I moved down the hallway, and recognized where I was. This was a wing off the main hospital. I walked past a double door with X-Ray painted on it. I couldn't bust in to see if Kaz was there, but I checked the stretchers lining the hall. Mostly GIs with broken bones or cracked skulls. A few sailors, maybe from the air raid on the harbor. I was almost to the end of the corridor when a nurse turned the corner and walked toward me.
"Are you all right, Lieutenant?" she asked, concern and confusion wrinkling her brow.
"Yeah, they checked me out and said I was fine, told me to get out of the way," I said, as cheerfully as I could, hooking a thumb back in the general direction of the X-Ray room.
"Well, this is your lucky day, Lieutenant," she said, and hustled by me to kneel down and check one of the sailors. I wanted to tell her if I was really lucky I wouldn't have had this knock on the head, but thought better of it and turned left, toward the main emergency room.
As I got closer I understood why there were so many stretcher cases lined up outside. The place was packed. Nurses and doctors were running back and forth, threading their way between gurneys as orderlies shifted the wounded from waiting areas into treatment rooms or surgery. Some of the doctors had on their white operating gowns, splashed with blood, while others were working on guys right in the hall, doing God knows what. One GI was screaming bloody murder as two nurses held him down while Perrini worked on his leg. I didn't interrupt.
I remembered Gloria had told me they had new doctors coming in, and I figured they got here just in time. The 21st was a General Hospital, not a Field Hospital. They were supposed to get cases sent up the line from the Field Hospitals, not fresh casualties. No one expected the Luftwaffe to be this active so far in our rear. The staff looked a little overwhelmed, and a lot scared.
As I approached the operating theaters, the odors got worse. Antiseptic, dried blood, the smell of shit and piss mixed with the smoky burned smells of fabric and flesh, all blending into the gut- wrenching stink of the ass-end of war, a military hospital under siege by the wounded and dying.
"Outta the way, outta the way!" An orderly ran by pushing a gurney with a still form on it, a white sheet over his body, soaking up blood wherever it touched him. His eyes were open and staring at the ceding as I stumbled back, out of the way, wondering if a dirty brown ceiling in a makeshift Algiers hospital was going to be the last thing that kid ever saw.
I had to back up to lean against the wall or fall down. The smells were getting to me and I needed to catch my breath. I moved on, checking the conscious and unconscious wounded on either side of me. No British uniforms, not that I could tell anyway, as most had been cut away.
I began to be able to tell the difference between the GIs who ran into the Germans at the front, and those in the convoy who'd been bombed and strafed just outside of town. The convoy GIs wore clean uniforms. They were dressed in herringbone twill coveralls, with the American flag patch sewn on the shoulder. Their woolen clothes were probably in their duffle bags, blown to hell on some deserted stretch of Algerian highway, with whatever wasn't burned or looted by Arabs. The GIs from the front were dressed in filthy, dirty wool pants, shirts, and twill coveralls in all sorts of combinations. They looked like they had been wearing everything they owned, dressed for cold nights in the desert. As their clothes were cut away by orderlies searching for secondary wounds, each layer would cover another shirt, or long johns, or whatever they had piled on for warmth. I wondered about the cold-weather gear stacked up in the warehouses down by the harbor. Had the army a clue how damn cold it got in the desert?
I passed a hallway leading to another wing of the budding, this one also stacked up with wounded on stretchers or sitting on crates. It looked like another holding area for those who could wait for treatment.
I walked the corridor searching for Kaz, hoping to see him sitting there with a big grin on his face.
There was some yelling going on. "You get the fuck out of here," hollered a GI, a huge bandage wrapped around one shoulder. It didn't stop him from jabbing a finger on his good side at the guy across from him.
"Shut up, dogface. Don't they teach you not to talk to an officer that way?" This from a guy in a leather jacket, an Army Air Corps pilot, a lieutenant with his trousers ripped open and bandages on both legs.
"Don't they teach you not to shoot up your own troops? Yesterday two P-38s killed four of our guys, and it wasn't the first time. I'm getting sick of it!" The GI tried to get up but winced at the effort and sat back down.
"You tell him, Morrie," said another GI. There were murmurs of assent and anger, but not one of them seemed to be as willing as Morrie to take on an officer, even if he was Air Corps.
"Listen, Private, it works both ways. You guys are supposed to know aircraft recognition, right? They ever teach you WEFT procedures? Wings, Engine, Fuselage, Tail?"
"Kinda hard to pick out that WEFT bullshit when half a dozen P- 38s are blazing away at you with their. 50 calibers," Morrie said.
"You probably fired on them first. You know what WEFT really stands for in the infantry? Wrong Every Fucking Time!"
This time Morrie stood up. "Yeah, well you murdering bastard, we have a saying too. If it flies, it dies!" Morrie raised his one good arm in a fist and advanced on the pilot, who lay immobile on his stretcher. Three guys who could get up did and pulled Morrie back. Words continued to fly, but not fists.
I kept checking for Kaz. As I did, on the stretcher to my right, I saw a Luftwaffe pilot, an amused look on his face. His blue tunic displayed the Luftwaffe eagle, grasping a swastika in its claws. I don't know if he spoke English, but he seemed to understand exactly what was going on. Our eyes met and he smiled. His entire left leg was swathed in bandages, and from what was left of his pants, it looked like he'd been burned. He must have been pretty doped up; I doubted he'd be smiling tomorrow.
I wandered back down the hall, feeling weak in the knees, went through the emergency entrance and checked the casualties stacked up there. No Kaz. I went through the treatment rooms, all filled with patients, doctors, and nurses. Everyone was too busy, or in too much pain to notice me. I began to wonder if this was a dream. I seemed to be invisible when I was close to the worst casualties. Whenever I was outside the main treatment area, some nurse or orderly would stop and check me out. I didn't know if I could convince the next one that I was okay. My head was swimming, and although the ringing was down to a reasonable volume, I was feeling more wobbly and I had to keep reminding myself what, or rather who, I was looking for.
Then I saw him. Kaz, on a gurney, being pushed down the hall. A nurse was doing the pushing. I tried to call to her, but I couldn't get my voice to work. My yell came out as a croak, and my head rebelled against the effort. She turned a corner and disappeared down another hallway. I forced myself down the hall after her, stumbling against an orderly carrying a tray of instruments. He and the tray went down with a crash, the noise in my ears ratcheting up the ringing up even worse.
"Hey, those were sterile! Watch it!"
The floor seemed to tilt. I had to swing my arms to keep my balance. I knew I looked like a drunk but I had to catch up. I couldn't hold onto the wall without stepping on the guys lined up alongside it. I focused on the floor in front of me, placing one foot in front of the other, turning the corner just in time to see the back of a nurse leave a patient's room. She was headed down the hall away from me. Had she seen me? I couldn't tell, but this time I managed to call her name out.
"Stop," I called once, and heads turned. I couldn't tell how loudly I'd said it with all the noise in my head, but I must've yelled pretty loud. Maybe she didn't hear me because she disappeared, her green fatigues blending into a crowd of nurses, orderlies, and wounded. There were three doors on the right but I couldn't remember which one she had walked out of. I looked in the first room, and it was full, three hospital beds and two gurneys crowded in together. I went into the middle room.