The Thin Red Line (52 page)

A silk battle flag, preferably bloodstained, was always worth at least three Imperial quarts. A rifle on the other hand would hardly bring a pint. A helmet if it bore the officer’s gold or silver star and was in good condition might bring one Imperial quart. Pistols were especially in demand. There were two types of Japanese pistols. One, cheaper and blighter, was modeled on some European popgun pistol and would bring three Imperial quarts; the other, heavier and better made, was copied from the German Luger and had the Luger’s elbow-type slide action. This one was much rarer and apparently for officers and would bring four, five or even six Imperial quarts. A typical,
normal
‘Samurai saber’ was always worth five Imperial quarts at least, and the better grade ones with gold and ivory chasing could bring as high as nine Imperial quarts. A jewelled one you could set your own price on, but they were unknown in the ordinary market. In addition to these solid staples there were other things. The thick leather belts with their old-fashioned leather ammo pouches, for example, which the Air Corps men liked to wear for pistol belts. Also a lot of the Air Corps men wanted Japanese photographs and wallets. The photos with Japanese writing on them were worth more than those without, and the photos of the soldiers themselves, or of groups of soldiers, were worth more than the photos of wives or girlfriends—unless of course they were pornographic. A certain amount of pornographic photos did turn up from time to time and were worth a lot. Money of course was practically meaningless to everyone except the crews of the “Milk Run” planes who could spend it in Australia, and men who had it but no souvenirs to trade were known to pay as high as fifty dollars for one Imperial quart of Scotch.

Into this already existing market C-for-Charlie charged eagerly with all its hard-earned leathergoods and hardware. The other three companies of the Battalion, for some reason of Army logic no one even attempted to understand, had been bivouacked at other sites, all of them far down at the other end of Red Beach in the coconut groves. For them it was an all-day job to get to the airfield and back, and even that was only possible if they got up at dawn to start hitching their rides. They had no choice but to sell most of their plunder on the cheaper ground-troops-and-service-forces market around them. But C-for-Charlie prospered.

On top the little hill above the airfield the drinking began before breakfast. They would crawl out of their netcovered cots, have a good stiff jolt of Australian Scotch, wash up at the trough, have another jolt, then report with mess gear to the kitchen tent which was now being run by First Cook Land in the absence of Storm who was in the hospital. Beside almost every bed there stood an Imperial quart. Breakfast was the only rollcall of the day by order of Shorty Tall, and after that they were on their own. Some might descend to the Air Corps with some plunder in the morning, but most preferred to sit in the tents or in the sun with their shirts off drinking from their Imperial quarts and refighting the great battle. Sometimes there was beer for a chaser, taken in from an outfit of Naval Seabees stationed at the field who apparently had endless amounts of it to trade for souvenirs. Almost everyone put away at least an Imperial quart a day, many quite a bit more. They were all young, and except for the malaria which everybody had at least a touch of by now, probably in the best physical condition of their lives. They could handle it. Besides, they were veterans. Blooded veterans. And they never intended to forget it—or let anybody else forget it, either. If some of them drank enough to get sick or pass out, they simply sat down or lay down wherever they were and slept it off until they felt like waking up and drinking some more. There were a number of drunken fistfights. After a midday dinner at which they consumed straight whiskey in the same way a European takes wine with his meals, they would drink more and wait for the rather tough spectator-sport of the afternoon light bomber raid. Then, when the airfield was safe, though sometimes burning, they would swagger toughly down with their souvenirs for the afternoon trading period. The Air Corps men who bought their objects must have hated them as much as they hated the Air Corps. In the night, after a meal of fried Spam and dehydrated potatoes, they would sit out on the open hillside drinking more and smoking cautiously in cupped hands and watch the spectacle of the night airraids, which because they bombed the coconut groves never bothered them on their hill.

They were, of course, undergoing the worst mental shock of their young lives, excepting perhaps only a few who had survived bad automobile accidents. As the blessed numbness receded, the unbelievability of each man’s death to himself returned to ridicule and plague each one who had ever thought that. They talked much in the nights too, though more drunkenly, as they watched with malicious relish the nocturnal raids. The dead of their great battle were always spoken of with a sort of awed wonder. The wounded when they were spoken of at all, was spoken of in terms of as to just how far along that long line of stops between here and the States each man’s wound would carry him: Division Forward Hospital here, Division Rear Hospital on Esperito Santo, Naval Base Hospital No. 3 on Ephate, Noumea in New Caledonia, New Zealand, Australia, home. Hardly anyone spoke of his own potential death next week. They were tough veterans; that much had been explained to them, and they sought desperately to carry out the role—not only because they were egotistically proud of it, but also because there wasn’t any other role. It was while in this state that on the evening of the fourth day they looked up drunkenly to find Mess Sergeant Storm and Corporal Fife were returned to them from the—“from the dead” was the only way they could honestly think of it; or, at least, “from the gone.” The safely gone.

Storm and Fife were the first wounded to be returned to C-for-Charlie, and as such they were objects of extreme curiosity. Everybody crowded around them. Everyone in the company who had not been hurt beyond the normal minor bruises and cuts carried the small, nagging guilt of a well man who through no fault of his own has not suffered. They pressed drinks on the two returnees and asked them questions. Fife’s head wound had turned out to be totally superficial and with no fracture, and after six days of observation he had been released for duty despite the fact that he had lost his glasses. He now sported a small patch on the shaved part of his head which he had been told he could leave off after three days. Storm’s hand had been examined by several doctors who asked him if he could use it. When he said yes, he had been assigned a bed in a tent where he sat ignored by everyone for five days until an orderly came and told him he could go back to duty. They had done nothing to his hand at all. They had not even put a bandage on it, and now there was a small scab over the tiny blue-edged hole. It still grated when he flexed it, and it still hurt him.

So that was it, and here they were. They were tough fuckers, those doctors in Division Hospital, was the opinion of the returnees. They were not letting anybody get out of anything if they could possibly help it. Apparently Division policy was to send everybody back to their outfits who could crawl, so the Division Commander could get this fight over with and secure the island and his reputation. Even the very worst of the malaria cases were not being admitted. Instead, they were given a double handful of atabrine and sent back to their outfits. The shit, the returnees said, had apparently hit the fan.

And so, borne on the wings of hospital gossip, in the mouths of Storm and Fife, the first real sense of the true imprisonment of combat reached the newly blooded veterans of C-for-Charlie. Storm and Fife had had nothing to do for some days except join in the unbelievably intense discussions among the wounded about who would be evacuated and who wouldn’t, and they brought that intensity back to C-for-Charlie with them. It was easy to see, when you looked at it from one point of view, that all prisoners were not locked up behind bars in a stone quadrangle. Your government could just as easily imprison you on, say, a jungled island in the South Seas until you had done to its satisfaction what your government had sent you there to do. And when one considered it—as all the wounded had—this matter of evacuation might well be actually and in fact a life and death matter. So a new element darkled in their already darkling mood: a somber, deep-rooted bitterness which would grow and grow until it would make of them—those who survived—the tough, mean, totally cynical infantry fighters which their leaders fondly on sentimental grounds already believed they were, and which all of them, everybody, hated the Japanese for being. And in this dark mood they plied Storm and Fife, their first two returnees, with Australian whiskey and with questions about the wounded; and while Storm and Fife got drunk they explained that So-and-so would certainly make it out but would just as certainly die, that So-and-so and So-and-so would be evacuated at least as far as Australia and perhaps to the States, that these three would never make it further back than Noumea, and that So-and-so and So-and-so would never make it off The Rock any more than they themselves had. It was quite a long cataloging, but neither of them minded much what with the whiskey.

Storm and Fife had talked together quite a lot in the hospital. There was little else to do once the doctors had made their rounds, and Fife had turned to Storm as a sort of father or older brother in his sharp despair at finding that his head wound was not serious. Not only was it not serious, it was not even semi-serious, and it certainly would never get him evacuated. When Fife learned this, he was almost beside himself with terror, fear and disappointment. He had wanted to lie down on the ground of the doctor’s examination tent and beat his fists in the mud there.

When Fife first had walked away from the battle streaming his blood, the only thought or emotion he had was a wild joy that he was wounded and could leave, plus a nagging desire to get behind Hill 209 where he could not be hit again and maybe killed. He could not remember anything else until he got to the bottom of the forward slope of Hill 209, where he saw something which stopped him. On the steep slope, which was thinly scattered with pieces of abandoned equipment including two rifles, lay an abandoned stretcher. On it lay a boyish looking soldier who was dead. The boyish soldier’s eyes and mouth were closed, and one hand and arm hung outside the stretcher. His other hand, which was inside the stretcher, was submerged to the wrist in an astonishing amount of drying, almost jellylike blood which all but filled the cavity made by his buttocks in the canvas. Standing like an oaf and staring at this sight, Fife realized the man had been hit a second time while they were trying to carrying him out. But it was that hand submerged to the wrist in his own blood which distressed Fife the most, and he had an impulse to go over and pluck it out for him and wipe it off. But he hesitated. On the other hand, what if it was already stuck there? That might be even more terrible. Fife suddenly wanted to cry. Suddenly he wanted to shout at the whole world of men: “Look what you
human beings
have done to this boy who might have been me? Yes,
me
, you
human beings!
” He was brought to his senses by a rifle bullet which struck and whined away a few yards from him, and he turned away. He tried to run, but the slope was too steep. He could only plod. He thought he saw a few other rifle bullets strike dirt near him. In any case the damage had already been done—by that boyish looking dead man in the stretcher—and when he reached the aid station he was blubbering.

They treated him very well at the Battalion aid station. But there seemed to be thousands of people running around everywhere, all shouting at one another in confusion. He sat with a line of grimy, bleeding, groaning men on the hillside, mopping the blood from his forehead whenever it began to drip. All Fife wanted most in the world was simply not to go back down below. He had done nothing heroic, nor even anything normally brave, but these men here thought him heroic. In fact, he had not even done what he considered to be his normal duty. But he was not going to tell anybody that.

When a doctor finally got to him, he swabbed it and probed at it and then shook his head. “I can’t tell. You never can tell with these.” He began wrapping a turban of bandage around Fife’s head. “Don’t walk. You mustn’t walk. Wait for the stretcherbearers to take you,” he said, and an orderly attached a colored tag to Fife’s jacket.

“Hear me?” the doctor said. “Don’t walk. Answer me.” He leaned over and looked into Fife’s eyes and then snapped his fingers in front of them. “I said don’t walk.”

“Yes, Sir,” Fife said. He had been far away, concentrating intensely to see if he could feel whether he was dying. And anyway, he didn’t think such a simple instruction required an answer.

“Good,” the doctor said. “Now don’t forget.” He moved away.

Fife was carted away by four beat-looking stretcherbearers. Even in the hot day the blanket felt good because he was cold. Hell, if he couldn’t walk he was a cinch to be evacuated to Australia. When the bearers were resting for the last and steepest climb to where the jeeps could come he sat up and said, “Listen, fellows. I can make it all right. You guys should be carrying somebody who’s hit worse than me.” He was pushed back down by a roughly gentle hand. “You just take it easy, Mack. Let us worry about the carryin.” Good guys, good guys. He relaxed cozily. This was the destiny he had been born to carry, and he had always known it. He would never have to go back there, and it hadn’t really been bad at all. Not like with some of the guys, like Keck and McCron and Jacques and little Bead.

But at Regimental aid station he had found it was not going to be at all as easy as all that. After the jeep ride with the three other stretcher cases hung from the pipe and angle-iron frame, he was carried into the tent where the four doctors were working on four separate tables. Each doctor had a second table beside him on which a man waited, making a total of eight tables in the tent. Fife was put on the only vacant one, and saw he had drawn old Doc Haines, the Head Regimental Surgeon. Red-headed, grizzled and bald with a big paunch, Doc Haines worked with an unlit stub of a cigar in his mouth, grunting to himself from time to time. On Sick Call back before the war Fife had made a father figure out of old Doc Haines, as had many others, and momentarily Fife’s eyes fogged up again. The man old Doc was working on was a young man with a slim, handsome, well-muscled back except for the fact that there was a hole the size of the mouth of a water tumbler just beneath his right shoulderblade. He sat on the edge of the table while Doc Haines working his cigar butt back and forth in his mouth cut loose strips of skin and flesh from the edge of the hole with tweezers and a pair of surgical scissors. The hole fascinated Fife and he could not take his eyes off it. Very slowly blood would well up in it until it overflowed in a slow-moving, thick, dark rill down the handsome back. When it had nearly reached his waist, Doc Haines would casually wipe it right back up to the hole again with a gauze swab and go on cutting. Frustrated but undaunted, it would prepare itself to start again. When he had finished tidying the hole to his satisfaction, Doc bandaged it and slapped the boy lightly on his good shoulder. He grinned with his much-wrinkled eyes.