Cherry Ames Boxed Set 5-8 Page 2

  Inside, up forward in the nose, and closed off by a door, was the pilot’s cockpit and just off this, the radio compartment. In the rear compartment, through a door leading into the tail, was a space for medical supplies, and a tiny galley. They would always take along fruit juice, water and coffee in their sky kitchen.

  The long body of the plane comprised the cabin. It had arching, ribbed, steel walls and a corrugated floor. In the low roof were flat ceiling lights. It was like being inside a tunnel or in a narrow steel freight car. Yet Cherry learned fascinatedly that this long cabin could be made into a temporary hospital ward.

  The walls were partitioned off, on either side, into three sections. In each section, stowed away in canvas containers on the walls, were four webbing-strap litter supports, at four different heights. These strong straps were pulled down, and a litter or stretcher was placed across them, parallel to the plane wall. The four litters went one above the other, bunk or Pullman fashion, from the floor to the ceiling. This left an aisle down the middle of the plane. There were additional straps to keep the patients from falling out of their stretchers.

  In case Cherry flew ambulatory patients, that is, patients who could walk and sit up, she would break down a section of litters and put up four bucket seats instead. These, too, pulled down from the wall. She would always reserve one seat for herself and one for the medical technician, because on take-offs or landings, everyone must sit down and strap in. Cherry was warned never to take off her safety belt until the plane had leveled off.

  Cherry’s chief pride was her nurse’s medicine chest in the rear compartment. This big seventy-two pound metal suitcase contained enough supplies for a small hospital. In addition to all the usual medicines for relief of pain, stimulants, sedatives, bandages, splints, there was also blood plasma, whole-blood units and equipment for intravenous medication.

  Cherry also carried an eighteen pound medical kit. She could zip it open and hang it on the cargo door of the plane, so that everything was within easy reach.

  “Besides the standard supplies,” Cherry told Bunce, “I’ll decide what special supplies we’ll need for particular patients on each trip. After I have a look at the wounded men we’re going to fly, I’ll ask you to get those supplies for me from the doctor. We’ll do that while we’re loading the patients aboard.”

  Cherry also had a talk with Wade Cooper. Some of the wounded would be apprehensive about flying. It would reassure them if the pilot made a little speech before the take-off.

  Wade fretted. “I’m a pilot—not a nursemaid! Besides, what’ll I say?”

  “Oh, just say—” Cherry assumed the deepest, gruffest voice she could “—‘Men, I’m your pilot. Don’t worry, because I’ve had plenty of flying experience. For instance, I’ve flown in—uh—in—’ ”

  “In China and over the Hump,” Wade supplied casually.

  “Oh! Did you really? Well, then, I’ll say, ‘Fellows, besides being experienced, Captain Cooper is a particularly careful flier. Isn’t that so, Captain Cooper?’” Cherry tried hard to keep a straight face.

  Wade gave her an exasperated look out of the corner of his eye. “Then I’ll say, ‘I’ll try to be particularly careful.’ ” He grunted.

  “Cautious. No recklessness. Responsible. Safe and sane,” Cherry persisted gleefully. “That’s Captain Cooper all over. Isn’t it, Captain?”

  “A fine thing! A fine thing they’re doing to me! Me—a bomber pilot! Telling me to be careful, be cautious, everything but stop for a cow to cross the road!”

  With her crew and a reluctant pilot, Cherry practiced loading and unloading perfectly healthy GI’s. She had classroom lectures, too.

  A Flight Surgeon, their commanding officer at Randolph, was one of the nurses’ several instructors. Major La Rosa talked quietly but forcefully.

  “Air evacuation is a modern miracle—a fusion of medicine and aviation. Now, you Army nurses already know how to care for your patients on the ground. But take a sick or wounded person up into thin air, and his condition changes. A man with a chest or abdominal wound could rapidly get worse, even die, above eight thousand feet. You may have to fly very high, to avoid bad weather or the enemy. So you must have special knowledge to treat sick and wounded at various altitudes.”

  Cherry listened, fascinated, as a new world—a world of high, empty thin air—was born in her imagination. A world of wind and empty space, one or two or three miles above the earth, so high up there was nothing at all, nothing but the sun or the moon. In that nothingness, a plane would be streaking along, with its precious cargo of wounded, suffering soldiers, and a nurse to keep watch over them.

  “You, the flight nurse, will be in complete medical charge on the trip,” Major La Rosa said. “From the time you pick up the wounded in the combat zone, until you unload them at the base hospital, you alone are responsible for the lives of eighteen wounded soldiers. Of course, you will have your medical or flight technician to assist you. With the pilot and his crew of two to fly the plane, you’ll all work together as a team. The Flight Surgeon will help you, but only when the plane is on the ground.”

  So Cherry had to learn to manage everything by herself, once the flying ambulance was in the air.

  Cherry already knew how to arrest hemorrhage, dress wounds, adjust splints, set fractures temporarily, administer blood plasma and give shock treatment. Now she learned how to do all these things, never easy, under the difficult and special conditions of flight. She learned that patients with head injuries must be flown at as low an altitude as possible—that chest injuries require oxygen at any altitude—that certain medicines must be adjusted to certain altitudes—and she learned when to substitute the rules with her own good sense. Flying would cause one patient to need a stimulant, but another patient a sedative. What impressed Cherry was that she must treat each case as a special problem and keep constant watch over each one of them!

  During these six weeks, Cherry and her classmates were up at six, at work by seven, and working until six or seven at night—Sundays too. Cherry felt as if she were performing in a three-ring circus, but she thrived on it. Gwen declared good-naturedly that this school was “a concentration camp on our side.”

  Cherry was more surprised than frightened when she was marched to the top of a thirty-foot tower, shown how to jump, fall, and to “hit the silk”—use a parachute.

  She was goggle-eyed when the nurses, in full uniform with pistols and medical kits, were ordered to clamber out of a floating “forced-down” plane in the post’s vast swimming pool, and to keep themselves and their husky “patients” afloat.

  She found herself swimming through burning gasoline and oil, finally to emerge scared but unharmed.

  She struggled through a hair-raising simulated plane accident which was casually listed as “crash procedure.”

  “Home was never like this,” said Cherry.

  Then Cherry took eleven examinations.

  Finally, she put on her good flying suit, which was slacks and blouse of blue-gray gabardine, and her garrison cap, carefully packed her parachute, and went traveling in a C-47 across the United States. She served as an aide to the flight nurse in charge, on an actual air evacuation mission. Two days later, Cherry got off the plane at Randolph Field. She was dirty and dead-tired but sure now that she knew her job.

  “Now,” thought Cherry. “Now!” At last the gruelling six weeks training was over—and now she was going to receive her wings and to see Dr. Joe.

  CHAPTER II

  Somewhere in Britain

  ONLY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LAY BETWEEN CHERRY’S graduation and her departure for overseas. Rumors flew among the fifty flight nurses in the two new squadrons. “We’re going to England.” “No, we’re slated for Alaska.” “At least we’re not going to the Pacific theater, we’ve already served there.” “They’ve issued us flying suits for a moderate climate, so it’s England for sure!”

  As Cherry packed in her airy little barracks room, and wrote her last
letters home, she wondered what her destination would be. Somehow she felt that her squadron would be stationed in Britain. The breathtakingly hard job that lay ahead troubled her. She had trained hard and well, had passed her examinations, but when it came to the real thing, the ultimate ordeal—

  “I’ll just have to call upon every resource I have, body, mind, and soul,” Cherry thought. “I won’t think of myself; I won’t listen to these doubts. I’ll think of the boys I’m there to help. That, if anything, will carry me through.”

  The evening before graduation day, Cherry took a bus into San Antonio, to the railroad station. When Dr. Fortune stepped off the train, he looked the same as ever. Cherry ran happily to the vague-minded little man, with the lock of gray hair falling boyishly over one eye.

  “Dr. Joe! Oh, I’m so glad to see someone from home!”

  “Bless your heart, Cherry. I’m glad to see you, too,” and he kissed her on the forehead.

  Cherry laughed happily. Then the realization that Lex had not come along flashed through her mind. It gave her a little pang.

  “You look tired, Dr. Joe, too tired,” Cherry said concernedly.

  “I’m fine—fine.” But his seamed face and thoughtful eyes betrayed signs of fatigue and worry. He made an effort to brighten up. “Midge instructed me to send you her ’most profound regards.’ Lex did the same, and I have a box of vitamins for you. I also brought you an identification bracelet as a graduation gift, but you may not have it until tomorrow.”

  Having recollected all he was supposed to say, Dr. Joe fell silent. He stood on the station platform rather helplessly, holding his hat.

  Cherry smiled. “Thank you, sir, but come along now! We’ll take a bus back to post, then I’ll get you installed in the guest house, and feed you some dinner.”

  “I want to talk with you, Cherry,” he said seriously. That evening, in a quiet corner of the Officers’ Club, they talked in low tones.

  “I have a friend in England who is in trouble,” Dr. Joe began, in his deep, slow voice. “I can’t make out from the censored letters exactly what the trouble is.” He explained that some years ago, through his university contacts, he had met and come to be friends with an English family. The son-in-law, Mark Grainger, was an engineer and had come to the United States to attend graduate engineering school. With Mark Grainger had come his lovely young wife, Lucia, and Lucia’s mother, Mark’s mother-in-law, widowed Mrs. Eldredge.

  “They were fine people. I liked them, particularly the spirited old lady, though she can be difficult to deal with. It’s she who has been writing to me—about Mark.”

  “What has Mark done?”

  “Let me tell you the whole story first.”

  The English family had returned to Britain when it looked as if their country might be attacked. Mark joined the British Army and was stationed in England. The next thing Dr. Joe heard was that Mark and Lucia had had a baby girl. Then the Germans bombed London. Dr. Joe wrote and wrote, wondering if his friends were still alive. At last came a heartbroken letter from Mrs. Eldredge. Her daughter Lucia had died, when her house was struck by a bomb and she had been buried in the cave-in. The baby girl, then a year or two old, was rescued from the burning ruins.

  “What’s the baby’s name?” Cherry asked breathlessly.

  “I don’t recall. At any rate, she’s not a baby now. She must be about six—six or seven.”

  Cherry found herself thinking not of the adults but of the little girl, who had been so miraculously saved. That child could not remember her mother, had never known anything but the terror and privation of war. Poor little tyke!

  “Do you know where your friends are now, Dr. Joe?”

  “The grandmother and the little girl are living in a country village a couple of hours’ ride north of London. You know, they evacuated the children from the cities, to safer country places. Fortunately Mrs. Eldredge and the youngster were not separated—as so many families were.”

  “And Mark Grainger?”

  Dr. Joe pushed back his lock of gray hair. “That’s the curious thing. That’s what Mrs. Eldredge is suspicious about.”

  “Suspicious—of her own son-in-law? Of that child’s father?”

  Dr. Joe shrugged. “I find it hard to believe anything wrong of Mark Grainger. Besides, Mrs. Eldredge doesn’t dare write about all this in any detail. All I know is that he is no longer in the British Army, and that Mrs. Eldredge is very much disturbed about something.”

  “It is odd,” Cherry agreed. But her thoughts strayed back to the little girl.

  “Now this is what I want you to do, Cherry, if you will. There is an American Army air base north of London, very near the village where Mrs. Eldredge and the little Grainger girl live. It’s likely that you may be stationed there, from what I know. If you are, and if you have the chance, find out what you can. Do what you can to help those people. But—” Dr. Joe hesitated, then looked at her quizzically, “be discreet.”

  “Discreet? Oh, yes, Dr. Joe, I’ll be the soul of discretion,” Cherry promised. “But why…?”

  “Cherry, child,” Dr. Joe got to his feet, “that is all I know. Just promise me you’ll help if you can.”

  Cherry tossed back her black curls and rose too. “As if I’d ever say ’No’ to you! Of course I promise, Dr. Joe.”

  “Now off to sleep! Tomorrow is going to be your big day.”

  Graduation was hurried but inspiring. The new flight nurses filed into the lovely little chapel, knowing this was their great and perilous beginning. The chaplain’s prayer for their safekeeping sank deep into their hearts. Cherry heard the school’s Commandant praise their courage. He reminded them that they were not only nurses, but also soldiers with wings.

  Then, in a simple ceremony, each bright-eyed nurse stood at attention while the Colonel presented diplomas and pinned miniature Flight Surgeon’s wings—of silver, with the superimposed N—on each girl’s slate-blue jacket. Cherry cherished her silver wings as the proudest possession of her entire life. She saw that Ann and Gwen, even the experienced ex-stewardess, Agnes Gray, felt the same solemn happiness. Together, they all renewed their nurse’s pledge, and sang the stirring song of the flight nurses.

  The Commandant said, “I am sorry there is no time for celebrations. You will be assigned at once.”

  Immediately upon leaving the chapel, the two new squadrons were staged. Cherry did not even have time to say good-bye to Dr. Joe, nor to telephone her mother long-distance, nor to hunt up Wade or Bunce. Cherry had expected this. She calmly accepted her sealed orders and as calmly boarded a northbound train, that night.

  The nurses were whisked through New York next day to a pier, and promptly sent up the gangplank of a troop transport. Once a luxury liner, this huge steamer was crowded, deck upon deck, from stem to stern, with young men in Army uniform. Some of the fellows hanging over the deck rail whistled at the nurses. The nurses smiled at them and waved friendly hellos.

  The nurses waited in the ship’s lounge, amid bright electric lights and piles of luggage, for cabin assignments. An officer came up and started reading off their names.

  “Ames, Evans, Gray, Hortas, Jones, Wiegand—you’re Flight Three—Cabin 27 on B deck.”

  Cherry and Ann and Gwen exchanged glances. These other three were to be not only their bunkmates for the voyage, but also their permanent mates in their flight group of six nurses! Cherry was pleased that the one-time stewardess, Agnes Gray, was in her flight. Lieutenant Gray was pleasant, and she was the calm veteran of seventeen hundred hours flying time. Gwen went to find the other two. Elsie Wiegand was tall and fair and looked like a good scout. Margaret Hortas, a small, dark girl, seemed to be perishing of shyness. They had seen one another at Randolph Field, but there had been no time there for real acquaintance.

  Cherry tried to break the ice by saying, “Elsie… Agnes… Margaret … Let’s see. That would make you Aggie and Maggie.”

  Everyone laughed. Lieutenant Wiegand whispered, “Look over there
! Inside that soldier-musician’s French horn. He’s smuggling a dog aboard inside the horn!”

  They made their way through the ship’s narrow corridors and found Cabin 27—a room originally intended for three. Now there were three regular beds, one of them a second-story bunk, and three Army cots in the room. Cherry was relieved to see that not one nurse in her flight made a selfish dash for a bed instead of a cot. They good-humoredly flipped coins to see who would sleep where. Cherry drew a cot, and was perfectly satisfied.

  All six nurses of Flight Three sat down on their respective beds (except Margaret, who was small and refused offers to be hoisted to her second-story bunk) and proceeded to play Truth. Cherry started it off.

  “I’m from a small town in Illinois, went to Spencer Nursing School, and nursed in the Army Nurse Corps in Panama and in the Pacific.”

  “Ditto for me,” said Ann Evans. “I—I have a fiancé in the Army.”

  “Ditto for me,” said Gwen, nodding her red head, “except no fiancé and I come from a Pennsylvania mining town where my father is the town doctor. I guess that’s not so ditto after all!”

  Lieutenant Wiegand’s light eyes danced. “I’m from Minnesota, up north in the wheat country. I trained in St. Paul, and I nearly melted away in the heat when the Army sent me to nurse in Brazil.”

  “Brazil!” they all exclaimed.

  “The Pacific!” the tall fair-haired girl exclaimed right back at them. “Now Aggie and Maggie.”

  The small, dark nurse needed urging. “I’m from California, the San Joachim valley. I trained in the Cadet Nurse Corps—on a scholarship, you know—and I’ve nursed only in Army camps in the United States.” Lieutenant Hortas said hesitantly, “I’ve never been overseas.” She hesitated again, and a gnomish grin spread over her face. “I’m really lots more capable than I look.”

  “You’re probably a pint-sized dynamo,” Lieutenant Agnes Gray said generously. She was a little older than the rest, very poised, very pretty and trim, with neat brown hair and brown eyes. “Aggie” was a New Englander. She had flown on one of the civil transcontinental airlines for several years, before she became an Army nurse, and had been through three major crashes without a scratch. The other girls, though, like Cherry, were new to flying.