Battle Cry (67 page)

“How far do you want us to go?”

“Not ‘us.’ You don’t go out tonight, Max.”

“Aw hell, Colonel.”

“Send Lieutenant Rackley, he’s got eyes in back of his head. McQuade and Paris, you go along too. Move as far up as you can. Get the picture of the terrain. As soon as you contact them, shag-ass back.”

“Aye aye, sir,” McQuade and Paris said.

“We’d better use a password tonight.”

“May I suggest
Helen,
” Wellman said.

“Helen it is. Pass it on.”

The machine gunners of the other companies were already filtering past us for the front. Shapiro put his helmet on over the hair which now looked like a permanent wave and mudpack combination. “If you start fighting, you are not to commit Fox Company without my orders, understand, Max?” Shapiro nodded. “Gunner, have a telephone line run in there.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Dark was coming quickly. We went over our weapons in a final check and then, out of nowhere, native women and children began to shyly edge into our bivouac. At first we were scared that they might be lepers, but were assured that the colony had not been in existence since the British were run off some years back. The natives seemed in a jovial mood. It was really the first time we had had to sit about and exchange chatter. Under the stern eyes of the officers we kept a talking distance from the women. Before long a group of them began singing and the entire camp gathered about. First shades of night were lightened by a huge white moon which dipped low on the lagoon. The sturdy, handsome people sang an ancient song, maybe as old as time itself. Their primitive harmony, born from sheer love of music, awed us. We stamped and applauded for more. They accepted our offerings of gum and cigarettes and sang again. Every new song brought a melody with beautiful harmony. The swelling chorus drifted over the glass-still waters as the group of tattered Marines sat entranced. Then, their voices blended in a familiar tune, and after their own words they sang the words that were known by us:

“Oh, come all ye faithful,

Joyful and triumphant,

Oh, come ye, oh, come ye…”

Muffled voices sent me springing up with my carbine. Burnside arose with a knife in hand. I had a hard time opening my eyes, which were puffed shut from mosquito bites. Through the netting I made out Pedro and Doc Kyser coming down the road. Behind them was McQuade and three stretchers sagging. Moans came from one of them. Colonel Huxley jumped from his hole, followed, as always, by Ziltch.

“The patrol,” Burnside whispered.

“That’s Paris on a stretcher,” I said.

“Lay them over there. Pedro, get that plasma.” Pedro bent over the moaning Marine and squinted at his dogtag.

“Type O, we have a pint or two, quick.”

“Hokay.”

“Put sulfa on and dress those other two lads,” Kyser ordered another corpsman.

“Aye aye, sir.”

I recognized the anguished boy as a corporal, a squad leader from Alabama. He was in bad shape with a hole in his stomach. Kyser moved him to a place where he could get some light to perform the transfusion. “I hope we don’t run out of plasma before we stop the bleeding,” Doc muttered.

Paris and the other men accepted their treatment easily. The Intelligence sergeant sat up and emitted a shaky smile. Pedro gave him a shot of brandy to steady him.

“Where did you get hit?” I asked.

He held up his right hand. Four fingers were torn away. “Stateside survey,” he said, “finally made it.”

“Can you talk, Paris?” Huxley asked.

“I’m all right, sir.” Highpockets knelt beside the stretcher as Paris gave the story. “We moved out and went up about two hundred yards to where the island starts getting wider. In dead center there is a clearing and a big camp. We counted thirty huts and an observation tower by the ocean. The camp has a lot of big boulders in it and it will make good cover. We went through the camp, it was empty. There is open ground for fifty yards past it, then brush. It’s thicker than hell. The Japs were waiting in the brush for us, we didn’t even see them.” Paris grimaced as Pedro tightened a tourniquet on his wrist. He reached to scratch his beard with the stubs of his fingers, then brought his hand down slowly and stared at it.

“Good work. Take it easy, lad.”

“Thank you sir.”

“Where is Lieutenant Rackley?”

“Dead,” McQuade said. “Right through the head. We had to leave him to help the other three back.”

“Too bad. How hard do you estimate they hit you, McQuade?”

“Looks to me like they have a skirmish line in that brush. There was at least two machine guns and they shot like they had plenty of ammunition.”

Huxley whistled under his breath. “How wide is the island up there?”

“Big. Five hundred yards maybe. The camp runs from the center of the island to the ocean. On the lagoon side it’s like jungle.”

Huxley turned to his staff. “Wellman, get Shapiro on the phone. Have him move Fox Company into that abandoned camp and take cover at zero five hundred. Contact Harper and have him move George Company on the flank and move up slowly on the lagoon side and dig in when he straightens his line to meet Fox. Tell him it is jungle thick.”

“Suppose they counterattack?”

“I don’t think they’ll choose to. They are going to make their stand past the clearing of the camp in that brush. We can move to the camp in comparative safety, I believe.”

“Got any ideas of how we are going to get at them past the clearing?”

“We’ll come to that tomorrow. I want to take a look in daylight.” He turned to McQuade. “You’d better stay here tonight.”

“I’d better get back up with Max…er, I mean Captain Shapiro. He’s so mad he’ll probably go after them tonight if I don’t get him calmed down.” Huxley smiled as the large-gutted gunny hitched his belt over his sagging stomach and headed back for Fox Company.

“Gunner.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Radio the destroyer. I want them in the lagoon as close to shore as they can get. Radio to Bairiki and ask them to send some landing craft up here so we can shuttle the wounded to the destroyer.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Through the night I was awakened by the terrible itching. My hands were swelling fast under the impact of a hundred mosquito bites. With each fitful awakening I sat up, and each time, I caught a glimpse of the gangly skipper still sitting by the water’s edge, his knees up, his arm draped about them and his head half nodding. Early in the morning I climbed from my hole and walked over to him. The rest of the camp was asleep except for the radio watch and the corpsman.

“Mind if I sit down, sir?”

“Oh, hello, Mac.” I looked about and saw Ziltch propped against a tree ten yards away with his eyes ever watchful on his skipper.

“How did the fellow with the stomach wound make out, sir?”

“Dead…not enough plasma to do him any good. He had a widowed mother with three other sons in the service. One of them went down on the
Saratoga.
”

It seemed strange that with the burden of eight hundred men in his command he should be so concerned over the loss of one.

“We picked a dandy spot. These mosquitoes are murder tonight, sir.”

“Hadn’t you better get some sleep, Mac?”

“Kind of hard. I saw you up and I wondered if you were feeling all right.”

“I always did say you’d make a fine chaplain…go to sleep.”

“Aye aye, sir.” I returned to my infested hole and snuggled in close to Burnside. For the first time, I felt sorry for Sam Huxley.

Marion and Lighttower were in the aid station. Mary couldn’t open either eye and the Injun’s face was lopsided. They were assured that the condition was temporary and they would be able to join us by the time we were ready to move up. Marion’s eyes were distorted so that the flesh of his eyelids had overlapped his glasses and cemented them to his face.

They joined the squad around the radios and awaited orders. Up front there was an increased tempo of gunfire as Fox and George Companies were moving out.

“Yes sir, yes sir. We’ll have your dress blues when you get to San Diego, just sign here,” L.Q. chattered.

“I wish they wouldn’t give us so much chow. A man can’t fight proper when he’s so stuffed up.” There had been no breakfast.

“Butts on that cigarette.”

“Butts on them butts.”

Four walking wounded straggled down the road and asked for the aid station. “How’s it going up there?” Andy asked.

“Rough.”

Then came a half dozen stretchers straining under their gore-drenched loads.

“Looks like we’re getting us a nice casualty list. Another couple hours and we’ll be able to rejoin the division.”

A white-robed nun stepped up to Doc Kyser. “Are you in charge here?” she asked.

“Yes, Doctor Kyser is the name, Sister.”

“I am Sister Joan Claude, Mother Superior of the Mission. I would like to offer our services with the wounded.”

The hard-pressed doctor breathed a sigh. “You’ll pardon the play on words, Sister, but you are the answer to a prayer. Do you people understand anything about medicine?”

“Nursing is one of our duties, Doctor.”

“How many are you?”

“Ten.”

“Good, we’ll be able to release the corpsmen for line duty. Pedro!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have all corpsmen in the aid station come here at once for reassignment. This is nice of you people.”

“We are glad to be of service.”

Huxley, Marlin, and Ziltch ducked behind some trees as they approached the Fox Company area. The men before them lay dispersed throughout the abandoned Jap camp, behind boulders, trees, and in protected huts. The air was singing with bullets coming to and from the thicket past the camp.

“Runner,” Huxley called.

The call for a runner went down the line till a Marine leapt from behind a rock and zigged from cover to cover till he slid in beside Huxley. A trail of slugs ripped the earth up behind him.

“Where is Shapiro?”

“How the hell do I know?” the runner answered. “He’s all over.”

“Take us to your CP,” Huxley ordered. The runner fell flat and crawled forward to new cover and waved the party up to him. One by one they crawled up behind him. He dashed for a boulder, and a clatter of fire went up from the brush. Highpockets’ legs opened as he sprinted to the new cover. It was several moments before Ziltch and Marlin could safely be waved over. Marlin dived head first on top of them, then Ziltch came. The orderly tumbled and fell in the open, and Huxley bolted out and literally threw him to the safety of the rock.

“Damn, it’s hot up here,” Marlin bellowed.

“There’s plenty of them in the brush,” Huxley said. The runner pointed to a thatched hut about fifty yards from the ocean. It was hemmed in by trees on the side facing the Japs and offered a natural barrier. Behind the trees a squad of riflemen crouched in protection of the command post. They sprang up for the last dash and bolted across the open ground and tumbled breathlessly into the hut. Gunnery Sergeant McQuade lay flat on his back, his legs crossed and knees up as he enjoyed a cigarette while gazing at the ceiling.

“Sorry to interrupt your siesta, McQuade,” Huxley puffed.

“Hello, Sam,” McQuade said, dropping military formality in deference to the flying bullets.

“Where is Shapiro?”

“He went to straighten the line, he’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Huxley impatiently snarled as he peered out of the hut at the brush. Fox Company was pinned down. To rush the Japs when you couldn’t even see them might cost the entire company. A runner sprinted toward the hut, fell, arose and skittered in. He held his face.

“Man, I’m lucky. Just nicked me. We’re bringing in the telephone,” he panted.

“Lay down a covering fire,” Huxley shouted outside. “Make them lay low, there’s a telephone man trying to get in. Do you people have a mortar here, McQuade?”

“We ran out of mortars an hour after we started.”

“Sonofabitch!”

The telephone man ducked with the reel of wire hanging from his hand as he awaited the signal to move for the CP. His covering fire raged. Huxley gave a signal and the man tore across the field like a whippet, with the wire unrolling behind him. He ducked into the safety of the hut, shakily cut the wire from the reel, and unstrapped the field phone from about his neck. Quick and workmanlike, he peeled the wire and screwed the ends under connecting posts of the phone. He held the butterfly switch down and blew into the receiver. He cranked the handle. “Hello Lincoln White, this is Fox CP.”

“Hello Fox, this is Lincoln White.” The phone man smiled and relaxed as he handed the phone to Huxley.

“Hello, Wellman, this is Huxley. What’s the word back there?”

“Hello, Sam. George Company is getting plastered, drawing a lot of casualties. We’ve got forty or fifty wounded here in the aid station now. Harper says he is ass deep in jungle and trying to move to connect a flank with Fox Company but his position is vulnerable. If Fox can push them out of that thicket, Harper will be able to move forward. Can you move Fox up, Sam?”

“It would be suicide. There’s an open field up here and we can’t even see them.”

“Hang on a minute, Sam. There’s a runner from George Company here now.”

“Where the hell is Shapiro?” Huxley muttered as he waited for Wellman.

“Hello, Sam…are you still there?”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“George Company is pinned down. The Japs are picking them off one by one. Do you want me to have Whistler move Easy Company anywhere?”

“Stand fast. Tell Harper to dig in as best he can. I’ll call you when we can figure out how we’re going to dislodge these bastards. By the way, any word from the alligator?”

“Still a couple hours away.”

“How are the wounded holding up?”

“Fine, splendid. No squawks, good bunch. Sisters from the mission are acting as nurses. Doing a good job under the circumstances.”

Huxley replaced the phone in its case just in time to see the unmistakable, squat figure of the little captain of Fox walking toward the hut several yards away.