wards, rattled to the train station in another springless ambulance, hoisted through a hospital car window to his berth. Only sheer stubbornness had kept him from crying out a dozen times. But he had made up his mind he was not going to let anybody see him blubbering.
He had seen nothing of San Francisco, and he had had no desire to.
From the time he had been wounded and had got his squad back inside the lines, he had been carded, tagged and stamped, indexed and inspected, numbered and catalogued increasingly the closer he got to home and any kind of civilization. In certain of his worst moments, it seemed to him it was more important to them that they keep track of him and not lose him than that they keep him alive. It seemed to Prell there ought to be a better way to treat men who had given their life and limb for their country, but there didn’t seem to be any better way of handling it. If there was, nobody had figured it out. He had come almost to feel that he was actually a piece of that “living meat” the casualties on the ship jokingly so liked to refer to themselves as. But so far he had managed to keep his mouth shut about it.
He had already gone through two major operations, and been wired and screwed back together. And would apparently have to go through another, to get the wires and screws out of him. When the first group of doctors at Letterman examined him, one of the younger surgeons studied his file and whistled, then smiled with admiring disbelief the way a man might over a piece of brass sculpture hammered out by another. It gave Prell a certain thrill of pride.
Because Prell wasn’t fighting only to save his legs; he was fighting to save his life. He had already made up his mind that if they took off his legs, he was going to kill himself. He would shoot himself in the head. Or perhaps in the heart. He hadn’t decided which yet. But he certainly wasn’t going to go on living around the clock in a Veterans’ Hospital without any legs. Even if they took off only one of his legs, it would not be enough. He wouldn’t live with one leg, either. He didn’t have to do it, and he wasn’t going to. So the way Prell figured it, he wasn’t saving only just his legs. He was saving his whole life. And he wasn’t particularly ready to die yet.
So at Letterman the young surgeon’s reaction was a shot in the arm. It meant at the very least that there was still some hope. There was an indifferent impersonality in the admiring smile but that didn’t matter to Prell since he knew the surgeon was looking at him as a job of work. He had no way of knowing how hard Prell had fought, and how many times, to keep them from amputating. Prell did not tell him. He compressed his lips and kept his mouth shut again. Nor did he mention all the incredible, unbelievable pain all the moving around had caused him. Prell was playing his cards, the bad hand he had been dealt, as tight and as close to his shirt as he could, and was taking no chances. The enormity of the pain might be a point in favor of amputation. The surgeon, however, seemed to know. All Prell had in front of him now, he said, was the three-day train trip, and then soon they would begin to be able to tell. Only three days on the train, then he could rest. The reason they were sending him so far, to Luxor, Tennessee, was because not only did they have one of the best orthopedics leg surgery teams there, they also had about the best postoperative team in the country.
“I can do it standing on my head, sir,” Prell said cheerfully. But he was already sweating from the pushing and probing.
The doctor gave him back a funny, arrogant smile. “Let us hope you don’t have to,” he said, in a snobby superior way. Apparently he didn’t like brash confidence in potential amputees. Prell didn’t care, or even get angry, since this one wasn’t going to be making any of the crucial decisions. Through the sweat on his upper lip and forehead, he made himself grin.
It was, however, a lot easier to talk about the train trip