By midnight the United States Army was working one of its accustomed
miracles.
It involved a number of things, starting with a phone call at noon from
the White House to Fort Lowder, New Jersey. A major general commanding
a division in training there said to the phone call, "Yes sir," and
after he hung up, to his one-star assistant commander, "Excellent
training for the 432nd, Jim. Get it done." The brigadier made some
calls and then he and the C.G. finished their lunch serenely. The calls
whipped Fort Lowder to a froth of activity that looked senseless at
first; an engineer officer took off like a bat out of hell in one of
the division's light planes and soared over the flood valley 175 miles
away, swooped low over promising field after field, and returned.
Leaves were canceled for the division's quartermaster battalion of
two-and-a-half-ton, six-by-six trucks. Ordnance mechanics of the
division's heavy maintenance company swarmed like maggots around a
dozen red-lined vehicles under orders to get them rolling at any cost.
Warehouses were skillfully looted of parts by ordnance sergeants while
ordnance lieutenants engaged guards in casual conversations that ended
when they got the high sign that all was well. And the cause of all
the activity, the 432nd field-hospital battalion, which had almost
forgotten that it _was_ a field-hospital battalion, got the pitch by
early afternoon. Long broken up into their training-camp formation,
scattered through dispensaries and the base hospital, they were
abruptly reminded of their battle mission by an announcement over the
base PA system by the division surgeon, their commander.
Wonderingly, the six hundred officers and men formed on the parade
ground, many still in hospital whites. They were young M.D. first
lieutenants grinding out their drafted service wearily. They were
male R.N.'s with their big perennial bitch that they were lucky to
get a rocker while a woman of equal training automatically got a gold
bar. They were corporals who knew one end of a hypodermic needle from
another, pharmacists who ached to inventory their own stock of trusses,
penicillin, candy bars, yo-yo's and bulk vanilla ice cream in their own
corner stores again, privates and recruits who could swing a sledge or
mop a corridor. They were a handful of majors and lieutenant colonels
who were honest-to-God career military surgeons passionately interested
in the problems and possibilities of their work. On the parade ground
the division surgeon reminded them of something. It was that they were
trained to move into a given bare field and turn it, in two hours, into
a functioning, five-hundred-bed hospital.
They dispersed to almost-forgotten warehouses where they broke out
field medical chests of instruments and medicine. They found again
the long coiled snakes of green treated canvas, tons of it, the 500
litters, and the thousand tent pegs, big and small, and the jointed
tent poles and the miles of rope, each piece in its place, and the
sledges to drive the pegs, and the Coleman lanterns to hang on the
poles. The trucks of the quartermaster battalion backed up and the tiny
handful of field-grade officers buzzed everywhere, yelling and cajoling
and consulting loading lists, and trucks were unloaded and reloaded a
dozen times in some cases to get the right load in its right place in
the line of convoy.
The engineers had finished an overlay strip map of the route by then,
and mimeographs began to spin out copies for the quartermaster drivers.
An MP platoon moved out in a truck and one man was dropped at each
tricky intersection to wave the convoy through. Each MP had a couple of
K-rations with him, because he'd be busy long into the night; as the
convoy went past the rearmost men they'd be picked up in the truck and
leap-frogged ahead of the foremost men to the next tricky intersections.
The water trucks went as a matter of course, but it took a flash of
genius for somebody to realize that the area would be short of gas, and
this got the infantry into it. A puzzled rifle company found itself
yanked off the firing range and assigned to the mysterious chore of
filling five-gallon jerry cans with gas from the pumps of the division
motor pool and stacking them solid in three six-by-sixes.
It took a flash of West Point tradition for the division band to be
massed at the camp gate when the 432nd rolled off shortly before
sunset. The division commander was there; the band oompahed and
he impassively took the salute from the startled doctors in the
command cars. A few of the enlisted men of the battalion rolling past
remembered vaguely about crossing the arms and sitting at attention.
There wasn't a man there who was not, though they'd hoot at the word,
inspired by the ancient tradition of the field music and the ancient
greeting they were exchanging with the tough old pro who was sending
them on their way.
They rolled for six hours, until their tailbones were bruised and
their bladders ready to burst, along highway and detour and miserable
blacktop. It was dark soon, but the sound of some of the bridges they
rumbled over scared them silly. K-rations and canteen water staved off
the boredom, and so did banter when they crept through the towns.
They arrived eventually at the field the engineer officer had spotted
from his division plane and stiffly went about turning the field into a
five-hundred-bed hospital. It took cursing and coaxing, and five men,
utterly out of condition, doubled up clutching at brand-new hernias
while they manhandled the tons of canvas and pegs and poles. Another
was doping off in the dark and a truck backed over him, killing him.
The casualty rate for the operation was one per cent, which was not bad.
While the tents rose in the headlights' glare the officers in their
jeeps and command cars were spreading out to the stricken communities.
One of them found Hebertown, two miles away.
* * * * *
The young lieutenant, for a few hours not wearily grinding through
his period of drafted service, said to Chief Brayer, "We're prepared
to take over your entire medical load. Who's in charge on the medical
side?"
The police chief said to one of his men wearily, "Get Dr. Soames. Good
news for him."
But Soames had seen the jeep and medics in it. He burst in and roared:
"Tench-_hut_!" Automatically the lieutenant popped to. "Suck in
that gut!" Soames snarled, and then broke into relieved, hysterical
laughter. "My God, you looked funny as hell," he wheezed at the
officer. "Haven't had so much fun since we bribed the cooks to serve
the division surgeon fricassee of haemoangioma!"
The lieutenant looked a little green and asked stiffly, "How many cases
have you, doctor?"
"Ninety-five, shavetail. Take 'em away. We're all beat to our socks
here. The town medics, the emergency people they flew in--we're beat."
Dr. Soames sagged into a chair and seemed to lose interest.
The lieutenant went outside to his jeep and told the signal corps man
with the SCR 6300: "Ambulance-fitted trucks for ninety-five cases. I'll
check 'em over and get them classified."
* * * * *
Mrs. Goudeket and Polly Chesbro had, semi-automatically, fallen into
the routine of the improvised hospital. For hours they had been doling
out rationed water, mopping brows, jumping to the "Here-you" of the
handful of nurses and doctors, cleaning up vomit and blood, dumping
and washing ducks and bedpans. Mrs. Goudeket first saw the brisk new
lieutenant talking crisply to an exhausted nurse.
"That one," she said. "He isn't tired."
Polly said wanly, "That's nice." She wasn't listening, particularly.
She'd come to the hospital in the first place to keep an eye on the
burgess, but he was off in an upper room, what they humorously called
the "quiet" ward because there was, in fact, fractionally less noise
and confusion there than on the lower level. She hadn't seen him for
hours.
Mrs. Goudeket insisted, "Look, darling. There's another one. Maybe
another ambulance came in?"
"That's nice," said Polly, escaping. They were moving two of the
patients again, and it was her sector of the floor. The patients were
carried off in litters--new green ones, Polly noticed wearily; maybe
there was another ambulance in. Strip the cots, bundle the bedding,
scrounge through the stacks of afghans and torn sheets and quilted
comforters for something to make a new bed with, turn down the covers
and help the new patient in.
But there wasn't any new patient, not for either of the beds.
Two pink-faced kids in clean green fatigues brushed by her and set a
litter down next to the bed with the eleven-year-old boy in it. Polly
started to warn them about his probable fractured ribs; he had been
under most of a frame dwelling for eight hours before he was found. But
they seemed to know what they were doing; they rolled him gently to one
side, slipped the litter under, rolled him gently back.
She watched them carrying him away. Funny. A lot of the patients were
going away, carried by these frighteningly expert, incredibly fresh new
people.
It had to be true. Help had arrived--help in quantities, enough to meet
the need.
Polly stood up straight. "That's nice," she said dizzily, and pitched
headfirst across the bed she was stripping down.
* * * * *
Dick McCue, young and healthy and very tired after toting the burgess
in, had slept twelve hours, awakening in darkness in the school
gymnasium. A child was crying on one of the other litters and a weary
mother was trying to soothe it. McCue was enormously hungry; his last
"meal" had been a cup of syrupy coffee before he staggered into the
improvised dormitory and passed out; his last before that had been
breakfast on cheese crackers in the gas station. His stomach was
actively growling.
He headed for a dim door, stumbling over litters and bundles of
personal possessions; he was cursed a couple of times.
The dark corridor outside was lighted at its end, and he emerged into
the school lobby full of men with homemade armbands. From somewhere
came a tantalizing smell of coffee.
He asked one of the brassarded men. "Just coffee here," the man said.
"Nearest food's the diner up the hill. Can't miss it; it's lit."
And the diner did stand out like a bonfire by virtue of one pressure
lamp. He found a cop there to keep order and a chipper waitress who
looked at him, grinned and set out a bowl of breakfast food, crunched
open a can of condensed milk with the corner of a cleaver and poured
the whole can into the bowl. "Sugar," she said, and shoved the
dispenser at him.
"Thanks." He poured sugar on and began to spoon down the cloying
mixture as fast as he could.
"Another?" the waitress asked when he was done.
He patted his stomach experimentally. "I guess not," he said. "You have
any coffee?"
"Coming up." She slapped a mugful at him and he sipped it down.
"Better," he said. "How much?"
"For free," she said. She assumed a Greek accent. "Mr. Padopolous says,
America's so good to him this is his chance to say thank you."
"Well, thank Mr. Padopolous for me when he gets back."
He walked out into the dark and bummed a cigarette from the cop. After
a deep drag he told him, "I'm a transient. In town by accident."
"You're lucky," the cop said sourly. "I live here."
"Yeah. Well--I mean, is there anything I can do?"
The cop shrugged. "Not much. Help's getting here, lots of it. The army
rolled in a hospital and the governor sent a battalion of National
Guards. One of them's supposed to show up here and relieve me so I
can get some sleep." He yawned tremendously and sat down on the diner
steps. "My advice to you, get some sleep and in the morning they'll
have something fixed up for you. Maybe those army trucks'll get you
where you want to go."
Dick said, "Thanks," and walked off. Well, he'd missed it. Slept right
through it.
The cop called after him, "Hey, kid. Not toward River Street. The Guard
sent a sound truck around. Unsafe buildings, wide-open warehouses and
stores. They're patrolling with guns. Got it?"
"Got it," said the too-late hero. "Thanks." He turned right and walked
on. He'd be able to find the school again; it was the only place in
town, maybe the only place for miles, with _two_ lights in front, one
shining through the door and the other hung to a spike in a phone pole
outside where the motor-pool man guarded a weird collection of vehicles.
He rambled down one dark street cursing inwardly. He was sure the big,
dynamic Mickey Groff hadn't slept through it, had seized the chance for
leadership and heroism.
Quite suddenly his chance arrived and he almost walked right past it.
Two writhing figures in a doorway, a woman and a man in a silent,
deadly struggle. He had one arm around her head and his paw over her
mouth; her dress was torn down the front.
It flashed through his head. He was about to Defend the Virtue of
a Maiden against the assault of a Lust-Maddened, Drink-Crazed Human
Beast. Chivalry stuff.
He grabbed the man's shoulder and heaved, but his heart wasn't in it.
A fist flailed from nowhere and smashed him high on the right
cheek, hard enough to make an icy area of numbness for a moment and
then--hell's own pain. From that moment his heart was in it. While the
woman, shoved aside, lay on the ground panting, he waded into the man.
After the first few blows it was no longer a fight but first-degree
assault. He battered the man to the ground and stood over him grimly,
his chest heaving. "You want any more?" he croaked.