The Thin Red Line (11 page)

“That’s chino! That’s not even Marine khaki! That’s Army chino!” A hollow voice.

“Well, the Americal Division’s here. Maybe he’s one of them.”

“Whoever he was he was hit pretty bad,” Queen said. It was the first time he had spoken. Queen felt curiously, but strongly, ashamed of himself for looking at the hurt man’s shirt, and for the nervous excitation which possessed him in doing it.

“Wonder just where it did hit him?” A guilty voice, this one; trying to sound offhand.

It was the second time this had been mentioned. One of the men nearest it—not the finder—leaned down silently and picked it up with thumb and forefinger as if afraid he might catch a terrible disease from it.

“Here,” he said, and looked pleadingly at the man next to him.

Between them they stretched it out, turned it around, turned it back—strangely like two lady clerks in a dress shop holding up a new model for prospective buyers. From within the group there was a sudden high constrained hysterical giggle.

“Now this here’s from our new Spring-of-’43 collection, just out. Fits any type a figure. Wouldja like to try it for size?”

Nobody acknowledged the remark. The giggler subsided. The two men turned the shirt back and forth a few more times while the others looked in silence.

Like so many of the shirts they had all seen here it was without sleeves. It was not entirely sleeveless however, like some. The sleeves had been lopped off halfway up the upper arm, then meticulously shredded to the shoulder seam with either a very sharp knife or a razorblade to look like the oldfashioned buckskin fringe of the plainsmen.

The sight gave Big Queen, who had owned and worn a buckskin jacket during his two years as a hand, a peculiarly painful twinge. A twinge of odd loneliness—and of something else. It was that American love of cowboy fringe. It brought Queen closer in understanding to this other, unknown man that Queen liked to be. It was such a ridiculous, boyish gesture; and, intuitively, Queen understood it all too well. Much better than he wanted to understand it consciously. Because the gesture hadn’t worked. It hadn’t protected him at all. That much was obvious.

The bullet had entered at the bottom of the flat plane of the pectoral muscle just above the nipple and had struck bone and keyholed downward, coming out flatways below the left shoulder-blade. There was not much blood around the neat hole in the front. Most of it was on the back. The fringewearer had been very unlucky. Had the bullet caromed upward it might have missed the lung. As it was, it had torn its way down and out through the center of it, moving flat instead of by the point and thus insuring even greater tissue damage.

Once again the two men, after pausing, turned the shirt back and forth a few times, its wet homemade fringe fluttering heavily. Still nobody said anything.

Bell, peering between the helmeted heads of the two men in front of him, blinked suddenly as if struck in the face by a sea wave while swimming. Quite without preparation he had found himself staring at a horrible, halucinatory double-image of himself and that shirt. He was both standing upright wearing that pierced, lifesoaked shirt and at the same time lying pierced and lifesoaked himself on the ground after having flung it away from him, while somewhere up behind him out of eye range he could nevertheless see a weird, transcendental image of his wife Marty’s head and shoulders superimposed among the foliage gloom of the trees looking down at the two images sadly. The blink did not help. The images did not go away.
Oh, I’m sorry,
he clearly heard her voice say. In an infinitely, exquisitely sad tone.
I’m so sorry. So sorry for you.
It was said with all of that vitality and force-of-life lifeforce Marty had so much of in her.
Go away!
he frantically wanted to shout at her.
It isn’t real anyway! Go away! Don’t make it real! Don’t look! Do not pass Go! Do not collect two hundred dollars!
But he could no longer even blink, let alone shout.
Oh, I am sorry,
she called down to him,
really and truly so sorry.
And Bell knew without thinking it, without daring to think it, that half of her sorrow was because she knew as well as he that that powerful, perpetually affirming, female force for life that was in her would require her to go on living, even when she might not want to; require her to go on needing to be loved by a male, another male, even when she might have preferred not. It was in her, that female puissance; was her nature; as unstoppable as water running downhill.
So sorry, John. So sorry for you.
It faded away softly in the dripping jungle gloom, infinitely sad. Frantically, in a sheer terror at having to face sheer terror, Bell forced his eyes to blink. Then he blinked them wildly several more times. Perhaps seeing the jungle again today, after the Philippines, after so long?…But the most terrifying of all was that Bell knew, again without daring to think it, that if he had been alone at this moment he would have found himself wearing an erection. Out of his pain, out of the agony of his knowledge, the surety of his intuition, he would have had a full sexual erection. This at least trebled his terror. Again he blinked; desperately, this time. The two men were once again holding the shirt, that death shirt, and still not a soul had spoken a word.

“Well, what’ll I do with it?” the man who first had picked it up said.

As if released from his responsibility by these first words spoken into the bellying silence, the second man immediately let go and stepped back. His half of the soggy, muddy shirt fell heavily toward the first man. The first man straightened his arm out, so the shirt would not touch him, and continued to hold it. And there it dangled, like some forever windless flag symbolic of the darker, nether side of patriotism.

“Well I mean it don’t seem right—…” he began, and stopped. The end of the statement trailed off into conjecture.

“What do you mean it don’t seem right?” Queen demanded in a suddenly furious, almost squeaky voice. He managed to pull it down into its normal deepness before finishing: “what don’t seem right?”

Nobody answered.

“It’s only a shirt, ain’t it? It ain’t the guy who was in it, is it? Whatta you want to do? Take it back to the compny? What’ll you do with it there? Bury it? Or give it to Storm to clean stoves with?”

This was a great deal of talking for Queen. But at least he regained control of his voice, was speaking in the deep voice everybody expected from Big Queen. Again, nobody answered.

“Leave it where you found it,” he said with ponderous authority.

Without a word the man (who still held it by thumb and forefinger as if it might contaminate him) turned and swung it and let it go. It fluttered back down into its angle between the roots, no longer wadded.

“Yeah, leave’m lay where Jesus flung’m,” someone else said. No one answered him.

The breathless, curiously sexual look had disappeared from the faces. It had been replaced by a sullen look of sexual guilt. Nobody seemed to want to meet anybody else’s eyes. They looked curiously like a gang of boys caught masturbating together.

“Yeah. Let’s look around a little more,” one said.

“Yeah; maybe we’ll find out what happened here.”

Everybody wanted to leave.

And so it was that, in such a mood, they found the battlefield and nearby to it, afterwards, the trench grave.

A curious sense of unreality had come over all of them with the discovery of the shirt. The dripping, gloomy, airless jungle with its vaulted cathedral-like ceiling far above did not serve to lessen it. Fighting and killing, and being struck by death-delivering bullets which keyholed through you, were facts. They existed, certainly. But it was too much for them to assimilate, and left them with a dreamlike nightmare feeling which they couldn’t shake off.

Mutely (because of course nobody wanted to admit this essentially unmanly reaction to anybody else) they moved off through the green air of the arm of jungle in a conspiracy of silence. Their minds had balked. And when the mind balked like that, the reality became more dreamlike than the nightmare. Each man each time he tried to imagine his own death; tried to conjure up the experience of that bullet keyholing through his own lung; found himself being tricked by his own mind. The only thing he was able to picture was the heroic, brave gesture he would make when dying. But the rest was unimaginable. And at the same time somewhere in the back of each mind, like a fingernail picking uncontrollably at a scabby sore, was the small voice saying: but is it worth it? Is it really worth it to die, to be dead, just to prove to everybody that you’re not a coward?

Tacitly they had resumed almost exactly their same places in the line. Instinctively and without apparent reason they all moved off to the left, leaving the line anchored in the person of Queen. And it was there, at the other, the far left end, that they found the first abandoned, tumbledown emplacements. They had entered the jungle perhaps thirty yards too far to the right to see them. Had they not found the shirt, and then had they not reasonlessly extended their line to the left, they might never have known the place was there.

The position was unmistakably Japanese. It was also clear that it was a lost position. They had had a line here along the edge of the jungle at some time or other, and C-for-Charlie’s men had come upon it just where it turned in from the edge to wind its way tortuously back into the depths of the jungle. It was in acute disrepair. Mounds and humps and ditches and holes which once had been dugouts, trenches and parapets twisted in and out in a continuous band of raw earth between huge tree boles and clumps of undergrowth until they lost themselves in the dim light of the jungle interior. Total silence hung over it everywhere except for the occasional loud cries of birds. Eagerly in the dim light, more than glad to forget the shirt, the men hurried over and began to clamber up onto the mounds to inspect—with a sort of painful, almost lascivious masochism—what they one day soon would be up against themselves. It was beyond these mounds, where it had remained hidden from their view because of them, that the mass grave lay.

From the top of the mounds a look at the terrain was enough to show that the Marines and, as evidenced by the shirt, elements of the Americal Division had attacked or else counterattacked this line. Slowly (that much was apparent) and perhaps several times, they had come across the same ground which C-for-Charlie’s men had themselves just traversed. Stumps of saplings, torn undergrowth, cut vines, pitholes all showed the volume of mortar and machinegun fire to which the ground in front of the position had been subjected. Already, new growth had effectively hidden most of these signs and they had to be searched for, but they were there. Only the scarred, bullet-hacked forest giants, standing impassively like rooted columns, seemed to have survived this new type of tropical storm without crippling effects.

Like a band of energetic ants the men spread out, poking here, peering there, looking at everything. Souvenirs had now become their preoccupation. But no matter how greedily they hunted, there was almost nothing left for them to find. Quartermaster Salvage units had been over the ground with fine-tooth combs. Not a piece of equipment, not a single strand of barbed wire, not even an empty Japanese cartridge casing or old shoe remained to be picked up by scavengers like themselves. Once they had disappointedly assured themselves of this, as if by a common accord they turned their rapt, still somewhat awed attention to the long mass grave.

It was here that the delayed emotional reaction to the death shirt caught up with them in the form of a sort of wild horseplay of bravado. Big Queen was the leader of it. The grave itself ran for perhaps forty yards along the very edge of the jungle, just inside the tight skin of leaves. It had been made by widening the former Japanese trench. Either it was very shallow or there was more than one layer of bodies, because here and there undecayed appendages or smaller angular portions such as knees and elbows stuck up out of the loose dirt that had been shoveled back over them.

Obviously it had been a sanitary arrangement more than anything else. Which was quite understandable, if one contemplated the acrid, bronzegreen odor that hung over the position and became slowly stronger the closer one came to the edge of the ditch. It must have been hellish before they buried them. They were of course all Japanese. An ex-undertaker, after examining a greenishcolored, half-clenched hand found sticking up near the edge, gave it as his opinion that the bodies were a month old.

It was up to the edge of this ditch, not far from where a stocky, uniformed Japanese leg thrust up out of it at an angle, that Big Queen advanced and stopped. Several men before him already had somewhat incautiously stepped out onto the grave itself in their eagerness to see, only to find themselves slowly sinking kneedeep into the dirt and dead. For men whose feet were still sinking and not resting on anything solid they all had leaped back out with astonishing nimbleness. Cursing savagely and smelling strongly they provided, to the guffaws of the others, a sterling object lesson. So Queen ventured no further.

Standing with the toes of his combat boots exactly at the edge of the solid ground, sweating a little, grinning a strangely taut, fullwidth grin which made his large teeth resemble a dazzling miniature piano keyboard in the green light, Queen looked back at the rest challengingly. His face seemed to say that he had suffered enough personal indignities for one day and by God now he was. going to get even.

“Looks like this one was a healthy spec’men. Ought to be somethin worth takin home on some of them,” he said by way of preamble, and leaning forward seized the shod foot and jiggled it around tentatively to see how well it was attached, then gave it a solid heave.

The surface of the ditch quivered seismically, and along it tranquil flies rose buzzing in alarm, only to settle back in the quiet that followed. In the late afternoon jungle light everyone watched. Queen still held the leg. The leg itself still remained in the ditch. After a time-dead second in which nothing moved or breathed, Queen gave the foot another, even more tremendous heave; and again the flies buzzed up in panic. The leg still held.