American face that looked up at him from the beds begged for a chance of escape.
The doctor sorted them. Most surgeons would have declared it nothing short of murder to put such sick men on the road. Dr. Wassell was counting on their will to get through to preserve them on that journey. But there were ten men, including Lieutenant Commander William Goggins, executive officer of the U.S.S. Marblehead, whose state was so serious that transporting them was not to be thought of. Those ten would have to be left behind.
The doctor got the others dressed and over to the embarkation depot.
"How about you?" he was asked.
"I'm staying. With the ten."
"But a medical officer is needed to look out for these men."
"They'll get along. They all have fresh dressings. And they can help each other."
The doctor went slowly back through the February rain to his quarters at the Grand Hotel. Now there was nothing to do but wait — wait for the Japs to come up the road from Surabaya and take the hill town as they had taken the port.
Much of his time he spent at the hospital with the ten Americans whose eyes questioned him mutely each time he appeared: "Have they come yet?"
"See if you can't dig up some way of getting us out of this," Bill Goggins pleaded, and cursed the bandages on his burned arms and hands which made him helpless.
"The way I figured it," Dr. Wassell explained, "was if I could find a way of getting those ten men out of Java while the getting was good — a way they could stand in the state they were in — there wasn't any reason on earth why I shouldn't."
So he went poking about in the confusion and debris of the landing field on which the advance waves of Jap bombers were dropping high explosives every day and which the Dutch were impatient to blow up to keep the Japs from eventually landing on
