Once an Eagle (111 page)

“Look, I don't know the God damn password—”

“Who are you?” Pritchard recognized First Sergeant Lattimer's voice in one of the forward holes.

“We're from Bowcher's battalion. There's five of us. Let us come in, will you?”

Sergeant Lattimer called back toward the CP hole, “How about a flare at eleven o'clock?” and Pritchard picked up a flare shell.

“Christ, no—no flares. There's Japs all around us. Look, we got a wounded guy with us. Just hold your fire …”

“Who are
you?
” Lattimer called softly.

“Rodriguez, Lou Rodriguez …” Then quickly, angrily: “What the hell difference does it make who I am? For Christ sake, let us come on in, now. We've had a rough time up there …”

“Okay,” Lattimer answered. “Come ahead.”

There was a hurried, stealthy rustling, and the empty ration cans and rifle clips on the strands of wire tinkled merrily, like distant off-key cowbells.

“Fire.”

Pritchard turned in amazement. Damon had his hand on the shoulder of the machine gunner at the leading edge of the hole. “Open fire.”

The gunner's helmet swung around. “What? But look, they're—”

Damon jabbed the gunner smartly in the neck. “Do as I
say!
”

The gun jumped, a blast of blue flame half a foot long leaped from the muzzle in a sudden, stunning roar, and tracers floated like eerie orange balls into the night. Pritchard heard the thunk of a flare shell hitting the bottom of the tube, as the General moved. He gazed front. The Old Man's cracked up, he thought with sudden horror, he's blown his top. Someone was screaming, “Hold your
fire,
you stupid bastards—!” Then the flare burst with a sharp crack, in a wild diffusion of light that made his eyeballs smart. He saw a flurry of commotion at the wire: two figures lay on the ground, another was holding his head, and a voice was screaming in Japanese—quick, explosive syllables that made no sense. Rifles were roaring now, two more were down, the last man flitted away, a wild, scarecrow wraith, into the sea of vines. Then the machine gun stopped, and the rifle fire fell away to a chorus of voices calling, “Cease firing! Cease firing …”

“Trick,” the General was saying crisply. “Couldn't know Rodriguez has called himself Tico for years. Hates his first name.”

“I see,” Pritchard answered shakily. The suddenness of the incident, the utterly unforeseen turn of events, and now the return of silence and darkness, had left him jangled, half out of breath. Still, there was something that bothered him. “But if he used Rodriguez' name—and Major Bowcher's—”

“Yes. That's right.” Damon's voice was completely without inflection.

The perimeter was bathed in quiet again. One of the Japanese was moaning softly. Pritchard stood there with the flare in his hand. Oh the bastards, he murmured, half-aloud. The rotten bastards—to pull a trick like that, take advantage of a man that way … Again he heard the thick, deliberate sibilance of men moving. They were coming forward again, in the filthy dark they loved so, the jungle was crawling with them. He felt his head and shoulders shiver once, uncontrollably. With the death of the flare all his vision had deserted him; he could see nothing but gray splotches drifting and sinking in a black field. He rubbed his eyes. The air was close and foul; the odor of earth and damp rot and offal sank into the base of his nose and lodged there. Mosquitoes kept bumping against his cheeks and forehead. By Christ, he wasn't going to be late with a flare next time, he'd have the place looking like Broadway, he'd keep a—

“Hello, Yankee Doodle.”

The voice was feline, tremulous, as if poised on the edge of laughter; but tensed now for anything out there beyond the perimeter Pritchard remained calm, listening intently.

“Oh, boy. Now you're going to get it … You know that? Soldier-boy?” In the dense, close air the words sounded extra-human, as if a hideous, epicene statue had been given voice. It's not the same man, Pritchard thought quietly—not the same one who tried to impersonate Rodriguez; they've got two men who can speak English that well. They certainly have got it all over us in the matter of languages.

“Soldier-boy, you're going to die very soon. You know that? Oh yes. Very soon, now.” But as the voice went on, taunting, mocking them, it seemed less frightening. “Not much fun, is it, Yankee Doodle? Sitting there waiting to die?”

“—You eat shit, Tojo!” someone shouted hoarsely on the left.

“Thank you, soldier-boy,” the voice simpered. “Thank you so much.”

“Keep the frigging change!”

“All right,” Damon called mildly. “That's enough of that …”

“How about it?” Major Scholes said. “Work them over now?”

“No,” the General answered. He might have been discussing a requisition to Corps for blankets or tentage. “They're not all there yet. This is just to get us to fire prematurely, show them where our automatic weapons are. Won't be long now.” And leaning forward Pritchard felt he could hear a dense, feathery rustling along the whole line. He was quivering with impatience, with exasperation.

“Why don't we—”

There came a soaring, mounting shriek, grinding away into the jungle depths. Siren. He realized he had jumped, that even the General had started. It went on and on, rising and falling, piercing the last recesses of the brain, evoking memories of times back home with the cars pulling over and faces turning, and a night when the apartment house diagonally across from theirs had caught fire. People were standing in dressing gowns out on the sidewalk, gazing upward where firemen clung antlike to swaying ladders and here and there figures moved at the windows; flickering, gesticulating shadows.

“Wonder where in hell they got that?” Major Scholes was saying to the General.

“Siren for the fire brigade. Pulling everything in the book, aren't they?” Pritchard felt Damon's hand on his arm. “They're coming up now. Hear them?”

“I can't hear
anything
with that God damn thing going … ” All the same, in spite of the siren's wail and the firing off to the west, he could hear the crunch and susurrus of many men making their way through brush. And now the siren itself descended to a craking growl, and subsided. The taunting, feline voice had stopped. This is why they make you wait, Pritchard thought; wait and hurry, wait and hurry—to get ready for a rotten, stupid, maddening wait like this …

“Mortars,” the General said crisply. Major Scholes relayed the order, and from behind them came the muffled pop-pop-pop and then in the jungle out ahead the crash of the shells exploding. Now screams and hoarse cries were audible.

“Good,” Pritchard heard himself say. “Take it, you bastards. Take it!” He felt a taut, quivering rage against every Japanese who ever lived.

There was a torch flaring, a blinding blue-white blaze of light, and he flinched, saw the clean red wires of tracers; they seemed to float straight at him and then curve up and away, gaining speed, burning their way through the night overhead. Now another one was firing in long, shuttling bursts. Trying for the gun got the five at the wire, he thought. He averted his head now, peering out sideways at the flickering glare.

A hand tapped him on the arm and he looked up. “Flares,” Damon was calling to him. “Continuous.”

He wheeled obediently and dropped the projectile into the tube, swung away from the painful air-compressed
whunk!
of the propellant, reached out and picked up his carbine. The General, his hands cupped to his mouth, swung his head from left to right and roared, “Commence firing! Commence fi—”

His voice was drowned in the crash of gunfire. The night was laced in a crazy-quilt of tracers and the white darts of muzzle blasts: a terrible carnival, close at hand. Then with a flat crack the flare burst, the area was shot with light—and there they were, coming silently and steadily, their faces smooth and dark and glistening as if part of their helmets, their eyes incredibly long, theatrical slits in the inverted dawn of the flare. Coming in clots and clumps against the wire, hurling their bodies at it or slashing at it feverishly, their bayonets flickering, and here and there the short, fiery red arcs of thrown grenades. They were everywhere. For a wild, interminable instant Pritchard felt utterly paralyzed, defenseless, constrained to crouch helplessly in a hole and watch this brute, stubborn force sweep over them, destroy them all. It was too much, too much. Then the scene broke into a thousand crazy zebra stripes and colophons as the flare—Jesus the flare!—swaying, reached the trees; in an agony of dread he dropped in another shell, snatched up still another.

“Not too fast, Harry,” Damon was saying, his face very close. “Pace them out, now.”

“Right.” He turned and raised his carbine. The machine gun beside him clattered like a riveting machine drilling at an anvil, the Japanese danced and scuttled and came on with that terrible menacing intention, and the concerted fire from the perimeter brought them down. It was very hard to think. Think clearly in all this bedlam of screams and roars and swaying underwater glare. But he was free now: he was able to move. He raised his carbine, held it centered on a huge man in a nearly black uniform who had just snapped his fist against his helmet. Grenade. He'd hit him, he was certain he'd hit him but the big Imperial Marine armed another grenade with that quick flexing of his arm, the blow against his helmet, and threw again. Then all at once he fell as if caught on a trip wire and went down out of sight. Pritchard remembered the flare this time, got off another and went on firing, emptied the magazine. The Japanese had reached the first line of holes and were shooting into some of them, tossing grenades, but he felt no fear now, only an anger dry as dust and a tight, vengeful exhilaration, a sense of being mildly out of wind. Two men were locked together like kids wrestling in a playground, swaying and scuffling, and an officer in a tightly fitting tunic with a burnished helmet and a sword held levelly in his two hands was racing up to them. He fired, saw the officer jerk from the impact, right himself and continue past the two struggling figures, raising the sword above his head, a fearfully quick gesture; then tracers slanted into his chest and he sank gently to his knees, his teeth flashing in an anguished grimace, like a man mired in quicksand. Pritchard swung left to another group of four or five who were driving their bayonets down at a hole. A hand gripped his shoulder, hard. Damon, pointing behind him and to their right, where several men were running through the splotched shadows.

“Stop them! Bring them back!”

He understood instantly and nodded. Taking off. That was bad. Thing like that could turn into a rout, mustn't happen. He leaped out of the hole, catching in the corner of his eye Brand feeding a belt into the machine gun, Scholes huddled in the forward edge of the pit, both hands cupped over the phone. Even as he got to his feet he could see another man scuttling off into the shadows.

“You!” he yelled. “Come back here!” It was curious: he'd never been much as a runner—he'd been rather slow of foot, preferring sports where his solid bulk could have free play, such as wrestling and the hammer throw, at which he'd excelled. But now he overtook the stragglers as though they were chained to the trees. He snatched at a man's collar and stopped him, caught another by the belt, and cried: “Where do you think
you're
going?”

The second man's eyes rolled wildly. “—We can't stay here, can't
stay—!
”

“Of course you can. You can and you will!”

“No, no—we've got to pull back, I heard them say—”

“You heard nothing of the kind! You were taking off. Now you cut that out, all of you …” They stood watching him, agitated and indecisive; he recognized one of them as a drafting clerk in G-2. “And you a sergeant!” he said hotly. The inanity, the sheer banality of his remarks astonished him. “Come on, now—get back to your holes!” One of the group started to run again, but he had worked his way around behind them and he stopped the soldier with a gesture. Tracers showered into the trees over their heads. The man who had spoken before gave an exclamation of uneasiness and started to move away again.

“God damn your asses,” Pritchard roared, “—go back to your holes!” He waved his carbine at them. He wanted to howl with laughter, and at the same time he was filled with rage, standing here in the dark with all manner of ferocious destruction whining and moaning around them. “By Jesus, you're in the Double Five and you'd better act like it …” Something struck a tree trunk immediately behind him with a monstrous crash and fragments sang through the air around them; the little group trembled and fluttered.
There is no excuse for malingering or cowardice during battle. It is the task of leadership to stop it, by whatever means would seem to be the surest cure, always making certain that in so doing it will not make a bad matter worse.
Paragraph 23.

“Now I said get
back
there …!” He thought, I could shoot one of them right now, just like that—and the realization frightened him. The safety on his carbine was in the off position. “Come on now, God damn it—move!” Slowly he raised the carbine, keeping his finger well outside the trigger guard.

“Ooh, don't shoot, Cap,” a short, fat man with thick lips cried with fearful concern, holding up one hand. “No, don't shoot, now …”

“Then get going! They're
counting
on you here—all of you …” He was pushing them now, a counselor with some reluctant kids on a hike through the rain. “All right, let's move out.” At that moment a figure staggered out of the shadows, hand to his head. He was completely silent but in the fitful, splashed light of the flares they saw the side of his face and throat were coated slickly with blood. He threw them a single agonized glance and wandered away; but with the sight of him the little group went all to pieces again. The thin soldier who had spoken earlier murmured something and started backward. Pritchard seized him by the front of his fatigue jacket and shook him. “Where the hell are you going?” he demanded savagely. “Look, there's another defense line a hundred yards down that trail with orders to blast anything that moves. Anything! So you can forget
that …
”