The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

  C-for-Charlie began to laugh and snort and pound each other on the back. Down the long aisles of cocopalms the klaxons kept on with their short, maniacal barks. Officers and men alike, they appeared to be congratulating each other on having personally ended the raid. This lasted almost a minute, then the officers remembered their dignity and separated themselves. The klaxons stopped. Within the two groups the laughter and backslapping went on for several minutes more. Finally this too wore itself out, and with halting steps because of the darkness they straggled back to their places of shelter looking sheepish and hoping no real veterans had seen their violent display, and once again began trying to protect themselves against the chill and wet.

  That was the way they spent the night. Nobody slept. There were five more raids during the course of the night and if Washingmachine Charley was one single man, he certainly was an energetic one. He was also sleepless. So was C-for-Charlie. In one raid the last bomb in the last stick landed a hundred yards in front of them damaging an antiaircraft position and killing two men—all quite by accident, of course. It was close enough (that huge earfilling impersonal rushing flutter descending like an express train) to put them all down on the ground and wet and muddy them up again and next day two chesthigh rents were found in the sides of the supply tent. Everybody speculated upon the fact that if there had been one more bomb in that particular stick it might well have landed very close to the center of their bivouac. In the morning when they all came out into the warm, revivifying safety of the sun and looked into each other’s stubbled, dirtcaked faces from which human eyes still peered, they found they all were looking at changed men.

  During the next two weeks they changed more. Labeled “acclimatization period” by the division’s plans and training section, this two weeks sifted itself down into a peculiar double rhythm. There were the hot sunny days of comparative safety on the one hand, and on the other nights of wet chill, mosquito clouds, klaxons and terror. And the two really had nothing at all to do with each other, had no continuity between them. There was a great deal of joking laughter about fear during the days, because in the sunshine the nights did not seem believable. But when dusk came, that swift purple tropical dusk, whatever had happened during the day was laid aside, not to be taken up until the morning, as they prepared themselves for the night. The days might be ones of work or loafing or perhaps a little training. The nights were always the same.

  Daily everyone bathed in the nearby stream, whose official name was Gavaga Creek they learned. Every evening they shaved, with stream water heated in their helmet shells over little fires. There were—in the daytime—further excursions to the jungle and to the site of Queen’s feat. The swiftly moldering Japanese man still sprawled on top the trench. This position they had discovered in the jungle marked the site of the final phase of the Battle of Koli Point. A large Japanese force had been surrounded and destroyed here, and it was possible to trace the entire perimeter of the Japanese fortifications in and out of the jungle along Gavaga Creek. They did this. It did not affect the nights. There were excursions to other points of interest. They went to the beach, to Koli Point itself, to the big home of the plantation manager, now full of shell holes and abandoned. A couple of groups, on different days, even ventured as far as the airfield, which was several miles away, bumming rides on trucks along the soupy roads through the endless groves of coconut. At the airfield in the hot, lazy sun bombers took off and landed. Mechanics worked in the shade of the cocopalms bare to the waist. The groups bummed rides home again. And everywhere they went or looked, both coming and going and all along their route, trucks and men were busily laying up great caches of stores for the coming offensive. The offensive of which, they remembered, they themselves were going to be a part. All of this still did not affect the nights.

  The hot tropic sun was marvelous to sit and soak in, after one of these nights. It rejuvenated and refreshed, bringing with its heat and its daylight the daily return to sanity. There was always a slight breeze to rustle the fronds of the palms. They made a dappled, swaying shade on the ground. From it the fetid smell of the tropical mud rose with warm, humid, overpowering force.

  It was not all play however. Almost daily new ships arrived to unload troops and supplies. Details of platoon strength, commanded by their own sergeants, were requisitioned to help with the unloading. It was the same work they had watched with awe on the day of their arrival, and they became veterans of it, and of the occasional daylight raids. On the days when no ships arrived the same details were needed to help move the supplies away from the beach, back to the huge caches within the groves. Every morning there was an hour of intensified calisthenics, ridiculous to everyone but required by division order. They made a few tentative little practice marches, hardly more than walks. One whole day was spent on an improvised rifle range testing and firing weapons. None of this affected the nights.

  Nothing affected the nights.

  It was always the same. There would be supper. Then there would be an added half hour, perhaps, of reprieve. Then the dusk would come while they sat and watched helplessly, powerless to prevent it. Then it would be night. On the morning of the second day they all had dug slit trenches without further orders or urging. They now slept ready to leap into them with increasing proficiency, wet or not, whenever the klaxons sounded. To stumble up half awake and fight your way out of your mosquito netting. (Never fully to sleep, only half sleep, in the first place.) Then to grope your way out to that hole outside the tent. To lie there numb and dumb and nervous, scared, target for millions of mosquitoes, if not for bombs. To fumble your way back inside afterward in the darkness and try to laugh it off while in fact you were embarrassed. These were the nights. It was not heroic. It was merely undignified. Nightly they acquired more and more the aspect of suspicious, sullen cats. Faces glowered and eyes burned. Finally it would be day and they would take up their lives once more.

  This strange schizophrenic life, this separation of nights and days, was enhanced when they were ordered to move their bivouac. They had spent three days hunting down their lost tents, cots and mosquitobars, a fourth day getting them set up, and two days living with them. Then they had to move and do it all again—a hard job entailing a long trek by truck, manhandling of the canvas, redigging all of their slit trenches. Making it even more difficult was the fact that at least one and usually two platoons were absent every day at the beach. Probably the reason for it was to put them closer to the unloading area to make them more available for work. But they did not know, because no one told them. Some logistics expert worked it all out on a chart. The result was to put them much closer to the airfield, so that now instead of having only one bomb land near them occasionally, they were right in the middle of it and the personnel bombs, known as daisycutters in the trade, were exploding all around them every night. And while such a move for such a reason might have its ironic, funny side from a certain point of view, it was not laughed at much in C-for-Charlie.

  Back at the old bivouac there had been an element of decision available. It was possible to ask yourself whether to go out to your hole, or not to go and be brave and stay in bed. Generally it was answered in the affirmative. Most went. But at least indecision was possible. At the new bivouac no such choice existed. You got out and you lay in your hole. And you were glad.

  It was strange that only one man was wounded. A distinct impression existed that there should have been many more. And of course there were, in other outfits around them. The one man wounded in C-for-Charlie was Pfc Marl, a Nebraska cornball and dry-dirt farmer. Long and work-gnarled, a draftee who had not wanted to leave his father’s farm, he had never much liked the army anyway. A piece of a daisycutter whistled into his hole as he lay in it during a raid and cut off his right hand as neatly as a surgeon could have done with a knife. When Marl yelled, two men nearby leaped in with him and put a tourniquet on him until the medic could get there. The bomb had landed thirty yards away and by this time the giant strides ha
d already marched on anyway.

  Marl thus became the first actual wounded casualty in the company. It was bad luck for him. He was treated with the same upsurging consummate tenderness as the wounded at the beach had been, but he did not like it any better than they. Everything was done for him that could be, but Marl became hysterical and began to blubber. Never very bright, he could not get it through his head that he would still be able to work.

  “What’m I gonna do now, hey?” he cried at his helpers fretfully. “How’m I gonna work, hey? How’m I gonna plow, hey? I mean it. What’m I gonna do now, hey?”

  Sergeant Welsh tried to soothe him by telling him how he was all through now, how he could go home, but Marl would have none of it. “Take it away!” he cried at them. “Get that damned thing out of here! I don’t want to look at it, goddam it! It’s my hand!”

  The hand was taken away by one of the two company medics, who was supposed to be trained at this kind of work but actually was not as yet, and who stopped to vomit behind a tree. Because no one knew what to do with it, since all felt it deserved an obscure respect, it was later buried by Storm out behind the mess tent under a log. But its absence did not aid Marl to bear his misfortune. He refused to be placated by descriptions of what marvelous artificial hands they made nowadays.

  “Goddamn it, it’s easy for you!” he cried. “But how’m I gonna work?”

  “Can you walk?” the medic asked him.

  “Sure I can walk, goddam it. Fuck yes I can walk. But how’m I gonna work, hey? That’s the point.”

  He was led off into the darkness to the battalion medical station and C-for-Charlie saw him no more.

  The increased bombing affected different people in different ways. Fife, for instance, discovered he was a coward. Fife had always believed he would be as brave as the next man, if not perhaps a little more so. He realized with surprise and dismay after two raids that he not only was not more brave, he was actually less so. This was fierce news but there was no way out of facing it. When he laughed and joked after a raid, it was plain to him that his laughter was more shaky and less sincere than the others’ laughter. Doll, for instance. Obviously they did not shiver and shake in their holes as he did, did not cringe without dignity in the mud. Obviously they were only scared; whereas he was terrified, would have given anything he possessed in the world—or anything he did not possess, if he could get his hands on it—not to be here defending his country. To hell with his country. Let somebody else defend it. That was how Fife honestly felt.

  Fife would never have believed he could react like this, and he was ashamed of it. It affected the way he regarded everything in life—himself, the sunlight, the blue sky, the trees, skyscrapers, girls. Nothing was beautiful. A desire to be somewhere else constantly trickled up and down his back in vague muscular spasms, even in the daytime. Worse was the knowledge that these violent, raging twinges did him no good at all, did not change anything, affected nothing. It was awful to have to admit you were a coward. It meant he would have to work harder at not running away than the others. It was going to be a hard thing to live with, and he knew he had better keep his mouth shut about it and try to hide it.

  Pfc Doll on the other hand—he whom Fife envied—discovered two good things about himself and was pleased by both. One of them was that he was invulnerable. Doll had suspected this, but had not been willing to trust his intuition until he had proved it beyond shadow of doubt. Twice now—one of them the night Marl lost his hand, when Doll had been not far away—he had forced himself to stand up in his hole when he heard the bombs start down. The muscles of his back were jumping as though trying to buck a rider, but there was a testicletingling, excited pleasure in it too. Both times he went untouched—although the one time Marl had got his close by. Doll felt this proved it. And he felt twice was enough to prove what he desired to know. Especially since in the other raid the bombs had landed even closer than the ones that got Marl. Both times, afterward, he had sunk down in his hole triumphant if exhausted, his knees trembling in a strange way and he had not done it more than twice because it took too much out of him. But he was glad that he had proved it.

  Doll also found out he could convince everybody he had not been afraid. It all went back to that thing he had learned in his fight with Corporal Jenks. You acted out your fiction story and everyone accepted it. Thus he could laugh and josh about the raids, pretending he had been scared, yes, but not really terrified. And whether it was true or not didn’t matter. Doll was almost as glad to learn this as he was to prove he was invulnerable.

  A third reaction was that of Sergeant Welsh. Welsh discovered something, too. What Welsh discovered, after all these years of wondering, was that he was a brave man. He reasoned this way: any man who could be as terrified during these raids as he was and not either roll over and die or else just get up and walk away forever—that man had to be brave; and that was him. Welsh was glad, because he had wondered; and when Welsh sacrificed himself to United States property and to the properties of the world, he wanted to be able to do it grinning sardonically. And he now felt that he could.

  There were other reactions. There were in fact as many various reactions as there were men under the whickering bombs. But however various, there was in all of them one constant: Everybody wished these nightly air raids would stop. But they didn’t.

  There was one night of relief for them in the two weeks. Regimental Headquarters, functioning as a unit now after its separation into echelons for the sea voyage by transport, opened up a post exchange. C-for-Charlie only learned of this at all through the loyalty of their regular company clerk (a sergeant; Fife was only the forward clerk) an Italian boy from Boston named Dranno (and of course universally known as “Draino”) who being stationed with the personnel section knew about it and came and told them. The entire stock of this new PX consisted of two things, Barbasol shaving cream and Aqua Velva shaving lotion. But this information was enough to cause a run on the store. Inside of seven hours the entire stock of Aqua Velva was sold out, although there was plenty of Barbasol left for those who wanted it. The trouble was that the other company clerks were just as loyal to their outfits as Draino was to C-for-Charlie. Nevertheless, members of the company managed to buy enough bottles of Aqua Velva so that everybody was able to get solidly drunk for one night.

  Mixed with canned grapefruit juice from Storm’s kitchen supply, the shaving lotion did not taste at all. Grapefruit juice seemed to cut all the perfume out of it. It made a drink rather like a Tom Collins. Everyone loved it. There was a number of cases of men stumbling into the wrong slit trenches during the raids. There were several sprained wrists and ankles. And there was one bad incident where a drunk dived into the latrine by mistake when the klaxons sounded. But for one night at least, one glorious memorable night, there was relief from the spraying daisycutters. Many men went right on sleeping through every raid. And those who did not didn’t give a damn that night—about air raids or anything else—and trooped out to their slit trenches laughing and sportive.

  Meanwhile, life in the daytime went right on. Two days after the Aqua Velva party there occurred the most important thing to happen to C-for-Charlie since their arrival. This was the discovery, in a tent near the airfield, of a cache of Thompson submachineguns which they were able to send a raiding party after and steal. This triumph was largely due to little Charlie Dale, Storm’s belligerent little second cook, who not only found the guns but also—if he did not actually organize the raid—certainly stumped for it and was its sparkplug.

  Dale did not like working in the kitchen and never had. A lot of this was due to having to work for Storm whom Dale considered too authoritarian. Dale might ride his shift of KPs overhard, and was noted for this, and secretly was proud of it; but that was only because you couldn’t make them work any other way. But Storm—Storm was in the habit of demanding an instantaneous and unquestioning obedience from his own cook force which not only seemed to imply he didn’t trust their abilities, b
ut also that he did not even trust their motives, their good faith. Dale resented this. Also, for a long time now, he had felt Storm did not like him personally for some reason. Twice Storm had passed over him for promotion to first cook. Both times Dale should have had the job. And yet Storm had not said a word to him. Dale had not forgiven him for this, either.

  Like many others Charlie Dale had come into the Army from a career of two years in the CCCs, enlisting as soon as he became eighteen. He had not cooked in the Cs—or anywhere else—beyond frying himself a couple of eggs once in a while. He had come into Storm’s kitchen after six months as a rifle private because on regular duty—contrary to his expectations—he had remained lost in the shuffle and mass of khaki ciphers. If he left the kitchen, he would lose his rating and his authority and go right back to that. And Dale had no intention of getting lost again. He stayed in the kitchen. But he did not have to like it.

  Because he didn’t like the kitchen, and because on Guadalcanal cooks naturally were exempt from the unloading details when off shift, Dale had taken to going off by himself on exploring trips whenever he was off duty. It was on one of these trips one hot still afternoon, while wandering along the edge of the dust-blown airfield under that drowse-producing, perpetually midsummer sun, that he found the tent full of guns.