The Thin Red Line (41 page)

John Bell, crawling along in the lead of the little seven-man assault group, did not concern himself with whether the attack could succeed. He kept thinking only that he had volunteered to
lead a party back
. He had not volunteered to be a fighting part of it. But no one except himself had paid the slightest attention to this nicety of phrasing. Now here he was, not only leading them as point, but expected to fight with them, and unable to back out without looking cowardly, schmucky. Pride! Pride! What stupid foolish things it forced us to do in its goddam fucking name! He kept his eyes glued on that changing point where the ledge disappeared around the curve of the hillside. It would be just his goddamned luck to find the Japanese had suddenly decided to correct their fault and put some men down here to cover this ledge. He as the point would be the first big fat target. Irritably, he glanced back to motion the others to come on and in doing so discovered something strange. He no longer cared very much. He no longer cared at all. Exhaustion, hunger, thirst, dirt, the fatigue of perpetual fear, weakness from lack of water, bruises, danger had all taken their toll of him until somewhere within the last few minutes—Bell did not know exactly when—he had ceased to feel human. So much of so many different emotions had been drained from him that his emotional reservoir was empty. He still felt fear, but even that was so dulled by emotional apathy (as distinct from physical apathy) that it was hardly more than vaguely unpleasant. He just no longer cared much about anything. And instead of impairing his ability to function, it enhanced it, this sense of no longer feeling human. When the others came up, he crawled on whistling over to himself a song called
I Am An Automaton
to the tune of
God Bless America.

They thought they were men. They all thought they were real people. They really did. How funny. They thought they made decisions and ran their own lives, and proudly called themselves free individual human beings. The truth was they were here, and they were gonna stay here, until the state through some other automaton told them to go someplace else, and then they’d go. But they’d go freely, of their own free choice and will, because they were free individual human beings. Well, well.

When he reached the spot where he had crawled out above the ledge he stopped and sending Witt ahead to guard, pointed the place out to Captain Gaff.

Witt, when he crawled out to take the point—or post rather, it was, since they were no longer moving—did think he was a man, and did believe he was a real person. As a matter of fact, the question had never entered his head. He had made his decision to volunteer himself back into the old outfit, and he had made his decision to volunteer for this thing, and he was a free individual human being as far as he was concerned. He was free, white and twenty-one and had never taken no shit off nobody and never would, and as the prospect of action got closer and closer he could feel himself tightening all up inside with excitement, exactly like he used to do in the coal strikes back in Bloody Breathitt. The chance to help, the chance to save all his friends that he could, the chance to kill some more goddam fucking Japanese, he would show that fucking Bugger Stein who had had him transferred out as a malcontent. Standing on his knees out away from the ledge, he held his rifle ready with the safety off. He had not shot squirrel all his life for nothing, he had not made High Expert on the range for the past six years for nothing, either. His only fear was that something might open up back there where Captain Gaff was trying to make up his mind, while he was out here on point—on post, rather—and could not get into it. Well, they would know soon enough.

And Witt was right. They did know soon enough. After he had been shown the spot, young Captain Gaff, who if he was nervous at all hid it to perfection, decided to crawl out for a look himself and after he returned, decided that this was as good a spot to observe the fire as any. The only trouble was that the tiny low place with its thin short brush cover was too low to allow him to drag the walkie-talkie up there above the ledge. “Any of you guys know how to operate this thing?” he asked. Bell was the only one who did. “Okay, you stay below the ledge and I’ll call down the data to you from up above,” Gaff said. First though he would call them and set up the coordinate himself. Then he explained his plan. Once the 81s had plastered the place as much as they were able, he and his trusty band would crawl out along the low place until they formed a line, then they would try to crawl as close as they could through the grass before throwing their grenades. “Okay?” Bell’s automatons all nodded their heads. “Okay. Then here we go.”

Gaff crawled out into the low place before the first shells arrived. They could hear their soft shu-shu-shu coming almost straight down before they hit, then the hillside exploded into smoke and flame and noise. Only about fifty yards from the bunker, they were showered with a rain of dirt, chips of rock and small pieces of hot metal. Someone had motioned Witt in against the wall of the ledge, and they all clung to it with their faces pressed against the sharp rock and their eyes closed, cursing with hatred the goddamned fucking mortarmen because they might drop a short round, though they didn’t. After fifteen minutes of this, during which Gaff constantly yelled down changes of range, Gaff finally yelled down, “Okay! Tell them to stop!” Bell did. “I think that’s enough!” Gaff yelled down. “Whatever damage they can do, they’ve done by now.” Then, as the command was executed back there far away, the mortars stopped falling in a silence that was almost as devastating as the noise had been. “Okay,” Gaff called much more softly, “let’s go!” If they were under any hopeful illusion that the mortar barrage had smashed and flattened every Japanese in the strongpoint, they were straightened out on this point right away. As the elderly, morose, Calvinistic-looking 2d Lieutenant from B-for-Baker climbed out first, he foolishly climbed straight up exposing himself to the waist, whereupon a Japanese machinegunner immediately shot him three times through the chest. He fell down flat on his face in the little trough, as he should have been in the first place, and hung there, his legs dangling straight down against the ledge in the faces of those behind him. Gingerly, and as gently as they could, they pulled him back down behind the ledge. Stretched out on his back with his eyes shut and breathing shallowly, he looked more morose than ever. He did not open his eyes and put both hands up over his damaged chest and went on breathing shallowly, sour-visaged, Calvinistic, his blue jowls shining darkly in the late afternoon sun.

“Well, whadda we do now?” Charlie Dale snarled. “We can’t take him with us.”

“We’ll have to leave him,” Witt said. He had just come up.

“You can’t leave him here,” the Baker Company sergeant protested.

“Okay,” Dale snarled. “He’s from your company.
You
stay with him.”

“Nah,” the Baker Company sergeant said. “I didn’t volunteer for this thing just to sit with him.”

“I should have been a Chaplain,” the dying man said in a faint voice without opening his eyes. “I could have, you know. I’m an ordained minister. I never should have fooled around with Infantry. My wife told me.”

“We can leave him and pick him up on the way back,” Bell said. “If he’s still alive.”

“You boys want to pray with me?” the Lieutenant said, his eyes still closed. “Our Father Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name.”

“We can’t, Sir,” Dale interrupted politely. “We got to get going. The Captain’s waitin on us.”

“All right,” the Lieutenant said, still without opening his eyes. “I’ll do it myself. You boys go ahead. Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily …”

As they climbed out one by one on their faces and bellies so as not to make the same mistake he made, the faint voice droned feebly on. Dale went first, Witt immediately behind him.

“The son of a bitch,” Witt whispered when they were both in the trough behind the thin fragile screen of leaves. “I wish he had of been a Chaplain. They’ve seen us now. They know we’re here. It’s going to be hell.”

“Yeh, fuck his goddam prayin,” Dale said, but he did not say it with much force. He was too busy looking all around everywhere, eyes wide with tension.

Bell was the last to go, but he stopped at the ledge feeling he ought to say something, some word of encouragement, except what did you say to a man dying? “Well, good luck, Sir,” he managed finally.

“Thanks, son,” the Baker Company Lieutenant said without opening his eyes. “Which one are you? I don’t want to open my eyes if I can help it.”

“I’m Bell, Sir.”

“Oh, yes,” the Lieutenant said. “Well, if you get the chance, maybe you can say some little prayer for my soul. I don’t want to embarrass you. But it certainly can’t do my soul no harm, can it?”

“Okay, Sir,” Bell said. “Goodby.”

As he climbed out, pressing his face and chest as hard into the dirt of the trough as he could, the faint voice went droning feebly on, repeating some other kind of prayer now which Bell had never heard and didn’t know. Automatons. Religious automatons, irreligious automatons. The Business and Professional Automatons Club, Chaplain Gray will give the benediction. Yes, siree. The dirt tasted very dusty in his mouth that was pressed to it.

Captain Gaff, the Battalion Exec, had crawled completely to the end of the trough and out beyond the tiny little brush screen, a matter of twenty or thirty yards.

“Is he dead?” he asked when the others reached him. They were now strung out single file one behind the other in the trough.

“Not yet,” Dale whispered from immediately behind him.

Out here beyond the little screen of brush they were more in the open, though the trough still hid them, but here the grass was much thicker than back near the ledge, and it was here that Gaff had decided to make his move. They were to turn their little line by its right flank, he informed Dale and Witt behind him, and told them to pass it back, and on his signal begin to crawl, out of the trough and through the grass, toward the bunker. They were not to fire or throw their grenades until he gave the signal. He wanted to get as close to the bunker as possible without being seen.

“Actually,” he pointed out to Dale behind him, “we could go straight on here. You see? After that little open space we would be behind that little rise, and I think we could maybe crawl all the way around behind them.”

“Yes, sir,” Dale said.

“But I don’t think there’s that much time.”

“Yes, Sir,” Dale said.

“That would take at least another hour of crawling,” Gaff said earnestly. “And I’m afraid it’s too near dark.”

“Yes, Sir,” Dale said.

“What do you think?” Gaff said.

“I agree with you, Sir,” Dale said. No fuckin officer was goin’ to get Charlie Dale to take no responsibility for what the officer done.

“Has everybody behind been informed?” Gaff whispered.

“Yes, Sir.”

Gaff sighed. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Slowly Gaff snaked his belly over the lip of the trough and off into the grass, dragging his rifle by the muzzle rather than cradling it, so as not to disturb the grass more than absolutely necessary. One by one the others followed.

For John Bell it was like some insane, mad nightmare which he could remember having had before. His elbows and feet fell through holes in the mat of old dead stems, catching and holding him. Dust and seeds filled his nose and choked him. Stems whipped his face. Then he remembered: it was that crawl up through the grass to the ledge with Keck. It really had happened to him after all. And Keck was dead now.

None of them ever knew what set them off. One moment they were crawling along in utter silence, each man totally alone and separate and out of contact with the others, and in the next machinegun fire was whipping and slashing over and around and all about them. No one had fired, no one had thrown a grenade, no one had shown himself. Perhaps one nervous enemy had seen some grass move and had fired, thus setting them all off. Whatever it was, they now lay in a storm of fire, separated and cut off from contact with each other, unable to take concerted action. Each man put his head down and huddled to the ground, praying to gods or godlessnesses that he might keep on living. Contact was lost and with it all command and control. Nobody could move. And it was in this static situation of potential total loss that Pfc Don Doll came forward as hero.

Sweating, lying pressed flat in an ecstasy of panic, terror, fear and cowardice, Doll simply could not stand it any longer. He had had too much this day. Wailing over and over in a high falsetto the one word “Mother! Mother!”, which fortunately nobody at all could hear, least of all himself, he leaped to his feet and began to run straight at the Japanese emplacement, firing his rifle from his hip at the one embrasure he could see. As if startled beyond reasonable expectation, most of the Japanese fire stopped suddenly. At the same moment Captain Gaff, released from his own temporary panic, leaped up waving his arm and bawling “Back!” With him in the lead the rest of the assault force ran for the trough and their lives. Meanwhile Doll charged on, wailing his incantation:

“Mother! Mother!”

When his rifle was empty, he threw it at the embrasure, drew his pistol and began firing that. With his left hand he tore a grenade from his belt, stopped firing the pistol long enough to pull the pin with one finger, and lobbed the grenade over onto the camouflaged roof of the emplacement, which he could now see clearly since it was only about twenty yards away, and where the grenade exploded uselessly and without effect. Then, continuing to fire the pistol, he charged on. Only when the pistol ceased to fire for want of ammunition did he come to his senses and realize where he was. Then he turned and ran. Luckily for him, he did not turn back toward the others but simply ran blindly off to the right—though he would deny this later. In that direction the curving ledge was only ten yards away, and he reached it before the mass of the Japanese fire, which by now as if getting over its start had commenced again, could find him and cut him down.