“No, I went to the hospital to check on one of our boys. We almost lost him on the way back.”
“I lost one today,” Emma said sadly, wide-awake now, when she thought of it. “We tried everything. Terrible chest wound. He died halfway back. We should have taken off sooner, but we didn’t have a full load yet, and they took too long to bring the others on.”
“You can’t guess at that, Em. He might have died anyway. I lost one like that last month. It happens.”
“He was twenty years old, just a kid.”
“They’re all kids. There are no old men on the battlefields. They’re all boys, who should never have to be there.” Emma nodded and didn’t speak for a minute.
“A load of Americans arrived today. I saw them when I came in. They talk and laugh a lot,” Emma commented, and Pru smiled.
“That’ll liven the place up. I met a few of them on my way in. They were nice.” The Australians were usually jolly too, and good fun.
“I guess so.” Emma was slower to warm up to people than Pru was, and she was always a little suspicious of new faces in their midst.
“We should try to get to meet them. We’ll be flying with them soon,” Pru commented.
“I hope they’re good,” Emma said seriously.
“I’m sure they will be. And in the end, we all figure it out as we go.” Emma nodded agreement and closed her eyes again. “Get some sleep. You look knackered,” Pru told her.
“I am. I have to be up at three-thirty. We fly at four tomorrow.”
“Me too.”
“Wake me, if I don’t get up,” Emma said, as she turned on her side, and was already half asleep again.
“Night, Em. Sleep tight,” Pru whispered and closed her eyes, trying to forget the images of the day. She didn’t know how she’d survive it sometimes, if it weren’t for her friends, like Emma and Ed. They gave each other the strength to do it all again every day. She wondered if any of the Americans who had arrived would turn out to be good friends too. Time would tell.
* * *
—
The alarm Emma had set the night before went off at three-thirty, which gave them both just enough time to roll out of bed and into their flight clothes, head down the hall to brush their teeth, wash their faces, and comb their hair, and then run down the stairs, and grab a cup of coffee, rush out to a car and head to the tarmac less than a mile away. Or if there was no car, they ran there. They had the time calculated down to the last second, without a minute to spare, to get every last second of sleep they could before facing another day.
The wartime coffee was bitter, and sugar was rationed, but tea was hard to come by. Neither Emma nor Prudence took the time to eat breakfast. Their corpsmen would bring them something from the mess hall, even if it was a single piece of toast and an apple, or a paper cup of porridge. It was enough to start the day.
Their planes were side by side on the tarmac, and their pilots were already there, checking the engines. Ed drove up minutes after Pru got there. He looked fresh and alert, and he smiled when he saw her. Emma had already climbed the ladder into her own C-47 and was checking the supplies. They had used a lot the day before, and her corpsmen had restocked them. Ten minutes later, they were ready to go. Pru glanced at the empty beds on her plane. They were ready for twenty-four men to be brought back to the base.
“Where are we headed?” she asked the pilot. He had the flight plan and the map. She put her parachute on as they taxied down the runway a few minutes later. They went where the battles were hottest, and where they’d been radioed in code that the need was greatest. They would have the wounded ready for them on litters when they arrived.
“We got a call an hour ago. Luftwaffe hit about eighty miles from here. They have thirty-nine men injured. It won’t take us long to get there. They’ve got the boys ready to load, we can take twenty-four and another transport will pick up the fifteen or sixteen walking wounded after us,” he said matter-of-factly, in the jargon that was familiar to her now.
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.