nurses had thought they had stiff training in the swamp, but they truly got a taste of real training when their journey ended in the pine thicket at three that afternoon. No sooner were the ropes tied to the last tent peg than they were ordered to a near-by field.

They found several soldiers with guns in the bushy cover on the edge of the field. When the nurses came up in their coveralls and G.I. shoes, Sergeant Tanner gave them instructions.

“We’re going to let you find out what it feels like to be fleeing with the enemy firing behind you,” he said, a mischievous twinkle in his brown eyes. “You’re to start across the field, and every time a blast of firing comes you’re to fall on your faces.”

“We won’t need any second invitation to do that,” said Mabel with a giggle.

“When the whistle blows that’s your order to advance again,” continued the sergeant.

Nancy looked at the guns with some apprehension. She would be truly glad when this was over. Shorty was all a-jitter again.

“Nancy, I’ll run close to you,” she said.

“Sure,” agreed Nancy, recalling their trying time at the gas chamber.

“Somehow I always feel safer when you’re around.”

At the signal they were off across the corn stubble left from last year’s harvest. As a child, Nancy had read how that other Nancy—Nancy Hart, and other women of Georgia, advancing in a field of corn stubble had taken part in the battle of Kettle Creek, and driven the British from upper Georgia during the Revolution. How little she had dreamed that she, another Nancy, six generations later, would be rehearsing for battle in a war for liberty that encircled the globe in just such a field.

The nurses had run only about a hundred feet when there came a roar of gunfire behind and far overhead. Almost everyone wondered if her neighbor had been struck as she saw her dive for the earth.

“Golly Moses!” groaned Mabel. “I’m scared stiff!”

Nancy giggled nervously as she turned to see her pal’s forehead smeared with dirt where she had tried to go through the corn furrow.

“Exciting, but awful!” she agreed.

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