The Story of Dr. Wassell Read online

  The doctor replied that nothing was on his mind, and rather sharply bade them all good-night. Then he went into Wilson’s room and told him the truth. “We’re getting out in the morning and we’ll be on the sea this time tomorrow night.”

  “What’s the name of the ship?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Where’re we going to?”

  “Don’t know that either. But we’ll be on our way, and I can tell you now that it’s happened, I’m mighty glad.”

  “Same here…but it hasn’t happened yet. There’s the journey to face. I mean the journey to the ship, and getting on board, and so on. Think all the men can stand it?”

  “Listen,” answered the doctor, “You’ve been just about the worst case of the whole bunch—barring Bailey who died. Do you think you can stand it?”

  Wilson looked astonished. “You really mean that? That I was the worst case?”

  “Sure. I had you measured for a wooden box.”

  “Like hell you did! Well, after that I’ll stand anything if only to spite you.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said the doctor, holding the thermometer to the light. He did not tell Wilson that the mercury was still far too high for safety. But what a word—safety ? Where was there safety, anyhow?

  Soon after dawn he told the men, and from then until ten o’clock, when the hospital train moved out for its eight-hour journey to the coast, the doctor worked as he had probably never worked before in his life. There was no problem now in finding things to be done; the difficulty was to fit them into the time allowed. First the consent of the Dutch hospital staff had to be secured for each separate departure—by no means a formality, for Dr. Voorhuys would have vetoed the trip for any man if he had thought it dangerous to his life during the few days ahead. Further than that Dr. Voorhuys forbade himself to look; and what degree of doubt he permitted himself was another unknown quantity among the many unknown quantities surrounding them all. He certainly did hesitate over Wilson, fiddling about with his burned skin until Wilson said: “Since you’ve got such a lot of time to spare, Doctor, did you ever hear the story about the…”

  Dr. Voorhuys had no time to spare, and as that kind of story always embarrassed him, he nodded perfunctorily and passed on.

  When the men left in ambulances for the railway station the entire hospital staff stood round and waved. Before that there had been a few tearful farewells between the men and individual nurses, as if at such a moment many feelings were revealed that till then had been unsuspected by either party. Three Martini said good-bye to everyone, but lingered afterwards at the door of the ambulance where Renny was. She carried some flowers which she laid on his stretcher at the last moment, just before the doors were closed. She did not weep, or say anything but the one word she had learned especially for him—“good-bye.”

  Dr. Voorhuys also said good-bye to everyone, wishing them luck and bon voyage ; whereupon the doctor from Arkansas replied that never, never would any of them forget the kindness of the Dutch and Javanese. The fact that he meant it so sincerely brought a tremor into his voice.

  Thus the forty-one men from the Marblehead and the Houston began the journey on that February day, and within twenty-four hours nine of them were back at the hospital.

  It happened this way. When the hospital train reached Tjilatjap the men’s nerves were tense and their physical condition worse after the journey. The doctor had been marvelously busy during the hours of slow travel; he had watched over his charges incessantly, rushing out at every stop to buy them food and drink, and passing along the train every few minutes to see how each man was getting on. But there was nothing he could do about the heat as the railway dropped down towards the coastal plain; nor could he do much to calm the men’s excitement when, at one station, the train was held up for over an hour because of an air-raid alert. It was not that they feared the bombs, but they were afraid the delay would mean that the ship would sail without them. Now that they were actually on their way to the coast, they could not think of anything else but getting on board the ship. It was for this that they had nerved themselves for discomforts, so that they welcomed the jolting of the cars that cost them pain, and stirred restlessly whenever the train eased them to a standstill.

  “Now don’t go grousing all over the place. Try to make ‘em think you’re all right,” the doctor kept saying, as if with some premonition of trouble ahead. He said it for perhaps the fiftieth time as the train reached the terminus.

  Some of the men could walk without assistance under favorable conditions; but favorable conditions were not to be had at Tjilatjap, and the doctor soon realized it. To begin with, both railway station and town were swarming with refugees evacuated from the interior; Dutch, American, and British soldiers; and local officials trying to improvise some sort of order amidst conditions which were fast becoming chaotic. There was no panic, but much confusion, and a certain wildness in the behavior of some who were asked too many questions by too many people at once. Beyond the town itself lay the small harbor, glassy under a heat haze; the whole outfit terribly inadequate for the job now pending. So many ships were waiting to sail at nightfall that one might have been reassured—until one saw the press of human movement seeping slowly seawards through the streets of the town.

  The doctor knew how tired and anxious his men were, how unaccustomed to the heat, and how likely to be dispirited by the general atmosphere of the scene. He knew that his first task must be to find out exactly where the ship was that would take them away, and to make his arrival known to whoever it was who had charge of the embarkation. Then, when all had been arranged in advance so that there could be no further hitches, the men could be taken aboard as quickly as possible and made comfortable with the sedatives they would need. In the meantime, while he did all these preliminary things, the men must rest somewhere and try to conserve their strength for the ordeal.

  There was a hotel opposite the station, and he assembled them there, on a sort of terrace, where they could stay together and keep reasonably cool and out of other people’s way. The hotel people were very obliging, but they too were under a strain, not knowing what would soon happen to them. The doctor talked them into providing extra chairs and cold drinks; they could not supply food, because they had none, but he had brought some canned food from the hospital and left it for the men to share.

  All this took time, and meanwhile the town kept filling up as if all Java were draining its population southward into this one narrow bottleneck. The sun blazed down the sky towards the end of the afternoon, and wafts of hot air fanned against weary, preoccupied faces.

  On his way to the dock the doctor heard that a Jap reconnaissance plane had already been over, taking photographs (Kodak Joe, they called it); which, after the experience of Surabaya, could only mean that Tjilatjap was high on the list of places soon, perhaps immediately, to be bombed. The thought increased his pace as he hurried through the crowds; it even helped him to ignore the heat and humidity.

  On the waterfront he had a stroke of luck; he found the Navy headquarters easily, and—even more important—found a man in charge who, whether because he was utterly worn-out or temperamentally acquiescent or from some other reason, gave none of the trouble the doctor had half anticipated. “Sure…Forty-one?…You have the list?…Thanks. All right, I’ll okay that…You can sail in a few hours…Get your men here right away…”

  The doctor was immensely relieved, and when, almost as an afterthought, the question came: “I suppose they’re all able to help themselves?”—he answered expansively: “Oh yes, naturally.” It was true of most of them, at any rate, and for the few others there was a point he might have mentioned but did not care to—that it was his job to help those who could not help themselves.

  He was in mounting spirits as he went back to the hotel. The men also, when he told them to get ready at once, shared his mood and began to bustle about, collecting their small possessions together. Several were able to walk the short dist
ance to the dock; others climbed into a truck which he persuaded the hotel people to lend; there were ambulances to take the stretcher cases. He said a few words to each of the men, chiefly relative to their own injuries and the best way to adjust themselves during the difficult time that lay ahead. “Once we’re on board I’ll find you places to sleep, and then I’ll give you a shot of something…so don’t worry. Keep your chin up and if you feel bad, tell me , but don’t tell anyone else.”

  He hoped he could get the men on board without any further official inspection or red-tape delay. His dislike of red tape rose now to a point where he feared it more than a Jap air raid; and the reason (which he did not analyze) was that often in life the short cuts of his own individual judgment had turned out not so well, so that in blaming red tape he was choosing an enemy more comforting to his pride.

  The crowds on the dock were greater now, but at last he got his men near to the ships, the largest and likeliest-looking of which was called the Breskens ; then he helped them down from the trucks and ambulances. To his dismay there was no shade anywhere, and even a moment in the broiling sun must be distressing for the men lying on their backs on the stretchers. Then suddenly, while he was making sure that no one was missing, he found that one person was missing—McGuffey, of course. That sent him into a sharp temper, the sharpest he had known since—well, since before he joined the Navy. “I’m not going back for him,” he shouted. “If he finds us here, okay…if not…That boy’s been nothing but trouble all the time, and to choose a day like this for…I suppose he sloped off from the hotel when you weren’t looking?”

  “We were looking,” Edmunds said. “But she was good - looking.”

  The doctor did not smile. He could almost understand why Sun never smiled; there was nothing to smile at in a world where wounded men had to be embarked from crowded docks with the possibility of bombs falling at any moment. He told the men sharply to wait where they were while he arranged for them to go on board, and as he pushed his way through the crowd he tried to push also the thought of McGuffey from his mind. Whatever happened to him, that boy deserved it.

  The Breskens was already packed with agitated humanity. All crowds on all steamers are always agitated till a journey begins, but on the Breskens there was a note of extra confusion, a sort of fourth- dimensional tension that matched the third and skyward direction to which so many eyes were turned. The doctor could not even get aboard himself, because a Dutch officer standing at the gangway politely but firmly (and in Dutch) demanded some permit he didn’t possess, and when he produced the Navy document waved it gently aside. The doctor could be persuasive, but only in English, and all that the Dutch officer could reply in English was “You talk to the captain, please.” Apparently the captain was to be found ashore, in a vaguely indicated building several hundred yards beyond the edge of the crowd. The more the doctor argued and waved his document, the more firmly and politely the Dutch officer insisted that he should talk to the captain; so presently, with a shrug, the doctor set off on this troublesome quest, and in pushing through the crowd collided with a middle-aged high-ranking officer of the American Navy who asked him where the devil he thought he was going. The doctor, as is unusual in such encounters, informed him, whereupon the officer exclaimed: “Good God, sir, I wish you luck! There’s a line of them trying to see him!”

  The doctor then explained he had forty-one wounded sailors in his charge and wished to get them on board. “They’re from the Marblehead , sir—they’ve been at a hospital inland, and I’ve brought them here for evacuation.” He added: “Acting on Navy instructions.”

  “Instructions? …Wait a minute—weren’t you the fellow I telephoned last night?…I thought I recognized that accent. Tennessee, isn’t it?”

  “No, sir, Arkansas.”

  “And so what? All right, get ‘em on board.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, but the Dutch officer doesn’t understand this paper—he said I must see the captain about it—but perhaps if you could explain—”

  “Sure, I’ll explain…Where are your men, anyway?”

  It was too bad that the Navy officer had at that moment caught sight of the group waiting near by, too bad that there was nothing for the doctor to do but point confirmingly. “Good God, sir!” exclaimed the Navy officer again, so loudly that the men heard him and turned their heads. Sensing that something was wrong, they valiantly remembered the doctor’s advice to look as well as they could, but there was something almost more pathetic in that effort than if they had not made any. And the men on the stretchers, lying under the sun, looked most pathetic of all.

  The officer swung his glance back to the doctor, and the glance stiffened into a gaze and the gaze into a glare. “What the devil have you been up to? I said to bring only those who could stand a rough passage—”

  The doctor’s voice was very calm. “These men can stand a rough passage, sir.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “These men, after what they’ve gone through, sir, can stand anything.”

  “But the stretcher cases—don’t you realize the ship may be torpedoed—what sort of chance would they have?”

  “They’ll take that chance, sir, whatever it is.”

  “They’ll do nothing of the kind, and I’ve no time to argue. I shall have argument enough with the captain to make him take any of these men…and the stretcher cases are simply out of the question. Good God, sir, you might have known that!”

  “But—what’ll I do with them?”

  “Get ‘em back where they came from, and that’s an order!”

  The doctor stood his ground in sheer incredulousness. “You mean I’m to take these eight men back to a hospital hundreds of miles away?”

  “Yes, and be thankful it is that far—don’t you know an air raid’s expected here any time?” Something in the doctor’s expression made the other add, less brusquely: “I’ll take your walking cases on board now—give me the list of names. And you be off as quick as you can with these others, for God’s sake.”

  The doctor had no time to say good-bye to the men who were leaving, but some of them waved to him and he waved back. As for the eight men on the stretchers, it would not have been easy for him to pass on the bad news to them, so he was rather glad that they must have overheard most of the conversation. The thought that he had suffered humiliation in being rebuked in front of them by a superior officer did not even occur to him, and even if it had, it would have seemed of very small account just then. All he said was: “Well, boys, I guess you heard what’s happened. I feel just as sick about it as any of you, but an order’s an order…We’d better get going.”

  Fortunately the ambulances had not left the dock, so that within an hour he had the men back at the railway station. There, however, he had no similar luck with the hospital train, for it had already left for some unknown destination. But it was true enough that there was nothing for it but to return to the hospital somehow. Even apart from the risk of an air raid, there was no place in Tjilatjap that could take the men, and probably not even a roof under which he could find sleeping room for them. Eventually he persuaded the railway authorities to hitch a box car to a train that was about to leave for the interior; it was far from comfortable, but at least the men could stay on their stretchers without being disturbed. And the journey, being by night, would at least be fairly cool.

  One thing he hardly noticed till his eyes grew used to the dim light in the box car after the train began to move, and that was the return of McGuffey, slightly the worse for wear.

  It was a quiet, sad journey back. There was very little talking. The men did not want to talk at all, except McGuffey, and the doctor did not want to talk to him. The men were depressed and disappointed, and to be frank, he did not blame them. He did not know quite what else he could have done, or how a smarter man might have handled the entire situation better; but he had so often had this kind of mystification in life that he could no longer think of it as much of an e
xcuse. The only cheerful thought was that at least the thirty-two walking cases had had some luck.

  He also thought that McGuffey had let him down, but the matter seemed too unimportant to argue about at such a moment. When, however, the train stopped at a junction station for a quarter-hour wait, he told the boy sharply to fetch the men bottles of beer while he went to the telephone. “And don’t drink any yourself. You’ve had enough already, I can see.”

  He knew he must somehow telephone the hospital to be prepared to receive the men; he had tried to get through from Tjilatjap, but without success.

  He managed it now, but the conversation was not easy. He detected a note of quizzical surprise in the reply of Dr. Voorhuys after a long pause that of course, of course they would have everything ready.

  Perhaps the anonymity of the telephone released a little of the doctor’s private emotion, for he added, in not quite his usual voice: “And please, Dr. Voorhuys, if you could—if you could tell the nurses also—to make the men feel as if you were all glad to have them back.”

  He was speaking too closely from the heart to think of any aspersion that might be implied by such an appeal; certainly none was intended. There was another long silence before an answer came. Then Dr. Voorhuys said, and hung up immediately afterwards: “But we are glad. We shall not have to pretend anything.”

  The doctor went back to the train and found the men enjoying their beer as little as beer was ever enjoyed. He could understand that, and made no comment. Nor did the men thank him for the beer.