The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

  “Mother! Mother!”

  When his rifle was empty, he threw it at the embrasure, drew his pistol and began firing that. With his left hand he tore a grenade from his belt, stopped firing the pistol long enough to pull the pin with one finger, and lobbed the grenade over onto the camouflaged roof of the emplacement, which he could now see clearly since it was only about twenty yards away, and where the grenade exploded uselessly and without effect. Then, continuing to fire the pistol, he charged on. Only when the pistol ceased to fire for want of ammunition did he come to his senses and realize where he was. Then he turned and ran. Luckily for him, he did not turn back toward the others but simply ran blindly off to the right—though he would deny this later. In that direction the curving ledge was only ten yards away, and he reached it before the mass of the Japanese fire, which by now as if getting over its start had commenced again, could find him and cut him down.

  From behind him as he ran the ten yards a dark round fizzing object arched over his head and fell a few feet in front of him. Automatically Doll kicked at it with his foot as if placekicking a football and ran on. It bounced away a few yards and exploded in a cloud of black smoke which knocked him down. But when he fell he found that there was nothing under him; he had fallen over the ledge. His foot stinging painfully, he bounced to the foot of the ledge at almost the exact spot where Private Catch had been killed, landed with a bonejarring thud, then rolled another twelve yards further down the hillside before he could get himself stopped. For a while he just lay in the grass, breathing in groans, bruised, sore, the wind knocked out of him, half-blinded, thinking dully of almost nothing. This one had not been like his other experiences: the zigzag run back from 1st Platoon, then the return to find Skinny Culn, not like the charge up the ridge with Keck. This one had been horrible, totally and completely horrible, without any relieving qualities or graces. He devoutly hoped he would never have even to think of it again. When he looked at his shoe, he found a neat little slit a sixteenth of an inch long just above the ankle bone. Where the fuck was he, anyway? He knew where he was, but was he alone? What had happened to the others? Where were they? At the moment all he could think about was that he wanted to be with people, so he could put his arms around somebody and they could put their arms around him. With this in mind he got up, climbed to the ledge and ran gasping back along it till he came to the trough, where he almost ran headon into the others, all sitting against the rock and gasping breathlessly. Only one of them, the Sergeant from Baker Company, had been hurt, and he had had his shoulder smashed by an MG bullet.

  “Doll,” Captain Gaff gasped, before Doll could apologize, make excuses or explain away what he had done, “I’m personally recommending you to Colonel Tall for the Distinguished Service Cross. You saved all our lives, and I never saw such bravery. I shall write the recommendation myself, and I shall pursue it. I promise you.”

  Doll could hardly believe his own ears. “Well, Sir, it wasn’t nothin,” he gasped modestly. “I was scared.” He could see Charlie Dale looking at him with a kind of hate-filled envy from where he leaned gasping against the ledge. Ha, you fucker! Doll thought with a sudden explosion of pleasure.

  “But to have the presence of mind to remember that the ledge was ten yards off there to the right,” Gaff gasped, “that was wonderful.”

  “Well, Sir, you know, I was with the first patrol,” Doll said and smiled at Dale.

  “So were some of these others,” young Captain Gaff said. He was still breathing heavily but beginning to get his breath back. “Are you okay? You’re not hurt?”

  “Well, Sir, I don’t know,” Doll smiled, and proceeded to show them the tiny slit in his boot.

  “What’s that from?”

  “A Jap handgrenade. I kicked it away.” He bent to unlace the shoe. “I better look.” Inside he found the little piece of metal, which had slipped to the bottom of his shoe like a pebble, but in actual truth he had not even felt it during the run back along the ledge. “Hunh!” he lied, laughing. “I thought I had a rock in my shoe.” It had struck his anklebone just above its peak and cut it slightly; it had bled a little into his sweat-wet sock.

  “By God!” Gaff exclaimed. “It’s only a scratch, but by God I’m recommending you for the Purple Heart, too. You might as well have it. But you’re all right except for that?”

  “I lost my rifle,” Doll said.

  “Take Lieutenant Gray’s,” Gaff said. He looked around at the others. “We better be getting back. And tell them we couldn’t take the objective. Can a couple of you drag Lieutenant Gray?” Gaff turned to the Baker Company sergeant. “You all right? Think you can make it?”

  “I’m all right,” the Baker Co sergeant said with a grin that was more a pained grimace. “It only hurts when I laugh. But I want to thank you!” he said, turning to Doll.

  “Don’t thank me,” Doll said, and laughed shyly, brilliant eyed, with a new magnanimity born of his sudden recognition. He had forgotten all about wanting to put his arms around somebody, or have them put their arms around him. “But what about you? Are you going to be all right?” He looked down at the bloody hand from which blood dripped slowly as the arm hung useless against the sergeant’s side, and suddenly he was scared again.

  “Sure, sure,” the sergeant said happily. “I’m out of it now. I’ll be going back. I hope I’m crippled a little.”

  “Come on, you guys,” Captain Gaff said. “Let’s move. You can talk it over later. Dale, you and Witt drag Lieutenant Gray. Bell, you help the sergeant. I’ll take the walkie-talkie. Doll, you rearguard us. Them little brown brothers, as the Colonel likes to call them, are liable to send some people down here after us, you know.”

  And thus arranged the little party made its way back. The Japanese sent no one after them. Gaff with the radio, Bell and the B-for-Baker sergeant behind him, then Dale and Witt dragging the dead lieutenant’s body by its two feet, with Doll bringing up the rear, they did not make a very prepossessing sight as they came crawling around the corner into view of the Battalion. But Gaff had been talking to them on the way back.

  “If we do get another chance at it tomorrow, I think we can take it,” he said, “and I for one am going to volunteer for the assignment. If we crawl on across that open space and get behind the little rise, we can come around in behind them and come down on them from above. That’s what we should have done today. From above like that we can put the grenades to them easier than hell. And that’s what I’m going to tell the Colonel.”

  And strangely enough, there was not one of them but who wanted to go back with him—excepting of course the Baker Company sergeant who of course could not go. Even John Bell wanted to go, just like all the others. Automatons all. What was it? Why? Bell did not know. What was this peculiar masochistic, self-destructive quality in himself which made him want to get out in the open and expose himself to danger and gunfire as he had that first time at the trough? Once as a child—(once? many times, and in many different ways, but this one particular time when he was fifteen, and the memory assailed him now so strongly that it was as if he were actually there, living it again)—once he had gone for a tramp in one of the Ohio woods outside his town. This particular woods had a cliff and a cave, if you could call a hole four feet deep in the rock a cave, and up above the cliff there was more woods for about fifty yards which ended at a gravelled country road. Across the gravel road farmers were working in their fields. Hearing their voices and the snorts and jingles of their horses and harness, he had a strange sweet secretive excitement. Peeking through the screen of leaves that marked the end of the wood, he could see them, four men in overalls and rubber boots standing beside the fence, but they could not see him. A lot of cars used this gravelled country road, too. One of the cars, with a man and three women in it, stopped to talk to the four men, and Bell suddenly knew what he was going to do. In a sweet, hot rush of visceral excitement he retreated through the trees almost all the way back to the clifftop and began to take off his cloth
es. Naked as the day he was born in the warm, rich June air, sporting a throbbing erection, he crept like an Indian back to the screen of leaves, the twigs and old leaves crunching noiselessly under his bare feet, leaving his clothes and his sandwiches back there behind him because that was all part of it: his clothes must be far enough away so that he could never reach them in time if he were caught or seen, otherwise it was cheating; and standing just behind the leaf screen, where he could see them and the expressions on all their faces, trembling violently in his excitement and excitation, he masturbated. Crawling along behind Captain Gaff beneath a ledge on Guadalcanal, helping along the wounded sergeant beside him, John Bell stopped and stared, transfixed by a revelation. And the revelation, brought on by his old memory, and which he was forced to face, was that his volunteering, his climb out into the trough that first time, even his participation in the failed assault, all were—in some way he could not fully understand—sexual, and as sexual, and in much the same way, as his childhood incident of the gravelled road.

  “Ouch!” said the sergeant beside him. “God damn it!”

  “Oh! I’m sorry!” Bell said.

  He had not thought of that episode in a long time. When he had told that one to his wife Marty, it had excited her too, and they had gone rushing off to bed together to make love. Ahhhhh, Marty! The silent cry was like an explosion wrung involuntarily from his bowels.

  Covertly Bell with his new knowledge looked around at the others. Were their reactions sexual too, then? How to know? He couldn’t tell. But he knew that he himself, as had all the others said too, would be volunteering to go back again tomorrow if the chance arose. Partly it was an esprit de corps and a closeness of comradeship coming from having shared something a bit tougher than the rest. Partly it was Captain Gaff whom he liked and respected more and more all the time. And partly, for him at least, it was that other thing, which he could hardly name, that thing of sexuality. Could it be that with the others? Could it be that all war was basically sexual? Not just in psych theory, but in fact, actually and emotionally? A sort of sexual perversion? Or a complex of sexual perversions? That would make a funny thesis and God help the race.

  But whether or not Bell could discover in his comrades anything about their sexual involvement, and he couldn’t, he could read something else in their faces. That spiritual numbness and sense of no longer feeling human which he had become aware of in himself on the way up, was growing apace on all their faces. Even Gaff who had only been up here with them for a couple of hours was showing a bit of it now. So Bell was not alone. And when they crawled, limping and licking their wounds, back into the midst of the Battalion, which was already beginning to take on the look of a permanent, organized position, which indeed it was, or was soon to become, he was able to note the same ahumanness in many other faces, some more than others, all of them almost precisely measurable in direct ratio to what the owner of the face had been through since dawn today. Next to his own little assault group, those who had made the first crossing with Keck showed it the most.

  It was getting very close to dark. In their absence, they found most of Charlie had on Colonel Tall’s orders already dug themselves in a few yards back from the ledge. As it turned out, their little battle had been heard and interpreted correctly as a failure, and because of this B-for-Baker had been ordered to pass below and to the rear of Charlie, curving their flanks uphill to join and thus completing the defensive circle, and were now busily at work digging their holes for the night. There was to be no withdrawal. Holes for themselves, the little assault force, were already being dug for them, also on Colonel Tall’s orders.

  And as it also turned out, as they found out almost immediately, they were going to get a chance at the bunker again tomorrow. Colonel Tall made this plain to them as soon as he took Captain Gaff’s report. Colonel Tall’s plan for a night attack, about which they knew nothing and of which they heard with astonishment, had been vetoed by the Division Commander. But at least, Colonel Tall said, he had made the offer. Anyway, he agreed with Captain Gaff’s tactical interpretation completely. He shook hands with Doll first because of his recommendation for the DSC, then with each of the others, excepting of course Lieutenant Gray, who was already on his way back to Hill 209 on a stretcher. Then, tucking his bamboo baton under his arm, he dismissed the enlisted men and turned to a dispositions discussion about tomorrow with the officers.

  Colonel Tall’s plan, which he had devised after receiving the news of the rejection of his proposed night attack, was one calculated to take account of every contingency, and it utilized—as Bugger Stein was quick to note—Stem’s suggestion of today to explore the right for the possibility of a flanking maneuver. Before dawn Stein was to take his C-for-Charlie Company (less the men with Gaff) back across the third fold and move down the hollow to the right into the jungle which had been so quiet today. Unless he encountered very heavy resistance, he was to push on to the top of the Elephant’s Head from the rear. “That Elephant’s Trunk is one hell of a fine escape route for our brown brothers,” smiled Colonel Tall. If Stein could get astride of it higher up where the slopes were steeper, perhaps they could bottle up the whole force. Meantime, Baker would be moved by Captain Task up to the ledge, where he would wait the reduction of the strongpoint by Captain Gaff’s assault force to begin his uphill frontal attack. “I’m giving you the roundabout flanking movement, Stein, because it was your idea in the first place,” said Colonel Tall. Perhaps, but only perhaps, and then even only to Stein, there was a veiled double meaning in the slightly thin way Tall said it.

  “That Bell,” Colonel Tall said after the discussion of his plan was over. He looked off to where he had thoughtfully placed the assault force near to Gaff’s hole and his own. “He’s a good man.” This time the unspoken meaning was clear to every officer present, since they all knew, and they knew Tall knew, about Bell’s past as an officer.

  “He sure is!” young Captain Gaff put in with boyish enthusiasm, and without reservation.

  “In my company I have always found him an excellent soldier,” Stein said when Tall glanced at him.

  Tall said no more, and so neither did Stein. He was willing enough to let well enough alone. Stein had increasingly found himself put by Tall into the position of a guilty schoolboy who had failed his exam, although the Colonel had never said anything to him openly or directly. Slowly the talk among the officers drifted back to the outlook for tomorrow as they squatted in the center of the position. It was almost quiet now; the high racketing which had hung in the air all day had ceased some time ago, and only sporadic riflefire was heard now in the distance. Both sides lay waiting and breathing.

  And as the twilight deepened, that was the way they remained: the little knot of officers in the center discussing the prospects and possibilities of tomorrow, the men in the holes around the circle checking and cleaning their weapons: the Battalion at the end of its first real day of real combat: neither successful nor unsuccessful, nothing decided, exhausted, growing number. Just before full dark the officers parted and went to their own holes to lie down and wait with the men for the expected Japanese night attack. Perhaps the worst thing was that now one could no longer smoke. That, and the shortage of water. A few more men had collapsed during the late afternoon and been carted away like the wounded, and many more remained on the verge of collapse. Fear was a problem too, more in some, less in others, according to how far the ahuman numbness had advanced in each. John Bell was not afraid at all now, he found. Wait until the shooting started, to get scared.

  They were paired off of course in each two holes, one man to guard, one to sleep; but nobody slept very much. Quite a few men, spending their first night outside their own lines, fired at shadows, fired at everything, fired at nothing, revealing their positions; but the expected Japanese night attack did not develop, though they did manage to cut both companies’ sound power phone lines. Probably they were too weak and too sick to attack. And so the Battalion lay and waited for
the dawn. Along about two o’clock John Bell suffered another malarial attack of chills and fever like the one he had had two days before on the road, except that this one was much worse. At its worst he was shaking so uncontrollably that he would have been of no use to anybody if the Japanese had attacked. And he was not alone. First Sergeant Welsh, clutching his precious musette bag containing the leatherbound Morning Report book in which for tomorrow he had already recorded in the dusk all of the personnel changes of today: “KIA; WIA; Sick;”—suffered his first malarial attack, which was worse than Bell’s second one, though neither knew it about the other. And there were others.

  One man who had to shit did his business in the corner of his hole cursing hysterically, and spent the rest of the night trying to keep his feet out of it. To have gotten out of your hole was worth your life with this bunch.

  CHAPTER 5

  BILLIONS OF HARD, bright stars shone with relentless glitter all across the tropic night sky. Underneath this brilliant canopy of the universe, the men lay wide awake and waited. From time to time the same great cumuli of the day, black blobs now, sailed their same stately route across the bright expanse blotting out portions of it, but no rain fell on the thirsting men. For the first time since they had been up in these hills it did not rain at all during the night. The night had to be endured, and it had to be endured dry, beneath its own magnificent beauty. Perhaps of them all only Colonel Tall enjoyed it.

  Finally, though it was still black night, cautionary stirrings and whispers sibilated along the line from hole to hole as the word to move out was passed. In the inhuman, unreal unlight of false dawn the grubby, dirtyfaced remnants of C-for-Charlie sifted from their holes and coagulated stiffly into their squads and platoons to begin their flanking move. There was not one of them who did not carry his cuts, bruises or abrasions from having flung himself violently to the ground the day before. Thick fat rolls of dirt pressed beneath the mudcaked fingernails of their hands, greasy from cleaning weapons. They had lost forty-eight men or just over one-fourth of their number yesterday in killed, wounded or sick; nobody doubted they would lose more today. The only question remaining was: Which ones of us? Who exactly?