The Naked and the Dead (95 page)

            The sun came out again, inflamed the wet kunai grass and dried the earth whose moisture rose in sluggish clouds of mist. The men gasped, took deep useless breaths of the leaden wet air, and shambled forward grunting and sobbing, their arms slowly and inevitably bending toward the ground. They would start off carrying Wilson at waist level but by the time they set him down thirty or forty yards ahead his weight had bent them over until the litter was skimming the ground. The grass interfered with them, tripping at their feet, and meshing against their bodies, flicking into their faces. They labored forward in desperation and rage, advancing until their anger lapsed and then there was nothing left to force them on.

            About three o'clock they stopped for another long break underneath an isolated tree. For half an hour no one said anything, but even through their prostration other emotions were working. Brown lay on his stomach staring at his hands, which were cruelly blistered and spotted with dried blood from a variety of old sores and cuts which had opened again. He knew abruptly that he was through; he could stand up, even march perhaps another mile of intolerable agony, but he was going to collapse. His entire body was racked; he had been retching emptily ever since they had halted, and his vision was uncertain. Every minute or two a wave of faintness would glide through him, darkening his sight and pocking his back with an icy perspiration. All his extremities were quivering, and his hands shook too much for him to light a cigarette. He hated himself for his weakness and he hated Goldstein and Ridges because they were less exhausted than he, and he loathed Stanley and hoped Stanley was weaker than he. His bitterness resolved into self-pity for a moment -- he was angry at Croft for sending them out with only four men. Croft must have known it would be impossible.

            Stanley was coughing thickly into his hands, which he held against his face. Brown looked at him, and found a focus for his resentment. He felt Stanley had betrayed him. He had made Stanley corporal, and Stanley had turned against him. Perhaps if they had had another man instead of Stanley they might have proceeded better.

            "What's the matter, Stanley," he blurted out, "you ready to quit?"

            "Aaah, fug you, Brown." Stanley was furious. Brown had taken this detail because he was afraid of continuing with the patrol, and he had brought him into it. What they had gone through was far worse than anything the rest of the platoon would meet. If he had stayed with them he would have done better, and Croft might have noticed him. "You think you're okay, don't you?" he asked Brown. "Listen, I know why you took this goddam litter."

            "Why?" Brown listened with a numb stricken anticipation.

            "It's because you were too fuggin yellow to keep up with the patrol. A sergeant taking a litter detail, Jesus."

            Brown heard him almost with satisfaction. This was the worst thing he could imagine, it was the moment he had been dreading for so long, and it did not seem so horrible. "Stanley, you're just as yellow as I am, we're in the same goddam boat." He searched for something with which to hurt him, and came up with it. "You're worrying too much about your wife, Stanley."

            "Aaah, shut your. . ." But it had caught him. In his weakness he was convinced now that his wife was unfaithful, and he passed through a cruel montage of her infidelities in an interval of a few seconds. It loosed a whole web of insecurities, and he felt like weeping. It was unfair that he should be left so much alone.

            Brown pushed his palms against the ground, lifted himself dully. "Come on, let's get going." He felt dizzy on his feet, and his hands had the spongy powerless sensation of a man awakening in the morning, unable to grasp anything.

            They all got up very slowly, fastened their belts, knelt beside the litter and started forward again. After they had gone a hundred yards, Stanley knew he was not going to continue. He had always resented Wilson mildly because Wilson had more combat than he, but now he did not think of Wilson at all. He just knew that he was going to quit; he had gone through too much, and what did it count for?

            They set Wilson down for a short rest and Stanley reeled away and then fell to the ground. He closed his eyes deliberately, pretending he had fainted. The others gathered about him, looked at him without feeling.

            "Shoot, le's jus' put him up on top of Wilson," Ridges said, "an' anyone else we jus' put on top o' that. I'll take y' all back." He guffawed wearily. Stanley had mocked him so often that he felt a mild revenge now. But immediately he was ashamed. Pride goeth before a fall, he told himself soberly. He listened to Stanley's rapt sobbing with a distant amusement. It reminded him of a mule which had collapsed once after plowing in a summer sun, and he felt the same mixture of amusement and pity.

            "What the hell we gonna do?" Brown panted.

            Wilson looked up abruptly. He seemed quite conscious for the moment, and his broad fleshy face looked incredibly tired and gaunt. "Jus' lea' me, men," he said weakly. "Ol' Wilson is through."

            Brown and Goldstein were enticed. "We can't leave ya," Brown said.

            "Jus' stop, men, and the hell with it."

            "I dunno," Brown said.

            Goldstein shook his head abruptly. "We have to carry him back," he said. He could not have explained why, but he had remembered abruptly the moment when the gun slid down the embankment.

            Brown stared again at Stanley. "We can't go on and leave him here."

            Ridges was disgusted. "If y' start a job, then y' finish it. We ain't gonna set here on account of one man."

            Goldstein saw the solution abruptly. "Brown, why don't you stay with Stanley?" Goldstein was very tired, not too far from prostration himself, but it was impossible for him to quit. Brown was almost as sick as Stanley. It was the only answer, and yet Goldstein resented it. I always have to be nicer than the next fellow, he thought.

            "How'll you know the way back?" Brown asked. He had to be honest now, face all the objections. In his defeat it was very important for him to maintain a last tatter of dignity.

            "Ah know the way," Ridges grunted.

            "Well, then, I'll stay," Brown said. "Somebody's gotta take care of Stanley." He shook him for a moment, but Stanley's moaning continued. "He's through for the day."

            "Listen, I'll tell you what," Goldstein said, "after Stanley gets up you can catch us, and give some help. That'll be fine, huh?"

            "Okay, leave it that way," Brown said. Both of them knew that would not happen.

            "Let's be movin'," Ridges said. He and Goldstein got at opposite ends of the stretcher, lifted it painfully and staggered off. After twenty yards they set it down again, stripped off all but one pack and one rifle. "You bring that stuff in, all right, Brown?" Goldstein asked. Brown nodded.

            They labored off again, advancing at a painfully slow pace. Even stripped of equipment, the litter with Wilson on it weighed more than two hundred pounds. It took them almost an hour to cross a low ridge a half mile away.

            . When they were out of sight, Brown took off his shoes and massaged the blisters and sores on his feet. They had almost ten miles to go. Brown sighed, and slowly kneaded his big toe. I oughta turn in my stripes, he thought.

            But he knew he wouldn't. It'll just go on and on until I get busted. He looked at Stanley, who was still lying on the ground. Aaah, the two of us are just alike. He'll be havin' my worries soon.

10

            Croft had an instinctive knowledge of land, sensed the stresses and torsions that had first erupted it, the abrasions of wind and water. The platoon had long ceased to question any direction he took; they knew he would be right as infallibly as sun after darkness or fatigue after a long march. They never even thought about it any more.

            Croft himself did not know the reason. He would never have been able to explain what prompted him when he was circling a bluff to decide on an upper or lower ramp when both spiraled up the walls of a cliff. He knew only that the one he had not chosen would end in a sheer fall. The lower might narrow into nothing, or the upper ramp lose itself in an isolated knoll or outcropping. A geologist with years of study and field experience might have chosen as well, but it would have taken him longer; there would have been a pause while the man raced through his jargon, weighed the factors, estimated the intangibles, correlated all the graphs of growth and decay, expansion and decrease, and then the geologist would have been uncertain. There were too many elements, after all.

            Croft felt the nature of rock and earth, knew as well as he knew the flexing of his muscles how in an age of tempest the boulders had strained and surged until the earth had shaped itself. He had always a feeling of that birth-storm when he looked at land; he almost always knew how a hill would look on the other side. It was the variety of knowledge that felt intuitively the nearness of water no matter how foreign the swatch of earth over which he was traveling.

            The aptitude might have been innate, or perhaps it was developed in all the years he had worked on land driving cattle, all the patrols he had led, all the thousand occasions when it had been important for him to know which route to take. In any case, he led the platoon up the mountain without hesitation, scrambling upward from ridge to ridge, branching from defile to defile, halting against his desire to wait for the others to catch up with him and regain their wind. Each halt annoyed him. Despite all the exertion of the preceding days, he was restless and impatient now, driven forward by a demanding tension in himself. He had the mountain in his teeth as completely and excitedly as a hound which has picked up the scent. He was continually eager to press on to the next rise, anxious to see what was beyond. The sheer mass of the mountain inflamed him.

            He had brought the platoon up the first clay gully in the cliffs, and at the top he had paused for a moment and then filed off to the right to climb a steeply rounded slope of kunai grass which abutted a rock wall thirty feet high. He bore back to the left again, and found a series of slabs up which they could climb. Above that was a tumble of rocks which issued into a sharp ridge-line zigzagging toward the middle slopes of the mountain. He led the platoon along it, bounding forward through the tall grass, pausing only at the places where the ridge grew dangerously narrow.

            The ridge was pocked with boulders, and dropped almost vertically on one side to the cliffs beneath. In the kunai grass there were places where the footing was very uncertain; the men could not see below their knees and they felt their way forward slowly, holding onto the tall stalks with both hands, their rifles crossed over their packs. They climbed along it steadily like this for half an hour, and then took a break. Little more than an hour had elapsed since Croft had led them up the first gully, and the sun was still in the east, but they were tired. They accepted the break eagerly, sprawling in a line along the narrow top of the ridge. .

            Wyman had been panting heavily for the last twenty minutes of the march, and he lay quiet on his back, waiting for the spring to return to his legs.

            "How're you feeling?" Roth asked.

            "I'm pooped." Wyman shook his head. They would be continuing like this all day, and he knew with the experience he had gained on this patrol that he would not be able to make it. "I'm going to lighten my pack," he told Roth.

            But everything in it was essential. Wyman deliberated whether to throw away his rations or his blanket. They had taken twenty-one K rations with them and only seven had been eaten so far. But if they crossed the mountain and scouted through the Jap rear they would be gone at least a week. He couldn't take the chance. Wyman withdrew his blanket from the pack, and tossed it a few yards away.

            "Whose blanket is that?" Croft had seen it, and was walking toward them.

            "Mine, Sergeant," Wyman admitted.

            "Go fetch it and stick it in your pack."

            "I really don't need it," Wyman said softly.

            Croft glared at him. Now that Hearn was gone, the discipline was his, and it was not going to be threatened. With Hearn, sloppy habits had developed which he must cauterize. Besides, waste always offended him. "Go get it, boy, I'm telling you."

            Wyman sighed, stood up, and retrieved the blanket. As he was folding it, Croft softened a trifle. He was pleased at how quickly Wyman had obeyed him. "Listen, you're gonna need that blanket. You wake up with a cold ass tonight, and you're gonna be feeling damn glad you got it then."

            "Yeah." Wyman couldn't arouse any enthusiasm. He was thinking how much the blanket weighed.

            "How do you feel, Roth?" Croft asked.

            "I'm all right, Sergeant."

            "I don't want ya to be dickin'-off today."

            "No." But Roth was furious. As he watched Croft saunter away and talk to a few of the other men, he tugged at some grass with his fingers, pulling it out angrily. "Doesn't even give a fellow a chance," he whispered to Wyman.

            "Oh, gee, I wish the Lootenant. . ." Wyman felt a sudden depression. Other things were becoming clear now too; before, with Hearn, there had been a chance. "What a lousy break."

            Roth nodded. You'd think he'd give the underdog a break, but Croft was like a wolf. "If I had the platoon," he said in his slow pompous voice, "I'd give the men a break, I'd try to be decent, appeal to better nature."

            "Yeah, I would too," Wyman commiserated.

            "I dunno." Roth sighed. Once he had been in a spot like that. His first job after two years without one during the depression had been for a real estate agent. He had made the collections. It was a job he had never liked, and he had had to take a lot of abuse from tenants who resented him. But once he had been sent out to an apartment where there was an old couple who were in arrears for several months' rent. Their story had been sad, like all the stories he was hearing then -- they had lost their savings in a bank crash. Roth had been tempted to give them another month, but he did not dare to return to his office. He had taken no collections that day. And so to hide his sympathy he had become harsh with them, and had threatened eviction. They had pleaded and he had found himself enjoying his role, elaborating the terrors of being dispossessed. "I don't care where you get the money," he had said at last. "Just get it."