it. In a partly demolished shed he found a dozen expensive and powerful motion-picture cameras, and stopped long enough to smash them. Then, somewhere under the rubbish, he discovered a brand-new and uninjured four-engined plane. Here was the way out. He had only to find a pilot and get his wounded aboard. He started on a run for headquarters in the Grand Hotel.
Boom!
Crash! Flames and smoke behind him, close enough to singe his coattails. The shed that housed the plane was a blazing ruin.
He couldn't face Goggins and the others right away after that. Instead, he joined the last stragglers in the Grand Hotel. That was how he happened to be on hand when a British colonel came in with the word he was trying to get a motor caravan of anti-aircraft batteries over the pass to Tjilatjap. The doctor marched up to him.
"Can you take me and ten American wounded?" he demanded.
The colonel said he could. "If you get them here inside of twenty minutes. We can't wait. The Japs are on our tails now."
"They'll be here," Wassell promised, and sprinted for the hospital.
He told it to members of the Medical Corps in Washington months later as follows:
"A Dutch rating at the hospital helped me put fresh dressings on the burn cases. All we had to use was sulphur ointment, and not enough of that. We did the best we could to make the men fit for evacuation. The rating stole mattresses and we carried them on them to the caravan. That Dutch hospital corpsman was a hero. I slipped a 25-guilder note into his hand and kissed him on both cheeks. And, gentlemen, I'm not ashamed of it. We made places in the caravan for our wounded so they could travel with as little pain as possible. Just the same it was going to be a hard trip for some of them. The worst was their nerves. The injuries they had sustained, plus the anxiety and the knowledge the Japs were nearly on us, had produced cases of severe war neurosis. Big, strapping fellows, and yet ready to cry if you spoke sharp to them. Like babies, they were.
