“This is it!” he said, when he rapped for attention. “You will file out immediately to the room across the hall and wait further orders. Your room baggage will be taken care of.”
Now they understood why they had been told to come to meals, prepared for marching orders. They filed into a drawing-room across the hall. Some did not even sit down, expecting to be on their way to the docks at once. However, when an hour passed and marching orders had not yet come, they lit more cigarettes and hunted seats. Nancy, Mabel, Ida and Shorty huddled together on a window seat.
“Why in heck didn’t they let us finish our dinner?” Mabel wanted to know. “I’ll see that wasted, juicy steak to my dying day.”
“I’d be glad for even a drink of water,” said Shorty.
“No law against drinking from your canteen,” Nancy told her. “I guess this situation rates as an emergency.”
The time dragged into an eternity. Everyone wondered what had happened. Would they be sent back to their rooms for another night’s sleep? Then at long last Major Reed appeared to give them the final alert. Nancy glanced at her watch. It was ten minutes of twelve. They had been waiting in this room over four hours. She wondered what was back of the delay.
They were packed into trucks waiting in the alley at the back of the hotel. Then by dark, back streets, their convoy approached the dock. When the nurses were lined up beside a long warehouse Nancy’s heart swelled with pride that she was one of this brave, snappy unit. Every nurse wore her dress uniform and carried her overcoat over one arm. Her musette bag, filled with a score of oddments she might need in an emergency, was slung over her shoulder. In her pistol belt was a first-aid kit, and on her left hip was a freshly filled canteen.
With a rhythmic shush, shush of many feet they passed by the long warehouse, and went across the dock to the great ship rising like a giant from the water. To Nancy it seemed incredible that anything so large could remain afloat. She had taken only two ocean trips in her life, and those were on small, coast-wise steamers between Charleston and New York in the good old days when no subs darkened the waters, nor death wings roared overhead.
They marched up the long gangplank and were directed to their quarters. Everything moved with oiled smoothness. The staterooms had been turned into bunk rooms. Some of the larger ones, that had once been luxury suites, had as many as sixteen bunks lining the walls, three tiers deep with a double bunk to each tier. Fortunately Nancy, Mabel, Ida and Shorty got together once more in a small four-bunk cabin. Each nurse would have to use her bunk for lying, dressing and sitting, for all floor space was filled with the hand luggage.
Each nurse hung her helmet on the head of the bunk, close to her life preserver and well-filled canteen. In her musette bag Nancy had crammed what she thought she might need in case they had to take to lifeboats. She had a small flashlight, some milk chocolate, a change of undies, an extra pair of dark glasses, cleansing tissues, a small comb, two tins of concentrated food, and many other odds and ends.