Angels of Bataan and Corregidor
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5: The Long Routine
By the time the rains came in June, Santo Tomas had stopped feeling like an emergency and started feeling like a life, which frightened Ruth more than the emergency ever had.
An emergency had an end built into its shape, however far off—a battle, a siege, a surrender, something that resolved. A life inside a fence had no such shape. It had mornings and roll calls and rations and the same stone quadrangle crossed a thousand times, and the danger of it, Ruth came to understand across that first long stretch, was not the danger of dying but the danger of forgetting there had ever been another way to live.
“You get used to the wire,” Dorothy said, one gray morning, watching the camp wake below the classroom window they’d converted into a dormitory. “That’s what worries me. Not that it’s there. That I stopped seeing it around April.”
~ ☆ ~
The camp had built, in the months since the nurses’ arrival, an entire shadow economy and shadow government neither the Japanese commandant’s office nor the official Army chain of command had designed, and the seven of them had each found a groove worn smooth by repetition within it.
Helen ran the hospital ward as though she’d been born to run exactly this one, training a rotation of civilian volunteers—teachers, housewives, a former dental assistant—into something approaching a nursing staff, because the camp’s actual need for trained hands outstripped any seven women’s capacity to meet it. She kept her private ledger of medicine on hand, updated weekly now instead of nightly, the numbers no better than they’d been in Malinta and, by midsummer, considerably worse. Quinine came into camp in trickles the Japanese administration allowed and the black market occasionally supplemented, and Helen spent an increasing share of her waking hours deciding, with a coldness she’d built for exactly this purpose, whose fever earned the last of it.
“You never ask me how I choose,” she said to Ruth once, mixing what medicine she had into doses too small to properly treat anyone, only to slow the worst of it. “I’ve noticed that. Everyone else asks eventually. You never have.”
“I didn’t think I wanted the answer.”
“Smart girl.” Helen didn’t elaborate further, and Ruth let the subject close, the way she’d learned to let several subjects close inside this camp, because not every truth needed saying twice to be understood.
Bea took over the night shift by default and then by preference, running it with the same unhurried authority she’d carried since the truck accident on the road to Fort Stotsenburg, and trained two of the civilian volunteers so thoroughly in her methods that Helen began referring to the night rotation, half in admiration, as “Whitfield’s Own.” Bea found, in the camp’s dark hours, a use for something she’d carried quietly since Chicago—a patience with fear that came, she told Ruth once, from having managed other people’s fear of her long before she’d had reason to manage her own.
“They still look at me twice, some of them,” Bea said, of the civilian internees, most of whom had never worked beside a Negro nurse before the camp forced the arrangement on them. “Fewer than they used to. I’ve stopped counting how many, exactly. Progress, I suppose, comes in whatever units it comes in.”
Peg had, by midsummer, stopped asking after her husband by name to strangers, though she still wrote him letters she had no way to send, folding them into a tin box she kept beneath her cot the way other women kept photographs. She worked the camp’s children’s ward more often than not, alongside Vivian, and found in it a use for the same steadiness that had once anchored her own two children back home, safe on a family farm in a country that felt, some days, like something she’d invented rather than remembered.
“Do you think they know,” Peg asked Ruth once, of her children, “that their mother’s in a place like this?”
“I think they know you’re doing something important. I don’t know how much of the rest gets through.”
“I hope none of it does. I hope, whatever letters make it out of here, they only ever hear the parts I choose to tell them.” Peg folded another letter into the tin without sealing it. “That’s the one mercy I still get to arrange. What they’re allowed to know.”
Vivian had, by summer, become something close to indispensable to the camp’s children’s ward, in a transformation that surprised no one who’d watched her since Bataan and would have astonished anyone who’d only known her at Sternberg. She ran a small daily routine for the malnourished and the frightened—songs, games rationed carefully against her patients’ strength, an insistence on calling every child by name rather than by bed number—that Halloran herself had begun quietly pointing new arrivals toward, when a child came into camp too traumatized to speak.
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