They lay on cots so close together that the nurses could not walk between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers, and along the transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship’s bow be turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger nor nausea nor aching bones could shake them.
The hospital steward touched the Lieutenant lightly on the shoulder.
“We are going North, sir,” he said. “The transport’s ordered North to New York, with these volunteers and the sick and wounded. Do you hear me, sir?”
The Lieutenant opened his eyes. “Has she come?” he asked.
“Gee!” exclaimed the hospital steward. He glanced impatiently at the blue mountains and the yellow coast, from which the transport was drawing rapidly away.
“Well, I can’t see her coming just now,” he said. “But she will,” he added.
“You let me know at once when she comes.”
“Why, cert’nly, of course,” said the steward.
Three trained nurses came over the side just before the transport started North. One was a large, motherly-looking woman, with a German accent. She had been a trained nurse, first in Berlin, and later in the London Hospital in Whitechapel, and at Bellevue.
The nurse was dressed in white, and wore a little silver medal at her throat; and she was strong enough to lift a volunteer out of his cot and hold him easily in her arms, while one of the convalescents pulled his cot out of the rain. Some of the men called her “nurse;” others, who wore scapulars around their necks, called her “Sister;” and the officers of the medical staff addressed her as Miss Bergen.