The Thin Red Line (6 page)

Personally, Storm got along with him quite well. Their association, if not quite actually what could be called armed truce, was that of two suspicious dogs eyeing each other warily in the street. Storm did his job and did it well, and Welsh left him alone. And Storm was aware that as long as he did his job well, Welsh would continue to leave him alone. That was enough for Storm. If Welsh wanted to be crazy, that was his own business.

On the other hand, Storm could not see what advantage to efficiency or organization could be gained from giving a clerk a verbal hiding for no reason at all except that you yourself felt in the mood for it. Storm could, and often did, give a man an oral flaying when it was necessary; but never when there wasn’t a specific reason for it. About the only thing to be gained from Welsh’s raking little Fife over the coals was that it would take the minds of Storm’s cook force off the prospect of being bombed in an air raid and relieve their nervousness a little, which was what Storm himself had been trying to do. But Storm knew Welsh well enough to know that that was not Welsh’s only reason for doing it, or even his main reason. He had seen him do it too many times before. He could even give the first line of Welsh’s routine before it was said.

“All right, fuckface! Where’s that fucking platoon roster I told you to fix up for me?”

The fact that it was already done and handed in, and that Welsh himself knew this, made no difference at all.

“I already did it,” Fife said indignantly. “I made it up and turned it in to you, Welsh.”

“You what! You did no such a fucking thing, Fife. I don’t have it, do I? Christ, of all the...”

Storm sat silently and listened to the First Sergeant’s elaborations. Welsh was really a master craftsman at the art of imaginative insult. Some of the comparisons he could think up when inspired were fantastic. But when was Fife ever going to learn not to get mad or indignant? Storm’s kitchen were grinning and enjoying themselves.

Storm looked around at them, covertly. Land, the tall, thin, silent one; efficient when he was sober, but without the initiative to do anything for himself unless specifically ordered. Park, the other first cook, fat, lazy, petulant; loving to give orders but hating to take them; and always complaining that his authority was being flouted. Dale, the little second cook, muscular and hard as a rock, a constant worker who never stopped; but doing it with a scowling, nervous, angry intensity that could not be anything but abnormal; and always more than willing, too willing, to take on every bit of authority given him. These three were the main personalities of Storm’s gang.

Storm could not help but feel an outwardly hard, but inwardly melting and near tear-starting, sentimentality for all of them, the slobs. He had gathered them here, sensing their nervousness, and only partly because he wanted them where he could keep an eye on them, and had got them started in a bull session and begun regaling them with comical stories out of his past eight years’ service. All to keep them, as best he could, down off that too-high pitch of nervousness which the whole outfit was beginning to suffer from with all this waiting. And it had worked, at least partially. But now Welsh had taken over with his verbal skinning alive of poor little Fife, and so Storm didn’t need to bother now, for a while. He could think about himself.

Storm had done just about everything he could think of to set his own personal affairs straight. In the staging area, before shipping out, he had made a large allotment of almost all of his pay to his widowed sister and her large family back in Texas. She was his only living relative and his army insurance was already made out to her, and where he was going to be from now on for quite a while there wasn’t going to be much use for money. Before leaving he had written her a long letter, explaining that he was going; and he had also written two other letters which he had given to friends on the other transport with instructions to mail them only if the ship he was on got sunk or bombed out and himself killed. If either letter reached his sister, it would explain to her to start checking into the insurance and deviling the government even before the final telegram arrived. It would almost certainly take her a long time to collect it in any case, and with that big family of kids to feed she would need it once the allotment stopped. It wasn’t a very satisfactory or efficient way of handling it, but under the circumstances it was the best Storm could do. And once he had done it, he felt he had done all he could, and that he was ready. Ready for anything. Storm still felt the same way now, despite his own rising squeamishness over possible air raids. It amused him that he kept continually wanting to raise his arm and look at his watch. He was forced to exercise the whole of his will power in order not to.

Welsh was still raucously deriding Fife, who by now had become quite red in the face and very angry. Storm debated whether he should say something that would stop it, shift the subject. Storm had no particular liking, or even sympathy, for Fife. He was a good enough kid. He just hadn’t been away from home long enough. And Storm, who had started off bumming during the Depression when he was only fourteen, couldn’t find kids like that very interesting. But Welsh was a man who often didn’t know when to quit; he would get something like this going, which could be fun, but then he would keep on with it until it passed beyond the point of being funny. And even though it was keeping Storm’s cooks amused and thinking about something other than air raids, Storm felt it was time to call a halt. He was saved from having to do anything about it, though, by the great, vibrating belch of the klaxon horn which resounded through the clanging, overheated hold, deafening everybody. The immense sound caused everyone to jump, even Welsh.

It was the signal for the inhabiters of this particular hold to prepare to disembark, and with its sounding everything that was taking place ceased to be important, or even to exist. The dice and poker games stopped in mid-play, everybody grabbing back his share of the pot, and a little extra if he could. Conversations died soundlessly in mid-word, their very subjects no longer remembered; and Welsh and Fife simply stared at each other without recalling that Welsh had just been insulting Fife to make him angry. After so much waiting of such high intensity, it was as if life itself had crossed a line with the sounding of the klaxon, and that whatever had happened or existed before had not and would never have, any connection with whatever would come after. Everybody had turned hastily to their equipment, and cries of “All right! Off and on!” and “Drop your cocks and grab your socks!” rose up from the throats of noncoms to bounce off the steel ceiling; and in the one moment of total, complete silence which had somehow got mixed in with this jumbled stew of noise and then emerged out of the middle of it, nobody would ever know how, could be heard one nameless man’s single voice, high and shrilling, and intensely elucidating some declaration of faith to a neighbor with the words: “I guaran-fucking-tee you!” Then the noise closed back over as everybody went on struggling into their equipment.

Bulging in all directions under full field equipment, they found the narrow steel stairs difficult to navigate; and after three nervous flights of them each man was winded. And as they emerged into the now hot, midmorning sunshine and fresh sea air on deck, Captain Bugger Stein their commander, standing by the hatch in musette bag, map case, glasses, carbine, pistol and canteens, stared into each of their helmet-shadowed, intense faces and chokingly felt tears rising up in him, tears which of course as an officer and commander he must hold back and never show above a stiff upper lip. His sense of responsibility was monumental, a near holy thing. He treasured it. Not only that, he was very pleased with himself that he felt it. If the old man could only see him now!

And beside him stood his first sergeant, no longer looking like Welsh an individual, now that he was in full gear and had his helmet on. He too watched the faces, but in a different way: in a sly, cunning, calculating way, as if he knew something none of the rest of them knew.

By squads and by platoon they went over the side and clambered down the four-storey-high side of the ship on the nets and into the endless chain of LCIs still shuttling back and forth from shore. Only one man fell, and he got no more than a slightly wrenched back because he lit on two other men already in the barge, all three crashing to the steel floor in full equipment with loud grunts and curses. But they heard from the barge pilots that the list of injured, for this ship, had already reached fifteen: par for the course, the barge pilots, who had the experience, said with dry, cheerful cynicism. C-for-Charlie heard this news with the awed realization that these injured were first casualties: the division’s first casualties in a combat zone. They had expected at least bombs, or machineguns, to account for that. But to fall into a barge? By standing up, while digesting this, they could see the shore and the sand beach and cocopalms gradually coming closer, and closer, to them. As they got closer to it, they could see where the tops of a number of the coconut trees had been shot away.

In the barge in which Doll’s squad found itself the assistant pilot, who was Army Transport Corps like all the others, quipped grinning, in best Naval officer style: “Glad to have you aboard, gentlemen!” then added with matter-of-fact cheer: “Your outfit’s lucky. Old Nippy’ll be comin along in—” he looked at his waterproof watch— “in about another fifteen minutes.”

“How do you know?” Doll’s squad sergeant, whose name was Field, asked.

“We just got the news from the air strip,” the assistant pilot smiled.

“But, well won’t they try to get the ships out?”

“Can’t. Not enough time. We’ll just have to go on unloading.” The information didn’t seem to bother the assistant pilot much, but Doll, who was wearing his new pistol proudly, gripped the gunnel to keep his balance in the jouncing, swaying barge and looked back at the dwindling ship with the greatest sense of relief he had ever felt in his life. He devoutly hoped he would never see that old tub again in his lifetime, or any other ship—save one; and that was the one that would take him off this island.

“In this business you take them as they come,” the assistant pilot said.

“But won’t the fighter planes—” Field started to say.

“They’ll try. They always get some of them. But some always get through.”

“Hey, Terry, jerk the lead!” the barge pilot called in a harassed voice.

“Aye, sir,” the assistant called back dryly. He went aft.

Ahead of them in the barge the island had got steadily larger, and now they could make out individual men scurrying around huge piles of stores. Doll stared at them. They got slowly bigger. Doll continued to stare. He was fascinated by something he could not even put a name to. What made men do it? he wondered suddenly, awed. What kept them there? Why didn’t they just up and leave, all go away? All he knew was that he was scared, more scared, and in a different way, than he had ever been in his life before. And he didn’t like it, any of it.

“Grab holt and prepare to land!” the barge pilot shouted at them. Doll did. In a couple of moments the barge grated, cleared and rushed on, grated again, lurched, ground on noisily a few more feet and stopped, and Doll was on Guadalcanal. So were the rest of the men in the same barge, but Doll did not consider that. The front ramp, handled by the talkative assistant pilot, had already begun to fall almost before the barge was stopped.

“Everybody out!” the barge pilot shouted. “No transfer slips!”

There still remained two feet of water beyond the end of the ramp, but it was easy enough to jump; and only one man, who slipped on the metal of the ramp, landed in the water and got one foot wet. It wasn’t Doll. The ramp was already rising, as the barge went into reverse and pulled back out to go for another load. Then they were trudging through the sand up the long beach, trying to pick their way across it through the streams of men, to where Bugger Stein and Lieutenant Band were assembling the company.

Corporal Fife had, of course, been in the barge which brought off the company headquarters. Their barge pilot had told them substantially the same thing Doll’s had: “Your outfit’s lucky. The Jap’s on his way.” The transports must have been spotted, he said. But they were getting off just ahead of time, he said, so they’d be safe. The main thought uppermost in Fife’s mind was that everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch. Like a business. Like a regular business. And yet at the bottom of it was blood: blood, mutilation, death. It seemed weird, wacky, to Fife. The air strip had got the news, by radio from a plane apparently, and had transmitted it to the beach, where the barge pilots were all informed—or else informed themselves and each other—and presumably the crews as well as the army commanders, if not the troops themselves, on board the ships were told, too. And yet there was nothing anybody could do about it, apparently. Except wait. Wait and see what happened. Fife had looked around at the faces in the barge covertly. Bugger Stein betrayed his nervousness by continually adjusting his glasses, over and over, with the thumb and fingers of his right hand on the frame. Lieutenant Band betrayed his by repeatedly licking his lips. Storm’s face was too impassively set. The second cook Dale’s eyes were snapping bright, and he blinked them over and over. Welsh’s eyes, through the narrow slits to which they were closed in the bright sun, betrayed nothing of anything. Neither amusement nor anything else, this time; not even cynicism. Fife hoped his own face looked all right, but he felt as though his eyebrows might be too high up on his forehead. Once they got ashore, and the guide had led them to their assigned spot in the edge of the coconut trees which came right down to the beach itself, Fife kept saying over and over to himself what the barge pilot had told them on the way in: “Your outfit’s lucky. You’re getting off ahead of time.”

And in a way, it was quite right too. When the planes came, they were after the ships, not the shore. As a result, Fife, and all the rest of C-for-Charlie had a perfectly safe grandstand, ringside seat for the whole show. Actually Fife at least, who loved humanity, was going to find that he wished he hadn’t had a seat at all, after it was over. But he had to admit it fascinated him, with a morbid fascination.