We Band of Angels by Elizabeth Norman

Author:Elizabeth Norman [Norman, Elizabeth M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79957-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Terry was also a talented mimic, and her send-ups left the nurses in stitches. The teenager called their captain “Old Maude Davison” and parodied her grumpy ways. She nicknamed Ann Mealor “Cobweb Annie” and “Miss Clean” because Mealor was always scolding the young volunteers who scrubbed the hospital operating room. Terry had them down pat, but the teenager was smart enough to know when to stop. She understood that the nurses were “tight-knit,” like a big family. “They were very protective of each other,” she said. “And any member could call someone else an SOB or lazy, but don’t let an outsider do it.” So she watched her tongue, sharing her most private thoughts only with her “big sister,” waiting for the moments when they were alone, strolling shoulder to shoulder in the shadow of the outer wall.

In time Cassie’s prison life took on a pattern. She had her work, her friends, her growing friendship with Terry. And it was just about then, just as she was getting accustomed to the camp and its routines, that she decided to work for the underground.

Weekly, through the package line, word would filter into camp about the treatment of the twenty thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines who had been captured during the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. Those who had survived the Death March had been taken to prison camps in northern Luzon, and there, between April and July, some two thousand POW’s died of malaria, beriberi, dengue fever, gross malnutrition, dysentery and the incessant assaults of their keepers. Many were flogged so severely, the guards literally beat the flesh off them. Many were worked so hard, they simply dropped dead.

Finding a sufficient number of able-bodied men among the prisoners to bury the dead was not the least of the problems with which the camp authorities were confronted. It was not unusual to have several of the burial detail drop dead from exhaustion and overwork in the midst of their duties, and be thrown into the common grave which they were digging for their dead comrades. Not infrequently men who had collapsed from exhaustion were even buried before they were actually dead.6

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