Emma’s flight took off first, and they were right behind her. Pru saw them take off in the opposite direction. The Luftwaffe had been busy the night before. It was an ugly thought, but she hoped that their own boys had done just as much damage in Germany that night. She was so tired of the war. They all were.
The heavy C-47 took off in a velvet sky filled with stars. They would land at their destination before the dawn, and bring the boys back to the base, restock supplies, and take off again. They would spend the day ferrying broken bodies and bleeding men back with them, twenty-four of them on every flight, a never-ending stream of wounded after four and a half years of war. The cities were in rubble. Almost every family had lost a son, or several, and children had lost parents. Prudence sat in her jump seat looking at the night sky. It looked so peaceful. It was hard to believe that they kept killing people every day.
“Beautiful up here, isn’t it?” Ed said softly, sitting just behind her, and he handed her an apple. She nodded in answer and took a bite. “We’ll miss this one day.”
“No, we won’t. How can you say that?” She turned to look at him.
“It gives our lives purpose, and meaning. We know why we’re here. We have a mission, and we fulfill it many times. We have a chance to win again every day, and save lives.”
“And when we don’t, it hurts like hell.” She thought of Emma the night before, and the sadness in her eyes over the boy they had lost. She didn’t know him, they never did. It didn’t matter. The boy’s life was precious. They all were. Pru thought sometimes that she’d never want children after this. She had already lost too many. She didn’t know how their parents, or the parents who had lost little children in the bombings in London, survived it. She couldn’t have borne it, and never wanted to be this brave again. She longed for peacetime. She had grown up with war. It had gone on for too long. The plane took a sharp turn then, and they dropped altitude sharply. She looked at Reggie, the pilot. He was watching the sky intently.
“I saw something.” A moment later they saw a fighter plane heading toward a target, with two more behind it, and they dropped lower. No one spoke as Reggie maneuvered, waiting for the fighter planes to come after them and attack. They saw the sky light up when the bombs hit the ground in the distance. Death had come early in the day to the people below them. They took another sharp turn and stayed well below the fighter planes that kept heading into the distance. They didn’t bother to come after the big cargo plane. They had completed their mission and headed back to Germany. Prudence and her crew had been lucky this time. The fighter planes could have come after them, but they didn’t. Pru and Ed and the pilot watched the fires grow beneath them as the bombs did their damage, and they headed toward their mission to pick up twenty-four men who might get lucky that day. Some lived and some died, some would be saved, and some couldn’t be. It was all in a day’s work for Pru and the men she flew with.
“Ten minutes,” the pilot said a little while later. The copilot took out a map and confirmed that they were almost at their destination, while Pru and Ed, and Charlie, the other corpsman, got everything set for their pickup. Her heart was pounding as they got ready to land and start another day. The sky was slowly turning purple with pink streaks starting across it. The pilot brought down the landing gear as they descended, and Ed smiled at Pru.
“It’ll be a good day,” he predicted, and as they touched down on an old rutted runway, with the loaded litters lying on the grass beside it, she hoped he was right.
Chapter 9
Pru’s and Emma’s last flights came in right behind each other that night. They’d been flying missions for fourteen hours, and were both more tired than they were willing to admit. Ground crews got the wounded to where the transports could land, and the planes either came back for another load of wounded or moved on to another destination. It was a continuing process. They had changed pilots once several hours before, but the medical crew remained the same until their day’s work was done. Lifting the litters and sometimes carrying the men, moving them, dealing with their severe injuries was backbreaking work and emotionally draining. Whenever possible, they talked to the wounded to reassure them and keep them alive. Some were unconscious, or heavily drugged, but many were awake, frightened, and in pain. It required constant concentration and rapid decisions that could cost or save their lives. There were no hard-and-fast rules. Pru and her crew, and the others, were willing to try anything to save the boys.
When they went into particularly dangerous areas, they were assigned fighter planes to go with them and protect them. But often they flew alone. They were a legitimate target for the enemy since the C-47s bore no red cross to indicate their medical mission. Since they carried both cargo and men, they were fair game for the enemy. There were no polite rules in this war, no gentlemen’s agreements or humanity or compassion. Hitler’s armies and his allies had one primary goal: to destroy them and in addition, to sink morale.
When they left the airstrip after a halfway decent day, Pru walked along next to Emma with a tired smile. Neither of them had lost a patient, so far, which made it a successful day for them. It was all they cared about.
Ed had manually held an eighteen-year-old soldier’s entrails in place for one of their flights that day and saved his life, while talking to him about Ireland when he was a boy, just to keep the soldier’s mind on something else. The ambulance drivers and medics took over once they landed back at Down Ampney, their home base. With the last man off both their flights, Emma and Pru were free for the night, until the next day when it would all begin again. They had to have tremendous fortitude to face it every day, but that was what they were here for. And neither of them, nor their fellow flight nurses, would have wanted any other job. This was why they had enlisted, not to sit at a desk or walk down a hospital corridor. They had come for the rough work, and there was plenty of it.
“Are you up to stopping in to see the Americans I met last night?” Pru suggested. Emma hesitated and then nodded. She was bone-tired but wanted to be a good sport. She didn’t know where Pru got her energy from. She was game to go anytime, even after a fourteen-hour day with critically ill men depending on her. If anything, it seemed to energize her and give her superhuman strength, except when they lost one, and then the bottom fell out of her world. It was true for all of them. They took the losses very personally. They remembered all the boys they lost, and always met afterwards to discuss whether the situation could have been handled differently, for a better result next time.
“Yeah, why not?” Emma said, matching Pru’s long strides with her shorter ones. “They looked nice enough.”
“It’s a good thing the Americans are sending us their nurses,” Pru commented, and Emma bristled.
“We’re just as well trained as they are,” she said, and Prudence smiled.