They’d had their share of run-ins at first. Emma had a profound distrust of anyone from the upper classes, and she got into arguments with Pru constantly until she finally realized that Pru wasn’t snobbish and didn’t give a damn where Emma had grown up, or that she was from the East End. They had been best friends ever since. She teased Pru at times about where she came from, and Pru returned the favor by calling her an “East End guttersnipe.” The insults they cheerfully exchanged horrified anyone who heard them, only to realize later that the two women loved each other and would have died defending each other. Emma had punched a soldier in a pub once when she thought he had insulted Pru, and a bar fight had broken out all around them. The two women had escaped before the police arrived, and they laughed all the way back to their barracks.

Pru felt bad about the boy she’d heard Emma had lost that day. She knew how hard Emma took her losses and that she always considered it a failure on her part. But no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t save them all. They tried to, but sometimes the damage was so great that even extreme measures didn’t make a difference. The worst part of their jobs was the men they lost, although the time saved by airlifting them out of the battle zones and flying them back to the hospital saved many of them. It was a new fight for the nurses and the corpsmen every day.

Emma stirred as Pru changed into her nightgown and slipped into her bed across from Emma’s. Emma popped her head up, with her short bright red hair sticking up like a pixie’s. She was half asleep.

“Is that you?” Emma asked sleepily.

“No, it’s Claudette Colbert,” Pru said with a grin.

“Oh shut up, did you eat?” she asked, lying down again. They took care of each other since no one else did. They were combat buddies in the best sense of the word.

“No, I went to the hospital to check on one of our boys. We almost lost him on the way back.”

“I lost one today,” Emma said sadly, wide-awake now, when she thought of it. “We tried everything. Terrible chest wound. He died halfway back. We should have taken off sooner, but we didn’t have a full load yet, and they took too long to bring the others on.”

“You can’t guess at that, Em. He might have died anyway. I lost one like that last month. It happens.”

“He was twenty years old, just a kid.”

“They’re all kids. There are no old men on the battlefields. They’re all boys, who should never have to be there.” Emma nodded and didn’t speak for a minute.