The Thin Red Line (68 page)

They captured two undefended hills, leaving a squad on each to wait for Baker and Able, and emerged from the jungled foothills into the coconut groves at noon, just as 3d Battalion eight hundred yards away on the right was beginning its two company attack against Boola Boola. Band immediately started them over that way, moving them in a column of platoons.

He should have rested them. They looked like a ragged, taggleassed wrath of God, locusts and adders, descending upon a hapless countryside, and that was what they were. They were also beat. That jungle somehow took more out of a man than any other kind of physical endeavor. The coconut groves around them now looked exactly like the ones they had been bivouacked in, back over there on the other side, eons ago, and at the same time they looked entirely different, because this was enemy country now, not American. Band kept them moving. The sounds of 3d Battalion’s fight on the right grew louder. But long before they got there they were spotted and brought under fire. This time they had mortars against them, the big ones. The haggardfaced men hugged the ground and looked sweating across at each other with white eyes. But Band kept them moving, in rushes and small groups. A halfmad schoolteacherish gleam in his eye behind his steel spectacles, he could think of nothing but being in on the battle of Boola Boola. Actually, the mortar fire was nothing like as bad, nowhere had the character of a real barrage, as on The Dancing Elephant. The Japanese were fading fast. But it still hurt men. Finally they made contact.

Band had told the Baker Company commander Captain Task earlier in the morning that he was going to push hard, and now he was more than half a mile in front of Baker which had not yet emerged from the jungle. Captain Task, in turn, had told Band that he had talked to Battalion who were worried about Charlie Company because they had not heard from them. They had somehow already heard about the roadblock fiasco and were worried also about his losses. Band had begun to blink slowly at Task, a thing which Task perhaps noticed or perhaps did not notice, Band couldn’t tell, and had answered that his losses had been negligible, twenty-one men, to be exact, which was nothing for the job they had accomplished. Now he pushed his people even harder, remembering this peculiar, strange conversation. He knew that in war, as in everything else, it was
results
which counted. And he did love this company, desperately, passionately.

He had told his two squads he left behind on the two undefended hills to come on as quickly as they could, once they were relieved by Baker or Able. Naturally they did not. They did not arrive on the field until Baker Company itself did, which was too late to get hurt.

But in spite of their absence, and the absence of the twelve dead at the roadblock, the company succeeded.

The Japanese had two concentric lines of defense around Boola Boola. These were about a hundred yards apart, and both were clearly visible and well entrenched. Apparently they were determined to make some sort of stand here, and Band came in against the left of the semicircle while 3d Battalion was attacking the right. Actually, 3d Battalion had had to split its attack. Driving in to split the Japanese clear to the beach, they had had to wheel two of their companies right to attack an even larger Japanese force cut off there, so that in fact only one company was attacking the village, in what was really a holding attack instead of an allout effort at conquest. Band of course knew nothing of this. While his 2d and 3d Platoons reenforced by the two machineguns probed at the lines trying to find a hole, he withdrew his mortars far enough back so that they could fire, telling one off to fire for the first line and the other to hit at the second. In spite of the fact that they were attacked on the ground by a wandering squad of Japanese who had no business being there, they laid down good fire.

This went on until the mortar sections had used up every round of their ammunition. But then suddenly they were in, running hard but cautiously slow through the short grass between the long lines of coconut trees, leaping emplacements like the ones they had once looked at with awe and wonder, gasping and weeping and once in a while dying. They did not know that this sudden breakup was all due to the right having crumbled before Item Company’s attack. Nor did they care. Corporal Fife scampered along with Jenks’s squad shooting every Japanese he could see, filled with both terror and elation to a point where he could not separate one from the other. Then Jenks went down with a loud squawk and a rifle bullet through the throat, and Fife had the squad for himself, and the responsibility, and found he loved it, and all of them. John Bell, his panic of last night gone, ran leading his squad and yelling them on, but mainly watching coolly to keep the casualties down. Don Doll ran grinning with his rifle in one hand and his pistol in the other, and when the pistol was empty he let it hang and bounce from its rope lanyard and began using the rifle. They were in. They were in. When they began to come into the village proper, they found the majority of the Japanese killing themselves with grenades, guns or knives, which was just as well because most of those who did not were shot or bayoneted. In all, only eighteen prisoners were taken.

When it was all over, they began shaking hands with the guys from Item Company, grinning at each other out of blackdirty faces. A few men sat down and wept. Charlie Dale garnered many gold teeth, and an excellent chronometer which he later sold for a hundred dollars. Coming on a Japanese sitting dejectedly on a doorstoop with his head in his hands, this beautiful watch sticking out like a big diamond on his wrist, Dale shot him through the head and took the watch. This was almost the only loot taken. Quartermaster people arrived in what seemed like only seconds later, and began claiming everything. Also, almost everyone was too tired, too beat and exhausted, to care about loot. Later, of course, they would all regret it.

They attacked up the beach all the next day. They were relieved the day after. New, clean, smoothfaced, jollylooking troops from a totally new division relieved them and were to push the attack on toward Kokumbona up the coast. The Imperial Japanese Army was reputed to be in full retreat. At least as important as this was the fact that they did not have to walk home this time but were picked up by trucks which drove them back along the coast road sitting staring numbly at each other and at the peacefulooking sun-dappled shade of the wheeling groves, with the bright sea and the sound of the surf only a few yards away.

CHAPTER 8

B
AND WAS RELIEVED
three days later.

But before that happened the whole of C-for-Charlie had gotten blind, crazy drunk in a wild mass bacchanalian orgy which lasted twenty-eight hours and used up all the available whiskey, and Band—partly because of this great drunken rout—learned finally what his command that he loved so really thought of him. The honor for this development had to be given to, of all people, Private Mazzi the hep Bronxite of the Weapons Platoon.

The orgy itself was incredible. And it only stopped at all when it was discovered in drunken panic, like in some mad, fearridden, delirium tremens nightmaredream, that there was not a single Imperial quart, not a single
drop
of whiskey left anywhere in C-for-Charlie.

The scene was the coconut groves, where the new bivouac was this time. They were hardly down out of the trucks when the bottles, left behind here so long ago by different men and cataloged so carefully by Storm, were out and being utilized. MacTae and his clerk, in an excess of guilty love and aided by Storm and his disgruntled cooks who had returned from The Sea Slug when their stores ran out, had pitched all of the company’s pyramidal tents at the new site, and had even set up the cots in them complete with their blankets and mosquitobars. The kitchen fly was up and the stoves were lighted. All the weary warriors had to do was clamber down and start drinking seriously, as soon as they could draw their marked bottles from Storm’s locked chests.

All of them were a little bit mad. The combat numbness, with its stary eyes and drawn faces, had not yet left them and would not, this time, for a much longer period than last time. This led John Bell to theorize privately that, given a sufficient number of times up on the line after each of which it took longer to lose it and recover, combat numbness might possibly perhaps become a permanent state. Meanwhile, at the orgy, almost everybody vomited one or more times. Several men got down on their hands and knees, in the moonlight shining tranquilly down into the beautiful if deadly coconut groves, and bayed the moon like wolves or hounds. Another group of ten or twelve divested themselves of all clothing and, bareass nude, ran tripping and dancing like Martha Graham students across the open field beside the bivouac to swim in the Matanikau in the moonlight. There were at least nine fist fights. And Don Doll tried to seduce Carrie Arbre.

But the climax, the high point of all of it, was when Mazzi decided to beard Tall George Band in his den and tell him what he thought of him. What his outfit thought of him.

He was egged on to do it by Carni, Suss, Gluk, Tassi, and the rest of his Greater New York buddies. They were all sitting drinking in the tent of Carni, where Carni lay in bed drinking too but knocked nearly out with an especially bad malaria attack which had hit him on the way home in the trucks. Home? They were talking, naturally, about the campaign. Band had pushed them far too hard. Band had taken dangerous chances. Band had not needed to take them into Boola Boola at all where they were not even needed and which was not even their assignment. And, of course, The Glory Hunter should never have tried to set up that disastrous roadblock. Everybody was busy knocking Band, when Mazzi growled at them they ought to tell Band himself and what was the good of sitting around here yacking about it. Carni, droopyeyed and slackfaced from the fever, and who was the leader of the little Greater New York group of hep guys if it could be said to have a leader at all, looked over at him and asked in a voice hollow with fever and cynicism why the hell didn’t he do it himself then? Yeah, somebody else said, why didn’t he? Yeah, Suss added, why not? all he had to lose was that Pfc he might hope to get on the next promotions list because, Suss grinned, while it was certainly safer in the Weapons Platoon, the chances for rapid advancement there were correspondingly much more limited.

Mazzi got up drunkenly. “All right, by God I will!” he announced.

He marched out of the tent and staggered off through the cocopalms toward Band’s Hq tent, only falling down once. The others followed him at a distance sniggering happily, content to let him take the dangerous chance alone. All, that is, except Carni who could not get out of his bed.

Mazzi might not have done it if he had not been drunk, or if what happened to him at Boola Boola had not happened. But there raged in him such a despair, hatred, and unredeemable misery that, uninhibited by the alcohol, he no longer cared one way or the other what he did except that the worse it was the better. It had had to be that fucking goddamned Tills! So far Tills had not told anybody, but that did not mean that he wouldn’t. Mazzi was convinced that he would. After all, when somebody hated you as much as Tills hated him, how could they help telling? Especially when you had been showing them up for what they were all their lives? Whenever he thought about it it made his asshole twitch and his stomach burn.

During the Boola Boola attack, when the mortar sections had been counterattacked by that wandering squad of Japanese, they had been caught off guard. There weren’t supposed to be any Japanese around there. Finally they had been compelled to run. Their mission was not to engage in a longrange firefight with a squad of Japanese strays; it was to lay mortar into Boola Boola. The Japanese, firing down the lanes of cocopalms, showed no inclination to come on in and close with them, and appeared content to stay back off in safety and try to pick them off. Behind them on their right not far away was a small tongue of jungle undergrowth. With two men slightly wounded, on hectic orders from Lt Fullback Culp in the smoke, noise and confusion (the Japanese mortars were still laying in searching rounds here and there trying to find them) they dismantled and ran for this refuge in a long uneven sweating line. They were to meet, reassemble and set up again on the other side of it. And this was when, Mazzi thought for the tenthousandth miserable time, that it had happened.

Buttplate in one hand and carbine in the other, running somewhere near the right end of this line, Frankie Mazzi swung around backward to crash through the facewhipping screen of leaves. Once through, he swung to turn face front again, and suddenly felt himself speared, caught, and then held. He knew what it was, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to do anything about it. Some
thing
had grabbed hold of his ammo belt near his right hipbone. Unable to believe it, plunging and cursing and listening to rifle bullets snickerwhack through the brush around him, he remained tethered, still holding buttplate in one hand and carbine in the other. If he had dropped one, he might have been able to get himself loose and then pick it back up, but he could not think of this except far off dimly. Eyes wide and glaring, his mouth a cavern of teeth, he pushed and jerked eternally in a timeless world whose only measurable moments of sane, live time, coming like erratic red flashes of some mad beacon at sea at night, were the unevenly spaced clicksnaps of bullets through the undergrowth. And there he remained, buttplate and carbine still senselessly in hand. And he knew he would still be there when they came for him, shot him, cooked him, and ate him.

Two men from the section had pushed past him running hurriedly and obliviously, and he had begun to call in a feeble, moronic, plaintive voice the same word over and over. “Help!” Even to his own ears it sounded ridiculously hopeless. “Help!” he keened feebly. “Help! Help!”

It was Tills who came back for him. Eyes glaring wildly also, running hurriedly in a crouch, he had run up, surveyed the scene, and freed him. Mazzi had been pushing and plunging forward all this time. Tills merely shoved him backward two feet and the snag came free. Then they were both running in a crouch, the bullets still slitherclacking around them in the brush. Once Tills glanced over at him, made a liplifting mock of a grin, spat brown from the quid in his jaw, and ran on. By the time they could see sunlight on the other side the bullets had stopped. When they came out into the bright, eyebeating light, they could see the others about thirty yards away already setting up, resetting the bubble levels. They pushed on toward them going slower now, Tills with his carbine slung still carrying the mortar tube in both arms like a baby, Mazzi still with buttplate in one hand and carbine in the other. Someone waved at them to hurry.