The Thin Red Line Page 3

“That’s my pistol you’re wearin, soldier,” the private said. His voice held injured accusation.

  Doll said nothing.

  “He saw you take it off the bunk,” the sergeant said. “So don’t try to lie out of it, soldier.”

  Summoning all his energy—or courage, or whatever it was— Doll still did not answer, and forced a slow, cynical grin to spread across his face, while he stared at them, unblinking now. Slowly he undid the belt and passed it over. “How long you been in the army, mack?” he grinned. “You oughta know fucking better than to leave your gear layin around like that. You might lose it someday.” He continued to stare, unflinching.

  Both men stared back at him, their eyes widening slightly as the new idea, new attitude, replaced their own of righteous indignation. Indifference and cheerful lack of guilt made them appear foolish; and both men suddenly grinned sheepishly, penetrated as they had been by that fiction beloved in all armies of the tough, scrounging, cynical soldier who collects whatever he can get his hands on.

  “Well, you better not have such sticky fingers, soldier,” the sergeant said, but it no longer carried much punch. He was trying to stifle his grin.

  “Anything layin around out in the open that loose, is fair game to me,” Doll said cheerfully. “And to any other old soldier. Tell your boy he oughtn’t to tempt people so much.”

  Behind the two, the other faces had begun to grin too, at the private’s discomfiture. The private himself had a hangdog look, as if he were the one at fault. The sergeant turned to him.

  “Hear that, Drake?” he grinned. “You better take better care of your fucking gear.”

  “Yeah. He sure better,” Doll said. “Or he won’t have it very goddam long.” He turned and went on leisurely toward the door, and nobody tried to stop him.

  Outside, back in the hatchway area once more, Doll stopped and allowed himself a long, whooshing sigh. Then he leaned against the bulkhead because his knees were shaking. If he had acted guilty—which was what he really had felt—they would have had him. And had him good. But he had carried it off. He had carried it off, and it was the private who had come out as the guilty party. Nervously, shakily, Doll laughed. And it had all been one big lie! Over and above his scare he had a sense of high elation and of pride. In a way, he really was that sort of guy, too, he thought suddenly: that type of guy he had pretended he was back there. At least, anymore he was. He hadn’t used to be.

  But he still hadn’t got a pistol. For a moment, Doll looked at his watch wondering, and worrying, about time. He hadn’t wanted to leave this deck, hadn’t wanted to get that far from C-for-Charlie. Then, on legs still a little shaky, but feeling triumphant, he began to mount the stairs to the deck above with a high sense of his own worth.

  From the moment Doll stepped into the bunk area on the deck above, everything played for him. He was still a little shaky, and certainly he was considerably more skittish than before. It didn’t matter. Everything worked perfectly for him, and for his purpose. It could not have worked more perfectly if he had requested this exact sequence of events personally from God. Doll did not know why, he did nothing himself to cause it, and had he been a minute earlier or a minute later, it might certainly have been different. But he wasn’t earlier or later. And he did not intend to stop to question fortune. This was the perfect situation and set-up that he had originally imagined himself seeing and, in a flash, recognizing, and he did recognize it that way now:

  He had not taken three steps inside before he saw not one but two pistols, lying almost side by side on the same bunk, right on the edge of the companionway. There was not a man in this entire end of the bunk area except for one, and before Doll could even take another step, this man had gotten up and gone off down to the other end where, apparently, everyone was congregated.

  That was all there was to it. All Doll had to do was step over, pick up one of the pistols, and put it on. Wearing the stranger’s pistol, he walked on through the bunk area. At the other end he merely went out and down the hatchway stairs, turned back left, and he was back safe in the midst of C-for-Charlie. The company had not yet begun to move and everything was just as when he left it. This time he made a point of passing close by to Tills and Mazzi, something he had deliberately avoided before, when returning empty-handed from the stern.

  Tills and Mazzi had not moved, and still sat against the bulkhead with their legs clutched up against their chests, sweating in the heat. Doll stopped in front of them with his hands on his hips, his right one resting on the pistol. They could not fail to notice it.

  “Hello, lover-boy,” Mazzi said.

  Tills, on the other hand, grinned. “We seen you sneakin past a while ago. On your way back from the stern. When Bugger caught you. Where you been?”

  Neither of them, of course, was going to mention it. But Doll didn’t really care. He raised the holster and flapped it at them a couple of times against his leg. “Around,” he said, raising his lip and eyebrow in his superior smile, “around. Well, what do you think of it?”

  “Think of what?” Mazzi said innocently.

  Again Doll grinned his unpleasant smile, his eyes brilliant. “Nothin. The war,” he mocked, and turned on his heel and went on inside among the bunks, toward his own bunk and the rest of C-for-Charlie. It was the reaction he had anticipated. He still didn’t care. He had the pistol.

  “Well, what do you say now, hep guy?” Tills said looking after Doll.

  “Just what I fucking said before,” Mazzi said, unperturbed. “The guy’s a jerkoff.”

  “But he’s got a pistol.”

  “So he’s a jerkoff with a pistol.”

  “While you’re a hep guy, without a pistol.”

  “That’s right,” Mazzi said stoutly. “What’s a fucking pistol? I—”

  “I’d like to have one,” Tills said.

  “—could get me one any time I want,” Mazzi went right on unshaken. “That guy goes wanderin around lookin for a fucking pistol while we’re all waitin here to get our ass bombed off.”

  “At least when we get ashore he’s got a pistol,” Tills insisted.

  “If we get ashore.”

  “Well if we don’t, it ain’t gonna matter anyway,” Tills said. “At least, he was doin’ something. Not just sittin here like you and me, sweating it out.”

  “Leave it, Tills; leave it,” Mazzi said stoutly. “You wanna do somethin, go do somethin.”

  “I think I will,” Tills said angrily, getting up. He started off, then suddenly turned back, a strange look on his face. “You know, I ain’t got a single friend?” he said. “Not one? You ain’t, I ain’t?” Tills rolled his head around on his neck in a mad, wild circle to include the company behind him, “not a single guy in this outfit has? Not one? An’ if we get killed?—” Tills stopped, abruptly, still on the questioning note, which continued to hang, loudly and uncompleted, about his head in the air, very like the periodic long-echoing clangs of tortured steel when the LCIs struck the ship. “Not one?” he added inconclusively.

  “I got friends,” Mazzi said.

  “You got friends!” Tills cried wildly; “you got friends! Hah!” Then his voice fell off and away, drooped: “I’m goin’ over and get in a poker game.” He turned away.

  “Long as I don’t borrow money off them. Or loan it,” Mazzi said after him. “You want money? You want money, Tills?” he shouted after him, and burst out laughing. He clutched his knees to his chest again, laughing loudly, his head thrown back with violent appreciation of his wit.

  The poker game Tills came to first was little Nellie Coombs’s. Nellie, slight and blond and frail, was as usual dealing and cutting the game ten cents to a quarter a hand. In return for this, he furnished cigarettes to the players, and he never allowed anyone to deal except himself. Tills did not know why anybody ever played with him. Tills did not know why he himself did. Especially when he was suspected of a crooked deal. There was another, normal game, with a passing deal, just a few steps further on, but Til
ls got out his wallet and took some bills out of it and sat down in Nellie’s game. If only this damned waiting would get over with.

  Doll was thinking the same thing. Getting his pistol had occupied him so fully that for the moment he had forgotten all about the possibility of air raids. After leaving Mazzi and Tills, he had hunted around among the crowded aisles until he found Fife and Big Queen again, and had shown it to them. Unlike Mazzi and Tills they were both satisfactorily impressed with his feat, and also with how easy it had been when he described it to them. Even so, Doll’s pleasure could not rid him of that gnawing thought about the possibility of air raids. If, after getting a damned pistol, and all of that, they were to get bombed out anyway—He could hardly bear the thought. Hell, he might never even get to use it. It was a very distressing idea, and it left Doll with a bottomless feeling of the uselessness of everything.

  Both Queen and Fife had mentioned that they might go out and try to get a pistol for themselves, since it seemed so easy. Doll however did not encourage them: because of the time element, he said. He pointed out that they should have started sooner. He did not tell them about the second pistol he had seen upstairs, either. After all, he had had to find his own; why shouldn’t they? And anyway, if the men upstairs found one pistol missing, they would certainly be on the lookout; so it might be dangerous for his friends. He was really doing them a kindness not to tell them. After discouraging them, Doll had started back for his own bunk, to check over his equipment for lack of anything else to do. It was then that he suddenly found himself confronted by the wild hair and looming figure, and the sly, mad, brooding face of First Sergeant Welsh.

  “What are you doing with that fucking pistol, Doll?” he demanded grinning crazily.

  Before those eyes Doll’s new-found confidence wilted, and his perceptions melted down into a mishmash of confusion. “What pistol?” he mumbled.

  “This pistol,” Welsh cried and stepping forward, seized the holster at Doll’s hip. With it he pulled Doll slowly to him until they were only inches apart, grinning a cunning, insolent grin, right down into Doll’s face. With gentle violence he shook Doll back and forth by the holster. “This is the pistol I mean,” he said. “This pistol.” Very slowly, the grin faded from Welsh’s face, leaving a look of black, ominous violence; a piercing, murderous scowl which was nevertheless somehow sly.

  Doll was fairly tall, but Welsh was taller; it made for a disadvantage. And even though Doll knew the slow disappearance of the grin was deliberate, a theatrical bit of dramatics, it still affected him with a mild paralysis.

  “Well, I—” he began, but was interrupted. It was just as well. There were no words in his head.

  “—And what if somebody comes around here to Bugger Stein and wants to search this outfit for a stolen pistol? ’Ey?” Slowly Welsh raised Doll up to him by the holster, until Doll was standing on tiptoe. “Have you ever thought of that day? ’Ey?” he hissed with sinister gentleness. “—And what if I then, knowin who had it, was forced to tell Bugger Stein where it was? ’Ey? Have you thought of that, too?”

  “Would you do that, Top?” Doll said feebly.

  “You bet your fucking sweet ass I would!” Welsh bellowed with startling suddenness right into his face.

  “Well—Do you think anybody’ll come around?” Doll said.

  “No!” Welsh roared in his face. “I don’t!” Then, as slowly as it had disappeared, the sly ominous grin came back over the Sergeant’s face. After forcing this in his face a moment, Welsh let Doll down off his toes and all in the same motion flung the holstered pistol away from him as if it were not attached to anyone. Doll was carried back half a step with it, to see Welsh standing before him, hands resting easily on hips, and grinning his sly, mad grin. “Clean it,” Welsh said. “It’s probly dirty. Any man’d leave it layin around’s a fuckass soldier anyway.” He continued to stand grinning insanely at Doll.

  Once again unable to meet those eyes, Doll turned away toward his bunk, which was some distance away, filled with a mad rage. He was, in effect, retiring from the field, and his ego was badly bruised. Worst of all, it had happened in the midst of the crowded bunk area, and this was acutely painful to Doll, even though it had happened so suddenly and swiftly that hardly anyone had noticed it except the men nearby. Goddamn him, he had eyes like a hawk; he saw everything. Actually, the single idea remaining uppermost in Doll’s mind, above everything else, was what Welsh had said about cleaning it. It had left Doll startled. He would never have thought of it. Curiously, Doll could not find it in him to be angry at Welsh, even though he wanted to be, and this filled him with even greater rage. Objectless, and therefore frustrated, rage. But then who could be angry at an insane man? Everyone knew he was crazy. A regular madman. His twelve years in the army had debrained him. If Welsh had wanted to jump him about the pistol, then why hadn’t he gone ahead and followed it through and taken it away from him? Any normal noncom would have; that in itself proved he was crazy. On his bunk, Doll commenced to take down his new pistol, just to see if it was dirty. He would love to prove The Welshman wrong. What he found, triumphantly, was that it was not dirty at all. It was clean as a whistle.

  First Sergeant Welsh continued to stand grinning slyly in the aisle after Doll retreated. He had no particular reason to, he had already dismissed and forgotten Doll, but he enjoyed doing it. For one thing, it made all the men near him uncomfortable and Welsh liked that. Hands still on his hips, shoulders hunched ever so slightly, feet apart; in short, in exactly the same position he had assumed after shoving Doll away from him; Welsh decided arbitrarily to see how long he could stand without moving anything except his eyes. He was allowing himself his eyes. He couldn’t raise his arm to look at his watch, that would be moving, but there was a big navy clock high up on the bulkhead and he could tell how long by that. Immobile as an iron jockey on a lawn he darted his eyes this way and that above his sly grin and beneath his black, brooding brows, and whereever his glance fell, the nearby men beneath it would stir uneasily and drop their eyes and fall to doing something: adjusting a strap, checking a tie-rope, rubbing a riflestock. Welsh watched them all with amusement. They were a sorry lot, any way you took them. Almost certainly, nearly all of them would be dead before this war was over, including himself, and not a damn one of them was smart enough to know it. Maybe a few did. They were getting in on virtually the very start of it, and they would continue all the way right on through it. Hardly any of them were able or willing to admit or see what an alarming drop in chances this gave them. As far as Welsh was concerned, they had coming to them and deserved everything they would get. And that included him himself. And this amused him, too.

  Welsh had never been in combat. But he had lived for a long time with a lot of men who had. And he had pretty well lost his belief in, as well as his awe of, the mystique of human combat. Old vets from the First World War, younger men who had been with the Fifteenth Infantry in China, for years he had sat around getting drunk with them and listening to their drunken stories of melancholy bravery. He had watched the stories grow with the years and the drinking sprees, and he had been able to form only one conclusion and that was that every old vet was a hero. How so many heroes survived and so many non-heroes got knocked off, Welsh could not answer. But every old vet was a hero. If you did not believe it, you had only to ask them, or better yet, get them drunk and not ask them. There just wasn’t any other kind. One of the hazards of professional soldiering was that every twenty years, regular as clockwork, that portion of the human race to which you belonged, whatever its politics or ideal about humanity, was going to get itself involved in a war, and you might have to fight in it. About the only way out of this mathematical hazard was to enlist immediately after one war and hope you would be too old for the next; you might just make it. But to accomplish that you had to be of a certain age at just exactly the right time, and that was rare. But it was either that, or enlist in the Quartermaster Corps or some such branch. Welsh had already understoo
d all this when he enlisted in 1930 exactly between wars at the age of twenty, but he had gone ahead and enlisted anyway. He had gone ahead and enlisted, and he had enlisted in the Infantry. Not in the Quartermaster Corps. And he had stayed in the Infantry. And this amused Welsh, too.

  The way Welsh chose to see it, he had beaten the Depression in his country and had outsmarted the nation, and now, today, November 10, 1942, he was preparing to begin paying for it. Welsh found this amusing also.

  Everything amused Welsh. Or, at least, Welsh hoped it did. The fact that he had stayed in the Infantry amused him—although, if asked, he could not exactly have articulated why he had, except that it amused him to. Politics amused him, religion amused him, particularly ideals and integrity amused him; but most of all, human virtue amused him. He did not believe in it, and he did not believe in any of those other words. If pressed, as he often had been by irate friends, and asked to say just what he did believe in, he would have answered promptly, as he often had done, “Property.” This generally infuriated everyone, but that was not Welsh’s only reason for saying it, although he enjoyed infuriating everybody. Born of a highly Protestant, genteel family, whose Protestantism and gentility were both false even though the family owned much real estate, he had observed the principle of property in action all his life, and he saw no reason for changing his opinion because of some squeamish humanity lover. Property, in some form or other, was, in the end, what always made the watch tick. Whatever words people chose to call it. That much he was sure of. And yet Welsh had never tried to acquire property himself. And in fact whatever property came his way as by-product, he threw away or else got rid of, almost hastily, as soon as he could. This amused Welsh, too; as did the haste with which he watched himself get rid of it.

  Behind him in the corridor Welsh heard footsteps approaching his back and then a voice.

  “Sergeant, can I ask you a question?” It sounded like one of the draftees. Obsequious.

  Welsh did hot move or speak, and put his eyes up onto the big bulkhead clock. It had only been just a little over a minute, and that certainly wasn’t long enough. Welsh remained immobile. After a while, the voice and footsteps went away. Finally, when the clock showed he had been at it two minutes and thirty seconds, he bored of it and decided to go and needle his clerk Fife for a while. Around him, as he moved off toward the area where the company headquarters had been bunked, there was among the men something like a soundless sigh of relief. Welsh did not fail to notice and relish it with his sly, insolent, mad grin.