The Thin Red Line (39 page)

Fife’s body came to rest rolling in the lap of a 3d Platoon man, who happened to be sitting up, his rifle in his lap. Tearing itself loose, it scrambled away on elbows and knees, hands still to the face. Then Fife returned to it and opened its eyes and saw that everything had become a red flowing haze. Through this swirling red he could see the comic, frightened face of the 3d Platoon man whose name was Train. Never was there a less likely, less soldierly looking soldier. Long fragile nose, chinless jaw, pipsqueak mouth, huge myopic eyes staring forth in fright from behind thick glasses.

“Am I hit? Am I hit?”

“Y-yes,” Train mumbled. “Y-you are.” He also stuttered. “In the head.”

“Bad? Is it bad?”

“I c-can’t tell,” Train said. “Y-you’re b-bleeding from your h-head.”

“Am I?” Fife looked at his hands and found them completely covered with the wet red. He understood now that peculiar red haze. It was blood which flowing down through his eyebrows had gotten in his eyes. God, but it was
red!
Then terror blossomed all through him like some ballooning great fungus, making his heart kick and his eyes go faint. Maybe he was dying, right now, right here. Gingerly he probed at his skull and found nothing. His fingers came away glistening red. He had no helmet and his glasses were gone.

“I-it’s in the b-back,” Train offered.

Fife probed again and found the tornup spot. It was in the center of his head, almost at the peak.

“H-how d-do you f-feel?” Train said fearfully.

“I don’t know. It don’t hurt. Except when I touch it.” Still on hands and knees Fife had bent his head, so that the blood flowing into his eyebrows now dripped to the ground instead of into his eyes. He peered up at Train through this red rain.

“C-can you w-walk?” Train said.

“I-I don’t know,” Fife said, and then suddenly realized that he was free. He did not have to stay here any more. He was released. He could simply get up and walk away—provided he was able—with honor, without anyone being able to say he was a coward or courtmartialing him or putting him to jail. His relief was so great he suddenly felt joyous despite the wound.

“I think I better go back,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“Y-yes,” Train said, a little wistfully.

“Well—” Fife tried to think of something final and important to say upon such a momentous occasion, but he failed. “Good luck, Train,” he managed finally.

“Th-thanks,” Train said.

Tentatively Fife stood up. His knees were shaky, but the prospect of getting out of here gave him a strength he might not otherwise have had. At first slowly, then more swiftly, he began to walk rearward with his head bent and his hands to his forehead to keep the still flowing blood from getting in his eyes. With each step he took his sense of joyous release increased, but keeping pace with it his sense of fear increased also. What if they got him now? What if they hit him with something else now just when he was free to leave? As much as he could, he hurried. He passed a number of 3d Platoon men lying prone with those terror-haunted, inward-looking faces, but they did not speak and neither did he. He did not take the longer route back the way they had come, over the second and first folds, but took the direct one, walking straight along the hollow between the folds to the forward slope of Hill 209. Only when he was halfway up the steep slope of Hill 209 did he think of the rest of the company, and pausing he turned and looked back to where they lay. He wanted to yell something to them, encouragment or something, but he knew that from here they could never hear him. When several sniper bullets kicked up dirt around him, he turned and pressed on to come over the crest and down into the crowded Battalion aid station on the other side. Just before he breasted the crest, he met a party of men coming down from it and recognized Colonel Tall. “Hold on, son,” the Colonel smiled at him. “Don’t let it get you down. You’ll be back with us soon.” At the aid station he remembered his one nearly full canteen and began to drink greedily, his hands still shaking. He was reasonably sure now that he would not die.

When Fife got hit, Bugger Stein had just crawled away from him. Fife had crawled one way and Stein the other, to instruct the two remaining squads of 2d Platoon to advance and reinforce Beck and Dale on the grassy ridge. He might just as easily have crawled along with Fife and so have been there when the mortar-shell landed. The element of chance in it was appalling. It frightened Stein. Anyway he was dead-beat tired and depressed, and scared. He had watched Fife stagger bloodily to the rear, but there was nothing he himself could do because he was already in the midst of instructing the two squads from 2d Platoon about what they were to do when they got to the ridge, and what they were to tell Beck—which was, mainly, that he was to get his ass out and moving and try to knock out some of those machineguns.

None of them in the two squads looked very happy about their assignment, including the two sergeants, but they did not say anything and merely nodded tensely. Stein looked back at them earnestly, wishing there was something else, something important or serious, he could tell them. There wasn’t. He told them good luck and to go.

This time, as he had the last, Bugger watched their run down through his glasses. He was astonished to see that this time not one man was hit. He was even more astonished, when he watched through the glasses as they worked their way up through the grass to the little waisthigh ledge, to see that here no one was shot down, either. Only then did his ears inform him of something they ought to have noticed earlier: the volume of the Japanese fire had diminished considerably since Sergeant Welsh’s run down to aid the mutilated Private Tella. When he raised his glasses to the ledge itself, as he did immediately, even before the first of the newcomers began to arrive, Stein was able to see why. Only about half of Beck’s little two squad force was visible there. The rest were gone. On his own hook, without orders, Beck obviously had sent part of his group off raiding and, apparently, with some success. Lowering his glasses, Stein turned to look at George Band, who by now had appropriated glasses of his own somewhere (Stein remembered Bill Whyte’s father had presented him with a fine pair as a parting gift), and who now was looking back at Stein with the same astonished look on his face that Stein knew he himself wore. For a long moment they simply looked at each other. Then, just as Stein was turning to the newly arrived replacement medics to tell them he thought they might cross over to pick up the wounded with some degree of safety now, a cool, calm voice behind him said, “Now, Stein!” and he looked up to see Colonel Tall his Battalion commander walking leisurely toward him carrying beneath his arm the unadorned little bamboo baton he had carried there ever since Stein had known him.

What Bugger Stein and Brass Band could not know was that Sergeant Beck the martinet had, on his own initiative, knocked out five Japanese machinegun emplacements in the last fifteen or twenty minutes, all at the cost of only one man killed and none wounded. Phlegmatic, sullen, dull and universally disliked, an unimaginative, do-it-like-the-book-says, dedicated professional of two previous enlistments, Milly Beck came to the fore here as perhaps no one else including his dead superior, Keck, could have done. Seeing that no reinforcements were immediately forthcoming, framing his dispositions exactly as he had been taught in the small units tactics course he had once taken at Fort Benning, he took advantage of the terrain to send six men around to the right of the ledge and six to the left under his two acting sergeants, Dale and Bell. The rest he kept with himself in the center readied to fire at whatever targets of opportunity turned up. Everything worked. Even the men he kept with himself were able to knock down two Japanese who were fleeing from the grenades of his patrols. Dale and his men on the left accounted for four emplacements and returned untouched. Finding the little ledge totally unguarded, they were able to crawl into the midst of the Japanese position and drop grenades from the ledge down into the rear doors of two covered, camouflaged emplacements they spotted below them; the other two emplacements, on the uphill side, were more difficult but by bypassing them and crawling up alongside they were able to pitch grenades into the apertures. Not a single one of them was even fired at. They returned led by the grinning Dale licking his lips and smacking his chops over his success. The importance of their accomplishment was cut down by at least fifty percent the firepower which could be directed from the left of the ridge down upon the 1st Platoon or into the flat which their reinforcements later crossed in safety.

Bell on the right was not so lucky, but he discovered something of great importance. On the right the ledge slowly graded upwards, and after bypassing and grenading one small emplacement below them Bell and his group came upon the main Japanese strongpoint of the whole position. Here the ledge ended in a twenty foot rock wall which further on became a real cliff and was impassable. Just above this rock wall, beautifully dug in and with apertures in three directions, was the Japanese strongpoint. When the lead man climbed out above the ledge to detour around the rock wall, he was riddled fatally by at least three machine-guns. Both Witt the volunteer Kentuckian and Pfc Doll were in Bell’s party, but neither of them happened to be the lead man. This distinction was reserved for a man named Catch, Lemuel C Catch, an oldtime regular and drunkard and a former boxing friend of Witt’s. He died immediately and without a sound. They pulled his body down and retreated with it, while all hell broke loose firing just above their heads, but not before—further back along the ledge—Acting Sergeant Bell got a good look at the strongpoint so he could describe it.

Why he did it even Bell himself never knew. Most probably it was sheer bitterness and fatigue and a desire to get this goddamned fucking battle over with. Bell at least knew that at the very least an accurate, eyewitness description of it might prove valuable later on. Whatever the reasons, it was a crazy thing to do. Halting his men thirty-five to forty yards back from the rockwall where Catch had died, Bell told them to wait and indulged himself in his crazy desire to look too. Leaving his rifle, holding a grenade in one hand, he climbed up the little ledge and poked up his head. The Japanese firing all had stopped now, and there was a little scrub on the lip of the ledge here, which was why he chose it. Slowly he climbed up, led on by whatever insane, mad motive, until he was out in the open, lying in a tiny little defiladed place. All he could see was the unending grass, rising slowly along a hillock which stuck up out of the ridge. Pulling the pin, he heaved the grenade with all his strength and ducked down. The grenade fell and exploded just in front of the hillock, and in the cyclone of MG fire which followed Bell was able to count five guns in five spitting apertures which he could not see before. When the firing ceased, he crawled back down to his men, obscurely satisfied. Whatever it was that made him do it, and he still didn’t know, it made every man in his little group look at him admiringly. Motioning them on, he led them back down and around the ledge until the company’s main position at the third fold hove into view. From there on it was easy to get back. Like Dale’s group, they did not see or hear a single Japanese anywhere near the ledge. Why the ledge, which was the real key to the whole position on the ridge, had been left totally unguarded by riflemen or MGs, no one ever found out. It was lucky for both groups, as well as for Beck’s minuscule little attack plan, that it was unguarded. As it was, they had cleaned out all the Japanese below the ledge and established a real line, and had changed the situation. That they changed the entire situation almost exactly at the precise moment Colonel Tall walked on the field was one of those happenstantial ironies which occur, which are entirely unpredictable, and which seem to be destined to dog the steps of certain men named Stein.

“What are you doing lying down there where you can’t see anything?” was the next thing Tall said. He himself was standing upright but, because he was ten or twelve yards away, only his head and the tips of his shoulders, if anything of him at all, showed above the crest. Stein noticed he apparently had no inclination to come closer.

Stein debated whether to tell him that the situation had changed. Almost in the last few seconds before his arrival. But he decided not to. Not just yet. It would look too much like an excuse, and a lame one. So instead he answered, “Observing, Sir. I just sent the other two squads of my 2d Platoon forward to the ridge.”

“I saw them leaving as we were coming along,” Tall nodded. The rest of his party, Stein noted, which included three privates as runners, his personal sergeant and a young Captain named Gaff, his Battalion Exec, had decided that it might be just as well to be lying down flat on the ground. “How many of them were hit this time?” Right to the point, it was.

“None, Sir.”

Tall raised his eyebrows under the helmet which sat so low on his small, fine head. “None? Not one?” A mortar round mushroomed exploding dirt without hurting anybody somewhere along the rearward slope of the third fold, and Tall coming forward to where Stein lay permitted himself to squat on his haunches.

“No, Sir.”

“That doesn’t sound much like the situation you described to me over the sound power.” Tall squinted at him, his face reserved.

“It’s not, Sir. The situation’s changed.” Stein felt he could honorably tell it now. “In just the last four or five minutes,” he added, and detested himself.

“And to what do you attribute the change?”

“Sergeant Beck, sir. When I last looked, half of his men had disappeared. I think he sent them off to try and knock out some emplacements, and they seem to have succeeded.”

From somewhere far off a machinegun began to rattle and a long line of bullets struck up dirt twenty-five yards below them on the forward slope. Tall did not change his squatting position or alter his voice. “Then you got my message to him.”

“No, Sir. I mean, yes, Sir, I did. It went forward with the two new squads. But Beck had already sent his men off before they got there. Some time before.”