The girls had just started unpacking when news spread that a convoy of patients, a day overdue, was coming in. These were American boys who had been given first treatments in field hospitals and had been flown back from the front.
In a half-hour Nancy had donned her brown-and-white-striped seersucker uniform and received her first assignment from Lieutenant Hauser. The walls had been torn out of the entire lower floor of several bungalows to make wards about seventy-five feet in length. Nancy’s heart went out in compassion when she caught a glimpse of those long rows of beds and the faces on those pillows—faces gray with weariness, suffering and dirt.
Her first job, and that of many other nurses, was to get the men cleaned up, and begin dressing their wounds. The bandages had not been touched during the trying convoy journey from the landing field.
“It’s glad I am to see ye,” said the first man to whom Nancy ministered.
It must have taken courage to force that smile to his round Irish face, for gangrene had taken hold of his shrapnel-shattered leg, and Nancy knew it would have to be taken off promptly.
“And glad I am to be here,” she told him cheerfully.
“How’s everything back home?” the next boy wanted to know.
“Oh, just fine! We got here only ten days ago.”
“Haven’t had a scratch of mail in nearly four months. I hear you all are having it pretty tough with the rationing, and strikes and all.”
“We haven’t a thing to complain of as to food,” Nancy retorted. “We’re still living like royalty.”