too, our village was bombed.”

“Suppose we are bombed tonight?” the girl thought. Then she laughed silently, for she was lodged deep in the heart of Iowa, at old Fort Des Moines.

As the name drifted through her dreamy thoughts, it gave her a start. She was fully awake again, for the full weight of the tremendous move she had made came crashing back upon her.

“I’m a WAC,” she whispered, “a WAC! I’m in the Army now!”

Yes, that was it. She was a member of the Woman’s Army Corps. So, too, were all the girls sleeping so peacefully there. Here at Fort Des Moines in four short weeks they would receive their basic training. And then—“I may drive a truck,” she thought with a thrill, “or operate an army short-wave set, or help watch for enemy planes along the seacoast, or—” she caught her breath, “I may be sent overseas.” North Africa, the Solomons, the bleak shores of Alaska—all these and more drifted before her mind’s eye.

“Come what may,” she whispered, “I am ready!”

She might have fallen asleep then had not a cot less than ten feet from her given out a low creak as a tall, strong girl, who had caught her eye from the first, sat straight up in her bed to whisper three words.

The words were whispered in a foreign tongue. Norma was mildly shocked at hearing them whispered here in the night.

“She was talking in her sleep,” Norma assured herself as the girl settled quietly back in her place. Then it came to her with the force of a blow. “She too might be a spy!”

“What nonsense!” she chided herself. “How jittery I am tonight! I’ll go to sleep. And here’s hoping I don’t dream.”

She did fall asleep, and she did not dream.

From some place very, very far away, a bugle was blowing and someone seemed to sing, “I can’t get ’em up, I can’t get ’em up. I can’t get ’em up in the morning.” Then an alarm clock went off with a bang and Norma, the WAC recruit, was awake.

Her feet hit the floor with a slap and she was putting on her clothes before she knew it. A race to the washroom, a hasty hair-do, a dash of color to her cheeks and, twenty minutes later, together with thirty other raw recruits, she lined up for Assembly.

It was bitter cold. A sharp wind was 

 Prev. P 3/146 next