The Thin Red Line (24 page)

When the messenger who brought the bulletin delivered his other, unofficial news at the CP on the spur, there was almost a riot of murderous reaction. Storm, Bead, Culp, Doll who had come down from 1st Platoon with a message, and Lt Band all made sanguinary promises. Storm looked particularly killerish. Only Welsh with his sly eyes said, and showed, nothing. Little Dale the second cook with his stooped shoulders and intense, tough, flat-eyed face was almost beside himself and swore to gutshoot every Jap who tried to come to him to surrender, after toying with him five minutes first. Young Corporal Fife’s reaction on the other hand (though he said not a single word) was one of fear, disbelief and finally a massive horror (as he enviously watched these others) that any creatures who spoke a language, walked upright on two legs dressed in clothes, built cities, and claimed to be human beings could actually treat each other with such fiendish animal cruelty. Obviously the only way really to survive in this world of humansocalledculture we had made and were so proud of, was to be more vicious, meaner and more cruel than those one met. And Fife, for the very first time in his life, was beginning to believe he did not have the toughness of character which this demanded.

It was Pfc Doll who carried the news up the slope to the platoons on the line. John Bell, when Doll on his way back to the 1st Platoon stopped off to tell the 2d, was standing with his squad leader Mother McCron and Big Queen and another man named Cash. Queen, made sergeant after the defection of Stack, and Cash were both 1st Platoon. Queen’s and McCron’s squads linked the two platoons, and Bell’s and Cash’s holes were the actual joining point. The two sergeants were just in the act of telling the two men to buddy up for the night, one sleeping and one awake, to facilitate liaison between the platoons, when Doll reached the crest, breathing heavily, with his news.

Bell had never seen such reactions on men’s faces. Big Queen turned red as a beet with rage, and muttered something about cracking skulls, flexing his big fists. McCron’s eyes got vague and faraway and his face took on an unwilling, shamed look as if he did not want to hear as he muttered, “Oh, the dirty fuckers,” sadly. Cash, a tall powerfully built Ohio draftee who had been a cab driver in Toledo and was known in the company simply as “Big Un,” on the other hand grinned. He had a cold, gleefully tough face anyway, as hard and of the same texture as an uncracked walnut, and when he grinned and licked his lips like that, his blue eyes squinted, he looked positively and spinechillingly murderous. All he said was “Okay” in a very soft, breathed voice. He said it several times. Bell’s own reaction was one of sickness. He felt sick all over, physcially sick. He said nothing. But he thought. He thought about the new talisman he had made just today, and he thought about his wife Marty. Ah, Marty. He hoped if anything ever happened to him like that, that nobody would ever write or tell her how this cock and these balls of his which she had loved so had finally wound up.

The evening itself that night, in cynical contrast to the news, was very lovely. Up here in the hills night did not fall so swiftly as it did down below in the groves. The twilight lingered on turning everything including the air itself to rose, seeming as though it were reluctant to leave and plunge them into the blackness of their first night in combat. It did not depart until, apparently diabolically, it had given them a lovely striated tropic sunset to look at in the western sky. It was a time to think of peacefulness and women.

Shortly before dark, when it came time to eat, it was found that there was no water. There was plenty of C ration around. But ration details coming down from the platoons on the crest wanted water much worse than food. The sun, the heat, the sweltering, and the sweating had been enormous and every canteen was empty.

All of them had seen jeeploads of watercans on the way up from the river. But wherever these were, diverted into the back areas, or poured out on the ground, they were not at the front. Finally, after much haggling and arguing on the sound power phone and much sending back and forth of messengers, Stein was able to obtain enough water to allow each man half a canteen, which was to last him all through tomorrow. Supper was eaten dry and cold, choked down without any liquid to wash it down.

In the night it rained twice. No one slept much. Many useless grenades were thrown. And every now and then flaming bursts of riflefire lit the night, betraying positions, hitting nothing.

And at dawn, bearded, mudstained, grimy and greasy, rising in their blue holes to watch 2d Battalion take off over the top of Hill 209, the whole of C-for-Charlie looked as though they had been living here for months.

In the chill mists of first light, from this far away, it was difficult to see them as one by one, crouching and carrying their rifles in both hands or one, they hopped over the last foot of ridge and disappeared. A sort of ragged cheer rose briefly and fell away. After that those who remained watched in silence. With The Elephant’s Shoulder and Hill 209 now secured, the line snaked along for a thousand yards and more, following the contours of the several ridges which formed the Dancing Elephant’s spine. As the attacking companies of 2d Battalion were pulled out and sent forward a gap was opened up between the two battalions, and twice during the morning C-for-Charlie was forced to move.

Breakfast had been choked down dry, also. After that there was nothing to do but sit and wait. The moves, when the orders for them came, were not difficult to make. The left platoon simply pulled out, passing to the rear of the right one, and took up positions at the appointed spot. Then the former right platoon, now the left, joined them. To C-for-Charlie’s left Able Company was making the same maneuver and to the left of Able a battalion of the division’s reserve regiment was moving in.

Even with the two moves, they had not moved far enough right to see into the battle area proper. They were now almost to the actual Elephant’s Shoulder, and they could now hear the mortar and machinegun fire. But just here, as though The Dancing Elephant to keep its balance had hunched its massive shoulders, the ridge curved inward forming an angle of jungle which cut off the view. They were now on the same slope where yesterday, while they watched, F-for-Fox had made its try for the crest and been repulsed; and recognizing it with a sense of squeamishness, they settled down again to wait. They were not unaware that each time they were moved, it was closer to the fight, never farther away from it.

During one of the moves Fullback Culp had seen something move in the brush below, or thought he had. At that moment they had been above and just in front of the side ridge which the F-for-Fox CP had occupied yesterday, and at the foot of its forward slope a small brushgrown draw fell steeply to the main ravine. Culp stopped and whistled softly and pointed. Far down below them in the basin, so recently secured from the enemy, lines and groups of men were moving everywhere with supplies, but up here on the forward slope of the subsidiary ridge there was no one. Nobody else could see anything moving in the brush, but a sort of gleeful manhunt was organized anyway. Increasingly since yesterday and irrespective of rank the seven men who carried the new Thompsonguns had begun to see themselves more and more as a sort of private club. Welsh, Storm, Dale, MacTae, the officers Stein and Band, all of them except Culp were part of the Company HQ anyway, and Culp as commander of the weapons platoon was almost always with the HQ. And it was now the club which took over the manhunt. Spacing themselves so nothing in the little draw could get past their combined fire, while the rest of the CP and the reserve platoon stopped to watch, they waited while two of them, Culp and MacTae, came down the draw like beaters. When they had come halfway and with everyone watching intently, still nothing had moved.

“Watch out,” Culp called from above, grinning with all his teeth. “I’m gonna give ’em a burst or two, if they’re in there. Hold on.” Turning the gun in its side in the approved manner, he sprayed the brush with two short bursts. When he released the trigger he looked surprised. “Damn things really do kick. More’n I thought.”

Still nothing moved in the brush. “Come on, let’s look.” MacTae said. The two of them disappeared into the brush, which swayed above their heads as they moved. They came out looking sheepish.

“Nothin,” Culp said. “But you never can tell. Might of been. You know, infiltrators.”

He was quite right. There had been infiltration last night in 2d Battalion’s area. But there was a good deal of nervous laughter at his expense, anyway, as they all climbed back up to the platoons on the line. There had been some rather extreme nervous tension there for a moment, and now it relieved itself in laughter at Culp. None of them, they found to their surprise, were at ease in the use of their weapons. They had been trained too well and too long in the restrictive safety precautions of the rifle range to feel relaxed shooting over the heads of friends.

Shortly after noon they sustained a counterattack. After the firing all stopped, and they began to compare notes, it was discovered that not one of them could honestly say he had seen a Japanese during the firing. Later it was found that D Company on their right actually had repelled what was probably a patrol in force and had killed several. But when D had begun firing, the firing had spread all along the line until everybody, including the battalion from the reserve regiment on the far left, was heaving grenades and firing over the crest into the jungle whether they saw any Japanese or not. And even afterward when it was over, at least half of the firers still believed they had repelled a major Japanese attack. The others, who knew better, momentarily looked sheepish in the midst of their excitement, but were unable to refrain from rejoining the wild celebration. A few perhaps wondered what the Japanese patrol must have thought, to see a line a thousand yards long suddenly blaze up firing at nothing; they must have laughed heartily.

Corporal Fife, curiously enough, was one of these cynics. With the rest of the Company HQ he had rushed to the line when the firing started. He had fired a whole clip of eight and reloaded, intending to fire more, before common sense attacked him in the form of a deep depression at the uselessness of it all. All around him men were hollering happily and throwing their grenades and firing. A few feet to his left Welsh, cursing joyously and grinning ecstatically, was spraying everything in sight with his Thompsongun. And in front of them the empty jungle underbrush swayed and rustled as though in a rainstorm and chunks of bark and wood popped from the trees. Nursing his depression and setting his safety, he crept back away from the line a few feet and sat down by himself, cradling his rifle between his knees and leaning on it. What the hell was the matter with him? Even in a happy blowoff of useless firing he could not take part. But what depressed him most of all was the awareness of all these new situations he was being thrown into, which he could neither evaluate nor understand. It was like being blind.

It was during this ‘counterattack’ that Pfc Doll threw his first live grenade, and it was a traumatic experience. Doll lost his nerve. At the point where Doll stood the ridge made a slight dip and there was a chest high clay bank (whether manmade or not it was impossible to tell) behind which one could stand as though in a trench, though the back of it was open to all the basin. The firing when it started was feeble and sporadic and spread slowly, but when it thickened and the dull booming of grenades began to be heard among the chattering of riflefire Doll who had already fired a clip pulled one of his four grenades from a side pocket and pulled its pin. He had spread the cotter pins so widely for reasons of safety that he had to bite its ends together before it would pull out, sending a sharp drill of pain through an old bad tooth. Perhaps that was what undid him. He remembered movies where men pulled the pins of grenades with their teeth, and realized with a shock of inadequacy that his teeth would never be able to stand it. In any case, he had waited too long. He now had the pin out and was standing looking at this heavy orange corrugated castiron object in his hand. As long as he clenched it and kept the tin lever down it was not dangerous, but already his hand felt slippery. Even if he had not already dropped the pin on the ground, he knew it would be impossible to reinsert it, dangerous to attempt. He had activated it, and now here he was with it, and if he did not want to go on carrying it forever while his hand slowly weakened or cramped itself and relaxed, he was going to have to throw it; but what he really wanted to do was simply drop it on the ground and turn and flee. That of course was crazy, insane. If it did not kill him, it would certainly kill the men around him. Why oh why had he ever pulled the pin out? Clenching his teeth until his jaws ached, spacing his feet with great care, oblivious to the noise and firing around him and staring with bulging eyes at the object in his hand as though it were a lighted bomb he was holding, which in fact it was, he threw it with all his strength into the jungle and ducked shaking behind the bank, the ‘splatt!’ of the igniting fuse as loud in his ears as an explosion. When he had first pulled it out of his pocket, he had meant to watch it light and explode. There was no thought of that now. He could no more have stayed up and watched it than he could have flown after it. He heard a low boom from across the bank, then immediately after it two others. He would never know which was his, and he didn’t care. Shattered, he crouched quaking against the bank for several moments more, then blushing furiously, rose and commenced firing his rifle angrily into the empty jungle, hoping nobody had seen him. He fired three clips one after the other, but he did not try to throw any more grenades. When the whole thing was over, he simply turned in his tracks and sat down with his knees drawn up and his back against the bank, breathing in a kind of convulsive groan and staring furiously at nothing.

Somehow during the firing session a dead man had appeared behind C-for-Charlie. In the excitement he went unnoticed at first. Then everyone seemed to discover him all at once. Whole groups turned simultaneously to stare with startled faces. Nobody knew how he had got there or where he came from or who he was. He could not be from C-for-Charlie because nobody in Charlie had been hurt. He could not have been killed just now in the ‘counterattack’ because he was obviously already stiff. He had just sort of appeared. Ten yards back from the crest down the slope which was not as steep here as at other places, on a little clay ledge about two yards wide, he lay on his side in an almost fetal position, his knees drawn up against his chest, his half clenched hands up on either side of his face but not touching it. His helmet still on his head, his rifle belt still fastened around his green fatigue blouse, he appeared to be trying to hide from what had already overtaken him. Just below his little clay ledge the slope steepened sharply, and if he could only have rolled over once he could have slid all the way to the bottom of the basin. Many in C-for-Charlie wished that he would.