The Thin Red Line (53 page)

“Okay, son. Lay down there till they come for you. If there’s any more stuff in there, they’ll take it out back there. In any case, I’ve given you the best-looking cunt between here and Melbourne. Orderly!” he bawled around his cigar stub in his raspy voice, “bearers.”

The boy as he lay down grinned a silly drunken morphine grin, but he did not say anything. Fife suddenly felt that he had returned to the world of men, but he felt he had returned as a stranger. Doc Haines came over to him.

“Wait. Don’t tell me. It’s—” he grinned. “It’s—Fife, isn’t it? C-for-Charlie Company.”

“Yes, Sir, Doc,” Fife grinned.

“I remember you from when you went up to Post Hospital for that appendectomy that time. How did that ever turn out? Everything all right now?” He didn’t give Fife time to answer. “What have we here now? Head wound, hunh? Can you sit up?”

Fife wanted to shout at him that he was not the same Fife, and that it was not the same, that this was not an appendectomy, but he swallowed it. “I’m not that Fife,” he said wanly instead.

“Yeah. We none of us are,” Doc Haines grinned. “Can you sit up?”

“Sure!” Fife said eagerly, “sure!” and heaved himself up and was immediately dizzy.

“Easy. Take it easy. You’ve lost a little blood there. Now, let’s have a look-see,” he said, and with his tongue pushed the cigar butt from the right side to the left.

Efficiently he went to work, removing the turban, probing the wound with his fingers. “This’ll hurt a little bit now,” he said, and colored lights danced before Fife’s eyes as old Doc pushed a metal probe into it.

Doc Haines said softly, “Just one more time now,” and again a spiral turban of velvet-colored light engulfed Fife’s head.

“You’re lucky. It isn’t fractured. You may have, I think, what we call a greenstick fracture, which is a sort of crack like, but not a break. In any case, there’s no foreign objects inside. In a week or so you’ll be all ready to go again.” Having given his opinion, he came around in front of Fife.

“Then,—you don’t think I’ll be evacuated,” Fife said. “Or anything like that.”

“I wouldn’t hardly think so,” old Doc said. Quite suddenly his smile disappeared from around the cigar butt in it. His eyes got flatter, as if some veil had fallen over them.

“Then I can walk all right now,” Fife said desperately. “Now.”

“Do anything you like,” old Doc Haines said. “Except you should take it easy for a day or two.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Fife said bitterly.

“This battle’ll be over in a day or two, you know,” Doc Haines said. Without dropping his eyes he suddenly reached up and rubbed his stubby fingers in his grizzled fringe.

Fife got up off the table onto his feet. Somehow he had known all along that this would be the answer. And all that about it being his destiny to get out had been horseshit he’d fed himself. He felt a little shaky in the knees. “Sure, and as soon as this one’s over there’ll be another one. Right away after.” From his blood-caked face he grinned, feeling it draw his cheeks. He knew he made a good picture of a wounded man anyway.

Old Doc Haines stared back at him obdurately now. “I didn’t make the rules, son,” he said. “I just try to live by them.”

“Did you ever try dying by them?” Fife grinned. Then suddenly he felt ashamed and when Doc Haines didn’t answer he said quickly, “It’s not your problem. If a guy ain’t hurt bad enough to evacuate, you can’t evacuate him, can you?” But it came out bitter. He paused, ashamed again. “I better go now. You’re busy.” On the other table, the one where the boy with the hole in his back had been, the waiting table now, a man lay groaning with his eyes closed, one arm and shoulder bloody in their bandages and badly mangled. The whole thing had only taken a very few seconds, really, and he hadn’t kept him waiting long. Fife tottered out past him. Perhaps he tottered a little more than he really needed to. “Good luck, son,” old Doc Haines called after him, and Fife waved his hand without looking back. He felt very wounded, and quite pleased with himself for having carried it all off so well.

It was on the jeep ride back to Division Hospital that Fife saw, for the first time in a very long time, the young Captain who was the Regimental S-1, and who had once turned down—or sent back to Bugger, anyway—Fife’s application for OCS Infantry. He was standing with a bunch of other staff officers beside the road, and he recognized Fife or Fife would never have noticed him. He did not, of course, know Fife’s name. But he did recognize his face beneath all the bandages and dried blood, and, after he was hailed, Fife thought that was pretty good for an officer on the Regimental staff. After all, one could not expect to be known by name to everyone in the world.

Fife was riding beside the driver, now that he had been reclassified as “walking wounded,” and there were four litter cases hanging on the frame behind them. The young Captain, whose name Fife knew—and in fact, would never forget for the rest of his whole life (however long that might be)—left the group when he saw Fife and came toward them.

“Hey! Aren’t you from Charlie Company?”

“Yes, Sir.” A sudden emotion blossomed and burst in Fife like some miniature explosion, a perfect little miniature of the explosion which had caused his own wound, perhaps. “Yes, Sir! I sure am!” He was very aware of how wounded he looked. And the Captain couldn’t know he would not be evacuated.

They were back down off the hills now, back in the mud of the jungle, though they hadn’t yet crossed the river, and the jeep was moving slower than a man could walk, so that the Captain as they came toward him could turn and walk alongside.

“How’s it going up there?”

“Terrible!” Fife cried. “Just terrible!”

“Well.” It was obviously not the answer the S-1 had expected.

“They’re knocking the shit out of us!” Fife cried maliciously.

“How’s Lt Whyte making out?”

“Dead!”

The young S-1 Captain recoiled a little as if he had been struck, his eyes disturbed. “How about Lt Blane?”

“Dead!”

The S-1 had chosen to ask about the only two injured officers, as Fife had suspected he would, since he knew he was friends with them. The Captain had stopped following now, and was standing motionless beside the road. All the others in the gossiping group had turned and were listening too.

“Keck’s dead!” Fife cried. “Grove’s dead! Spain” (the other rifle platoon sergeant) “ ’s wounded!”

“Well what about Captain Stein,” the S-1 called. “We were good friends, you know.”

Fife swung himself around in the jeep seat to yell it back to him. “He was all right when I left! But he’s probly dead too by now!” The Captain didn’t answer. Fife swung back around in the seat, strangely satisfied—in a grinding, unsatisfied, miserable kind of way. The fuckers, never getting shot at, and with their shitty private club kind of atmosphere which they copied so carefully from the fucking British. Did they ask about anybody except officers?

There were several other small triumphs on the way down, as when groups of rear-area troops stopped their work to stare at the jeep and its cargo with widened eyes and Fife would flash them all a wolfish grin out of his blood-caked face. But through all of these, despite his enjoyment of the role, there was still the grinding misery of his knowledge that it was only an act, that he was not in fact the future evacuee whom all of the wide-eyed rear-area troops so obviously envied. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he began to blubber again. The driver, in a guilty, eyes-intent-upon-the-road silence, mercifully did not say anything to him, and finally he got himself stopped.

At the Division Hospital he was put in a hastily erected eight-man pyramidal tent with three others, none of whom knew each other or him, and they all sat around groaning or sighing to themselves in silence. Slowly the tent filled up, until two new cots were added in the center alongside the pole making a total of ten wounded. None of them saw a doctor that evening, though there were plenty of orderlies running around helping them, and when it came time for evening chow those of them who could walk lined up in the familiar coconut trees for their ration of the fried Spam and dehydrated potatoes served in the tin compartmentalized hospital plates. After the meal there was a great deal of searching through the milling throng in the late light while each man tried to find members of his own outfit. Fife was able to find four members of C-for-Charlie but none of them had any later news of the company than he himself had. After that they all sat around smoking cautiously and waiting for the night air raids. When the mosquitoes finally drove them all back to their tents long after the raids had ceased, he did not even try to sleep but lay mulling over and over the events of the day and his bad luck at getting a head wound. It would have been difficult to sleep anyway because in his own tent or in one of the tents nearby someone woke up every few minutes screaming or with a loud strangled yell. The one time he did doze off, he woke up yelling too.

Fife’s interview with the doctor next day was short and succinct. After probing his head, making the colored lights dance again, he came around in front to tell him with a big, pleased grin that not only was it not fractured, it was not even a greenstick fracture—only a big gouge in Fife’s thick, tough, American skull. He seemed to expect Fife to share his pleasure with him, and the physical toughness of American skulls seemed to be important to him. Lt Col Roth (Fife had heard him so addressed by an orderly) was a big meaty man with beautiful, perfectly silver, wavy hair (which matched his silver oak leaves) and the heavy, wellpadded face of a very successful bigcity doctor. He had a deep, heavy, authoritarian voice and eyes of cold blue steel—“eyes of steel” which, Fife thought with a cold inward infantryman’s sneer, he would like to see looking at the business end of a bayonet and see how they looked. He had been hoping desperately they would find him worse than Doc Haines had predicted, and he guessed this and his despair showed in his face, but he tried to hide it from this man.

“That’s fine, Sir,” he said. “But, you see, I lost my glasses.”

“You what?” Col Roth said, his steel eyes widening and getting more steely. “You lost what?”

“My glasses. When I was hit.” Fife was aware of the half-guilty, three-quarters-anguished look on his own face, but he had worn glasses since he was five, and he could just barely make out the facial features of someone ten feet away, and he did not intend to stop now. “I can’t see to do hardly anything without them.” He deliberately did not say Sir.

Col Roth made no attempt to conceal his contempt and disdain. He did not shout the word coward, but he looked as though he would like to. “Soldier, we’ve got badly wounded men dying all over the place here. What do you expect me to do about your glasses?”

“Well, I won’t be any good to anybody without them,” Fife said. He did not ask the obvious followup question. But then there was no need to.

Col Roth had stepped behind him and was rather roughly putting a small compress bandage on his head with adhesive tape.

“What’s your name again, Soldier?” he asked ominously.

“Fife, Sir. Corporal Geoffrey P,” Fife said, feeling that now the paperwork of bureaucracy would eventually and inevitably descend upon him and mark him forever—which of course was what Eyes of Steel wanted him to think.

“Well, Corporal,” Col Roth said coming around in front again and not hiding his contempt, “you’ll have several days to recuperate and convalesce here before you go back to your outfit. I’m going to forget all about this. You must know as well as I that we have no facilities here for making glasses. I don’t like malingering, or malingerers. But we need soldiers, even the worst kind. If we have the time, we’ll try and give you an eye examination and send to Australia for glasses for you. However, they may be a long time reaching you,” he said with a distasteful smile. “That’s all. You may go.”

Fife saw that he had a choice. He could go on protesting about his eyes and take the consequences or he could shut up and accept the insult, and something about the ponderous selfsatisfied setmindedness of Eyes of Steel warned him not to press. “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” he said getting up and trying to put all his hatred in his eyes. He left without saluting. Only when he was outside did he begin to brood over the possibility that if he had gone on protesting this Lt Col might actually have shipped him out, and that he had let himself be talked down. Later that same day, strolling around the hellish, moaning compound looking for someone from the company who was new and could give him news, he found Storm sitting on a cot staring glumly at the blue-edged hole in the back of his hand.

The Division Forward Hospital had been set up at the junction of two of the main thoroughfares of mud in the coconut groves so that the ambulances and jeeps from the front could get to it easier. Unfortunately, no one had noticed or considered important the fact that this junction was no more than six or eight hundred yards from the seaward side of the airfield, the prime target of the airraids; and while the hospital was never once hit by bombs, perhaps reenforcing the opinion of the planners, no statistical inquiry was ever made concerning the wear and tear on the nerves of the patients, all of whom had been wounded at least once. Despite this constant source of complaint, the hospital was well equipped and functioned very well under the circumstances. The installation consisted of two large three-masted circustype tents capable of holding upwards of a hundred men plus smaller tents for operating and treatment, plus now as an emergency measure a large number of pyramidal tents due to the unexpectedly high incidence of casualties. It was in one of the big dim circustype tents that Fife, who could not bear sitting in his own hastily erected, whopper-jawed, out-of-plumb pyramidal tent, came upon Storm.

Fife was overjoyed to see him. Despite his own current, very serious problems. Having been in the Company Headquarters himself, Fife had associated with Storm and his kitchen force more than he had with most of them in the company. And Fife had always felt that Storm liked him—at least, anyway, Storm
had
protected him from Welsh on several occasions.