The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

  “I think we better send them down in bunches of three or four, at irregular intervals,” he said turning his head to Keck. “When they’re all there, space them out. Advance them by rushes, or in a line. Use your own judgment.—I guess you might as well go.”

  “I’ll take the first bunch down myself,” Keck said huskily, staring down the slope. “Listen, Cap’n,” he said, looking at Stein, and at Brass Band who had just come up, “there’s somethin I wanted to tell you. That guy Bell is a good man. He’s pretty steady, He helped me get going and get the platoon out of that hole we were in after that charge.” He paused. “I just wanted to tell you.”

  “Okay. I’ll remember.” Stein felt an unnamable, nigh-unbearable anguish that he could not do anything about. It forced him to look away down the slope. Beside him Keck started to crawl off.

  “Give them hell, Sergeant!” George Band said cheerily. “Give them hell!”

  Keck paused in his crawl long enough to look back. “Yeh,” he said.

  The two squads, with their three extra men, had more or less separated themselves from the other half of the platoon. The most of them, in their bodily attitudes and in their faces, resembled sheep about to be led to the slaughter pens in Chicago. They waited. Keck had only to crawl to them and instruct them. “Okay, you guys. This is it. We’re goin’ down in groups of four. No point in goin’ by rushes, only make a better target stopped. So run all the way. We ain’t got any choice. We’re picked, and so we got to go. I’ll take the first bunch myself to show you how easy it is. I want Charlie Dale with me. Dale? So you can organize them guys that’s down there. Let’s move out.”

  He started to crawl to the jumpoff point just beyond the knot of officers and CP men, and it was here that the first case of overt cowardice (if it could be called that, and if S/Sgt Stack could be omitted) occurred in C-for-Charlie. A big, beautifully muscled man named Sico, an Italian draftee from Philly with some five months service, suddenly sat down in his tracks and began to hold his stomach and groan. It blocked the line behind him and when somebody called, the ones in front stopped also. Keck crawled back to him. His squad sergeant, Beck the martinet, crawled over to him too. Beck was very young for a martinet, but he was a very good one. The rifles of his squad had been the most perfect at inspections since he came into the company with six years service and immediately got promoted. Withal, he still was not really mean, only stern. He was not very bright at anything else or even interested, but soldiering was his code. Right now he appeared deeply ashamed that anything like this could happen to any man in his squad, and because of this, furious.

  “Get up, God damn you, Sico,” he said in his stern, command voice. “Or I’ll kick you so hard in that stomach you’ll really be sick.”

  “I can’t, Sergeant,” Sico said. His face was drawn up grotesquely. And his eyes were puddles of terror, bottomless, anguished, and a little guilty. “I would if I could. You know I would. I’m sick.”

  “Sick, my foot,” said Beck, who never swore much, and for whom the phrase God damn you was inordinately strong.

  “Hold it, Beck,” Keck said. “What is it, Sico?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant. It’s my stomach. Pains. And cramps. I can’t straighten up. I’m sick,” he said, looking at Keck appealingly out of the dark, tortured holes of his eyes. “I’m sick,” he said again, and as if to prove it suddenly vomited. He did not even try to bend over and the vomit burped up out of him and ran down over his fatigue shirt onto his hands which held his belly. He looked at Keck hopefully, but appeared ready to do it again if necessary.

  Keck studied him a moment. “Leave him,” he said to Beck. “Come on.—The medics will take care of you, Sico,” he said to Sico.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Sico said.

  “But—” Beck began.

  “Don’t argue with me,” Keck said, already crawling away.

  “Right,” Beck said, and followed.

  Sico continued to sit and watched the others pass. The medics did indeed take care of him. One of them, the junior, though he looked much like his shyfaced, bespectacled senior, came and led him back to the rear, Sico walking bent over in pain with his hands holding his stomach. He groaned audibly from time to time and now and then he gagged, but apparently did not feel it necessary to vomit more. His face was haunted-looking and his eyes tormented. But clearly nobody would ever convince him he had not been sick. Whenever he looked at the C-for-Charlie men he passed, it was appealingly, a certain unspoken request for understanding, for belief. As for the others, they looked back noncommittally. None of their faces held contempt. Instead, under the white-eyed sweating pucker of fear, there was a hint of sheepish envy, as if they would have liked to do the same but were afraid they could not bring it off. Sico, who could undoubtedly read this look, apparently got no comfort from it. He tottered on, helped by the junior medic, and the last that C-for-Charlie ever saw of him was when he hobbled out of sight beyond the second fold.

  In the meantime Keck’s men had begun their gauntlet-running. Keck led off with Dale and two other men. Each squad sergeant, first Milly Beck then McCron, supervised the jumpoff of his men in groups of four. All of them made it down safely except two. Of these one, a Mississippi farmer ‘boy’ of nearly forty named Catt, about whom nobody in the company knew anything for the simple reason that he never talked, was killed outright. But with the other something really bad happened for the first time in the day.

  At first they thought the second one was dead too. Hit running, he had fallen, bounced hard, and lain still like the Mississippian. So that was that. When a man was hit and killed outright, there was nothing anyone could do. The man had ceased to exist. The living went right on living, without him. On the other hand, the wounded were evacuated. They would live or die someplace else. So they too ceased to exist to the men they left behind, and could be forgotten also. Without a strong belief in a Valhalla, it was as good a way to handle the problem as any, and made everybody feel better. But this was not to be the case with Pvt Alfredo Tella of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who, as he liked jokingly to say, ‘had not gone to Harvard, but he had dug many a cesspool underneath its ivy-covered walls.’

  Actually, Tella did not begin to yell, at least not loud enough to be heard by Bugger Stein’s CP, until after Keck had framed and then carried out most of his attack. And by that time lots of other things were happening.

  For the moment, there was still nothing much to be seen from the top of the fold. Two new bodies lay on the slope, and that was all. Keck and his running men had dived headfirst into the taller grass and apparently disappeared from the face of the earth. The yammering of the cortex of Japanese fire had ceased. Quiet—at least, a comparative quiet, if one disregarded the racketing and banging which still hung and jounced everywhere high in the air—reigned over the grassy ridge. On the third fold they lay and waited, watching.

  Unfortunately, the Japanese heavy mortars, still firmly seated on the heights of The Elephant’s Head, had seen the forward movement of American troops, too. A mortar round exploded in the low between the folds. That one hurt nobody, but more followed. Mortar shells began exploding their fountains of terror, dirt and fragments along the rearward slope every minute or so, as the Japanese gunners fingered the area searching American flesh. It was not a barrage, but it was very nerve-racking, and it wounded some men. Because of it, only a very few, Stein, Band and Welsh among them, actually saw Keck’s attack. Most were as flat to the ground as they could get.

  Stein felt it was his duty to watch, to observe. Anyway, there was very little choice as to cover. There were no holes here, and one flat place was as good as another. So he lay, only his eyes and helmet above the crest of the fold, and waited and watched. He could not escape a distinct premonition that quite soon a mortar shell was going to land squarely in the center of his back. He did not know why Band had decided to watch too, but suspected that it was in the hope of seeing some new wounded, though he knew this was unfair. And as
for Welsh, Stein could not even imagine why this flatfaced, expressionless man should want to expose himself to watch, especially since he had not said a single word to anyone since offering his Thompsongun to Keck. The three of them lay there while a mortar shell blew up somewhere behind them, then a minute later another, then almost a minute later still another. There were no screams with any of them.

  When they finally did see men, it was about a third of the way up the ridge. Keck had crawled his men that far unseen. Now they rose in a line, which bellied downhill somewhat in the center like a rope bellying of its own weight, and began to scamper uphill firing as they went. Almost immediately the Japanese fire began to hammer, and at once men began to fall.

  If Pvt Alfredo Tella of Cambridge Mass had begun to yell before this, no one had heard him. And in the intensity of the action and of watching, no one was to hear him until it was over.

  In fact, it did not last long. But while it did, many things happened. Arriving in the defiladed area, Keck had first turned his attention to organizing the disorganized group of privates already there, and sent Dale to do that. Then he himself lay in the grass directing the others off to the right as they arrived. When the line was formed, he gave the order to crawl. The grass which was about chest high here had a matted, tangled underlayer of old stems. It choked them with dust, tied up their arms and feet, made it impossible to see. They crawled for what seemed an eternity. It required tremendous exertion. Most of them had long since used up all of their water, and it was this as much as anything in Keck’s mind when he passed the word to halt. He judged they were about half way up the slope, and he didn’t want them to start passing out on him. For a moment as Keck lay gathering his will power he thought about their faces as they arrived and dived into the grass down below: whites of the eyes showing, mouths open and drawn, skin around the eyes pinched and tight. They had all arrived terrified. They had all arrived reluctant. Keck felt no sympathy for them, any more than he felt sympathy for himself. He was terrified too. Taking a deep breath he stood straight up in the grass yelling at them: “Up! Up! Up! Up and GO!”

  From the top of the fold they could take the operation in at a glance, and follow its progress. This was not so easy on the ridge itself. But John Bell standing rifle in hand and trying to shoot and run in the thick grass was able to see several important things. He was, for instance, the only man who saw Sgt McCron cover his face with his hands and sit down weeping. When they had first stood up, the fury of the Japanese fire had struck them like a wind-tormented hailstorm. The Japanese had been smart and had waited, conserving their fire till they had targets. Four men of McCron’s squad went down at once. On the right a young draftee named Wynn was shot in the throat and screamed, “Oh, my God!” in a voice of terror and disbelief as a geyser of blood spurted from his neck. Ridiculously like a rag doll he fell and disappeared in the grass. Next to him Pfc Earl, a little shorter, was caught in the face, perhaps from the same burst. He went down without a sound, looking as if he’d been hit in the face with a tomato. To Bell’s left two other men tumbled, yelling with fear that they were killed. All this was apparently too much for McCron, who had clucked over and mothered this squad of his for so many months, and he simply dropped his rifle and sat down crying. Bell himself was astonished that he himself was not already struck down dead. He only knew, could only think one thing. That was to keep going. He had to keep going. If he ever wanted to get back home again to his wife Marty, if he ever wanted to see her again, kiss her, put himself between her breasts, between her legs, fondle, caress, and touch her, he had to keep going. And that meant he had to keep the others going with him, because it was useless to keep going by himself. It had to stop. There had to be a point in time where it ended. In a cracked bellow he began to harangue the remainder of McCron’s 2d Squad. In back of and a little below him off in the center as he looked behind, he saw Milly Beck leading his men in a fury of snarling hatred which shocked Bell numbly: Beck who was always so controlled and almost never raised his voice. Still below him yet came Keck, roaring and firing Welsh’s Thompsongun uphill. A silly phrase came in Bell’s mind and he began to yell at the other men senselessly. “Home for Christmas! Home for Christmas!”

  Keep going. Keep going. It was a ridiculous thought, a stupid idea in any case and he would wonder later why he had it. Obviously, if he wanted to stay alive to get home, the best thing to do would have been to lie down in the grass and hide.

  It was Charlie Dale on the far left who saw the first emplacement, the first live one any of them had ever actually seen. Far enough left to be beyond their flank, it was a one-gun job, a simple hole dug in the ground and covered over with sticks and kunai grass. From the dark hole he could see the muzzle spitting fire at him. Actually, Dale was probably the calmest of the lot. Imaginationless, he had organized his makeshift squad, and found them eager to accept his authority if he would simply tell them what to do. Now he urged them on, but not bellowing or roaring like Keck and Bell. Dale thought it looked much better, was far more seemly, if a noncom did not yell like that. So far he had not fired a shot. What was the point, when there were no targets? When he saw the emplacement, he carefully released his safety and fired a long burst with his Thompsongun, straight into the hole twenty yards away. Before he could release the trigger the gun jammed, solidly. But his burst was enough to stop the machinegun, at least momentarily, and Dale ran toward it pulling a grenade from his shirt. From ten yards away he threw the grenade like a baseball, wrenching hell out of his shoulder. The grenade disappeared through the hole, then blew up scattering sticks and grass and three rag dolls and upending the machinegun. Dale turned back to his squad, licking his lips and grinning with beady pride. “Come on, you guys,” he said. “Let’s keep it moving.”

  They were almost done with it. Off to the right of center Pfc Doll and another man discovered a second small emplacement simultaneously. They fired a clip apiece into its hole and Doll grenaded it, keeping up his unspoken competition with Charlie Dale, even if he wasn’t an acting sergeant. Wait’ll he hears about that, he thought happily, because he didn’t know that Dale had got one too. But the happiness was shortlived, for Doll and everybody else, as they ran on. Knocking out two one-gun emplacements made no appreciable difference in the volume of the Japanese fire. MGs still hammered at them from seemingly every quarter of the globe. Men were still going down. They still had not located any main strongpoints. Directly in front of them thirty yards away a rock outcropping formed a four-foot ledge which extended clear across their front. Instinctively everyone began to run for that, while behind them Keck, gasping, bellowed the useless order: “That ledge! Head for that ledge!”

  They dived in behind its protection pellmell, all of them sobbing audibly with exhaustion. The exertion and the heat had been too much. Several men vomited. One man made it to the ledge, gurgled once senselessly, then—his eyes rolling back in his head—fainted from heat prostration. There was nothing with which to cover him for shade. Beck the martinet loosened his belt and clothes. Then they lay against the ledge in the midday sun and smelled the hot, summer-smelling dust. Insects hummed around them. The fire had stopped.

  “Well, what’re we gonna do now, Keck?” someone asked finally.

  “We’re gonna stay right here. Maybe they’ll get some reinforcements up to us.”

  “Ha! To do what?”

  “To capture these goddam fucking positions around here!” Keck cried fretfully. “What you think?”

  “You mean you really want to go on with it?”

  “I don’t know. No. Not no uphill charge. But they get us some reinforcements, we can scout around and maybe locate where all these goddam fucking MGs are. Anyway, it’s better than going back down through that. You want to go back down?”

  Nobody answered this, and Keck did not feel it necessary to elaborate. By counting heads they found that they had left twelve men behind them on the slope killed or wounded. This was almost a full squad, almost a full third
of their number. It included McCron. When Bell told him about McCron, Keck appointed Bell acting sergeant in his place; Bell couldn’t have cared less. “He’ll have to look out for himself, like the rest of the wounded,” Keck said. They continued to lie in the hot sun. Ants crawled on the ground at the foot of the ledge.

  “What if the Japs come down here in force and throw us off of here?” somebody asked.

  “I don’t think they will,” Keck said. “They’re worse off than we are. But we better have a sentry. Doll.”

  Bell lay with his face against the rock facing Witt. Witt lay looking back. Quietly in the insect-humming heat they lay and looked at each other. Bell was thinking that Witt had come through it all all right. Like himself. What power was it which decided one man should be hit, be killed, instead of another man? So Bugger’s little feeling attack was over. If this were a movie, this would be the end of the show and something would be decided. In a movie or a novel they would dramatize and build to the climax of the attack. When the attack came in the film or novel, it would be satisfying. It would decide something. It would have a semblance of meaning and a semblance of an emotion. And immediately after, it would be over. The audience could go home and think about the semblance of the meaning and feel the semblance of the emotion. Even if the hero got killed, it would still make sense. Art, Bell decided, creative art—was shit.

  Beside him Witt, who was apparently not bothered by any of these problems, raised himself to his knees and cautiously stuck his head up over the ledge. Bell went on with his thinking.

  Here there was no semblance of meaning. And the emotions were so many and so mixed up that they were indecipherable, could not be untangled. Nothing had been decided, nobody had learned anything. But most important of all, nothing had ended. Even if they had captured this whole ridge, nothing would have ended. Because tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, they would be called upon to do the same thing again—maybe under even worse circumstances. The concept was so overpowering, so numbing, that it shook Bell. Island after island, hill after hill, beachhead after beachhead, year after year. It staggered him.