The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

  Queen, though stiffening badly and still bleeding, was still chipper enough to enjoy booting and clubbing his charges down the trail with hysterical joyousness whenever they fell behind, and the rest of the party had joined in the fun. Now Queen gave his considered opinion.

  “I say shoot the fucker,” he grinned, growling. “Look at him.”

  “You know Ol’ Shorty ordered us to get them all back alive,” someone else said.

  “So we’ll say he tried to escape,” Queen said.

  “Him?” someone said. “Look at him.”

  “So who’ll see him?” Queen said.

  “I’m with Queen,” someone else said. “Remember what they did to our guys on the Bataan Death March.”

  “But Shorty gave us personal orders,” the first man said. He was the corporal in charge of the four unwounded guards. “You know damn well he’s gonna check up if one turns up missin. What if he has Intelliegence ask these other guys what happened to their buddy? I don’t want to get in no trouble, that’s all.”

  “Well, it’s either that or carry him,” Queen said with finality. “I’m not about to carry no fuckin Jap all the way back to Hill 209. Are you? Anyway, I outrank you. I’m a sergeant. I say kill him. Look at him. Be doin’ the poor fuck a favor.” He looked around at the others.

  “The corprl’s right,” Storm said, putting in for the first time. He had been thinking it all over, pros and cons. “Shorty’s sure to check up if one is missin. If we shoot him or lose him, he’ll be on our ass like a bullwhip, spittin and bitin. Might even court-martial us.” He did not add that he was a S/Sgt, and thus outranked Queen.

  Queen stared down at the Japanese man, then shrugged and grinned ruefully. “Okay. I guess you’re right,” he said goodnaturedly. “It looks like we carry him.” He slapped his great palms together. “All right then! Come on! I’ll take a leg! Who wants the rest of him?”

  Storm, who wisely had already considered this problem, too, and decided he preferred vomit to feces, moved over to him and took an arm. Two of the other wounded got hold of the other arm and leg, and with Queen comically in command and calling the movements for them like a coxswain of a crew shell hollering “Stroke!”, the party moved off down the trail again.

  Queen’s goodnatured surrender to wisdom, plus his comical commands about portaging the sick Japanese, had put them all back into the high humor of their departure. Whooping and hollering they descended the steep hillside in a sort of nonsensical hysteria of cruel fun, slipping and sliding, one or another of them falling from time to time, and all of them except the four portagers who had all they could take care of, booting or shoving their seven walking prisoners to make them keep up. “Hey, Jap,” one of them cried once. “Come on, Jap! Tell the truth! Ain’t you glad you don’t have to fight no more now? Hunh? Ain’t you?” The Japanese he had addressed, who obviously did not understand a word, bobbed and bowed and nodded his head smiling numbly. “See there!” cried the guard. “I told you! They don’t want to fight no more than we do! What’s all this Emperor shit?” “Just you don’t give him your loaded rifle,” laughed another, “and then see how much he want to fight.” Queen soon caught on to the fact that he had made a mistake by taking a leg to carry. Both of the men on the sick man’s legs had difficulty keeping out of the way of the jets of yellow liquid the nude Japanese kept squirting as they bobbled him along down the steep hillside, and Queen goodnaturedly chided Storm for being smart enough to take an arm without letting him in on the idea. Then he had an idea of his own. “Let’s bump him a little,” he said as they came to a rock. “Maybe we can knock the shit out of him, hunh? Or, at least, enough of it to make him stop till we get him down.” Swinging him in unison, they bumped his behind against the rock and made him squirt, all of them laughing uproariously. The other Japanese bobbed and grinned, because they too had gotten the idea by now. Nevertheless, the bumping did little good. He kept right on squirting as they continued to carry him down. Conscious enough to blink his open eyes from time to time, he was too far gone, too near out, to control his bowels, and when his head hit the ground from time to time it did not even make him flinch. They would bump him against every rock they came to as they went on down, and then go on. When they delivered him to Regimental Hq, a doctor was called and went to work on him immediately. It was interesting to note that Big Queen passed out two minutes later on his way down the reverse slope and rolled the rest of the way down into the Battalion aid station, causing great consternation.

  Storm on his hospital cot with his head in his hands (he had given up trying to talk to the dead face of Fife in front of him) remembered everything in a state of agonized numbness which try as he would, he could not pull himself back up out of. His whole soul seemed anesthetized as if shot with a massive hypo of some powerful drug. This scared him, but he could not shake it. How long ago had it been? that all that had happened? Only a couple of hours. And laughing. They all laughed. Storm didn’t care about those Japs. All those Japs had coming to them everything they got and more. That didn’t bother him. But it had all been done in that state of numbness, he could see that now. Not only him but the other guys, too. Maybe even the Japs too. Storm had always thought of himself as a decent man. Sure, he had been rough on KPs and cooks in his time, to make them work. Had even beat up a couple, when he had to. But he did not believe in kicking a man when he was down, taking advantage of a weak person, or stealing from the poor. That was his code and he had always tried to live by it. Now he had to face the possibility that maybe he wasn’t so decent after all. And not only that, he who had always believed in never letting a friend down, was here preparing to try and use his hand to get him out of the company, out of the Battalion, out of the whole fucking combat zone. And what was more, he knew it was the only sane thing to do.

  “Well what about your hand there?” Fife said hollowly from in front of him. The silence had gone on and on, and Fife had been thinking about himself again. To have gone through all that: the explosion, the blacking out, the pain, the blood, the fear, and then to find out that it all really meant nothing. He had suffered all the terror, fear and agony of being killed in action and had not gained a thing from it. Fife felt he must talk to somebody about it, but he did not see how he could come out and boldly admit to someone he was that much of a coward.

  Storm had raised his head and was now staring at Fife with dark, haunted eyes. “Since you ain’t a doctor I guess I can tell you the truth,” he said, and looked down at it glumly in his lap. He raised it and flexed it and they both could hear it grate. “I got a pretty solid hunch it ain’t ever gonna get me off this Rock,” Storm said.

  “They’ve already told me that about my head wound,” Fife said.

  Around them in the big, dim tent in the hot afternoon air orderlies stirred and moved quietly about on the mud floor, and here and there men groaned from within their bandages.

  “I can move it. And it don’t really hurt too bad,” Storm said glumly. “But I ain’t got any strength left in it.”

  Two orderlies and a doctor came hurrying down the aisle between the cots past them and one of the orderlies said in a matter-of-fact voice, “I think he’s had it, Sir.” They stopped at a cot eight beds further up.

  “But you never thought you were going to die with it,” Fife said. “Did you?”

  Storm looked up at him. “No. No, I never thought that with it.”

  “I did.”

  Up the way the doctor was fussing over the man on the cot. Then he stood up. “Okay,” he said to the orderlies in a strangely angry voice. “Get the meat board and blankets and get him out of here. We need the fucking beds. How about Number 33?” An orderly said, “About twenty minutes or a half hour, Sir, I think.” The doctor snapped, “Call me.” They all left along the aisle in the high, dim, hot-aired tent.

  “I really did,” Fife said.

  “Yeah, I remember it. I was layin not far from you. You looked pretty bad then.”

  “And nothin
g,” Fife said bitterly. “Nothing! Not a fucking thing. Not even a fracture.”

  “It’s just tough luck,” Storm said sympathetically.

  “And I’m worried about losing my glasses,” Fife said. “I can’t really see very well without them, you know.”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  “They laughed.”

  After a while, Storm said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Fife. Whether I get off The Rock with this” (he raised his hand) “or not. I don’t have to go back up there to the front with the compny, and I’m not going to. I’m a Messergeant. I ain’t even supposed to be up there. Me and my cooks’ll get the kitchen as close as we can, and I’ll get them guys up hot meals every time I can. But fuck this volunteering shit. They got them hot meals coming to them—if they can get them. But that’s all. No more volunteer fightin. I ain’t required to, I ain’t supposed to be, and I ain’t.”

  “What about me? I’m the Forward Echelon clerk. I got to go.”

  “I’m sorry,” Storm said.

  “Yeah.” There didn’t seem to be anything else left to say. Fife still had not got said what he had been trying to say, nor had he come anywhere near it. How did you go about telling someone you were a coward? How you had never thought you would be a coward, but it had turned out that you were?

  “I’m a coward,” he said to Storm.

  “So am I,” Storm said immediately. “And so is everybody who ain’t a fucking goddam fool.”

  “Some of the guys ain’t. Witt, and Doll, and Bell. Even Charlie Dale.”

  “Then they’re fools,” Storm said without hesitation.

  “You don’t understand,” Fife began, but a sleeping man near them began to scream and then woke up. Fife jumped up and ran over to him and patted his shoulder. “Jerry. Jerry,” the man said, then “Oh!” when he saw Fife. After a moment he sighed and said, “It’s okay.” Fife came back.

  “I mean really a coward,” he said.

  “What did you think I meant?” Storm said.

  “But with you it’s different.”

  “No it ain’t.”

  “I mean, I didn’t want to be a coward.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to be one either, I guess,” Storm said. “But I am.” He flexed his bad hand and it grated. “Thank God I don’t have to go back up there, that’s all.”

  “But I do,” Fife said.

  “I’m sorry,” Storm said again. And it was clear that he was sorry. But his tone pointed out that even while he was sorry, all that really had nothing at all to do with him. Still, Fife felt better. Storm took being a coward so much more in his stride somehow, and it made Fife feel less unmanly. Also, Fife had learned another thing. While Storm had said he was sorry and had meant it, this still had nothing to do with Fife and changed nothing. His belly-grinding misery remained exactly the same. And he could see now that it would be the same with everybody else he talked to.

  “Maybe I could come to work for you in the kitchen,” Fife said suddenly. “I mean, since Dale will be making line sergeant, you’ll have a vacancy, won’t you?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Can you cook?”

  “No, but I can learn.”

  “Well, but there’s already a lot of guys in the compny who can already cook. If you can get the Compny Commander to move you to the kitchen force, I’ll accept you.”

  “Brass Band? He would never let me go. And anyway I could never make myself ask him.”

  “It’s the best I can do.”

  “Yeah,” Fife said, twisting his neck from side to side and peering around the big tent. “I know, I know.”

  It had been a silly idea anyway, and he didn’t bring it up again. He could never become a cook. It was a coward’s pipedream, and he couldn’t blame Storm for that. The grinding envy he felt for Storm’s good luck in having a means by which to avoid going back up with the company was huge and bitter and enormously covetous. But in spite of that he kept coming back around to Storm every day, and they spent a lot of time together. It was better than lying miserable and depressed in his own little overheated, badly pitched tent. Together they were able to find six other C-for-Charlie men scattered around the compound, five of whom could walk. Every day this little group would gather at Storm’s bunk to talk, pay a visit to the bedfast man, secure for themselves a sunny spot in the cocopalms where they sat with their shirts off and spent the rest of the day discussing their possibilities of being evacuated. It was absolutely impossible to find anything at all to drink, but every night there was an openair movie which they attended in a body to look nostalgically at the glittering, free, sophisticated life of Manhattan, Washington and California which they were fighting for but which none of them had ever seen outside of the films. Films like “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle” with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Invariably the airraids interrupted these showings, and in five days Storm and Fife saw parts of five films without ever seeing the end of one, but that didn’t really matter much since all of them had seen them all years ago. After the airraids, they would sit up smoking and talking about possible evacuations. Nobody wanted to go back to C-for-Charlie.

  It was Storm who organized the expedition to visit Bugger Stein. Regimental Rear Echelon Headquarters was only a short piece down the road, and Storm had learned from some courier or some old buddy of his at Regiment that Stein was staying there while waiting to be shipped out. So one afternoon, after discussing it, the group of seven walkables simply walked off with Storm in the lead to pay their respects to their Company Commander whom they had once hated but now admired, and tell him goodby. There were no guards or fences to stop them like there would have been in a civilized camp hospital, and they simply walked off through the sunblazing hot sweltering afternoon. After all, where was anybody going to run away to on this fucking island, that they needed guards?

  Stein was at work in his little tent sorting what few papers he had, when his guests arrived and took him by surprise. He had only just learned that he would be going out tomorrow to New Zealand by plane. He had a bloodstained battleflag, a Luger-type pistol, two officers’ collar insignias, and sundry photographs and leather articles as souvenirs to prove he had been here, and his personal baggage waited ready on the floor around him. Stein had spent the last three days hunting down that baggage. The Regimental Commander had kindly given him the use of a jeep, though he could not now allow him a driver of course under the circumstances, he said. Stein had enjoyed driving around the island by himself. At the company’s old bivouac near the airfield, where they had packed and laced down in the tents their “A” and “B” bags, he had found another outfit encamped there, with their own tents pitched in their own, to him entirely strange, formation. Not a trace of C-for-Charlie remained. After that, he had driven from the Matanikau through Lunga Point and the bustling welter of supply dumps to the far end of Red Beach twice, asking questions and hunting the C-for-Charlie cache. He finally found it not too far from the company’s old original first bivouac, half-in half-out of a little spur of jungle. Stein had no idea who might have done all this work of loading and unloading bags, striking and re-pitching tents, but they must have worked at it the whole five days of the battle. He spent one entire afternoon sweltering in the hot bright sun or sweating in the humid jungle shade looking through the tents for his own two bags, but he had enjoyed it—largely because he was alone—and now he was ready to go whenever they told him.

  This thing of preferring to be alone had grown on him steadily over the four days since he had come down. The second evening—after his first full day down here below—he had decided to brazen it out, and had gone over to the Regimental ‘Officers Club’ for a drink after supper. After all, officially (and even unofficially), the way Tall had laid it out to him, it was not supposed to be a stigma.

  The ‘Club’, which was the Regimental Commander’s idea, was really no more than an ordinary kitchen fly draped in mosquito netting with a knockup bar made out of crates at which the Regimental Comma
nder’s personal sergeant served. There were camp chairs and one camp table for poker. For after dark there was a blacked out tent right next to it to which they could adjourn. Normally the staff and rear echelon officers were the only ones here to use it, but that night because Tall had secured 1st Battalion a week’s relief most 1st Battalion officers were almost certain to be there too. They would be talking that relaxed, amiable chitchat conversation about tactics which helped all of them himself included to keep up the pretense of sanity. But he should have known better, and after that first time he did not go back. It just wasn’t worth it; the gain in pride just wasn’t worth the cost in energy. And, unaccountably, when he started doing it, he found he preferred being alone.

  It was not that they were nasty to him. Nobody snubbed him. Nobody refused to speak to him. It was just that unless he spoke first, nobody seemed able to find anything to say to him. And that took energy—from both sides. There were several little groups of them sitting around when he first came through the netting. He had the distinct impression that at least one group had been talking about him. Lt Col Tall was the center of another group, one which Stein sensed had very definitely not been talking about him. Tall nodded and smiled pleasantly with his lined, young-looking, handsome face, but at the same time he very deftly gave the impression that he thought Stein should not have come here. Stein had walked nodding and helloing straight to the bar and leaning on its structure of crates ordered a drink. He drank it there alone. But during his second Fred Carr, the Regimental S-1 and Stein’s old drinking buddy from the Officers Club back home, got up from his group and came over looking strange and unhappy. Because they had not seen each other since before the battle they shook hands and Fred stood and talked to him a while, mostly about the extraordinary encounter he had had with young Corporal Fife (Stein recognized who it was, though Carr didn’t know his name) coming down in a jeep wounded. Carr’s talk was rushed and nervous, but Stein appreciated the gesture in an objective way. A little later Captain John Gaff came in looking pretty drunk, though obviously nobody cared about that with Johnny Gaff, and he too came over and talked to Stein at the bar, mostly about yesterday’s mopping up operation and how well it had gone. He too, like Fred Carr, looked unhappy and finally excused himself. Gaff then joined Colonel Tall. Stein who was on his fourth drink now signed for them, all of which money went into the Regimental Officers’ Fund by order of the Regimental Commander, and left. After that he bought a bottle and kept it on the little camp table in his tent. He liked to sit in the little tent whose two ends had been opened up and covered with netting and watch it get dark in the coconut groves. He never bothered to close the tent down and black it out so he could have a light, and when the planes came over he would sit quietly in the dark without any fear and listen to the bombings, having a small drink from time to time. He was not at all afraid. Of course the whiskey helped, though he never got drunk, and he kept a bottle on the little camp table all the time. In fact, there was one there when the seven wounded C-for-Charlieites came crowding into the tent to say goodby to him, and Stein seized it and offered them all a drink thinking that not so long ago he would never have dared do such a thing for fear that it might impair discipline.