“Are you up to stopping in to see the Americans I met last night?” Pru suggested. Emma hesitated and then nodded. She was bone-tired but wanted to be a good sport. She didn’t know where Pru got her energy from. She was game to go anytime, even after a fourteen-hour day with critically ill men depending on her. If anything, it seemed to energize her and give her superhuman strength, except when they lost one, and then the bottom fell out of her world. It was true for all of them. They took the losses very personally. They remembered all the boys they lost, and always met afterwards to discuss whether the situation could have been handled differently, for a better result next time.

“Yeah, why not?” Emma said, matching Pru’s long strides with her shorter ones. “They looked nice enough.”

“It’s a good thing the Americans are sending us their nurses,” Pru commented, and Emma bristled.

“We’re just as well trained as they are,” she said, and Prudence smiled.

“Yeah, but they haven’t been in it as long. They’re fresher. We’ve been at it for four and a half years. They’ve been at it for two, and they’re only training them as flight nurses now. It’s a whole new game for them.”

“True,” Emma said. She couldn’t deny it. She felt as though she had grown up here, or maybe just grown old. It was hard to feel young with what they saw every day, so much tragedy and loss of life, such a waste of human beings, lives that were cut short, and dreams that ended with a single bullet or a bomb.

They walked to the nurses’ barracks since they weren’t in a hurry, and it was nice to get fresh air after a day with the smell of blood, burned and torn flesh, vomit, and disinfectant all around them. They both took deep breaths of the evening air and the smell of the earth.

There were clusters of women in uniform outside the dormitory, and as they walked past them, Pru and Emma could hear American accents mixed with English ones, from all walks of life. There were a group of Australian nurses banded together, laughing at something. And as they walked into the building, Pru spotted the women she had met the day before. They had notebooks in their hands and had just come in from their day in the classroom. Pru stopped to talk to Alex, and then introduced Emma to all the girls she’d met.