A/N: I don't own Hogan's Heroes and I don't get paid for this - it is truly a labor of love.
Remember when Colonel Klink was sick with the flu and Kinch said the camp medic was in the hospital with the same malady? Ever wonder what kind of experience Wilson had there?
Many thanks to Lizzi0307 for correcting my German!
The infirmary had never been so busy. The influenza epidemic had somehow spread from Hammelburg to Stalag 13, and the prisoners had been easy prey for the infection.
Those who could remember the deadly pandemic of 1918-1919 were understandably fearful of the outcome, but fortunately this was a milder form. Not hemorrhagic; just fever, cough, and debilitating weakness that passed within a week or so with most. For those unfortunate enough to develop pneumonia, though, the outlook was not so good.
Not surprisingly, Sergeant Scott Wilson joined the ranks of the sufferers eventually. He had been working night and day, tending to the sick prisoners, and although he did his best to keep up his own strength, one day it hit him.
Sergeants Kinchloe and Thomas found the medic collapsed on the floor of the infirmary. They discovered he was burning up with fever, and delirious. They quickly gathered him up from the floor and got him into a cot.
...
"Scotty..."
As if in a dream, the voice was haunting Wilson. He struggled to open his eyes, but his eyelids were simply too heavy.
"This man is very sick, Sergeant Kinchloe."
"I know, Kommandant. That's why I asked to have you see him."
"I will arrange for him to be transported to the hospital in Hammelburg. And the other ones?"
"The rest seem to be doing better, Kommandant."
"Good. You will inform Colonel Hogan of the transfer, Sergeant Kinchloe."
"Yes, sir."
...
Fevered dreams had their way with poor Wilson for a long time, dreams of a time past and a time present...
It was the war to end all wars, with disease killing as many as the bullets did. He was a young private with Pershing's army in France, spurred on to enlisting by the patriotic strains of George M. Cohan's "Over There". He was fortunate in that during his few months abroad he avoided injury, but the sickening sights, sounds, and smells of trench warfare made him resolve that he would never go to war again.
The Armistice had been signed but he had not yet been shipped back to the States when his wife, shortly after giving birth to their son Joey, succumbed to the dreaded influenza. Within hours she was gone, leaving a squalling infant to care for.
Wilson returned home to find his son in the care of the child's heartbroken grandmother. Although he was numb with grief, he made up his mind to raise their son the way Carrie had wanted him to be raised. With the help of his parents and his mother-in-law, Wilson took Joey with him to Ann Arbor and managed to finish his course at the University of Michigan with a degree in biology.
He was proud of his achievement, but the sweetest moment at the commencement ceremony was when three-year-old Joey ran to him and Wilson swung him up in his arms.
His parents wanted him to go on to medical school, but Wilson was determined to start earning a living for himself and his son. He moved back home to a little town on the shore of Lake Michigan and got a job as a teacher in the local high school.
With a wistful look back on the career as a doctor that he had given up, he decided to learn as much as he could regarding all things medical, and trained to become a volunteer ambulance driver as well.
Little Joey flourished in the small town, secure in the love of his father and grandparents, and grew up to be a young man they were all proud of. After he graduated from high school, Wilson sent him to his old alma mater, and eagerly awaited letters from Ann Arbor every week.
And then Hitler invaded Poland.
Wilson was stunned to receive a letter from Joey that explained that he had enlisted with the United States Army Air Corps, and was determined to become a pilot. For a long time after he received the letter, Wilson sat with his head in his hands. Visions of the Great War came to him, and he shuddered. His son, his only son, was to go to war? It was every parent's nightmare, and it was only now that Wilson realized what his own parents, and Carrie, had gone through in 1918 when he had enlisted as an idealistic twenty-year-old.
But at least Joey wasn't leaving a pregnant wife behind.
In the months following, Wilson was afflicted by a restlessness he had never known before. His mother and father had passed on a few years before, and he was alone in the world, except for his boy who was currently risking his neck in Burma, training with Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers.
In 1941, feeling the need to join Joey, if only in spirit and a shared purpose, Scott Wilson enlisted with the United States Army Air Corps and quickly attained the rank of sergeant. By 1942, with the US officially in the war, he found himself with the Eighth Air Force in England, flying daylight missions over Germany in a B-17, acting as waist gunner. One of his jobs as waist gunner was to tend to the wounded in the aft portion of the plane, and he thought wryly that his experience as an ambulance driver was being put to good use.
Eventually, Wilson's luck ran out and his Flying Fortress was shot down over Schweinfurt. He escaped injury but was quickly picked up by the local constabulary and shipped directly to a Luft Stalag not far away. He didn't realize at the time that he was fortunate not to have gone to a transit camp, but perhaps the fact that those who captured him referred to him dismissively as "der alte Mann" spared him that experience.
At any rate, he ended up at Stalag 13, part of a motley crew, international in scope, and multigenerational in age. He himself was one of the oldest POWs there, and found it amusing that his fellow prisoners, many of them younger even than Joey, tended to call him "Scotty" rather than "Sergeant" or even "Wilson".
Colonel Robert Hogan, the Senior POW Officer, was quick to sum up all new arrivals and had Wilson appointed as their acting medic the first week he arrived. Colonel Klink, the Kommandant, was agreeable to this, and Wilson, struck once more by the irony of the whole situation, wondered if his parents' ambitions of him becoming a doctor were to be fulfilled by his role at the POW camp.
His duties as medic had not been too arduous; other than attending to minor illnesses and injuries, splinting broken bones and suturing lacerations and such, he had not encountered anything serious. He concentrated his energies on keeping the POWs as well nourished and as healthy as possible, paying attention to infection control and sanitation. He also earned a name for himself as "the petty theft man", referring to his skill in scrounging medical supplies.
The influenza epidemic had been the first real challenge, and unfortunately he had no remedy for influenza, even if he had had access to all the drugs available in Germany. Keep 'em hydrated, and their lungs clear, and attend to their comfort; that was pretty much all anyone could do...
...
"Sie müssen trinken." A gentle voice roused Wilson from his dreams and he opened his eyes.
A little old lady, with pink cheeks, blue eyes, and white hair, was holding a cup to his lips.
Wilson struggled to lift his head, but he managed to take a few sips before dropping back to the pillow. A pillow? Pillows were an unknown commodity at Stalag 13, at least in the prisoners' barracks. He allowed his gaze to travel from the kindly woman seated at his bedside, to the other beds in the large, high-ceilinged room.
A hospital ward, apparently. Then he turned his head as another voice was heard, speaking very softly.
"Was macht dieser Mann eigentlich hier?"
"Die Grippe, Herr Major."
A man was now standing next to the little old lady seated at his bedside. He had a stocky build, narrow dark eyes, a narrow dark mustache, and was dressed in a black Gestapo uniform.
At this point, Wilson didn't have the strength to care, but he recognized his second visitor as Major Wolfgang Hochstetter. Wilson had no idea why Colonel Hogan's nemesis was visiting him in the hospital, but he raised one hand weakly in greeting.
"Howdy," he said.
The Major's mustache twitched, but he said, in heavily accented English,"You are from Stalag 13, no? Then you will know it is your duty to get better so you no longer occupy a bed in the Krankenhaus, a bed needed by loyal Germans. Listen to the gnädige Frau, ja?"
With that, he spoke a few more words in German to the little old lady, patted her on the shoulder, and took his leave.
Wilson watched him go, but wondered how he was to listen to the lady when he didn't speak German, and she apparently didn't speak English. Regardless, when she put the cup to his lips, he obediently drank, and just as obediently allowed her to sponge his face.
Later, he watched in puzzlement as she pantomined coughing and turning from side to side, then indicated he should do the same. It took a few moments before he caught her drift.
Of course...she wants me to move around and cough, to keep my lungs clear. Just like I made the guys do back in the infirmary. How quickly I forget.
He was so incredibly weak, it was an effort just to roll to his side, but the good lady assisted him, and gave him a handkerchief to cough into. She then made him drink some more before she prepared to leave.
Wilson looked up at her, not knowing why she had been so kind. "Danke," he said, pretty much exhausting his knowledge of German.
She smiled at him. "Bitte sehr."
...
Wilson recognized that visit as the turning point in his illness. The staff at the hospital were kind enough, but terribly overworked, and a middle-aged POW was not a high priority to them. The ward was crowded with flu sufferers of all ages and both sexes, and Wilson realized somewhat guiltily that he was just an added burden to them.
As soon as he was able to sit up, he managed to get himself out of bed and go to others in the ward, helping them to drink and caring for them as his kindly visitor had cared for him. The nurse in charge was alarmed at first by this behavior, but then observed that the American patient was helping and not hindering, so she held her peace.
Late one night, the ward was fairly quiet, with only a few coughs and mutterings heard, but Wilson was jolted out of a half-doze when he heard a faint stridorous noise.
He sat up and thrust the covers aside, climbing out of bed to stand somewhat unsteadily on still wobbly legs, clad only in a thin nightshirt. He cocked his head and heard the stridorous noise again.
For a moment, he relived an anxious time in Joey's childhood when the boy had the croup, and had struggled to breathe. He recognized the sound, and made his way over to a crib across the room and looked down at the child inside.
Even in the dim light, he could see a two-year-old in distress. The child's breaths were audible as a high-pitched whistle, her lips were cyanotic, her little hands were waving frantically, and he could see the muscles retracting at the base of her neck in her fight to get oxygen. Worst of all, her eyes were wide open and fixed on Wilson, begging him to help her.
He turned from the crib and staggered to the nearest window. It took all of his strength to force it open, but he managed it, and the cold night air poured in. He dragged a chair next to the window, and then hurried back to the child, rolling her in a blanket so that only her face was showing.
Somehow he made it back to the chair he had placed by the window, and all but fell onto it, still clutching the child in his arms.
He managed to support her so that she was almost upright, and the cold air blew in her face, helping to relax the laryngeal spasms that were choking off her airway. Eventually the stridor eased, and the effort of breathing as well, and her small body relaxed in his arms as she fell asleep.
Wilson looked down at the pale little face, and tears came to his eyes as he held her closer, and shivered a little in the cold breeze from the open window. She would be fine now, he thought. Just as Joey had been.
The tears fell more freely as he wondered where his son was now, and if he were safe.
The night nurse came in then, and hurried to the window, where the grizzled POW held a sleeping child in his arms, bundled up against the cold night air.
She started to expostulate with him in German, and then Wilson looked up at her.
"Croup," he said.
"Kruppe?" she gasped. She bent and put her ear against the child's chest. Apparently satisfied, she put a gentle hand on Wilson's shoulder. "Danke."
Wilson remembered a phrase from his visit with the kindly old lady.
"Bitte sehr," he replied.
...
The next day, Wilson was examined by a harried doctor, and apparently deemed fit for return to the stalag. Shortly thereafter Sergeant Schultz arrived to escort him back to captivity.
On the ride back to Stalag 13, Schultz happily provided Wilson with details of camp life that he had missed during his hospitalization.
"Oh, Sergeant Wilson, you will be glad to know that all of your patients are doing better - Sergeant Thomas has been looking after them. Even the Kommandant is feeling better. He caught the flu as well, but Corporal LeBeau cured him right away!"
"Is that right?"
"Ja, the big shot was so sick, and was almost going to go to a rest camp, but LeBeau used a string of garlic, and a béarnaise sauce plaster..."
"What kind of plaster did you say?"
"Béarnaise sauce. He was going to use a mustard plaster, but he did not have any mustard, so..."
"Of course." Wilson grinned and shook his head as the truck pulled into the gates of the camp. Yep, not much changed at good old Stalag 13. He was glad to be home.