The Thin Red Line Read online

  Storm had done just about everything he could think of to set his own personal affairs straight. In the staging area, before shipping out, he had made a large allotment of almost all of his pay to his widowed sister and her large family back in Texas. She was his only living relative and his army insurance was already made out to her, and where he was going to be from now on for quite a while there wasn’t going to be much use for money. Before leaving he had written her a long letter, explaining that he was going; and he had also written two other letters which he had given to friends on the other transport with instructions to mail them only if the ship he was on got sunk or bombed out and himself killed. If either letter reached his sister, it would explain to her to start checking into the insurance and deviling the government even before the final telegram arrived. It would almost certainly take her a long time to collect it in any case, and with that big family of kids to feed she would need it once the allotment stopped. It wasn’t a very satisfactory or efficient way of handling it, but under the circumstances it was the best Storm could do. And once he had done it, he felt he had done all he could, and that he was ready. Ready for anything. Storm still felt the same way now, despite his own rising squeamishness over possible air raids. It amused him that he kept continually wanting to raise his arm and look at his watch. He was forced to exercise the whole of his will power in order not to.

  Welsh was still raucously deriding Fife, who by now had become quite red in the face and very angry. Storm debated whether he should say something that would stop it, shift the subject. Storm had no particular liking, or even sympathy, for Fife. He was a good enough kid. He just hadn’t been away from home long enough. And Storm, who had started off bumming during the Depression when he was only fourteen, couldn’t find kids like that very interesting. But Welsh was a man who often didn’t know when to quit; he would get something like this going, which could be fun, but then he would keep on with it until it passed beyond the point of being funny. And even though it was keeping Storm’s cooks amused and thinking about something other than air raids, Storm felt it was time to call a halt. He was saved from having to do anything about it, though, by the great, vibrating belch of the klaxon horn which resounded through the clanging, overheated hold, deafening everybody. The immense sound caused everyone to jump, even Welsh.

  It was the signal for the inhabiters of this particular hold to prepare to disembark, and with its sounding everything that was taking place ceased to be important, or even to exist. The dice and poker games stopped in mid-play, everybody grabbing back his share of the pot, and a little extra if he could. Conversations died soundlessly in mid-word, their very subjects no longer remembered; and Welsh and Fife simply stared at each other without recalling that Welsh had just been insulting Fife to make him angry. After so much waiting of such high intensity, it was as if life itself had crossed a line with the sounding of the klaxon, and that whatever had happened or existed before had not and would never have, any connection with whatever would come after. Everybody had turned hastily to their equipment, and cries of “All right! Off and on!” and “Drop your cocks and grab your socks!” rose up from the throats of noncoms to bounce off the steel ceiling; and in the one moment of total, complete silence which had somehow got mixed in with this jumbled stew of noise and then emerged out of the middle of it, nobody would ever know how, could be heard one nameless man’s single voice, high and shrilling, and intensely elucidating some declaration of faith to a neighbor with the words: “I guaran-fucking-tee you!” Then the noise closed back over as everybody went on struggling into their equipment.

  Bulging in all directions under full field equipment, they found the narrow steel stairs difficult to navigate; and after three nervous flights of them each man was winded. And as they emerged into the now hot, midmorning sunshine and fresh sea air on deck, Captain Bugger Stein their commander, standing by the hatch in musette bag, map case, glasses, carbine, pistol and canteens, stared into each of their helmet-shadowed, intense faces and chokingly felt tears rising up in him, tears which of course as an officer and commander he must hold back and never show above a stiff upper lip. His sense of responsibility was monumental, a near holy thing. He treasured it. Not only that, he was very pleased with himself that he felt it. If the old man could only see him now!

  And beside him stood his first sergeant, no longer looking like Welsh an individual, now that he was in full gear and had his helmet on. He too watched the faces, but in a different way: in a sly, cunning, calculating way, as if he knew something none of the rest of them knew.

  By squads and by platoon they went over the side and clambered down the four-storey-high side of the ship on the nets and into the endless chain of LCIs still shuttling back and forth from shore. Only one man fell, and he got no more than a slightly wrenched back because he lit on two other men already in the barge, all three crashing to the steel floor in full equipment with loud grunts and curses. But they heard from the barge pilots that the list of injured, for this ship, had already reached fifteen: par for the course, the barge pilots, who had the experience, said with dry, cheerful cynicism. C-for-Charlie heard this news with the awed realization that these injured were first casualties: the division’s first casualties in a combat zone. They had expected at least bombs, or machineguns, to account for that. But to fall into a barge? By standing up, while digesting this, they could see the shore and the sand beach and cocopalms gradually coming closer, and closer, to them. As they got closer to it, they could see where the tops of a number of the coconut trees had been shot away.

  In the barge in which Doll’s squad found itself the assistant pilot, who was Army Transport Corps like all the others, quipped grinning, in best Naval officer style: “Glad to have you aboard, gentlemen!” then added with matter-of-fact cheer: “Your outfit’s lucky. Old Nippy’ll be comin along in—” he looked at his waterproof watch— “in about another fifteen minutes.”

  “How do you know?” Doll’s squad sergeant, whose name was Field, asked.

  “We just got the news from the air strip,” the assistant pilot smiled.

  “But, well won’t they try to get the ships out?”

  “Can’t. Not enough time. We’ll just have to go on unloading.” The information didn’t seem to bother the assistant pilot much, but Doll, who was wearing his new pistol proudly, gripped the gunnel to keep his balance in the jouncing, swaying barge and looked back at the dwindling ship with the greatest sense of relief he had ever felt in his life. He devoutly hoped he would never see that old tub again in his lifetime, or any other ship—save one; and that was the one that would take him off this island.

  “In this business you take them as they come,” the assistant pilot said.

  “But won’t the fighter planes—” Field started to say.

  “They’ll try. They always get some of them. But some always get through.”

  “Hey, Terry, jerk the lead!” the barge pilot called in a harassed voice.

  “Aye, sir,” the assistant called back dryly. He went aft.

  Ahead of them in the barge the island had got steadily larger, and now they could make out individual men scurrying around huge piles of stores. Doll stared at them. They got slowly bigger. Doll continued to stare. He was fascinated by something he could not even put a name to. What made men do it? he wondered suddenly, awed. What kept them there? Why didn’t they just up and leave, all go away? All he knew was that he was scared, more scared, and in a different way, than he had ever been in his life before. And he didn’t like it, any of it.

  “Grab holt and prepare to land!” the barge pilot shouted at them. Doll did. In a couple of moments the barge grated, cleared and rushed on, grated again, lurched, ground on noisily a few more feet and stopped, and Doll was on Guadalcanal. So were the rest of the men in the same barge, but Doll did not consider that. The front ramp, handled by the talkative assistant pilot, had already begun to fall almost before the barge was stopped.

  “Everybody out!�
� the barge pilot shouted. “No transfer slips!”

  There still remained two feet of water beyond the end of the ramp, but it was easy enough to jump; and only one man, who slipped on the metal of the ramp, landed in the water and got one foot wet. It wasn’t Doll. The ramp was already rising, as the barge went into reverse and pulled back out to go for another load. Then they were trudging through the sand up the long beach, trying to pick their way across it through the streams of men, to where Bugger Stein and Lieutenant Band were assembling the company.

  Corporal Fife had, of course, been in the barge which brought off the company headquarters. Their barge pilot had told them substantially the same thing Doll’s had: “Your outfit’s lucky. The Jap’s on his way.” The transports must have been spotted, he said. But they were getting off just ahead of time, he said, so they’d be safe. The main thought uppermost in Fife’s mind was that everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch. Like a business. Like a regular business. And yet at the bottom of it was blood: blood, mutilation, death. It seemed weird, wacky, to Fife. The air strip had got the news, by radio from a plane apparently, and had transmitted it to the beach, where the barge pilots were all informed—or else informed themselves and each other—and presumably the crews as well as the army commanders, if not the troops themselves, on board the ships were told, too. And yet there was nothing anybody could do about it, apparently. Except wait. Wait and see what happened. Fife had looked around at the faces in the barge covertly. Bugger Stein betrayed his nervousness by continually adjusting his glasses, over and over, with the thumb and fingers of his right hand on the frame. Lieutenant Band betrayed his by repeatedly licking his lips. Storm’s face was too impassively set. The second cook Dale’s eyes were snapping bright, and he blinked them over and over. Welsh’s eyes, through the narrow slits to which they were closed in the bright sun, betrayed nothing of anything. Neither amusement nor anything else, this time; not even cynicism. Fife hoped his own face looked all right, but he felt as though his eyebrows might be too high up on his forehead. Once they got ashore, and the guide had led them to their assigned spot in the edge of the coconut trees which came right down to the beach itself, Fife kept saying over and over to himself what the barge pilot had told them on the way in: “Your outfit’s lucky. You’re getting off ahead of time.”

  And in a way, it was quite right too. When the planes came, they were after the ships, not the shore. As a result, Fife, and all the rest of C-for-Charlie had a perfectly safe grandstand, ringside seat for the whole show. Actually Fife at least, who loved humanity, was going to find that he wished he hadn’t had a seat at all, after it was over. But he had to admit it fascinated him, with a morbid fascination.

  Apparently the news had not affected the beach very much at all. The LCIs and a welter of other types of barges still came roaring, jamming in to unload their cargoes of men or supplies, while others were in process of pulling back out to rejoin the shuttle. The beach was literally alive with men, all moving somewhere, and seemed to undulate with a life of its own under their mass as beaches sometimes appear to do when invaded by armies of fiddler crabs. Lines, strings and streams of men crossed and recrossed it with hot-footed and apparently unregulated alacrity. They were in all stages of dress and undress, sleeveless shirts, legless pants, no shirts at all, and in some few cases, particularly those working in or near the water, they worked totally stark naked or in their white government issue underpants through which the dark hairiness of their genitals showed plainly. There were no women anywhere around here at all anyway, and there were not likely to be any either for quite some little time. They wore all sorts of fantastic headgear, issue, civilian, and homemade, so that one might see a man working in the water totally naked with nothing adorning his person except his identity tags around his neck and a little red beany, turned-up fatigue hat, or a hat of banana leaves on his head. The supply barges were unloaded by gangs of men immediately, right at the water’s edge, so that the barge could go back for more. Then lines of other men carried these boxes, cases, cans back up the beach into the trees, or formed chains and passed them from hand to hand, trying to clear the space at the water’s edge. Further away down the beach the heavier matériel, trucks, anti-tank guns, artillery, were being unloaded, driven by their own drivers, or hauled up by Marine tractors. And still further away, this whole operation was being conducted a second time for the second transport, anchored quite a few hundred yards behind the first.

  All of this activity had been going on at this same pace since very early morning apparently, and the news of the impending air raid did not appear to affect it one way or the other. But as the minutes crept by one after the other, there was a noticeable change in the emotional quality and excitement of the beach. C-for-Charlie, from its vantage point at the edge of the trees, could sense the tautening of the emotional tenor. They watched a number of men who had been calmly bathing waistdeep in the sea in the midst of all this hectic activity, look at their watches and then get out and walk naked up to their clothes in the edge of the trees. Then, just a few moments after this, someone at the water’s edge flung up an arm and cried out, “There they are!” and the cry was taken up all up and down the beach.

  High up in the sunbright sky a number of little specks sailed serenely along toward the channel where the two ships lay. After a couple of minutes when they were closer, a number of other specks, fighter planes, could be seen above them engaging each other. Below on the beach the men with jobs and the working parties had already gone back to their work; but as the others, including C-for-Charlie company, watched, about half the engaged fighter planes broke off and turned back to the north, apparently having reached the limit of their fuel range. Only a couple of the remaining fighters started out to chase them, and they almost at once gave it up and turned back, and with the others began to attack the bombers. On they all came, slowly getting larger. The tiny mosquitoes dipped and swirled and dived in a mad, whirling dance around the heavier, stolid horseflies, who nevertheless kept serenely and sedately on. Now the bombers began to fall, first one here, trailing a great plume of smoke soon dissipated by the winds of the upper air, then another one there, trailing no smoke at all and fluttering down. No parachutes issued from them. Still the bombers kept on. Then one of the little mosquitoes fell, and a moment later, in another place, another. Parachutes appeared from both, floating in the sunbright air. Still the mosquitoes darted and swirled. Another injured horsefly fell. But it was surprising, at least to C-for-Charlie and the other newcomers, how many did not fall. Considering the vehemence and numbers of the attack, it appeared that they must all go down. But they didn’t, and the whole concerted mass moved slowly on toward the ships in the channel, the changing tones of the motors as the fighters dived or climbed clearly discernible now.

  Below on the beach the minutes, and then the seconds, continued to tick by. There were no cheers when a bomber fell. When the first one had fallen, another new company nearby to C-for-Charlie had made an attempt at a feeble cheer, in which a few men from C-for-Charlie had joined. But it soon died from lack of nourishment, and after that it was not again attempted. Everybody watched in silence, rapt, fascinated. And the men down on the beach continued to work, though more excitedly now.

  To Corporal Fife, standing tensely in the midst of the silent company headquarters, the lack of cheering only heightened his previous impression of its all being like a business. A regular business venture, not war at all. The idea was horrifying to Fife. It was weird and wacky and somehow insane. It was even immoral. It was as though a clerical, mathematical equation had been worked out, as a calculated risk: Here were two large, expensive ships and, say, twenty-five large aircraft had been sent out after them. These had been given protection as long as possible by smaller aircraft, which were less expensive than they, and then sent on alone on the theory that all or part of twenty-five large aircraft was worth all or part of two large ships. The defending fighters, working
on the same principle, strove to keep the price as high as possible, their ultimate hope being to get all twenty-five large aircraft without paying all or any of either ship. And that there were men in these expensive machines which were contending with each other, was unimportant—except for the fact that they were needed to manipulate the machines. The very idea itself, and what it implied, struck a cold blade of terror into Fife’s essentially defenseless vitals, a terror both of unimportance, his unimportance, and of powerlessness: his powerlessness. He had no control or sayso in any of it. Not even where it concerned himself, who was also a part of it. It was terrifying. He did not mind dying in a war, a real war,—at least, he didn’t think he did—but he did not want to die in a regulated business venture.

  Slowly and inexorably the contending mass high up in the air came on. On the beach the work did not stop. Neither did the LCIs and other barges. When the planes had almost reached the ships, one more bomber fell, crashing and exploding in smoke and flames in the channel in full view of everybody. Then they began to pass over the ships. A gentle sighing became audible through the air. Then a geyser of water, followed by another, then another, popped high up out of the sea. Seconds later the sounds of the explosions which had caused them swept across the beach and on past them into the coconut trees, rustling them. The gentle sighing noise grew louder, carrying a fluttery overtone, and other geysers began to pop up all over the sea around the first ship, and then a few seconds later, around the second. It was no longer possible to distinguish the individual sticks of bombs, but they all saw the individual stick of three bombs which made the hit. Like probing fingers, the first lit some distance in front of the first ship, the second coming closer. The third fell almost directly alongside. An LCI was just putting off from the ship, it couldn’t have been many yards away, and the third bomb apparently landed directly on it. From that distance, probably a thousand yards or more, one faint, but clearly discernible scream, high and shrill, and which actually did not reach them until after the geyser had already gone up, was heard by the men on shore, cut off and followed immediately by the sound wave of the explosion: some one nameless man’s single instinctual and useless protest against the taking of his life and his own bad luck at being where he was instead of somewhere else, ridiculous, pointless, but not without a certain dignity, although, ironically, it was not heard, and appreciated, until after he himself no longer existed. His last scream had lived longer than he had.