by Anton Myrer
“—never mind that, now is the time … call for you, but you can’t fire as separate … range one-eight-hundred, deflection as indicated … a big rush. Now lay it in as close as you can … until the tanks get—”
The mortar bursts moved ponderously off left, toward the river. Brand raised his head quickly. Dirt snapped just beyond his eye, and he ducked again; he felt pummeled and feverish—and yet at the same time oddly alert and prescient, on the edge of anger. He swung up again and there they were, in clumps and clusters, their mustard-brown uniforms like dirty patches against the rich green of the jungle; and they were screaming. Last night they had seemed to make no sound at all, but now they were giving this high, unearthly cry, their mouths round and black and wide; leaping and stumbling over their own dead, waving rifles, swords, grenades, looking clumsy and ineffectual and as strange as creatures from some remote planet. Around him the firing rose to one solid, all-engulfing roar. He pumped the cocking handle twice and fired, the gun bucking against the heel of his hand, deafening him. He watched his tracers converge with others into the chests and bellies of the enemy who faltered, slid forward, sank weakly away or kept on running, full of savage purpose, releasing their grenades like little tin cans and then fell in their turn, transformed into headless, limbless, lumpy sacks. And still they came on, screaming at the top of their lungs, words or names or cries of pain that all merged into the one, unearthly, incantatory aaaaiiiii—! Whelan fell against him, one arm outflung, struck him in the head and face, and collapsed in the bottom of the hole. The belt shivered and buckled and he swung the gun left, right again, firing in short bursts, wherever the clumps were largest, cursing, panting, hating with all his might this stupid, blind bravery that cared for nothing, had no end, that was going to engulf them all. Too many. There were far too many. They weren’t going to be able to hold them. They were at the lead foxholes now, shrieking and wailing, lofting more grenades—
There was a series of thunderclaps that seemed to strike at the base of his forehead: the air before him turned malignant and hard—hard as sheet iron, wreathed in towers of smoke and dust. The pressure waves beat him with the force of a piece of planking; his vision went dark, he sank into an eerie twilight of puny, cringing powerlessness. He found he was crouched under the gun, hands over his head, buffeted and gasping. “Too fast!” he heard himself cry—but his voice was as faint as an asthmatic old man’s. He had no idea what he was saying. “Too—fast!” Still it came, in rolling walls, in vast shattering blows—a hand pressing on his skull, squeezing out of it sight and sound and all coherent thought. It could not last, could not go on like this. But it did. The tops of trees dissolved in dreamy, floating fragments like the petals of some monstrous flower unfolding underwater. A leg—part of a leg with its boot and wraparound puttee—lay against his arm. Someone screamed vividly and long, and a body slammed into the pit beside him, confronted him with a scarlet pulsing fruit that he dully realized was the man’s face; from the center of the pulpy fruit the screams came, but lower now and hoarser, dwindling. His senses deserted him. No more of this; no more! In sudden importunate terror he looked for the Old Man—saw him doubled over, his hand against his ear, and realized, with stunned slow amazement, that he was talking on the phone.
“Oh my Jesus,” he panted. “Oh my good Jesus—”
Abruptly the crushing hand lifted, the belaboring plank vanished, sliding away. His sight cleared to a gray twilight flecked with drifting chains of blue. He reached up again, his hands shaking, and there they were still, unbelievably, unbearably, crawling, groping, stumbling over the high, careless windrows of their dead; moving like silly, deadly, drunken marionettes. He went on firing, watching them trip and falter. They were all around now, in among the foxholes, pressing on through sheer weight of numbers in a churned wilderness of mangled bodies and equipment and torn earth, slashing and firing. The gun stopped, shockingly. He snatched at the bolt, saw the belt had run out. A glance revealed the pit unmanned except for the Old Man, who was firing the BAR, his great shoulders shaking with the recoil, in perfect rolling bursts of four. Falk was down. So was De Luca. But they were nearer now, all at once, squat and bandy-legged, screaming their limbo battle cry: the hated, the enemy. He reached for a belt, saw there was no time, caught up his rifle instead and fired at two men running stride for stride, another, three more behind them, shouting himself, the numb fury of his rage astride him now, the dry white unreckoning rage that he could always trust, that never failed to carry him through when bone and muscle and nerve were gone. The empty clip whirled upward past his eye. He reached for another in his belt, and beheld in front of him an officer—a short, heavy man with a saber held at his shoulder, long and blue as ice in shadow. No time. He leaped forward out of the hole, slipped and went to one knee, flung up his rifle like a man on point signaling, watched angrily the sword come down and strike just below the stock ferrule with an impact that stung his hands. The officer, his face flat with exertion, terribly near, sweating, raised the sword again in his two hands, his thick body coiling with great celerity. Brand heaved upward with the bayonet, saw it go home, followed it right into the belly under a belt buckle adorned with the imperial chrysanthemum. Something struck him on the shoulder and back and drove him to his knees again. He looked up, thrusting. The officer was gripping the hand-guard of his rifle, his face flooded slowly with confusion, a kind of shame; and Brand saw he was an old man, sick and very frightened. A long jungle ulcer on his upper lip was oozing yellow mucus. Then he fell on Brand, his weight dragging the rifle down and away, and his body stank of fish and damp-rot and stale sweat.
Gasping, Brand let go of the rifle and flung the dead man to one side. His left arm hurt, a numbed tingling; but he could flex the fingers. He turned, saw Damon slumped against the back edge of the pit, fumbling awkwardly with a shiny black trapezoidal magazine, trying to reload the BAR; a crimson stain was slowly seeping through his jacket. Hit. The Old Man was hit.
“Chief!” he cried. He looked back to see four more—ah Christ, so many!—coming toward them now with implacable intent, shunning the other holes, their hands raised. They’ve figured it out, the thought reached him; they’ve doped it out: we’re the ones they want. The bastards. Oh the bastards! Rage caught him up again, he wrenched at his impaled rifle in a transport of agony, yanked it free at last, knowing he was too late, there was nothing to be done now, nothing at all on this earth, yet constrained nonetheless to raise the rifle and bayonet, interpose his body.
He started to his feet. Behind him there was the deafening air blast of a Thompson gun: the oncoming Japanese whirled this way and that, tumbling headlong. A grenade rolled free, spinning on the ground. He turned and saw Colonel Feltner standing behind the pit, helmetless, his eyes slitted, firing in a frenzy. He screamed, “Cover!—” and plunged headlong into the hole. The grenade exploded with a sharp, flat crash and fragments moaned through the air like plucked harp strings. Feltner was gone, as though the earth had swallowed him. Brand straightened, snatched up Whelan’s rifle and fired at an officer, a slender, willowy figure who was aiming carefully with a pistol at the message-center hole where Cuddles and some more of the headquarters people were. Brand hit him again and again, and still the officer continued doggedly to aim—finally clutched at his face and throat and fell, turning. Behind him came a short man in a fatigue cap, running with his head down, holding what looked like a saki bottle in one outstretched hand. Fire converged on him; he staggered but kept hurrying forward. His hand holding the bottle burst into flame that raced like an aureole over his head and shoulders. His hands were on fire, his tunic and cap; he turned sharply—a swift, agitated gesture as though he’d forgotten something—and darted off to the left, toward the river, uttering thin, harsh cries and fell at last in a faint, floating glide, the flames flaring from his hair and neck.
A towering, arching crash to the right: again. There were no more. No more of them. Only heaps of dead and dying, and the new-found silence
was flooded with screams and moans. The artillery was going high now, searching the woods beyond. Behind him he could hear an automatic rifle hammering away in short bursts. They had held them! Sweet Christ, they had stopped them again—
A man was walking toward them: a man where none had been scant seconds before. Wandering leisurely, a drifting, wavering walk. He fired without thought. The Japanese went down, rose again in his terrible somnambulistic waver, again went down. Brand glanced at the Old Man, who was sitting down now at the base of the hole, trying one-handed to insert a fresh magazine into the guides. His face was like new wax; blood had soaked the sleeve, the whole side of his jacket.
“Medic!” Brand called hoarsely. “For Christ sake medic—!”
A fierce struggle was going on not thirty feet away, hand-to-hand: a flurry of gesticulating, lunging figures, shouts and screams. The gun. He flipped the snap on a case, flung back the oblong metal cover, snatched out a belt and set it in the lips; glanced again at the Old Man—and saw the shiny black-and-porcelain cylinder, like a huge corrugated spark plug, rolling on the tamped earth at the bottom of the hole. No time. He gazed at it in deepening terror—an expanding white eternity of instant in which he knew there was no purpose in shouting a warning, in which he knew he could leap out of the hole but that Damon, slumped there with the BAR across his lap, could never make it. Never. A thousand years of instant during which he saw Whelan’s grotesquely twisted body, the angular bulk of the radio, and the Old Man now frankly holding his arm and shoulder and staring down at the terrible shiny corrugated engine which had stopped rolling now and lay there just out of reach, giving off a fitful little shower of sparks.
No time.
He flung away the belt and threw himself on the grenade.
… Cold. A still world, ringing and half-asleep, high on a mesa with the earth swinging ponderously below his body. Rocking and swinging. But he had no body, it had melted in the cold—blown clean, and his sight was dulled. Odd, because it was so clear out here, high on the mesa. Ah Mother of God, he’d made it, he’d made it home where the frost lay on the mountains in the fine dawn chill and the smell of woodsmoke from the morning fires was salt and heady—
But the Old Man. The Old Man was looking down at him, saying, “Joe, Joe …” He couldn’t hear him but he could see his lips moving. The Old Man’s face was all crinkled up; he looked scared, he looked as if he was going to cry.
All done. Home—
It was like the end of the world by violence. The valley made a long, lazy curve toward the northeast, trampled kunai grass and banana and coconut and ifil trees, stripped and scarred by gunfire. Around them the bodies lay in heaps, in vast ropelike mounds and windrows, strewn through a tattered junkland of smashed and abandoned war gear. The smell of death, which had reached out to them in brief waves on their way up the trail in the weapons carrier, was almost overpowering now. Colonel Beaupré rubbed his mouth and glanced sharply at Damon who, his arm bound close to his body by bandages and an improvised sling of webbing, was moving through this terrible wasteland with an obsessive fury, plodding ahead of the groups of medics and graves registration details and recon people, who kept peering fearfully into the impenetrable rain forest that was massed along the right flank of the valley. Once the General stumbled and almost fell. He was half-supporting himself with a Japanese rifle he held crutchlike under his good arm. He cursed and crept along among the dead, his eyes wild and wrathful under the fatigue cap; the lines in his face looked as if they had been cut in the flesh with a burin. Beaupré remembered an evening back in Devon Bay, after Moapora, with everyone moderately drunk, and Ben saying, “Sam, the lines in that craglike phiz of yours would hold three days of rain, do you realize that?” and Beaupré himself had scoffed, “Hell, that’s no phiz—that’s a God damn relief map of the Bitterroot Range!” But now it wasn’t funny, remembering; not funny at all.
All morning, after the Japanese had broken off contact and fled north, and exhausted tatters of Ben’s old regiment had come drifting into the lines, Sam had been in a torment to get back up here. It was stupid, it was how detachments ran into trouble, indulging in stunts like this, with handfuls of half-crazed Japanese with grenades, hiding in holes; which was why Beaupré had insisted on their taking a recon platoon with them. But there had been nothing: the enemy—what was left of him—was in full retreat toward Kalao and the mountains. There were no fire fights, no snipers, no incidents; just this vast and hideous graveyard of many, many men …
There was very little talk in the clearing. With such monstrous carnage the voices of the searchers had sunk away to monosyllabic whispers. Near them a sweating, buck-toothed medic kept muttering, “Holy Jesus Christ. Holy Jesus Christ … ”
“Keep looking,” Damon snapped at him.
“Yes sir,” the corpsman answered nervously, and shied away.
It was hard to know where to look. The valley was interrupted by two small mounds to their left, just off the trail, and Beaupré moved toward it, his eyes darting over the corpses that had fallen in clumps and series, in tangles, and now lay in bizarre postures, sprawled forward over their heads, or flung back on their legs, or flat on their backs with both knees drawn up, as if squashed against a wall by some rude celestial hand. About a regiment, his mind registered automatically; a regiment at least. But the cold professional estimate broke down under the impact of such losses, such violence and death. The need to avert one’s eyes, stop up all the bodily orifices in a single spasm of revulsion, was immense. Battle—yes, sure: he was used to battle and its odious consequences. But a vast thresher had done this—some sort of devilish combine and disk harrow bigger than a battleship had passed through this curving valley, grinding up trees and weapons and tentage and human beings and flinging them blithely aside. The peculiar stench of blood and putrefaction and damp-rot and burning grew heavier and heavier in the heat, clinging like a caveful of bats to the roof of one’s senses, drowning sight and hearing and even thought. Beaupré felt his stomach churn, churn again, and then the sour rush of saliva into his mouth. He was going to be sick. No. He would not be. He would not. He had never been sick before and he would not be sick now.
Someone across the clearing gave a muffled cry of protest, but he could not tell who it was. It was impossible to walk without stepping on the bodies—this tumult of crushed heads and sheared-off legs and tight bouquets of guts flowering from ruptured bellies. Flies clung in loose, weaving masses, like slick blued bees swarming; the whole valley hummed with their odious presence. Maggots worked in gross struggling chains at the gaping wounds, bloated and intent. The buck-toothed corpsman near him became sick, a choked rhythmic coughing that went on and on. There were no voices now at all.
If you could bottle it, Beaupré thought savagely, swallowing, fighting the hot clutch of nausea with all his might, trying not to breathe, trying to look without seeing. This smell. If you could bottle it, store it in some tanks just outside Washington or New York City or Chicago; and then when the drums began to beat, when the eminent statesmen rose in all their righteous choler and the news rags and radio networks started their impassioned chant, if you could release a few dozen carboys on the senate floor, the executive offices of Du Pont de Nemours, Boeing and Ford and Firestone, the trading posts on Wall Street; and seal off the exits. Repeat every three hours as needed. Rx. By God, that would take some of the fun out of it. If you could only bottle it and feed it to the fire-eating sons of bitches, jam it down their throats …
No, he thought, raging, looking down at an American still gripping the slender bayonet that had run him through, his hands congealed in his own blood; stepping over a Japanese lying on his back, spread-eagled, thick open hands clutching nothing, his belly and thighs already swelling monstrously in his clothes; no, the greedy moronic bastards would only launch one of their clean-up campaigns, underwrite funds, solicit contributions for scientific research. Stamp Out Stink. They’d invent something—trust them—some antidote compounded of
Chanel and coffee beans and beer; and then, safely delivered of such distressing reminders, they could hurry right back to the quickened pulse, the speeches, the righteous wrath—
Across the glade voices rose in muffled exclamation. He turned dumbly, saw the medics urgently extracting from a pile of wreckage a limp scarecrow dark with blood: they had found a soldier not quite dead. Someone who was alive here: actually alive. Beaupré looked away and went on walking, gagging frankly now, though without tangible result.
Hades, the word rose in his mind. That trip made by—who was it? Odysseus? Aeneas? had they both gone?—to the land of the dead. It seemed callous, sacrilegious, almost obscene to be walking around, still living, when all these men had died. War is so untidy, he thought, and smiled grimly. A southern boy, impetuous, hot-tempered, a bit spoiled, nursed on a pleasant, sunset gentility, he had never been very tidy himself. The Army had created an order for him, punctilious and severe, and he’d welcomed it. Life passed more serenely, with less friction and misunderstanding and waste, if there was order. You attended to your duties, which were moderately exacting and healthful and well defined; you played two hard sets of tennis in the afternoon and made your courtesy calls or attended post functions or poker sessions in the evenings. A well-ordered round … and it was all—he saw for the first time with a quick, angry shock—nothing more or less than preparation for this: this valley of death and wild disorder.
Stooping, he picked up a piece of paper, one of the multifarious scraps you always saw in battle. There were so many—snapshots and chits and money and letters from home; and lying here and there among them the foolish, trivial things soldiers always picked up and carried around with them, in spite of the grinding weight of packs and weapons and extra bandoleers: souvenir penknives and cowrie shells and postcards of Balboa Park Zoo or Diamond Head, subway tokens and Australian shillings, and carnival trophies such as monkey hand puppets and harmonicas and handkerchiefs embroidered with legends like HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS or Count Your Blessings.