The Thin Red Line (35 page)

If Pvt Alfredo Tella of Cambridge Mass had begun to yell before this, no one had heard him. And in the intensity of the action and of watching, no one was to hear him until it was over.

In fact, it did not last long. But while it did, many things happened. Arriving in the defiladed area, Keck had first turned his attention to organizing the disorganized group of privates already there, and sent Dale to do that. Then he himself lay in the grass directing the others off to the right as they arrived. When the line was formed, he gave the order to crawl. The grass which was about chest high here had a matted, tangled underlayer of old stems. It choked them with dust, tied up their arms and feet, made it impossible to see. They crawled for what seemed an eternity. It required tremendous exertion. Most of them had long since used up all of their water, and it was this as much as anything in Keck’s mind when he passed the word to halt. He judged they were about half way up the slope, and he didn’t want them to start passing out on him. For a moment as Keck lay gathering his will power he thought about their faces as they arrived and dived into the grass down below: whites of the eyes showing, mouths open and drawn, skin around the eyes pinched and tight. They had all arrived terrified. They had all arrived reluctant. Keck felt no sympathy for them, any more than he felt sympathy for himself. He was terrified too. Taking a deep breath he stood straight up in the grass yelling at them: “Up! Up! Up! Up and
GO!
”

From the top of the fold they could take the operation in at a glance, and follow its progress. This was not so easy on the ridge itself. But John Bell standing rifle in hand and trying to shoot and run in the thick grass was able to see several important things. He was, for instance, the only man who saw Sgt McCron cover his face with his hands and sit down weeping. When they had first stood up, the fury of the Japanese fire had struck them like a wind-tormented hailstorm. The Japanese had been smart and had waited, conserving their fire till they had targets. Four men of McCron’s squad went down at once. On the right a young draftee named Wynn was shot in the throat and screamed, “Oh, my God!” in a voice of terror and disbelief as a geyser of blood spurted from his neck. Ridiculously like a rag doll he fell and disappeared in the grass. Next to him Pfc Earl, a little shorter, was caught in the face, perhaps from the same burst. He went down without a sound, looking as if he’d been hit in the face with a tomato. To Bell’s left two other men tumbled, yelling with fear that they were killed. All this was apparently too much for McCron, who had clucked over and mothered this squad of his for so many months, and he simply dropped his rifle and sat down crying. Bell himself was astonished that he himself was not already struck down dead. He only knew, could only think one thing. That was to keep going. He had to keep going. If he ever wanted to get back home again to his wife Marty, if he ever wanted to see her again, kiss her, put himself between her breasts, between her legs, fondle, caress, and touch her, he had to keep going. And that meant he had to keep the others going with him, because it was useless to keep going by himself. It had to stop. There had to be a point in time where it ended. In a cracked bellow he began to harangue the remainder of McCron’s 2d Squad. In back of and a little below him off in the center as he looked behind, he saw Milly Beck leading his men in a fury of snarling hatred which shocked Bell numbly: Beck who was always so controlled and almost never raised his voice. Still below him yet came Keck, roaring and firing Welsh’s Thompsongun uphill. A silly phrase came in Bell’s mind and he began to yell at the other men senselessly. “Home for Christmas! Home for Christmas!”

Keep going. Keep going. It was a ridiculous thought, a stupid idea in any case and he would wonder later why he had it. Obviously, if he wanted to stay alive to get home, the best thing to do would have been to lie down in the grass and hide.

It was Charlie Dale on the far left who saw the first emplacement, the first live one any of them had ever actually seen. Far enough left to be beyond their flank, it was a one-gun job, a simple hole dug in the ground and covered over with sticks and kunai grass. From the dark hole he could see the muzzle spitting fire at him. Actually, Dale was probably the calmest of the lot. Imaginationless, he had organized his makeshift squad, and found them eager to accept his authority if he would simply tell them what to do. Now he urged them on, but not bellowing or roaring like Keck and Bell. Dale thought it looked much better, was far more seemly, if a noncom did not yell like that. So far he had not fired a shot. What was the point, when there were no targets? When he saw the emplacement, he carefully released his safety and fired a long burst with his Thompsongun, straight into the hole twenty yards away. Before he could release the trigger the gun jammed, solidly. But his burst was enough to stop the machinegun, at least momentarily, and Dale ran toward it pulling a grenade from his shirt. From ten yards away he threw the grenade like a baseball, wrenching hell out of his shoulder. The grenade disappeared through the hole, then blew up scattering sticks and grass and three rag dolls and upending the machinegun. Dale turned back to his squad, licking his lips and grinning with beady pride. “Come on, you guys,” he said. “Let’s keep it moving.”

They were almost done with it. Off to the right of center Pfc Doll and another man discovered a second small emplacement simultaneously. They fired a clip apiece into its hole and Doll grenaded it, keeping up his unspoken competition with Charlie Dale, even if he wasn’t an acting sergeant. Wait’ll he hears about that, he thought happily, because he didn’t know that Dale had got one too. But the happiness was shortlived, for Doll and everybody else, as they ran on. Knocking out two one-gun emplacements made no appreciable difference in the volume of the Japanese fire. MGs still hammered at them from seemingly every quarter of the globe. Men were still going down. They still had not located any main strongpoints. Directly in front of them thirty yards away a rock outcropping formed a four-foot ledge which extended clear across their front. Instinctively everyone began to run for that, while behind them Keck, gasping, bellowed the useless order: “That ledge! Head for that ledge!”

They dived in behind its protection pellmell, all of them sobbing audibly with exhaustion. The exertion and the heat had been too much. Several men vomited. One man made it to the ledge, gurgled once senselessly, then—his eyes rolling back in his head—fainted from heat prostration. There was nothing with which to cover him for shade. Beck the martinet loosened his belt and clothes. Then they lay against the ledge in the midday sun and smelled the hot, summer-smelling dust. Insects hummed around them. The fire had stopped.

“Well, what’re we gonna do now, Keck?” someone asked finally.

“We’re gonna stay right here. Maybe they’ll get some reinforcements up to us.”

“Ha! To do what?”

“To capture these goddam fucking positions around here!” Keck cried fretfully. “What you think?”

“You mean you really want to go on with it?”

“I don’t know. No. Not no uphill charge. But they get us some reinforcements, we can scout around and maybe locate where all these goddam fucking MGs are. Anyway, it’s better than going back down through that. You want to go back down?”

Nobody answered this, and Keck did not feel it necessary to elaborate. By counting heads they found that they had left twelve men behind them on the slope killed or wounded. This was almost a full squad, almost a full third of their number. It included McCron. When Bell told him about McCron, Keck appointed Bell acting sergeant in his place; Bell couldn’t have cared less. “He’ll have to look out for himself, like the rest of the wounded,” Keck said. They continued to lie in the hot sun. Ants crawled on the ground at the foot of the ledge.

“What if the Japs come down here in force and throw us off of here?” somebody asked.

“I don’t think they will,” Keck said. “They’re worse off than we are. But we better have a sentry. Doll.”

Bell lay with his face against the rock facing Witt. Witt lay looking back. Quietly in the insect-humming heat they lay and looked at each other. Bell was thinking that Witt had come through it all all right. Like himself. What power was it which decided one man should be hit, be killed, instead of another man? So Bugger’s little feeling attack was over. If this were a movie, this would be the end of the show and something would be decided. In a movie or a novel they would dramatize and build to the climax of the attack. When the attack came in the film or novel, it would be satisfying. It would decide something. It would have a semblance of meaning and a semblance of an emotion. And immediately after, it would be over. The audience could go home and think about the semblance of the meaning and feel the semblance of the emotion. Even if the hero got killed, it would still make sense. Art, Bell decided, creative art—was shit.

Beside him Witt, who was apparently not bothered by any of these problems, raised himself to his knees and cautiously stuck his head up over the ledge. Bell went on with his thinking.

Here there was no semblance of meaning. And the emotions were so many and so mixed up that they were indecipherable, could not be untangled. Nothing had been decided, nobody had learned anything. But most important of all, nothing had ended. Even if they had captured this whole ridge, nothing would have ended. Because tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, they would be called upon to do the same thing again—maybe under even worse circumstances. The concept was so overpowering, so numbing, that it shook Bell. Island after island, hill after hill, beachhead after beachhead, year after year. It staggered him.

It would certainly end sometime, sure, and almost certainly—because of industrial production—end in victory. But that point in time had no connection with any individual man engaged now.
Some
men would survive, but no
one
individual man
could
survive. It was a discrepancy in methods of counting. The whole thing was too vast, too complicated, too technological for any one individual man to count in it. Only collections of men counted, only communities of men, only
numbers
of men.

The weight of such a proposition was deadening, almost too heavy to be borne, and Bell wanted to turn his mind away from it. Free individuals? Ha! Somewhere between the time the first Marines had landed here and this battle now today, American warfare had changed from individualist warfare to collectivist warfare—or perhaps that was only his illusion, perhaps it only seemed like that to him because he himself was now engaged. But free individuals? What a fucking myth!
Numbers
of free individuals, maybe;
collectives
of free individuals. And so the point of Bell’s serious thinking finally emerged.

At some unspecified moment between this time yesterday and this time today the unsought realization had come to Bell that statistically, mathematically, arithmetically, any way you wanted to count it, he John Bell could not possibly live through this war. He could not possibly go home to his wife Marty Bell. So it did not really make any difference what Marty did, whether she stepped out on him or not, because he would not be there to accuse her.

The emotion which this revelation created in Bell was not one of sacrifice, resignation, acceptance, and peace. Instead, it was an irritating, chaffing emotion of helpless frustration which made him want to crawl around rubbing his flanks and back against rocks to ease the itch. He still had not moved his face from the rock.

Beside him Witt, still kneeling and peering out, yelled suddenly. Simultaneously Doll yelled too from down at the other end.

“Something’s comin!”

“Something’s comin! Somebody’s comin at us!”

As one man the line behind the ledge swept up and forward, rifles ready. Forty yards away seven pot-headed, bandylegged, starved-looking Japanese men were running down at them across an ungrassed area carrying hand grenades in their right hands and bayoneted rifles in their left. Keck’s Thompson, after his firing of almost all its ammo on the way up, had finally jammed, too. Neither gun could be unstuck. But the massed riflefire from the ledge disposed of the seven Japanese men quickly. Only one was able even to throw; and his grenade, a dud, landed short. At the same moment the dud grenade should have exploded, there was a loud, ringing, halfmuffled explosion behind them. In the excitement of the attack and defense they continued to fire into the seven bodies up the slope. When they ceased, only two bodies continued to move. Aiming deliberately in the sudden quiet, Witt the Kentuckian put a killing round into each of them. “You never can tell about them tricky suicidal bastards,” he said. “Even when they’re hit.”

It was Bell who first remembered the explosion behind them and turned around to see what had caused it. What he saw was Sgt Keck lying on his back with his eyes closed, in a strangely grotesque position, still holding the ring and safety pin of a hand grenade in his right hand. Bell called out, and rushing to him, they rolled him over gently and saw that there was nothing they could do for him. His entire right buttock and part of his back had been blown away. Some of his internal organs were visible, pulsing busily away, apparently going about their business as if nothing had happened. Steadily, blood welled in the cavity. Gently they laid him back.

It was obvious what had happened. In the attack, perhaps because his Thompsongun was jammed, but at any rate not firing his rifle, Keck had reached in his hip pocket to pull out a grenade. And in the excitement he had gotten it by the pin. Bell, for one, experienced a dizzying, near-fainting terror momentarily, at the thought of Keck standing and looking at that pin in his hand. Keck had leaped back from the line and sat down against a little dirt hummock to protect the others. Then the grenade had gone off.

Keck made no protest when they moved him. He was conscious, but apparently did not want to talk and preferred to keep his eyes closed. Two of them sat with him and tried to talk to him and reassure him while the others went back to the line, but Keck did not answer and kept his eyes shut. The little muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched jerkily. He spoke only once. Without opening his eyes he said clearly, “What a fucking recruit trick to pull.” Five minutes later he stopped breathing. The men went back. Milly Beck, as the senior noncom present, was now in command.