CHAPTER SIX   CAMOUFLAGE

Nancy was not too surprised when she found Tini having a whispered conversation with the soda jerker in the strange town. Tini seemed always involved in some undercurrent.

She glanced at her watch and saw they had only five minutes before the transport was due to move on. “We’ve got to beat it,” she told Mabel.

“Better come along, Tini, or you’ll be left behind!” warned Mabel as they went toward the door.

Tini threw her money on the counter and overtook the girls.

“Don’t see why you wanted a coke ’round here when we had plenty of free ones at the Canteen,” Mabel said.

“Oh, just an excuse to talk to the clerk. I wanted to ask him if Carl Benton had been here lately.”

“Carl Benton,” repeated Nancy as they almost ran toward their trucks. “You mean that fellow you dated back yonder?”

“Sure. He sells soda-fountain supplies. Said he came through here often.”

“Did that chap know him?” asked Nancy.

“Dumb bloke—no! He’s only had that job a few days.”

“Surely you’ve heard from him since he left,” said Mabel, not without an acid flavor in her tone.

“You bet! But I thought if he was around this way I might get a chance to see him again.”

“May as well put him out of your mind,” Nancy suggested.

“Gal, if my hunch is right we won’t be doing any dating till we get through some maneuvers ahead of us,” said Mabel.

Toward sunset it began to look as though Mabel’s hunch had some material foundation. They turned off the paved highway and bumped for five miles over a rutted clay road before they entered a swamp made shadowy by the Spanish moss that hung from the oaks, cypress and sweet gum trees. Though the nurses were tired after their long day’s travel, Nancy and Mabel exchanged satisfied glances.

“Say, gal,” whispered Mabel. “Looks like they’re preparing us for the real thing.”

“We’ll sure have to sleep under nets down here or there won’t be any snoozing,” said Nancy.

The sun had already gone down, leaving a red glow in the west, when the convoy circled a clearing in the swamp where there was a small tent village already set up. The passengers climbed out gratefully, each nurse loaded with her personal baggage.

Lieutenant Hauser called the roll and assigned four girls to each tent. The tents were numbered, so the nurses hurried off to see what their new homes were like.

“Four cots and that’s all!” exclaimed Mabel, the first to reach number four, their new habitation.

Nancy’s heart had taken a dive when she learned that Tini and her former room-mate, Ida Hall, were to share the tent with Mabel and herself. Had this been prearranged by Major Reed, she wondered? She certainly had no desire to continue serving as a day and night watchman for Tini Hoffman.

“Must think we’re made of cast iron,” complained Tini when she tried out her cot.

“But here are mattress cases,” said Nancy. “We can stuff ’em with Spanish moss from the trees and make grand mattresses. We used to do that when Dad took us fishing in the river swamp.”

“Not a bad idea,” agreed Ida.

They took their casings and hurried off under the trees to fill them before dark. The suggestion spread, and soon the swamp was alive with nurses preparing for a comfortable night’s sleep.

Their mess hall was a long tent in the center of the camp. They ate by lantern light. The food was all from cans, and cold, but the nurses were too hungry that night to be critical.

“Say, this is going to be real fun,” said Mabel, as they made their way back to their tents by G.I. flashlights.

Though it was spring the swampy air had a penetrating chill, which, however, did not discourage the mosquitoes at all.

“When we used to go camping we drove away the pests with a big campfire,” said Nancy, thinking sadly of the good times she had had with her dad, Tommy and their friends at their swamp shack.

“No fires here,” said Ida. “I heard Lieutenant Hauser say we must live just as if we were in range of enemy fire.”

Each tent had one lantern that hung from the center pole. Under it Nancy nailed a puny mirror, which had to serve all of them in turn. They transformed canned goods packing boxes into chairs. Their individual toilet articles had to be fished out from their musette bags every time they were used.

As neither Mabel nor Tini had ever been camping, they had their initiation that night in sleeping under mosquito nets.

“Gosh, feels like a prison in here!” exclaimed Mabel.

“A prison you’ll be glad to stay in,” Nancy informed her, “when you hear how those mosquitoes sing outside it.”

Long before day, however, each of the nurses was rolled in a blanket under her net and the discouraged pests had returned to their swamp muck.

The Nurses Washed Their Clothes in the River

In the days that followed the nurses discovered what it meant to do all their bathing and clothes washing in the shallows along the river shore. With only a compass to guide them, they learned to cut their way through the dense undergrowth of the river swamp. More than one rattler had to be killed in the process. But many others they left alone, as they had been given careful instructions about poisonous snakes and insects in various parts of the world. They crossed streams and lagoons in high boots, and several times ate from their mess kits the food they prepared for themselves on all-day hikes.

All nursing work was suspended while they were put through these physical fitness tests. To Nancy’s amazement, Tini Hoffman stood hers along with the others, for she seemed to understand its significance. Tini became another person when there were no men around on whom to turn her charms.

They had been camping on the river shore only three days when at breakfast one morning they were given orders to be prepared to leave by noon.

“I’m surely ready to go,” said Tini, who sat next to Nancy on the long bench at the table. “It’s been an eternity since we had any mail.”

They seemed so remote from civilization here that it seemed ages to Nancy also since she had heard what was going on in the rest of the world. But their high hopes proved premature as they were not yet scheduled for city lights.

Lieutenant Hauser gave the orders. “Every group is to take down its own tent, roll and pack it, according to previous instructions.”

Buzzing with talk and excitement the nurses scattered to their various quarters. Nancy had left her washing on a bush over night, so snatched it up as she hurried back to begin packing. Ten minutes before twelve all tents had been cleared to the last tent peg, and the nurses began to pack their belongings into the trucks in which they had arrived. It was thrilling and exciting business, for none of the trainees knew where the next stop would be.

To their surprise the convoy did not move out by the way it had come. Instead it turned toward the river. The nurses had discovered no bridges in all their hikes up and down the small stream, so they were not surprised when the trucks had to cross the stream at a shallow ford. For the first time they had a sample of what it would be like to travel where there were no paved roads and bridges.

After leaving the river the trucks moved on to higher ground. They left the gray-bearded trees behind and plowed through sand-rutted roads winding through a pine forest. At noon they stopped to eat from tins under the sighing pines. Then they learned they were not on their way back to their original training center.

“In about two hours we will pitch our tents again,” explained Lieutenant Hauser. “Some of your most difficult work is just ahead. Our camp will have a public highway on one side, but I warn you to talk to no one outside our unit, or give out any information about the tests you’re going through.”

“You mean we can’t even write our friends about what we’ve been doing on this trip?” asked Mabel.

“Certainly not! Too many times spies have deduced from the nature of a group’s training what its overseas destination might be.”

A surprised murmur swept over the semicircle of young women sitting on the carpet of brown pine needles. Nancy wondered about the letters Tini had written every day while they were in camp. She herself had written long descriptions of their camping life to her parents, but she realized now those letters she had been hoping to mail would have to be torn up.

But Miss Hauser was continuing, “This period is a try-out for actual overseas duty. We must conform to all restrictions we would have there.”

“Overseas duty!” Those were the magic words they had long wanted to hear. They brought a joyous outburst from the eager nurses, that ended in clapping.

“Aren’t we the lucky blokes!” exclaimed Mabel.

“And say, it looks as though it’s going to be in the tropics,” Nancy whispered.

When they rose to go back to the trucks Tini began to complain. “It’s utterly silly not letting us tell anything about what we’ve been doing in the swamp.”

“Ah, gee, who minds that?” asked Mabel. “After all, we agreed to submit ourselves to this rigorous training.”

“Of course we did,” said Nancy. “I’m sure they have good reasons for all these restrictions. You can never tell what spies may make of the smallest bit of information that may leak out.”

When they were rolling along again in their trucks, Nancy recalled how Tini had spent all her spare time back on the river shore, writing letters. Every night she had pushed her cot close to the lantern and sat under her mosquito bar to finish her writing. With her usual lack of consideration for others she kept the light burning till the tent swarmed with mosquitoes, moths and other insects.

“I bet she’ll try to mail those letters in spite of what Lieutenant Hauser said,” Nancy thought with disgust.

For the next twenty-four hours, however, there was no time to dwell on her tent mate’s tendency to insubordination. The nurses had thought they had stiff training in the swamp, but they truly got a taste of real training when their journey ended in the pine thicket at three that afternoon. No sooner were the ropes tied to the last tent peg than they were ordered to a near-by field.

They found several soldiers with guns in the bushy cover on the edge of the field. When the nurses came up in their coveralls and G.I. shoes, Sergeant Tanner gave them instructions.

“We’re going to let you find out what it feels like to be fleeing with the enemy firing behind you,” he said, a mischievous twinkle in his brown eyes. “You’re to start across the field, and every time a blast of firing comes you’re to fall on your faces.”

“We won’t need any second invitation to do that,” said Mabel with a giggle.

“When the whistle blows that’s your order to advance again,” continued the sergeant.

Nancy looked at the guns with some apprehension. She would be truly glad when this was over. Shorty was all a-jitter again.

“Nancy, I’ll run close to you,” she said.

“Sure,” agreed Nancy, recalling their trying time at the gas chamber.

“Somehow I always feel safer when you’re around.”

At the signal they were off across the corn stubble left from last year’s harvest. As a child, Nancy had read how that other Nancy—Nancy Hart, and other women of Georgia, advancing in a field of corn stubble had taken part in the battle of Kettle Creek, and driven the British from upper Georgia during the Revolution. How little she had dreamed that she, another Nancy, six generations later, would be rehearsing for battle in a war for liberty that encircled the globe in just such a field.

The nurses had run only about a hundred feet when there came a roar of gunfire behind and far overhead. Almost everyone wondered if her neighbor had been struck as she saw her dive for the earth.

“Golly Moses!” groaned Mabel. “I’m scared stiff!”

Nancy giggled nervously as she turned to see her pal’s forehead smeared with dirt where she had tried to go through the corn furrow.

“Exciting, but awful!” she agreed.

At the sound of the whistle they were off again. Over and over the gruelling performance was repeated. Then they had to turn and come back across the field in the face of the fire. Nancy found this easier. At least they could see that the shots were going far above their heads.

Most of them came in across the goal line triumphantly, though some were slightly hysterical between laughter and fear. Only two or three staggered back, tense and shaken.

During the rest of the afternoon their men instructors gave them illustrations of jungle camouflage. In the densely wooded section below the pine thicket and bordering a creek, they had to try to locate a half dozen men whose helmets and garments had been camouflaged.

“Hide and seek when we were kids was never half as thrilling as this,” said Nancy, as she and Mabel started off on the search.

Next morning Nancy, Mabel and Ida Hall were among the dozen nurses instructed to camouflage themselves and hide in the woods for the others to locate. Nancy had dabbled at painting in school, and did a fairly good imitation of bay leaves across Mabel’s face and coveralls. Then before their small mirror she touched up her own countenance to look like woods’ shadows. A net was secured over her helmet and in it she twisted pieces of jasmine vines and bay leaves, leaving some of the vines to trail down across her face.

They were given ten minutes to hide before the others of their unit were sent in search of them. Nancy found a spot of dense growth not far from the highway where a scuppernong vine trailed over some low bushes, and a near-by jasmine crowned an old stump with yellow blossoms. She stretched flat under the scuppernong, and stuck her head among the yellow blossoms. Certainly she could not have found a more fragrant hiding place.

She heard the shot fired for the search to begin, then came faint sounds of the cautious searchers. In spite of orders, whoops and little screeches escaped the nurses when anyone was discovered. Several passed close enough for Nancy to touch them, but still she wasn’t noticed. Like an ostrich sticking his head in the sand, Nancy closed her eyes at each approach, feeling somehow that she was better hidden that way. Someone was coming near almost at a run when the shot was fired to end the race. Nancy was thrilled to know she was among those who had missed being found.

She was about to crawl out of her hiding place when she saw that the approaching girl was Tini Hoffman. Tini seemed to have no interest in the search, however, but was intent on reaching the highway. While Nancy had crouched under the bushes she had heard several cars go by. Cautiously she lifted her head as Tini passed and saw some letters sticking from her coverall pocket. Suspicion stirred. No doubt Tini was intent on mailing those letters she had written in the swamp describing their activities.

Instantly Nancy had a hunch that she meant to stop some passing car and get the driver to put her letters into the nearest post office. But she couldn’t run out there and accuse her of such an intention. There was nothing to do but watch her.

She saw Tini running, and in the distance a farmer’s truck coming down the hill. Nancy crawled from her hiding place and hurried from tree to bush on Tini’s trail. The car was quite close now and Tini jumped a ditch and ran to the pavement. So intent was she on attracting the driver’s attention, she was completely unaware of Nancy’s approach.

Tini waved her letters and the driver slowed. When he stopped, she called out, “Will you drop these letters at the nearest post office for me?”

“Sure, lady,” agreed the farmer at the wheel. “Glad to ’comodate you, miss.”

With a leap across the ditch Nancy was at Tini’s side. She reached for the letters as Tini extended them toward the man.

“You know you shouldn’t do that, Tini!” she burst forth.

The farmer gaped in amazement at this strange creature draped in leaves and covered with splotches of paint.

“How dare you?” burst forth Tini. “I’ve a perfect right—”

“You have not!”

“Give me my letters.”

“I will not! And if you try to take them I’ll report the whole business to Lieutenant Hauser.”

“Reckon I’ll be moving on,” said the farmer uneasily, looking at both of them as if he thought they had just escaped from an asylum. He chugged his motor into action, but before he rolled off he glanced at them compassionately and said, “Y’all better be good now and go back to the ’sylum, so Doc can take care o’ you.”