I suppose the idea with training for what you cannot imagine is that when nothing else holds, when the world becomes a place you’ve never seen before, that training will keep you moving. Certainly we’d never practiced clambering down the side of a ship on a net, but we’d had plenty of practice in doing what we were told. The net must have swayed a little with the weight and movement of other bodies, but I don’t remember fearing I would fall. I remember I kept my eyes on the men still on the ship, and they grew smaller and smaller to me, as I must have done to them.
At the bottom I got in a smaller boat, a landing craft, and Kay was in there, too, and a few of the other nurses. I kept my eye on Kay. The night before, during the crossing, she’d fallen from a top bunk and done an injury to her back. She’d made me promise not to tell anyone. She was afraid the chief nurse would have her checked out, find some reason she wasn’t in shape to go on. The other girls in the cabin—Ada Dawson, Nina Hagenston—had been asleep, and when the noise woke Nina, Kay claimed she’d just dropped her helmet. Lucky it was Nina who woke, as she wasn’t the type to ask questions, such as what Kay was doing splayed out on the floor. I was sure she’d pulled something, or at least bruised herself badly, and that carrying all the weight of our equipment must have been twice as hard for her as it was for me. But she gave no sign that anything was wrong.
When we got near the beach they lowered the ramp on the front of the landing craft and we walked into the water. I had never been so hot, hunching through the water to the shore. It was like a steam bath inside my gas-impregnable clothing, and I was so weighted down with blanket and tent, gas mask and canteen, first aid kit and shovel that once I got out of the boat I couldn’t stand up straight. The equipment was arranged very carefully—you had to do it just so to make it fit—and it was all very well as long as you kept your feet but if I’d fallen on my back I would’ve been lodged there like a beetle. When I think about it now, I don’t know how I made it down the net in the first place with all that stuff hung all over me. Someone told me to go and I went, and that is what it is to be in the army, and sometimes just what it is to be alive.
What a mess that beach was, the sand churned up by feet and tires, strewn with vehicles and equipment, crisscrossed with lines of soldiers. If there had ever been anything beautiful about the spot it was gone, and if there would be anything beautiful again I couldn’t imagine it. Ahead of us up the hill we could see the concrete bunkers the Germans had built, squat and unlovely even if you hadn’t known how deadly they were. Behind us in the water the massive bodies of the ships.
Though the front line was only a few miles into France, the beach itself was safe. We walked up it and over the dunes with less fear than we’d had on our infiltration course way back in basic training. Only thirty-eight days before men had been slaughtered in that place by the thousands.
Dead bodies? No, there were no dead bodies. I just said this was D-Day plus thirty-eight. We didn’t wade through the floating dead, as I’ve read the nurses did who got there first. Do you wish I had? Would that be a better story? That’s not much of a thing to wish on someone. What I saw over there had horrors enough.
What I remember is that we hit the beach and had to climb a hill—that I remember well because it was so difficult. It was very hot. The foxholes were already there when we got to the top—I never had to dig a foxhole the whole time, after all the practice we had in basic training—and we slept in them that night and damn near froze to death. “Holy cow,” Kay said beside me when we flopped down at the top of the hill, and I laughed, though not because anything was particularly funny. For twenty-four years my life had been so small I could carry it in my pocket. Here I was in France, part of a thing so large it was beyond imagining. I was at war.
I’ve slept in a foxhole. I’ve sat on a hill in the dark and watched the tracer bullets go by. I say these things with a certain degree of amazement. Looking back it seems like someone else’s life.
I woke up just before dawn. I thought I’d heard something—a shell, an explosion—but now all was quiet. I’d slept balled up so tightly I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to straighten my limbs out again. I wanted badly to try—suddenly my whole body seemed beset with an unbearable cramping—but what if I really had heard something? I waited. And waited. Maybe I’d dreamed it. I gave in to the impulse to stand and all the bones in my body popped and cracked at once. I looked down over the beach. In the early light it looked like a graveyard, like all the vehicles had been abandoned to rust, like all the men were dead. I knew the fighting was ahead of us, now, but gazing at that beach, imagining what it had looked like a month ago, it seemed like everything that was going to happen already had.