The Thin Red Line Page 2

  “Wouldn’t be interested if they weren’t,” Mazzi said, and hugged his knees up more closely.

  “I’m on my way to get me that pistol,” Doll said.

  “Yeah? Well have fun,” Mazzi said.

  “Yeah; have fun,” Tills said.

  “Don’t you remember? We talked about gettin a pistol one day,” Doll said.

  “Did we?” Mazzi said flatly, staring at him.

  “Sure,” Doll began. Then he stopped, realizing he was being told off, insulted, and smiled his unpleasant, supercilious smile. “You guys’ll wish you had one, once we get ashore, and run into some of them Samurai sabers.”

  “All I want is to get ashore,” Mazzi said. “And off of this big fat sitting fucking duck we all sittin on out here on this flat water.”

  “Hey, Doll,” Tills said, “you get around. You think we’re liable to catch an air raid today before we get off this damned boat?”

  “How the fucking hell would I know?” Doll said. He smiled his unpleasant smile. “We might, and we might not.”

  “Thanks,” Mazzi said.

  “If we do, we do. What’s the matter? You scared, Mazzi?”

  “Scared? Course I ain’t scared! Are you?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Okay then. Shut up,” Mazzi said, and leaned forward and thrust out his jaw, working his eyebrows up and down pugnaciously at Doll with what could only be called comic ferocity. It was really not very effective. Doll merely threw back his head and laughed.

  “See you chaps,” he said and stepped over through the water-tight door in the bulkhead they leaned against.

  “What’s all this ‘chaps’ shit?” Mazzi said.

  “Ahh, there’s a bunch of Anzac Pioneers on this boat,” Tills said. “Guess he’s been hangin around them.”

  “That guy just ain’t hep,” Mazzi said decisively. “He’s as unhep as a box. I can’t stand people who ain’t hep.”

  “You think he’ll get a pistol?” Tills said.

  “Hell no he won’t get no pistol.”

  “He might.”

  “He won’t,” Mazzi said. “He’s a jerkoff. ‘Chaps!’”

  “Right now, I couldn’t care less,” Tills said. “Whether he ever gets a pistol, or whether anybody ever gets a pistol, including me. All I want is to get off this here fucking boat here.”

  “Well you ain’t by yourself,” Mazzi said as another LCI clanged against the hull outside. “Lookit over there.”

  Both men turned their heads and looked over into the bunk area and, hugging their knees nervously, observed the rest of C-for-Charlie going through its various suspension-of-imagination exercises.

  “All I know,” Mazzi said, “I never bargained for nothin like this here when I signed up in this man’s army back in the old fucking Bronx before the war. How did I know they was gonna be a fucking war, hanh? Answer me that.”

  “You tell me,” Tills said. “You’re the hep character around here, Mazzi.”

  “All I know, old Charlie Company always gets screwed,” Mazzi said. “Always. And I can tell you whose fault it is. It’s old Bugger Stein’s fault, that’s who. First he gets us stuck off on this boat clean away from our own outfit where we don’t know a fucking soul. Then he gets us stuck way down in fourth place on the list to get off this son of a bitch. I can tell you that much. Churchez old Bugger Stein. Whatever it is.”

  “There’s worse places than fourth, though,” Tills said. “At least we ain’t in seventh or fucking eighth. At least he didn’t get us stuck down in eighth place.”

  “Well it ain’t no fault of his. He sure didn’t get us in no first place, that’s for sure. Look at the son of a bitch down there: pretending he’s one of the boys today.” Mazzi jerked his head down toward the other bulkhead, at the other end of the companionway, where Captain Stein and his exec and his four platoon officers squatted with their heads together over an orders map on the deck.

  “So you see, gentlemen, exactly where we will be,” Captain Stein was saying, and he looked up from his pencil at his officers with his large, mild, brown eyes questioningly. “There will of course be guides, either Army or Marines, to help us get there with the least amount of trouble and time. The line itself, the present line, is, as I’ve shown you, up here.” He pointed with the pencil. “Eight and a half miles away. We will have a forced march, under full field equipment, of about six miles, in the other direction.” Stein rose, and the other five officers rose too. “Any questions, gentlemen?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Second Lieutenant Whyte of the First Platoon. “I have one, sir. Will there be any definite order of bivouac when we get there? Since Blane here of the Second and I will probably be in the lead, I wanted to know about that, sir.”

  “Well, I think we shall have to wait and see what the terrain is like when we get there, don’t you, Whyte?” Stein said, and raised a meaty right hand to adjust his thick-lensed glasses through which he stared at Whyte.

  “Yes, sir,” Whyte said, suitably chastised, and reddening a little under it.

  “Any further questions, gentlemen?” Stein said. “Blane? Culp?” He looked around.

  “No, sir,” Blane said.

  “Then that’s all, gentlemen,” Stein said. “For the moment.” He stooped and scooped up the map, and when he straightened back up he was smiling warmly behind the thick lenses. This was an indication that the official solemnity was over, that everybody could relax. “Well, how goes it, Bill?” Stein asked young Whyte, and slapped him warmly on the back. “Feel all right?”

  “Little nervous, Jim,” Whyte grinned.

  “How about you, Tom?” Stein asked Blane.

  “Fine, Jim.”

  “Well, I guess you better all of you have a look at your boys, don’t you?” Stein said, and stood with his exec, First Lieutenant Band, watching the four platoon officers go off.

  “I think they’re all good boys, don’t you, George?” he said.

  “Yes, Jim; I do,” Band said.

  “Did you notice how both Culp and Gore were taking everything in?” Stein asked.

  “I sure did, Jim. Of course they’ve been with us longer than the youngsters.”

  Stein removed his glasses and in the heat polished them carefully with a large handkerchief, and then replaced them firmly on his face, adjusting and settling them over and over again with the thumb and fingers of his right hand on the frame, while he peered out through them. “I make it about an hour,” he said vaguely. “Or at most an hour and a quarter.”

  “I just hope we don’t get any of those high level bomb groups before then,” Band said.

  “I rather do too,” Stein said and made his large, mild, brown eyes grin behind their lenses.

  Whatever Private Mazzi’s criticisms, and however valid or invalid they might be, Mazzi had been right about one thing: It had been Captain Stein who had given the order that C-for-Charlie’s officers would stay in the hold with the men this morning. Stein, whose nickname “Bugger” among his troops had come from the oft-quoted remark by a nameless private upon seeing his commander walk across a parade ground that he “walked like he had a cob up his ass,” felt that officers should be with their men on a day such as this, should share their hardships and dangers, rather than staying up topside in the club cabin where they had remained for most of the trip, and Stein had so informed his juniors. While none of them had looked too pleased about it, no one had commented, not even Band. And Stein was convinced that it could not help but aid morale. As he looked out across the crowded, sweating jungle of bunks and piping, where his men worked quietly without hysteria at checking and inspecting their equipment, he was even more convinced that he had been right. Stein, who was a junior partner with an excellent, large law firm in Cleveland, had taken ROTC as a lark in college, and had been caught early, over a year before the war. Luckily, he was unmarried. He had spent six months of astonishment with a National Guard outfit, before being shipped off to this regular division as a First Lieuten
ant and a Company Commander, after which he had been once passed over and had an old wornout Captain shipped in over him before he himself got his captaincy, during which terrible time he could only say over and over to himself, “My God, what will my father say,” because his father had been a Major in the First World War. Settling his glasses again, he turned to his First Sergeant whose name was Welsh and who was in fact of Welsh extraction, who had been standing nearby all the time, during this briefing, wearing a look of sly amusement which Stein did not fail to notice.

  “I think our outfit looks pretty capable, pretty solid, don’t you, Sergeant?” he said, putting a certain amount of authority in his voice, without overdoing it.

  Welsh merely grinned at him insolently. “Yeah; for a bunch of slobs about to get their fucking ass shot off,” he said. A tall, narrow-hipped, heavily-muscled man in his early thirties, his Welsh blood advertised itself in every part of him: in his dark complexion and black hair; in his dark, blue-jowled jaw and wild, black eyes; in the look of dark foreboding which never left his face, even when he grinned, as now.

  Stein did not answer him, but neither did he look away. He felt uncomfortable, and he was sure his face showed it. But he didn’t really care. Welsh was mad. He was insane. Truly a real madman, and Stein never had understood him. He had no respect for anything or anybody. But it didn’t really matter. Stein could afford to overlook his impertinences because he was so good at his job.

  “I have a very real sense of responsibility toward them,” he said.

  “Yeah?” Welsh said softly, and continued to grin at him with his insolent look of sly amusement, and that was all he would say.

  Stein noticed that Band was watching Welsh with open dislike, and made a mental note to take this up with Band. Band must be made to understand this situation with Sergeant Welsh. Stein himself was still looking at Welsh, who was staring back grinning, and Stein who had deliberately not looked away before, now found himself in the silly position of being engaged in a battle of stares, that old, ridiculous, adolescent business of who is going to look away first. It was stupid as well as silly. Irritably he cast about for some way of breaking off this childish deadlock with dignity.

  Just then a man from C-for-Charlie walked past in the companionway. Easily, Stein turned to him and nodded brusquely.

  “Hello, Doll. How’s it going? Everything okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Doll said. He stopped and saluted, looking a little startled. Officers always made him uncomfortable.

  Stein returned the salute. “Rest,” he murmured and then grinned behind his glasses. “Feeling a little nervous?”

  “No, sir,” Doll said, with great seriousness.

  “Good boy.” Stein nodded, halfway dismissing him. Doll saluted again, and went on out through the water-tight door. Stein turned back to Welsh and Band, the silly locked stare broken, he felt, without indignity. Sergeant Welsh was still standing grinning at him, in insolent silence, but with an asinine look of petty, sly triumph now. He really was mad. As well as childish. Deliberately, Stein winked at him. “Come on, Band,” he said brusquely, with shortened temper. “Let’s have a look around.”

  Private First Class Doll, after he stepped through the water-tight door, veered right and crossed the hatchway area to the forward hold. Doll was still looking for his pistol. Since leaving Tills and Mazzi, he had made the long trip back to the stern, covering the entire rear of the ship on this deck, and he was beginning to wonder now if he had not done it too hurriedly. The trouble was, he did not know exactly how much time he had.

  What did Bugger Stein mean, stopping him and asking him if he was nervous! What kind of shit was that? Did Bugger know he was out after a pistol? Was that it? Or was Bugger trying to make out that he, Doll, was yellow or something. That was what it looked like. Anger and outraged sensibilities rose up in Doll.

  Furious, Doll stopped in the oval water-tight doorway to the forward hold to look this next hunting-ground over. It was very small, compared to the area he had already covered. What Doll had hoped, when he started out, was that if he simply went wandering around with an open mind and open eyes, the proper moment, the right situation, would eventually present itself, and that he would be able with inspiration to recognize and seize it. That was not what had happened, and now he was desperately beginning to feel that time was running out on him.

  Actually, in his entire circuit of the whole stern, Doll had only come upon two loose pistols which were not being worn. That was not very many. Both pistols had presented him with a decision to make: Should he? Or shouldn’t he? All he had to do was pick it up belt and all and put it on and walk away. Both times Doll had decided against. Both times there had been quite a few men around, and Doll could not help but feel, quite very forcefully, that a still better opportunity would show up. None had however, and now he could not help but wonder, with quite equal force, if he had not perhaps erred on the side of caution because he had been afraid. This was a thought Doll could hardly bear.

  His own company might begin to move upstairs at any moment now. On the other hand, he was tormented by the thought of Mazzi and Tills and the rest, if they saw him come back now without a pistol.

  Gingerly, Doll wiped the sweat from his eyes again and stepped on through the doorway. He went on up the starboard side of the forward hold, working his way in and out amongst this crowd of strangers from another outfit, searching.

  Doll had learned something during the past six months of his life. Chiefly what he had learned was that everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was as if everybody made up a fiction story about himself, and then he just pretended to everybody that that was what he was. And everybody believed him, or at least accepted his fiction story. Doll did not know if everybody learned this about life when they reached a certain age, but he suspected that they did. They just didn’t tell it to anybody. And rightly so. Obviously, if they told anybody, then their own fiction story about themselves wouldn’t be true either. So everybody had to learn it for himself. And then, of course, pretend he hadn’t learned it.

  Doll’s own first experience of this phenomenon had come from, or at least begun with, a fist fight he had had six months ago with one of the biggest, toughest men in C-for-Charlie: Corporal Jenks. They had fought each other to a standstill, because neither would give up, until finally it was called a sort of draw-by-exhaustion. But it wasn’t this so much as it was the sudden realization that Corporal Jenks was just as nervous about having the fight as he was, and did not really want to fight any more than he did, which had suddenly opened Doll’s eyes. Once he’d seen it here, in Jenks, he began to see it everywhere, in everybody.

  When Doll was younger, he had believed everything everybody told him about themselves. And not only told him—because more often than not they didn’t tell you, they just showed you. Just sort of let you see it by their actions. They acted what they wanted you to think they were, just as if it was really what they really were. When Doll had used to see someone who was brave and a sort of hero, he, Doll, had really believed he was that. And of course this made him, Doll, feel cheap because he knew he himself could never be like that. Christ, no wonder he had taken a back seat all his life!

  It was strange, but it was as if when you were honest and admitted you didn’t know what you really were, or even if you were anything at all, then nobody liked you and you made everybody uncomfortable and they didn’t want to be around you. But when you made up your fiction story about yourself and what a great guy you were, and then pretended that that was really you, everybody accepted it and believed you.

  When he finally did get his pistol—if he did get it—Doll was not going to admit that he had been scared, or unsure of himself, or indecisive. He would pretend it had been easy, pretend it had happened the way he had imagined it was going to happen, before he started out.

  But first he had to get it, damn it all!

  He had gone almost all the way forward w
hen he saw the first one, up here, that somebody was not wearing. Doll stopped and stared at it hungrily, before he bethought himself to look around at the situation. The pistol hung from the end of a bed frame. Three bunks away in the heat a group of men clustered around a nervous crapgame. In the companionway itself four or five other men stood talking about fifteen feet away. All in all, it was certainly not any less risky than the two he’d seen in the stern. Perhaps it was even a little more so.

  On the other hand, Doll could not forget that maddening sense of time running out. This might be the only one he would see up here. After all, he had only seen two in the entire stern. In desperation he decided he had better chance it. No one was taking any notice of him as far as he could tell. Casually, Doll stepped over and leaned on the bunk frame for a moment, as if he belonged here, then lifted the pistol off and buckled it around his waist. Stifling his instinct to just up and run, he lit a cigarette and took a couple of deep drags, then started leisurely toward the door, back the way he had come.

  He had gotten halfway to it, and, indeed, had begun to think that he had pulled it off, when he heard the two voices hollering behind him. There was no doubt they were aimed at him.

  “Hey, you!”

  “Hey, soldier!”

  Doll turned, able to feel his eyes getting deep and guilty-looking as his heart began to beat more heavily, and saw two men, one a private and one a sergeant, coming down toward him. Would they turn him in? Would they try to beat him up? Neither of these prospects bothered Doll half so much as the prospect of being treated with contempt like the sneak-thief he felt he was. That was what Doll was afraid of: It was like one of those nightmares everybody has of getting caught, but does not believe will ever really happen to them.

  The two men came on down toward Doll ominously, looking indignant, their faces dark with outraged righteousness. Doll blinked his eyes rapidly several times, trying to wash from them the self-conscious guilt he could feel was in them. Behind the two, other faces had turned to watch, he noticed.