The Thin Red Line Read online

  They did not go back to the place of the shirt, but headed out toward the edge. Everybody had had enough exploring. At the tight skin of leaves they paused, still laughing senselessly, and looking back like Hallowe’en pranksters who have just upset the outdoor toilet of a farm. It was there that Queen finally got time to inspect the helmet.

  It made a pretty poor souvenir. They all had heard that Japanese officers had stars of gold or silver on their helmets. Real gold, or real silver. If that was so, this was the helmet of a junior private. Its star was iron—and very thin iron at that, and badly bent. The outside of the helmet was covered with mud, but inside though badly sweatstained it was curiously clean.

  Looking at it, this gave Queen a sudden inspiration. He had had a curious sense of oppression after dragging that poor damned muddy Jap corpse out of its final resting place—as though he knew he had done something bad and would be found out and punished for it. The oppression had abated somewhat during the stumbling, laughing, breathless trek back out to the jungle edge. And, instinctively in a way he could not have formulated, Big Queen sensed he had at hand the means of vanquishing it completely. By making himself laughable and ridiculous he could both atone and at the same time avoid admitting he needed to. Removing his own GI helmet Queen put the Japanese one on his head and struck a pose, throwing out his great chest with a silly grin.

  There was a burst of uproarious laughter from the others. Queen’s head was too big even for an American helmet, which rode high up on his head like a hat. The Japanese one, made to be worn by small men, did not come down over his head at all; it sat up flat on top of it. The chinstrap did not even come down to his nose, but hung in front of his eyes. From behind it Queen peered out at them. He began to caper.

  Even Doll laughed. Bell was the only one who didn’t. He grinned, and gave a short bark, but then his face sobered and he eyed Queen shrewdly. For a second they looked into each other’s eyes. But Queen would not meet his gaze and looked away and unwilling to meet Bell’s eyes after that, went on with his farce for the others.

  It had stopped raining while they were in the jungle. But they had not known it. The falling moisture, trapped high above and retarded in its descent, had continued to drip down—and would continue to long after—just as if it still rained outside. With surprise they stepped out to find the sky was blue again, and the washed air clear. Almost instantaneously, as though Storm had been watching with binoculars for them to reappear through the green wall, the chow whistle sounded clear and shrill across the open ground from within the grove. It was an intensely familiar, curiously heartwringing sound to hear here, studded with memories of secure evenings. It rose and then fell away to silence in the late clear island air which carried a feel of the sea. And it shocked the explorers. They stared at each other, realizing that those dead Japanese men were really dead Japanese men. From the hills the mortarfire and small-arms fire of some struggle came down to them clearly, faintly, reinforcing the opinion.

  They returned to the bivouac with Queen in the lead, clumping along and capering in his tiny enemy helmet. Doll dangled his new bayonet, showing it first to one then another. The others trooped along, and laughed and talked again after their shock. They were anxious now to tell their adventure to the rest of the company who had missed it. Before morning Big Queen’s forcible disinterment of the dead Japanese man had been added to the company’s annals of myth and legend, as well as to Queen’s own.

  That night at supper C-for-Charlie received its first dosage of atabrine. It had been decided not to dose the new troops until arrival because of the large number of jaundice cases the atabrine was causing. The pills were brought down in the bulk in cans from battalion medical.

  Storm took over the administering of it himself, ineptly assisted by the company’s first medic, whose job it really was. Standing at the head of the chow line by the Lister bag so the men could draw water, with the mild, bespectacled, unauthoritative medic standing helplessly behind him, Storm doled out the yellow pills, chaffing everyone goodnaturedly, but belligerently determined that nobody was going to avoid taking his pill. If a cynic threw back his head with dramatic abandon and brought down a closed hand, Storm would make him open it and show it. Only a few tried to deceive a second or third time. In the end, before he got his hot food, each man knew the gagging, bitter taste which made them all retch.

  Because the meal was hot. Storm, sporting his singed, wrapped hand, had succeeded in that if in little else. All he had to serve was fried Spam, dehydrated potatoes, dehydrated sliced apples for dessert. But in the chill wet the men were grateful, even if only the coffee was real. The coffee, and the atabrine.

  “What the fuck do you bother so hard for?”

  The tall blackbrowed Welsh spoke coldly from just behind Storm’s elbow as the last man was force-fed his pill and sloshed away down the line in the mud. Storm had no idea how long he had been there. He had come up and elbowed the selfeffacing medic out of the way in silence. Storm refused to turn around or be startled.

  “Because they going to need all the fucking help they can git,” he said, just as coldly.

  “They going to need a lot more than that,” Welsh said.

  “Than help?”

  “Yeh.”

  “I know it.”

  “And as for that shit,” Welsh said.

  “Least it’s somethin.” Storm looked down at the box of pills and shook it. He had counted them out carefully, so as to make sure each man got one. A few remained.

  The last man in the line had stopped and was looking back at them, listening. He was one of the draftees and his eyes were large. Welsh glanced at him.

  “On your way, bud,” he said. The man went on. “Ears stuck out a foot,” Welsh said with a thin look.

  “Some of them so dumb they actu’ly wouldn’t take them,” Storm said. “If I didn’t make them.”

  Welsh stared at him expressionlessly. “So what? They don’t take them maybe they’ll get asshole malaria so bad they’ll get themself shipped out and save their fucking useless life.”

  “They ain’t learned that yet,” Storm said. “They will.”

  “But we’ll be ahead of them. Won’t we? We’ll make them fucking take them. Won’t we? You and me.” And Welsh grinned his sudden mad, evil grin; then as quickly and suddenly he removed it. He continued to stare at Storm somberly.

  “Not me,” Storm said. “When it gets down that low, I let the officers take over.”

  “What are you, a fucking revolutionary anarchist? Don’t you love your country?”

  Storm who was a Texas Democrat and loved President Roosevelt almost as much as Queen did not bother to answer such a silly question. And as Welsh said nothing further, the two men simply stood and stared at each other.

  “But we know the secret, don’t we? You and me,” Welsh said in a silky voice. “We already know about not taking them, don’t we?”

  Again Storm didn’t answer. The stare seemed to go on and on. “Gimme one,” Welsh said at last.

  Storm held out the box. Without taking his eyes from Storm’s face Welsh reached down, got a pill, popped it into his mouth and swallowed it dry. He continued to stare at Storm.

  Not to be outdone Storm got one himself and swallowed it as Welsh had, dry, and stared back. He could taste the yellow gall of it spreading in his throat, incredibly bitter. Luckily, when he had first learned to drink whiskey he had also learned the trick of pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth and not letting in any air. Also, as he had seen the astute Welsh do, he had thumbed the surface chemical dust from the pill as he picked it up.

  With all the expressiveness of a stone Welsh stared at him another twenty seconds, apparently hoping to see him gag. Then he turned on his heel and strode off. But before he had gone thirty feet he executed an accurate aboutface and came striding back. Everyone was off eating. They two were alone.

  “You know what it is, don’t you? You realize what’s happened, what’s happening
.” Welsh’s eyes brooded across Storm’s face. “There ain’t any choice. There’s no choice left for anybody. And it ain’t only here, with us. It’s everywhere. And it ain’t going to get any better. This war’s just the start. You understand that.”

  “Yeh,” Storm said.

  “Then remember it, Storm; remember it.” It was all very enigmatic. Welsh turned and strode away again.

  Storm stared after him. He had understood it. Or at least he thought he did. But what the hell? If a man’s government told him he had to go and fight a war, he had to go, that was all. The government was bigger than him and it could make him. It wasn’t even a matter of duty; he had to go. And if he was the right kind of a man he would want to go, no matter how much he didn’t really want to. It didn’t have anything to do with freedom, for Christ’s sake. Did it? Storm looked down at his box again. He could still taste the incredible bitterness of the dry pill and repressed a desire to gag. There were nine left, three for his cooks on shift and six for the officers. If only it hadn’t had to go and rain on them like that, God damn it, the very first thing. Storm slapped at a mosquito on his bare elbow, perhaps the fiftieth within an hour. Well, at least the rain had stopped.

  Storm was being optimistic. Whether the rain had stopped actually made very little difference. It was perhaps nicer not to have to eat standing in the rain, but the main damage was done. In this humid, saturated air their soaked uniforms were only just beginning to dry on their bodies. It was next to impossible to clean a rifle in so much mud. And after supper, with their blankets wet and their sheltertents nearly awash, there was nowhere to go and nothing they could do. Then night fell. One moment it was full daylight in the coconut groves—late light it was true but still full day; the next moment it was full, black night and everyone was groping around surprised, as if they had all gone suddenly blind. Soon after this novel experience they had another. They got their first taste of the nocturnal air raids.

  At the moment that night fell upon them like a huge flat plate young Corporal Fife was sitting in the corner of the orderly tent. He was trying to arrange his files and his portable typewriter without getting mud on them. He had one small portable table upon which to attempt all this. The job was doubly hard because whoever designed the table did not foresee that it might be used on a mud floor. One or another of its legs was continually sinking slowly into the mud and throwing the top off level, threatening to spill everything. When the swift, sudden fall of night blinded him, Fife gave up in despair. He simply sat, his grimy hands placed flat upon the unlevel tabletop, one on either side the little typewriter like tools put away upon a shelf. And during the five minutes it took to get a hooded blackout lantern lit and going, while other people groped around him trying to get this job done, he did not move. Now and then he rubbed his muddy fingertips against the grained wood of the tabletop.

  Fife was suffering from a deep depression of an intensity he had never known before. Even his eyelids seemed immobilized by this slumping awareness of his total inability to cope. All the little dirts of life were attacking him en masse, threatening to destroy him, and they terrified him because there was nothing he could do. He could not even keep his files clean. He was wet and filthy dirty. His toes squished in his wet socks in his shoes, and he had not heart or energy to go and change them. Tomorrow he would probably be sick. Mosquitoes swarmed around him in the dark and bit his face and neck and the backs of his hands. He did not even attempt to dislodge them. He simply sat. Temporarily he had ceased to function. He stagnated in the close darkness, consciously rotting toward some indefinite future death, and the most painful thought of all was knowing that eventually he would have to move again. He continued to touch the mudgritty tips of his fingers against the tabletop.

  Undoubtedly part of Fife’s distress came from not going off with them to see the jungle when Doll asked him. If he had gone, it might just as easily have been himself who found the bayonet instead of Doll. But he hadn’t thought it would be exciting. It seemed to Fife that he was always missing out on all the exciting things simply because he couldn’t tell beforehand which ones would be. But he had pretended Welsh might need him. He hadn’t had the guts, and had been too lazy. And so he not only missed finding the bayonet, he also missed being in on Big Queen’s unbelievable feat—which had been the topic of every conversation since their return.

  Fife himself had approached his old friend Bell, who had been there and had seen it, wanting to learn the visual details truly firsthand. But Bell had only stared at him with blank eyes as if he didn’t know him, muttered something incomprehensible, and walked away. It hurt Fife’s feelings after all the things he felt he had done for Bell.

  But with everybody else it was the only thing they could talk about. Even here, before the night had fallen upon them bodily so suddenly, the officers—all of whom were hanging out in here as if this were their club—had been discussing it among themselves. And when the shaded lantern was finally lit and got to going, they went right on talking about it. Just as if, in the interval of darkness, nothing devastating had happened to Fife, still sitting there in his corner.

  “God damn you, Fife!” Welsh bawled at him, outraged, as soon as there was light, turning from the lantern. “I told you to get over here and fucking help me with this goddam thing! And all you did was sit there! Now get up off your ass and get to work around here!”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Fife said. His voice was utterly toneless. He neither moved nor looked up.

  From across the tent Welsh sent him a sudden sharp glance. It penetrated through the tobacco smoke and renewed din of conversational voices, straight into his face. Even when he wasn’t looking Fife felt it. He tried to prepare himself for a tirade. Then, curiously, Welsh turned back to the lantern without a word. Fife continued to sit, grateful to him, but too numbed in what he thought of as his mudcaked soul to think further, and listened to the officers discuss Big Queen and his feat.

  It was unnecessary to record in his mind the words they said. It was enough to watch their expressions and catch their inflections. Without exception they all laughed with a constrained embarrassment when they spoke about it. Without exception they were all proud of Queen—but they could not be proud of him with the same raucous, cynical amusement of the men, so that their pleased amusement carried a slight overtone of shame. But they were proud. Corporal Queen’ll be making Sergeant very soon, Fife thought absently, you watch. Well, he didn’t mind. Big Queen deserved it if anybody did. And it was just then that somewhere far away down the long aisles of the groves in the night the klaxons began their mournful, insistent belching.

  Panic and an objectless fright seized Fife and he surged up off his watercan blindly. By the time he reached the tent door the panic had changed to normal apprehensiveness and a morbid curiosity to see. He was not alone at the tent flaps, he realized, as he came to. Everybody else had done the same thing and he was in the midst of a crowd.

  “Wait!” Welsh bawled behind them. “Wait, God damn it! Wait’ll I shut this fucking lantern off! Wait!”

  The man in front of Fife—whoever it was; Fife never did find out—hesitated with the tie ropes, as if caught in a monumental indecision. Then the tent was plunged into blackness. There was more fumbling and cursing in front of Fife. Then everybody, officers and men alike, surged outside through the opened flaps past the hanging blanket into the clear, fresh, star-scattered night. They carried Fife along with them in the press. He couldn’t have stayed inside if he had wanted. All of them looked up at the sky.

  They were not alone. Every other member of C-for-Charlie had come out too, from wherever they had retired to nurse their chilled damp bodies. They had all been told to dig slit trenches, but in actual fact only six holes—the six for the officers; which were dug by details under orders—had been made by the entire company. If anyone regretted it now (and Fife, for one, did) nobody said so out loud. They stood in the mud in a straggling uneven crowd among the three big tents alongside the row
s of smaller ones, talking little and craning their necks up at the sky, trying to see something. Anything.

  What they saw was two or three weak searchlight beams feebly fingering the sky and finding nothing, and now and then the single quick blink of an antiaircraft shell exploding.

  They could hear a lot more than they could see. But what they heard told them exactly nothing. There were the klaxons, which kept up their long, monotonous, insane growling protest all through the raid. There were the machinelike, repetitious reports of the various-sized antiaircraft guns pumping their useless shells up into the night sky. And finally there was the stuttering, thin sound of the motor, or motors, up there in the dark. It was impossible to tell from the sound whether there was one plane or were several.

  Everyone tried—not very successfully—to conceal his nervousness. This was Washingmachine Charley, or Louie the Louse as he was also called with less wit. All of them had heard about him of course: the single plane who nightly made his single nuisance raid, and who had been nicknamed by the stouthearted American troops. This information was in all the news communiques. And in fact, because of the great height, the sound did resemble the noise made by an antiquated, onelung Maytag washer. But the nickname proved to be generic; it was applied indiscriminately to all raids of this type, whatever the number of planes, or the number of raids per night. The news communiques tended to minimize this point. Anyway, it was much funnier to read about Washingmachine Charley in the communiques than it was to discuss him here as they stood looking up into the unfamiliar tropic constellations of the night sky, listening, and waiting, and slapping absently at hordes of feasting mosquitoes.

  Finally there came that almost inaudible sighing sound which their hearts had memorized this morning. There was an instinctive ducking motion among them, like the passing of a breeze over a wheatfield, but nobody went to the ground. Already, their ears had learned enough to know these were too far away; and the ground was muddy. From far away down the groves in the direction of the airfield came the ca-rumping explosions, walking slowly toward them in great giant strides. They counted two sticks of five each, one stick of four (perhaps with a dud). If Washingmachine Charley was one plane, he was certainly a big one. In the profound silence that seemed to follow, the laughable antiaircraft guns kept on sturdily pumping their ridiculous shells into the sky for several minutes more. Then the klaxons all down the line began sounding their short, sad, barking belches which signaled the allclear.