The Thin Red Line (5 page)

Welsh had no use for Doll, and he had no more use for Corporal Fife, his forward echelon clerk. Doll was a punk kid who, up until his fight with Jenks six months ago, at least had pretty much kept to himself and out of the way and kept his mouth shut. Now, after his so-called ‘triumph,’ he had begun to think he was a big grownup man and had become a complete and obnoxious ass, getting in everybody’s hair. Fife, on the other hand, while also being a punk kid and an ass, was a coward. Welsh did not mean coward in the sense that he would shit his pants and run away. Fife wouldn’t do that; he would stay. He would be trembling like a dog shitting peach seeds and scared within an inch of his life, but he would stay. And as far as Welsh was concerned, that was an even worse kind of coward. When he said coward, what he meant to say was that Fife had not yet learned—if he ever would—that his life, and himself, his He, didn’t mean a goddamned thing to the world in general, and never would. Whereas Doll was too dumb to understand such a concept, or even be able to conceive of such an incredible idea. Fife was smart enough to know it, or at least learn it, but he wouldn’t let himself admit it. And in Welsh’s dictionary, that was the worst kind of coward there was.

He found the small but broad-shouldered Fife sitting amongst the headquarters bunks with a group of the kitchen force, and approached him wearing his sly, cunning—and remarkably hateful—grin.

Corporal Fife was sitting with the cooks and listening to their talk to take his mind off the unpleasantly nervous thought of being bombed. He saw Welsh coming, and what was more, recognized from his face and from considerable past experience what sort of mood the first sergeant was stoking up. Fife’s first impulse was to get up and saunter away before Welsh arrived. But Fife knew it wouldn’t do any good. Welsh would only follow him; or worse, order him to come back. So Fife simply sat, feeling acute discomfort growing on his face, and watched Welsh descend on them. If there was anything Fife hated, it was being made conspicuous; and that was what Sergeant Welsh, as if he slyly realized this, was always doing to him.

Fife had let Doll talk him out of going out to try and steal a pistol. So had Big Queen, the Texan. Both were sure there wouldn’t be enough time. So, when Queen had left him, in an effort to dispel, or at least cope with his own growing nervousness over an air raid, Fife had gone around through the bunk area looking for a particular friend of his to talk to, one of the only two friends in fact that Fife felt he had ever had in C-for-Charlie Company.

One of these two friends had been transferred out of the company and was not even on this ship. The other, and by far the most spectacular of the two as far as Fife was concerned, was a massive, quiet-voiced, big-handed private named Bell. Fife had found him sitting quietly with three or four other privates, waiting, and had joined them. But it had been pretty unsatisfactory. They hardly talked at all. And after a little while Fife had left them and come back here to where the cooks were chatting nervously. The, to Fife, spectacular Bell had offered him very little solace, and Fife was disappointed in him.

Bell, who was a new draftee, talked very little and kept to himself a lot, and there certainly was nothing about him that appeared to be at all unusual. The reason Bell was spectacular, however, was that he had a secret; or at least he had had; and the twenty-year-old Fife knew what it was. Bell was a former army officer. He had been a First Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers in the Philippines; back before the war; and he had resigned.

Fife would never forget the feeling of first awe and then surprised delight with which he had, in the orderly room, read this information in Bell’s 201 file, when Bell had first come into C-for-Charlie three months ago with a group of other draftees. Such an adventurous story, as far as Fife’s two and a half years’ army experience had shown, existed only in the pages of
Argosy
or some other such magazine. The Officers as well as the Men whom Fife had known had had pretty prosaic careers; only a few of the Men were ex-criminals or anything adventurous like that. Naturally Fife was delighted to find a Bell. As for the awe, all Officers awed Fife. Fife did not like Officers as a class, but he was awed by them, even when he knew they didn’t deserve awe, simply because they exercised over him the same authority that his parents and his teachers back at school had had, and exercised it over him in much the same way, too. That any man would voluntarily give up that authority to have it in turn exercised upon himself, seemed to Fife to be both very romantic, and very dumb.

Fife was really quite intelligent, although by his excitability he more often than not gave the impression that he wasn’t, and he had decided afterwards that he must have shown what he knew by his face that day, when he had looked at Bell in the chowhall. Anyhow, Bell had approached him later in the afternoon and, after giving him a quiet but rather careful scrutiny, had taken him aside and asked him not to say anything to any of the men about what he had seen in his records. Fife, who at least as yet had not consciously thought of telling anyone, agreed eagerly, although regretfully. Perhaps too eagerly, he thought afterwards: It made him look as though he was enjoying entering a conspiracy with Bell, apparently, and to Bell’s evident distaste. And Fife hadn’t meant that; it was just that damned excitability of his again. But how could he explain that to Bell?

Anyhow, after having granted Bell his request, Fife had been emboldened to ask Bell eagerly and excitedly to tell him the story of it. Maybe it was a dirty trick. Anyway Bell, after giving him another long, careful, quiet scrutiny, apparently had decided he must do it and had sat down on his bunk and kneading his big hands together with a curious desperate patience and staring at them fixedly, had told him. It was all because of his wife. They had graduated from Ohio State together, himself with an engineering degree. Naturally he had taken ROTC, and he had been called up in 1940 and sent out to the Philippines. Of course his wife had gone with him. But after getting there and being assigned, he had been sent off into the jungle on another island to work on a dam being built there that the army had its fingers in for defense reasons. Wives were not allowed there because the jungle was bad and she had stayed in Manila, and they had been separated. He had got the dirtiest job simply by being the newest man.

“You know what those pre-war officers’ clubs were like,” Bell said, kneading his big hands and staring at them. “And she didn’t know anybody in Manila. We’d never been separated before, you see. Not overnight. I took it for four months and then I quit. Resigned.”

“Yeah,” Fife had said, with eager encouragement.

“We were always very sexual together,” Bell said.

Fife waited for him to go on. “Yeah,” he smiled encouragingly.

Bell looked up at him almost angrily, with that curious desperate, sad patience, bottomlessly deep. “That’s all.” He appeared patiently resigned to Fife’s inability to comprehend what he was saying. And perhaps in a way it was true, Fife had reflected eagerly, since he’d never been married. But he couldn’t honestly see what was so terrible, why so much fuss.

“We both are the kind of people who need lots of physical aff—” Bell broke off, perhaps to try another tack. “It’s undignified,” he said stiffly. “It’s undignified for a married man my age to be separated from his wife.”

“Yeah,” Fife said sympathetically.

Again Bell merely stared at him. “Anyway, I worked in Manila until we had enough money to come back to the States, and we came back, and I went back to my job.” He spread his hands. “That’s all. They told me I’d never get another commission, they said they’d see to it that I got drafted, and what was more that I’d for damn sure be in the Infantry. And here I am,” and again he spread his hands. “Took eight months to get drafted. We had eight months.”

“Why the fucking sons of bitches!” Fife said loyally.

“Oh, you can’t blame them. It’s their way of life, you know. And I was thumbing my nose at it, I guess. From their point of view anyway. That isn’t their fault.”

“But the dirty bastards!”

Bell would not be moved. “No. I don’t blame them.”

“Where is she now?”

Bell looked at him again with that curious, strange look. “She’s home. Back in Columbus. With her folks.” Bell continued to stare at him, his eyes veiled with a deep and, to Fife at least, curiously adult reserve, behind which lay that impressive, tremendously deep, tremendously painful, hopeless patience. “How old are you, Fife?”

“Twenty.”

“Well, I’m thirty-three. You see? Well, there’s your story.”

“But why don’t you want any of the guys to know?”

“Well, for one thing, because EM don’t like officers and it would be embarrassing. And for another,” Bell said, his voice sharpening, “it embarrasses me to talk about it, Fife.”

“Oh.” Fife flushed, rebuked.

“The only reason I’ve told you is so you’ll know why I don’t want it mentioned.” Bell had stared at him with that curiously reserved—now almost commanding—look.

“Well, don’t worry about me telling anybody. I won’t,” Fife had promised.

Fife had kept his promise. He hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. But it hadn’t made much difference. It all came out finally, anyway. Within a week the entire company knew about Bell’s former status. No one knew how. But things always had a way of doing that. Nobody ever talked, but the word always got out anyway, somehow. The officers had all known about it of course, so had Welsh, and so had the rest of the office staff. Bugger Stein had called Bell in, in fact, and had had a long private talk with him, the subject of which Fife knew nothing about. All in all, it created quite a little furor, and in one way Fife was sorry, and a little jealous, to see it come out in the open. As long as it remained a secret Fife had felt he owned a personal stake in Bell. He had, of course, gone to Bell as soon as it became public knowledge, and had explained that the leak had not come from him. Bell had merely thanked him, staring at him with that same curious reserved, desperate patience.

Thinking it over later on, Fife had decided that it was not nearly as adventurous a story as he had imagined. He had hoped for something more dramatic, such as a fist fight with a general. Fife’s own experience with women had not, of course, been legion. He had had two serious girlfriends in his life, one back home, the other at the university in the town where the division had been stationed and where he had taken a few courses. Fife had never been able to sleep with either of these, but he had slept with a lot of whores on payday at various times. He could not help but feel that it was rather a show of weakness, to do what Bell had done, just because of wanting to be with his wife. On the other hand, he had to give it to Bell on one thing: he was certainly true to her. He had gone on pass with Bell several times, later on, after they finally became friends, and he had never seen Bell with a woman, or even go after one. When the rest went off to get laid, Bell would stay by himself and drink. Fife had to hand it to Bell on that, and he could not help but wonder if Bell’s wife was being as faithful at home? And he wondered if Bell wondered about that too. Probably he did.

Which would be worse, Fife wondered academically: To have her write and tell you honestly that she was going out and screwing some guy or guys although she still loved you? Or to have her go ahead and do it, screw somebody, but
not
tell you, and keep right on writing you as though she was faithful on the theory that if you never learned it it wouldn’t cause you pain? Fife couldn’t make up his mind which he would prefer. Both choices made his heart jump leaving him a little sick in the stomach, although he could not say just why. Could a woman actually love one man and enjoy screwing another, if the old man wasn’t available? Fife supposed she could. But he certainly didn’t like the idea. It left a man feeling pretty naked and unprotected, and it made Fife uncomfortable when he thought about a woman doing it. And they were back home where it was possible to have a lover; Christ, out here in this God-forsaken place there wasn’t even anything available. And Bell had said his wife was the kind that needed a lot of physical affection, hadn’t he? Fife decided that he was glad he wasn’t married.

Actually, there had been almost no reaction at all to Bell’s former status, when it became public; and all the concern expressed by everybody beforehand was wasted energy. The men eyed him curiously for a while, when they thought about having a former officer in their midst; and soon it was apparently forgotten. In any case, it was Sergeant Welsh’s reaction to Bell which most inflamed Fife and Fife’s very strong sense of fair play. Welsh had glanced at the 201 file and then tossed it down on his desk contemptuously, making one of his caustic, supremely cynical remarks which could be so inhumanly devastating, and infuriating, to anyone who believed in humanity as Fife did: “Well, here’s a real assbreaker. I sure can collect them. Probably figured out for himself there wasn’t going to be any war so why waste a couple years. Bet you ten, Fife, he won’t wait five days before he starts givin orders.” That he proved to be completely wrong did not bother Welsh in the least. And this was the man who at the moment was bearing down on Fife with that crazy, sly glint in his eye. Fife prepared himself as stoically as he could to endure the flaying that was coming. Unhappily, he glanced around at the cook force clustered nervously around their mess sergeant while they all waited. Fife at least was glad he had never told the son of a bitch about Bell’s wife. That really would have given him something to sneer about. At least that was one thing Welsh didn’t know.

Mess Sergeant Storm, sitting in the middle of his cooks, did not fail to notice the look on Sergeant Welsh’s face, also. Storm, who was twenty-six and in his third enlistment, was acquainted with the First Sergeant’s moods fully as well as Fife his clerk, and he was just as much aware of what was coming. In his eight years of service Storm had known a number of first sergeants, but never one who resembled Welsh. Most of them were pretty stolid, solid gentlemen, accomplished in their main business of paperwork, used to commanding and being obeyed. A few were drunken old thieves, getting by on a record of past performance, or else carried along by the services of an efficient staff sergeant who would one day succeed them. And here and there among these two types you might find one who was a little bit wacky on some particular point or other. But never anything like Welsh.