Cherry Ames 04 Chief Nurse Read Online Free PDF Page B

morning the nurses were on the road at eight-thirty, “and not eight-thirty-one,” Cherry thought, breathless but triumphant. The medical tents had magically turned into big bundles on the corpsmen’s shoulders.
    Grateful soldiers waved good-by as the little band started off.
    That day and the next were, as Ann said, “More of the same, only more so.” Pushing with slow difficulty all day through the silent, winding jungle, at evening they arrived at the next outpost to rejoin the second section of the unit. They camped overnight, pushed on again in the morning. By midmorning, the whole unit was together again.
    Major Pierce congratulated Cherry. “Your leapfrog plan worked out as neatly as a hole in one,” he laughed.
    Cherry glowed at her unit director’s praise.
    “You know, Major Pierce, we thought this assignment was impossible,” she confessed. “But we’ve done it!”
    “Sure you did it,” Major Pierce said, an amused twinkle on his attractive face. “But if you nurses think 34
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    this was difficult, then, in those classic words, ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet!’”
    Cherry’s excitement mounted at Major Pierce’s prediction, and at approaching so close now to their destination. The final lap of their trek turned out to be the hardest. The last outpost sent them part of the way, over a grassy plain, in two-and-a-half ton Army trucks. Cherry gasped, as she bounced in the truck, “If this is—riding, I’ll—oops!—walk!” But when the terrain grew so muddy and rutted that the trucks could no longer get through, and everyone took to his own two feet, even riding in a broken-down wheelbarrow would have been acceptable.
    Laborious hours under heavy pack and through scratchy foliage brought groans, moans, and the nurses’
    first real complaints. By afternoon, the girls were very tired, and Cherry realized that their spirits drooped along with their bodies.
    “Onward, my sissies!” she called back to the long column she led. “It’s only about a million miles more!”
    “I’ll bet we’re marching all the way to Asia!” someone shouted unhappily.
    From farther back, Mai Lee lifted her quiet voice.
    “If we’re ever anywhere near Asia,” the little Chinese-American girl called, “there’s a certain village where I have work to do.” Cherry and the girls fell silent. They knew Mai Lee meant her family’s peaceful ancestral little town, which the Japs had destroyed.

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    Cherry saw that this turn of the conversation was depressing the girls still more. Footsteps lagged. In desperation, Cherry suggested, “Let’s sing,” and started rather quaveringly herself.
    Vivian, the rather wistful girl Cherry had helped through a misguided romance, loyally joined in. Gwen made the duet a trio. “The rest of us will have to sing, if only to drown you three out,” Ann sighed, poked Marie, and they joined the chorus. Presently other girls sang too. Before long the whole column was singing.
    The steady rhythm, the heartening tunes, gave them a feeling of being warmly together and the remainder of the journey seemed less arduous.
    Finally they came to a beach. At the water’s edge, Cherry and her nurses halted. This was the farthest tip of Janeway Island. They had reached the jumping-off point. Ahead stretched only blue sky and blue water.
    The far-off guns were louder here.
    Colonel Pillsbee herded the big unit into the many Higgins boats, manned by Marines, waiting on the beach. Cherry and most of her nurses seated themselves in close formation in one boat, some of the nurses sat with corpsmen in another. These were square, stubby, wooden boats, with a front wall that dropped down for a gangplank. Cherry declared they all looked like so many bundles of groceries packed tightly in a square grocery box. Sitting down like this, 36
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    their heads came neatly to the top of the boat walls, so they could