* * *
—
It had been two months since Pru’s brother had been killed in August, and she wanted to go back to Yorkshire to see her parents, but hadn’t had a day off since. She knew Max hadn’t had leave since then either. He hadn’t had time to visit her. They all worked constantly. Pru wrote to her mother regularly, and her mother’s letters sounded valiant, but there was an undercurrent of sadness now beneath the surface of the brave words.
Pru had just mailed her a letter the day before she took off on a flight to pick up men in the Argonne Forest, from a field near the American 12th Evacuation Hospital. Ed was supposed to fly with her, but Lizzie had somehow gotten a day off, and he put in a request for a day off so he could be with her. He apologized to Pru the night before. She said she didn’t mind.
“Someone should have some fun around here.” She hadn’t in a long time. She was still sad about her brother but tried not to let it show. Everyone had their losses to deal with and her stock-in-trade was her cheerful, positive demeanor. She thought it was important for a nurse. And she didn’t begrudge Ed the time off. He and Lizzie were so much in love that it made everyone around them happy to see it, and she told him to have fun and forget their missions for a day.
Reggie got the flight off smoothly the next morning despite some fog low to the ground. Autumn weather had set in, but they rose through the clouds into blue skies above. As soon as they did, they saw two fighter planes head toward them. Reggie tried to outrun them. They hadn’t picked up their wounded yet, and Reggie played tag in and out of the cloud cover with the planes. He thought he had outflown them when a third one appeared just above and opened fire. The others flew close, and they could see Reggie in the pilot seat when they too opened fire on them. The three fighter planes shot through their fuselage and peppered the plane with hits. The C-47 plummeted with a trail of smoke behind it, and hit the ground with a massive explosion from a full tank of fuel. The copilot had radioed back to the base while they were under attack, before they killed him. Reggie was already dead, and one of the corpsmen had taken a direct hit, and he said the nurse in charge was down too. He went off the airwaves after that.
A reconnaissance team went out looking for the wreckage later that day and saw where it had gone down. There was a blackened crater where the plane had exploded close to the location the copilot had given them. There was some debris in the area, and nothing else left. The crew of five had died when the plane crashed, and some before. There had been no other passengers, no wounded aboard.
The crew of the reconnaissance plane was silent on the way back. The successful Luftwaffe kill was confirmed when they reached the base, and the names of those who had died were reported to the commanding officer and the War Office. Their names were listed on a bulletin board in the mess hall, and in the nurses’ dormitory. Word of mouth spread like wildfire, as it always did. Emma sat in her room that night, crying, surrounded by her friends. It was the first of their air evac transport planes that had been shot down in months. Morale plummeted when that happened. Everyone in the squadron had known Pru and loved her.
Emma could only imagine how her parents felt, having lost a son only two months before. And Max had lost both his siblings now. She sobbed in the arms of her fellow nurses. Her American counterparts had come to love Pru as much as she did.
“She was the only person of her kind who never cared that I grew up in the East End. She didn’t have a snobbish bone in her body,” Emma said, crying. “All she had was that huge heart of hers.” The matron on their floor asked Emma to pack Pru’s things to send home to her family. Emma was wracked by sobs when she did, and in the bottom drawer of the dresser Pru had used, she found a dog-eared red leather journal that she had seen Pru write in occasionally, though not very often. She never had time. Emma put it aside and decided to read it. She would send it to Pru’s family after she did. They wouldn’t miss it. They didn’t know it existed. And when she sat down with it that night, a handful of photographs fell out, all of Emma and their other friends at various times, from fun moments they had shared, birthday parties and dinners out, plus a photograph of Ed and one of Reggie in the cockpit. He was gone now too. She thought the journal might mean more to Max, since it was mostly about her time in the air force, and some of it might make him laugh. Emma felt sorry for him too, but had never met him or Pru’s parents, so she felt awkward just sending it to him.
Ed was as devastated as Emma, even more so because he was guilt-ridden for having taken the day off. The same thing had happened when their crew’s plane lost an engine and Pru and Emma were MIA for eight days. But this time the entire crew had died, and he hadn’t, and he couldn’t forgive himself. He sobbed in Lizzie’s arms when he found out, and he got blind drunk that night. Why hadn’t he died with her? Why had he been spared? The questions kept going around in his mind, and Emma was the first to absolve him.
“We don’t decide these things,” Emma said, trying to get through to him in the abyss of guilt where he was drowning. “They happen. We’re in the wrong place, or the right one, on any given day. God decides. We don’t.”
“She was twenty-five years old. She didn’t deserve to die. She was the best person I knew, always kind to everyone, always generous, always forgiving. Why Pru?” he sobbed.
“It was her destiny. It could be you or me tomorrow. None of us knows.” Her brother, Phillip, had been twenty-four.
“It should have been me instead of her,” he said angrily.
“And what good would that do? What about Lizzie? She needs you too. How would she feel now if you’d been on that plane? She’s already lost a brother, she doesn’t need to lose you too.” He nodded, hearing reason finally. But Pru’s parents had lost two children now. It made Emma think of the journal again. She wanted to finish reading it and send it to them. She read more of it that night and fell asleep with it in her hand. There were several entries in it about Emma that made her laugh and cry. Pru talked about how much fun they had, what a terrific girl Emma was and how much she liked her. The entries touched her and, in some ways, made Pru’s death seem even worse. She talked about how much she loved her family too. Emma realized again how much the journal would mean to them as soon as she finished reading it. She meant to send it as soon as she could, but she was so tired, she fell asleep at night with it in her hand, and never seemed to get through it.
The clothes and personal possessions she had boxed up for Pru’s family had been sent to them by the RAF, but Emma still had the journal she knew they should have too.
* * *
—
Everyone kept saying that the war would end soon, that the Allies were turning it around. Having the Americans on the ground since the invasion of Normandy in June was helpful. Paris had been liberated, and the Germans had lost some ground around Europe, but not enough, and the Luftwaffe was relentless. The Germans still hadn’t surrendered.