the nurses bought souvenirs for cheeri
ng up their unknown patients, candy for the children who were sure to be about, and had a final fling at the beauty shops. The girls were comparatively free after official business to go sight-seeing or to the theater, but actually this waiting was tedious. Cherry grew more and more restless. She packed her white uniforms in her bedding roll, put the heavier garments in the foot locker, stowed just enough things for the voyage in her small suitcase, and waited. Why didn’t they get started? Where was their ship? But another day, and still another day, slipped by.
Cherry had a great deal of time to think. She wondered where Lex was. She had known all along, of course, that Captains “Ding” Jackson, and Hal Freeman, and Colonel Wylie himself, had arrived with them and were sailing with them. It was strange that there was no word of Lex and of Dr. Joe. Inquiries, she knew, were useless.
Most of all, Cherry thought poignantly of her family in Hilton, and of the inspired adventure which was taking her farther and farther away from them. She reread their last letters, and longed to see them again. Yet she was leaving them so that she might have a free family and a safe home town to return to. She hoped with all her heart that she would measure up to the unknown responsibilities she had sworn to undertake. Many lives hung in the balance. Searchingly, Cherry asked herself, “Am I not too young? Too inexperienced?” But many other Army nurses were as young and green as she, yet they were doing a magnificent job all over the world. “I hope I’m as good as they are, as brave and skillful. If only I could be sure …” But there was no way to know except to test herself against the steely reality. And that most serious of all tests still lay ahead.
Then one night they were roused out of their sleep, told in whispers the moment had come. They dressed swiftly and silently, snatched up their suitcases, left the hotel, and were gone in the night.
At the dock, in the dark and the tense silence, Cherry and her fellow nurses lined up beside, almost beneath, the swelling steel hulk of the great ship. She heard the lapping of water, hurried footsteps, terse commands, the low purr of engines. The girls were in uniform, with gas mask, helmet, and canvas bag slung from their shoulders. They stood in silence. Colonel Wylie and Major Dorothy Deane and an unknown officer came by with flashlights. Then the officer quietly called off their names one by one “Aarons … Ackland … Allen … Ames …”
Cherry responded by reciting her serial number. The flashlights flared briefly on her face, and she groped her way up the gangplank to the huge blacked-out transport. She was aboard!
Cherry made out a milling but orderly crowd of soldiers on the black decks of the troopship. In the half dark, she saw Captain “Ding” Jackson and Captain Freeman. Like everyone else, she leaned over the rail, trying to see what was going on below. At one end of the ship, under a small shielded light, supplies were being loaded. “Hope it’s candy,” she heard one soldier say.
“Boy, what this boy wouldn’t give for a chocolate bar right now!” came another voice with an unmistakable Middle West twang. “Or some good old rabbit stew out of those rabbits I shot myself!”
The first voice, amazed, said, “Were you allowed …” “Did the C.O. give you leave to go hunting?” Cherry began to listen with some attention.
“Why, sure!” The owner of the blithe voice straightened up from the ship’s rail and his tousled head towered against the steam-clouded night sky. “The C.O. said to me, ‘Doc, you’ve been working too hard. You’re a mighty valuable man. Why don’t you take the day off and—–’ ”
“Bunce!” Cherry stopped him. It was part protest, part greeting.
“Land’s sakes! Miss Cherry! And hot on my trail!”
Cherry and her irrepressible corpsman practically fell into each other’s arms. She barely noticed that cranes were lifting the gangplanks away, the engines throbbed louder, and the whole ship started to vibrate and slip away.
“Bunce,” Cherry shouted joyfully over the engine noise and fumbled in her bag, “here’s three chocolate bars for you and your hungry friends! And what’s more, now that I’ve found you again, you certainly are going to behave!”
CHAPTER VII
Señorita Cherry
BLUE SKIES, BLUE WATER, YOUNG FACES ON THE SUNNY decks … and now, on the watery horizon, rose a purple silhouette of land. Cherry leaned against the ship’s rail, along with the crowds of soldiers, and stared. As their ship plowed nearer, she excitedly made out beaches fringed with palm trees, and blue mountains rising sheerly out of the sand.
Cherry took a deep breath of the sweet, hot, ripe wind from land. “It even smells exotic,” she thought. She could almost imagine strange music, fiery mountains, and voices clattering in a new tongue. “But where are we?”
A metallic voice presently rumbled out of the ship’s loud-speaker. “We are approaching the Republic of Panama. We stop briefly at the port of Cristobal, then continue via the Panama Canal to Panama City.”
“The announcer makes it sound so prosaic,” Cherry mourned to “Ding” Jackson, who had pushed through the crowd to her side.
The lanky New Englander grinned. “Why, girl, Central America is one of the most romantic little stretches of land in the world! Look here!” On the back of a prescription pad, he drew Cherry a tiny map. It showed a long, very thin, crooked piece of land, like a turkey’s neck. These few little miles of land were all that connected the vast northern and southern continents of the two Americas, all that separated the mighty Atlantic from the endless Pacific. “But the oceans aren’t separated any longer,” “Ding” said. “The Panama Canal, which the United States built and operates through treaty and purchase from Panama, cuts right through.”
Their boat nosed its way into Cristobal. Cherry saw, lying in its harbor, warships and merchant ships flying the flags of Russia, China, England, Canada, South Africa! Panama was certainly an international zone! The Cristobal docks rang with staccato words of Spanish, flashed with dark Latin and Indian and Negro faces. Cherry nearly fell over the rail watching the longshoremen on the pier below. They were loading huge boxes and bales onto ships bound for the States.
“Pirate treasure,” “Ding” nudged her. “Pirates used to hide in Panama and waylay ships bringing jewels from the Orient, or caravans laden with gold from Brazil. In Panama City, which they burned and sacked, you might still find a stray ruby stolen from India, buried deep in the sand!”
On the dock below, something else caught Cherry’s attention. Several brisk young men, Americans, were giving the ship opposite Cherry’s own a thorough, rapid search. They were the G-men of health safety … on the trail of germs, fever-bearing mosquitoes, and disease. They worked relentlessly with the military in charge of the Panama Canal Zone. Cherry knew that these men of the United States Public Health Service were as adventurous and daring, fighting disease in the Rockies, in the Louisiana swamps, or here in ocean-bound Panama, as any pirates had ever been. No ship, plane, train or auto could move across an American border until these men were satisfied that no infection was being carried from one land to another. And no wonder, for an epidemic can kill more thousands than bombs.
Out of Cristobal, the most amazing part of their journey began. It was fascinating to float down the intricate man-made canals and locks, to look from deck to land. Panama was a land of volcanos, of hilly tawny earth, of steamy jungle, and flowering plantations. Everything was lush, tropical, intensely colored under the densely purple sky and the fierce burning rays of the sun.
That night, Cherry looking from deck at the passing beautiful hilly country, lying so still and peaceful under the brilliant star-studded sky, wondered what adventure lay before her in this picturesque land.
Next morning, in Panama City, the girls disem-barked and clambered onto busses. Cherry was eager to go sightseeing, but they were urgently needed at the Army base hospital. So she had to satisfy herself with glimpses from the bus of Latin-American Panama City, and its sister American city, Ancon, where they were to live and work.
Everywhere were white stone government buildi
ngs in Roman style, cathedrals of white marble, sunny plazas and pigeons and wide low marble steps. They drove past gardens, behind wrought-iron fences, full of playing fountains and leafy shadow and cabbage-size white and red roses, blooming in this first week in November. Beyond all this, beyond an old fort high on the harbor’s hill, lay the Pacific Ocean.
The nurses were led into an exposition building converted to nurses’ quarters. “Did you ever see anything so romantic?” Cherry marveled, as they unpacked in a dormitory room. There were eight girls to a smallish room containing double-decker beds.
“Yoo-hoo, I’m Carmen!” Gwen waltzed past her, snapping her fingers, her comb between her teeth. Hi, Señorita Cherry!
“I’m only an imitation!” Cherry took a good-natured poke at her. She slipped into her brown and white seersucker dress, with its matching jacket and jaunty cap. They all went out together in search of a bus.
The girls promptly got lost, wandering through a little park. A frantic Chief Nurse caught up with them.
“A fine way to behave!” she scolded them. She was a lithe and lively woman of about forty, very professional, with reddish brown hair and snapping brown eyes. “What do you girls mean by running out on me? I was delayed at the dock—didn’t you get word? I’m Captain Johnny Mae Cowan, your Chief Nurse, and after this you stick close to me!” When they begged for lunch, she had to grin. “Serves you right,” she said. “There’s a Nurses’ Mess waiting for you. And a special bus will take you from quarters to the hospital and back.”
Cherry soon saw how badly they were needed. This base hospital had two thousand beds. But instead of the hundred and eighty nurses needed, they had less than a hundred native nurses because the hospital unit assigned there had been reassigned to move on. Fortunately, less than half the beds were full at the moment. But Captain Johnny Mae Cowan warned them, “In the Army, you never know what’s coming!” She led them through the wards and Cherry saw another difficulty. This sprawling old building had been enlarged by tacking on wings here and there, so that a single ward stretched out for two or three blocks. One lone nurse responsible for two or three wards would have to run to make her rounds! And if, in an emergency, the cases doubled or tripled overnight …!