The Story of Dr. Wassell (13 page)

No one in the crowded smoke room of
Janssens
knew what was
happening until a few until a few seconds after they heard the roar. It was
something which, with their fears concentrated on submarines, made them think
first of some strange new undersea weapon preparing to strike; and during
those few seconds the mind refused perception that the roar came from above
and that the sound of it was recognizable. Then somebody shouted “Planes,”
and at the same instant the roar expanded into successive explosions as
bullets tore through the wooden superstructure.

Everyone dropped to the floor, a few by instinct, some because they really
thought it safe, most because they saw others do it. And there was no room on
the floor for a roomful of people who had been jammed enough when sitting or
standing, so that bodies soon piled on top of bodies, and the lower ones did
not object—it seemed to them all the greater protection. Meanwhile the
ship swerved sharply, its decks sloping so that bottles and magazines fell
off the table tops over the heaped bodies. The picture of the Balinese girl
crashed from the wall onto a fat Dutchman who thereafter held its ruined
canvas over him like a shield.

The doctor and Wilson were on the floor, half under a table, and because
they had been finishing a drink when the roar began they were still holding
their half-filled glasses. For some reason that neither of them was
afterwards able to explain exactly, they finished their drinks during the
first cannonade. It was certainly not bravery, much less bravado; more likely
it was because they did not know what else to do with half-glasses of beer in
their hands. Anyhow, they finished them off, the liquid spilling a little
when the floor began to slope.

The whole incident, from the beginning of the roar to the end of the
drinks, could not have lasted more than twenty seconds; there was no time to
be heroic, certainly nothing to be heroic about. The chance of being hit was
neither much greater nor much less whatever one did; lying down might reduce
the target area for one bullet, or increase it for another—it depended
on angles unforeseeable and incalculable. And neither tables nor human bodies
were any protection if the bullet struck. In this sense (but nobody of course
thought or argued about it till afterwards) everything the occupants of the
smoke room did was meaningless, ineffective, a mere reshuffling of cards in a
game whose rules were unknown.

But the individual will to survive ignored all this, and once the firing
stopped there was reason enough to do so; for it then occurred to everyone
simultaneously that whereas the roof was of wood, the floor was of steel, and
that to get below it, onto the lower deck, was logical, obvious, and
imperative. The doctor had another overwhelming urge: he wanted to reach his
men. He did not know what had happened to them, or what he could do for them;
but he wanted to be with them with the same primitive instinct that had made
him drop to the floor.

All the crowd in the smoke room were now pressing into the companionway
towards the lower saloon, and the doctor and Wilson could not get further
than halfway down the stairway when the roar began again. The steel deck
began its overhead protection about six feet in front of the doctor, and try
as he could there was no means of jamming humanity more solidly forward than
it was. And lie could not move back either, because pressure was increasing
from the rear. He could see, from where he stood, the terrible blue
unsheltered sky, and when he saw that, he felt as if giant fists were opening
and closing inside his stomach.

The roaring increased; few people spoke or made any sound except a heavy
strained breathing that could be felt rather than heard. A child whimpered
somewhere, clear and shrill over the din. And one incident happened quite
close that might have been funny if one had had time (then) to see the joke.
Cully, the newspaperman, was jammed up close behind a prim middle-aged woman
who suddenly swung round and shouted “Don’t push me!” as indignantly as if
she had been in a theatre queue. Cully laughed and shouted back: “I wasn’t
pushing you, lady, I was just trying to lace up your life jacket…”

The roaring expanded again into the shatter of bullet explosions.

The three Jap Zero fighters were raking the
Janssens
from stem to
stern, swooping up when they had finished each dive and circling over to come
again. A dozen Dutch sailors manning the guns fore and aft were trying to
blast a series of targets moving towards them at three hundred miles an hour.
These Dutchmen were brave, disciplined, and intelligent, but most of them had
never faced this sort of enemy before. They were too eager, too excited,
their hate boiled too high in the blood—too high, anyhow, for the
split-second technique of modern warfare. They fired too soon.

Crowded in their cockpits the Japs were doing the things they had
practised for years. Their planes were not especially made for ship sinkings,
merely for casual terrorism and murder, with perhaps an outside chance of
setting a ship on fire; they carried no bombs and must not take too much time
over a small impromptu attack of no particular importance—a mere
sideshow, as it were, in the business of the day. Aware of this, yet with
routine efficiency, the men pressed buttons to deal out a smattering of death
to the crowded decks below.

The diving and raking went on, and the gunners would soon have learned the
trick of holding fire until the enemy was almost overhead and then blasting
him in a short sharp burst of concentrated attack—they would soon have
learned this if there had been time. But there was no time, and presently
there was no more ammunition. Then the planes dived again and again upon the
defenseless ship, till at a signal they suddenly turned off and flew back
over the land.

Throughout all this (only a matter of a few minutes in all) Captain Prass
had stayed on the bridge, his eyes measuring the track of each dive as
against the S-curves his hands could impart to the ship. When the planes flew
away he tilted his blue beret over his forehead and set the ship again on her
straight eastward course.

No one had been killed outright aboard the
Janssens
nor had any
serious damage been done to the structure of the ship. It seemed almost a
miracle that only ten human bodies out of over six hundred had been struck by
bullets. Most of these ten had been among the gun crews.

Not till the all-clear whistle sounded was the doctor able to push through
to the men from the
Marblehead
. He found them all safe. Those who
could move had somehow dragged the others on their mattresses under the
shelter of a projecting upper deck; the awning above the place they had left
was torn to shreds. The men were as glad to see the doctor as he was to see
them; then suddenly somebody exclaimed: “Where’s McGuffey?”

The doctor, knowing where McGuffey had been half an hour before, hurried
to the upper deck. It was there, and amongst the gun crews fore and aft,
where the casualties had been. One man, riddled with bullets through the
stomach and legs, had been watching the attack as if it were a sporting
event. A boy of fourteen, hopping around on one leg as the blood ran out of
his other shoe, had been shot painfully but not seriously through the
instep.

The doctor went far enough to see that McGuffey and his girl companion
were, unhurt; then he hurried back to the boy with the smashed foot. He knew
he had work to do.

The wounded were carried into the bar, because that was where, for some
reason, the first-aid cabinet was situated; and it was found convenient to
lay them on the bar counter for treatment. It was odd, too, how apt the bar
equipment was for improvised medical uses—water, glasses, swabs,
towels, to hand; even the rail that stopped drinks from sliding off in rough
weather proved equally useful in holding a human body.

The doctor had not practised serious surgery y for years; but in first-
aid emergency stuff he was as good as many a thousand-dollar operator, and
perhaps better than some; he had a sound knowledge of the human body and its
reactions to pain and shock, plus an ingrained reluctance to do more with the
knife than he felt absolutely necessary. (He had already, he hoped, saved
Edmunds’s leg and Muller’s arm by communicating that reluctance to a perhaps
bolder surgeon.) In any case, there were no facilities on board the
Janssens
for final treatment of wounds; all anyone could do was to
give the sufferers shots of morphine, splint smashed limbs, swab and stanch
and bandage, and prevent some well-intentioned helper from flooding a hole in
a man’s stomach with iodine. It was an hour’s hard and rather horrible work,
and while he performed it, a little audience gathered which included
passengers, crew members, some of his own men from the
Marblehead
,
and one Dutch pharmacist’s mate who gave him useful help.

He did not talk much during this hour, except to ask for things and to
give encouragement to each new patient when laid on the bar counter. For
instance, as he gave a shot to the whimpering boy with the smashed foot he
said, smiling: “Hey, sonny, you just got a rabbit in you if you’re afraid of
this little needle…”

And when someone said that a man’s wound in the lower part of the back
didn’t look serious, he answered sharply: “It’s always serious, when a man’s
hit in the—” He was about to finish the sentence when he saw that a few
women were within hearing, so he amended hastily: “What I mean is, a bullet
can go in here right through to the guts and make one hell of a
mess—”

When his task was over the doctor washed his hands and face, but it was
impossible to do much to improve the look of his clothes, and he had no other
clothes. They were streaked with grime and grease and blood, and damp through
with sweat. It took him some moments to realize, after he left the bar, that
no one shared his sense of relief, and soon he knew why and had to admit that
there was nothing to be really relieved about. For of course the attackers
would come again. They would return to their headquarters, report the
position of the
Janssens
chugging along at its steady seven and a half
knots, and come back or send others to have another try. The flaps were like
that.

Everybody on board the
Janssens
knew that there had been no
reprieve, only a postponement of sentence. Captain Prass knew it; the men
from the
Marblehead
knew it, and one of them said to the doctor:
“Well, Doc, looks like as if it wasn’t such a smart thing to get on this ship
after all.”

The doctor replied: “Don’t you aim to be smart—you leave that to me.
And any of you that want anything from the kitchen, just holler out and I’ll
get it for you, and what’s more, I’ll race everybody that don’t eat with a
dipper.”

So the doctor fetched food to his men and ate with them, but he soon found
he had very little appetite. Apprehension that the planes would come again
was already dripping into his veins like ice water.

Meanwhile (and unknown to him because most of it was in the Dutch
language) important discussions were being held between some of the
passengers and Captain Prass. It was being demanded that, in view of the
extreme probability of further attack by air, the
Janssens
should put
ashore and allow those to leave the ship who preferred to take their chances
on land. Captain Prass heard out this suggestion grimly and without comment;
heard grimly also the prophecy that several of the wounded would die if they
were not put ashore to receive hospital attention.

Captain Prass said he would consider the matter and make his decision
within half an hour. Then he went down to the deck where the men from the
Marblehead
lay. As he had expected, the doctor was there with
them.

“Well, Doctor,” said Captain Prass, his bloodshot eyes staring the man up
and down. He did not quite know how to broach the subject, so he said, with a
slant of the mouth hardly to be called a smile: “You’ll have to send your
suit to be cleaned.”

“Sure I will, and I could do with a bit of delousing myself.”

The slant of the Captain’s mouth broadened. “I am obliged to you for your
help recently.”

“Oh, that was only a patch-up job—they’ll need more than that when
they can get it.”

“Tell me, how many do you think will recover?”

The doctor pondered a moment, then answered: “Most of them ought
to—barring complications. One won’t, I guess—he’s belly-shot
through and through. And there’s a few doubtfuls—if they were in a
hospital, I’d say yes—but of course—”

“Thank you. I understand.”

Captain Prass went away, and presently the doctor lit a cigarette while he
contemplated his own peculiar problems and anxieties. He was awakened from
them by a ship’s officer scurrying about the decks with the announcement that
the Captain wished to see all the passengers (those who felt well enough,
anyhow) in the smoke room immediately. So there the doctor went, drifting in
with the quick-gathering crowd whose tension was mounting as conjectures
spread as to the reason for such a summons. The litter left by the bombing
attack was a grim reminder to them all, the more so as they could now examine
it in greater detail. The doctor noticed that at one spot there was blood on
the floor; he had not known till then that anyone in the smoke room had been
hit. Some of the paneling was shredded with bullet holes, and on the steel
deck underfoot bullets had made circular dents the size of a silver dollar.
Some of these dents were in the stanchions reaching up to the ceiling. He
could not take his eyes off those dents; he could not help thinking of the
fateful collision of flesh and steel, of the softest and hardest things on
earth.

All at once Captain Prass burst into the room, mounted the small platform,
and began in a sort of staccato bark: “‘We have decided to put in at a place
near here and send the badly wounded ashore. Anyone else who wishes to leave
the
Janssens
may also take that opportunity to do so. You have all
time to think it over—ample time—say, half an hour.”