Page:Doctors Aweigh.djvu/58

Rh ship ceased shuddering, we got onto our knees and began to work on the injured until the next bomb was due. Often this was less than a minute."

After four hours of this, the orders came: "Abandon ship!" From the sick bay, the injured men were carried up the slanting deck to the starboard side of the ship. Life jackets were put on them. Sailors jerked the kapok-filled mattresses from the officers' berths, and the most severely injured men were lashed to these and lowered over the side. A well man went with every injured one, to look out for him.

"The most impressive thing about the whole business," Yon recalled, "was the men's willingness to help each other. There never was any thought of each man for himself. And you never had to tell a man to do something for one of the injured. Every member of the crew seemed to feel a personal responsibility for the others, and for the fellows from the Langley, who were getting their second shipwreck inside of two days." One disadvantage of steel ships is that they offer so little floatable wreckage. The men tore down the doors, broke out all the wooden panels, and flung them over the side. Dr. Yon's eyes fell on the chart box in the captain's cabin. It was fully six feet long and two feet square. He wrenched it off the wall, and by the time it floated to the ship's bow, there were six men clinging to it.

Before sailing from Tjilatjap, the skipper had taken aboard a lot of lengths of bamboo, big ones, cut in ten-foot lengths. These were laid on the boat davits. As the Pecos sank, the water washed the bamboos overboard, which provided further valuable wreckage for the men to cling to. One bamboo would support at least four men. "The trouble with a life jacket," said Yon, "is that after it gets wet, it gets heavy, and as you hang in it, it chafes you under the arms. It helps a lot to have something to rest your elbows on. Those lengths of bamboo were just the thing."

It was five minutes to four that afternoon when the Pecos went down. The Jap planes had decided their job was done, and had