The Thin Red Line (2 page)

In this dimly lighted hellhole of exceedingly high moisture content, whose metal walls resounded everything, C-for-Charlie scrubbed the sweat from its dripping eyebrows, picked its wet shirts loose from its armpits, cursed quietly, looked at its watches, and waited impatiently.

“You think we’ll catch a fucking air raid?” Private Mazzi asked Private Tills beside him. They were sitting against a bulkhead clutching their knees up against their chests, both for moral comfort and to keep them from being trampled on.

“How the goddam hell do I know?” Tills said angrily. He was more or less Mazzi’s sidekick. At least they often went on pass together. “All I know, them crew guys said they dint catch no air raid last time they made this run. On the other hand time before last they almost got blew up. What do you want me to tell you?”

“You’re a big help. Tills: nothin. Tell me nothin. I’ll tell you somethin. We’re sittin out here on this great big wideopen ocean like a couple big fat fucking ducks in these here boats, that’s what.”

“I already know that.”

“Yeah? Well, brood on it, Tills. Brood on it.” Mazzi hugged himself tighter and worked his eyebrows up and down convulsively, a gesture of nervous release which gave his face an expression of pugnacious indignation.

The same question was uppermost in all of C-for-Charlie’s minds. Actually C-for-Charlie was not the last in any line. The numbers ran up as high as seven and eight. But this did not give consolation. C-for-Charlie was not concerned with the unlucky ones that came after it; that was their problem. C-for-Charlie was concerned only with the lucky ones who came before it, and that they should hurry, and as to just how long it itself was going to have to wait.

Then there was another thing. Not only was C-for-Charlie fourth in line at its assigned station, which was resented, but it also happened for whatever reason to have been set down among strangers. Except for one other company far away in the stern C-for-Charlie was the only company of the first regiment to be assigned to the first ship, with the result that they did not know a single soul in the companies on either side of them, and this was resented too.

“If I’m gonna get blown-fucking-up,” Mazzi mused gloomily, “I don’t wanta ged my guts and meat all mixed up with a bunch of strangers from another regiment like these bums. I had much ruther it’s be my own outfit anyway.”

“Don’t
talk
like that!” Tills cried, “for fuck’s sake.”

“Well—” Mazzi said. “When I think of them planes up there maybe right now…

“You just ain’t a realist, Tills.”

In their own way other C-for-Charlie men coped with the same imagination problem as best they could. From their vantage point against the companionway bulkhead Mazzi and Tills could see the activities of at least half of C-for-Charlie. In one place a blackjack game had been started, the players indicating whether they would hit or stay between peerings at their watches. In another place a crapgame proceeded in the same oscillating fashion. In still another Private First Class Nellie Coombs had pulled out his everpresent poker deck (which everyone suspected—but could never prove—was marked) and had started up his near-perennial five-card stud game, and was shrewdly making money off the nervousness of his friends despite his own.

In other places little knots of men had formed, and stood or sat talking earnestly to each other with widened, consciously focused eyes while hardly hearing what was said. A few loners meticulously checked and rechecked their rifles and equipment, or else merely sat looking at them. Young Sergeant McCron, the notorious motherhen, went along personally checking each item of equipment of each man in his squad of nearly all draftees as if his sanity, and his life, depended on it. Slightly older Sergeant Beck, the professional martinet with six years service, occupied himself with inspecting the rifles of his squad with great preciseness.

There was nothing to do but wait. Through the locked glass of the portholes along the companionway a few faint sounds of scrambling and some shouts came in to them, and from up on the deck a few even fainter still, to let them know that debarkation was moving ahead. From the hatchway beyond the open water-tight door they heard the clangor and muffled cursing of another company toiling up the metal stairs to replace a company already taken off. At the closed ports a few men who could get close enough, and who felt like watching, could see portions of the dark hulking figures of fully equipped men climbing down the net which hung outside the ports; now and then they would see an LCI pull away in the water. They shouted out progress reports back to the rest. Every so often an LCI, caught wrong on a wave, would bang against the hull and reverberate through the closed space of the dim hold the clang of tortured steel.

Private First Class Doll, a slender, longnecked southern boy from Virginia, was standing with Corporal Queen, a huge Texan, and Corporal Fife, the orderly room clerk.

“Well, we’ll soon know what it feels like,” Queen, an amiable giant several years older than the other two, said meekly. Queen was not usually meek.

“What what feels like?” Fife said.

“To be shot at,” said Queen. “To be shot at seriously.”

“Hell, I’ve been shot at,” Doll said, drawing up his lip in a supercilious smile. “Hell, ain’t you, Queen?”

“Well, I only just hope there aren’t any planes today,” Fife said. “That’s all.”

“I guess we all hope that,” Doll said in a more subdued tone.

Doll was very young, late twenty, possibly twenty-one, as were the majority of C-for-Charlie’s privates. He had been in C-for-Charlie over two years, as had most of the regulars. A quiet, freshfaced youth with considerable naivete, who talked little and shyly, Doll had always remained pretty much in the background; but lately, in the past six months, something had been slowly happening to him, and he had been changing and coming forward more. It did not make him more likeable.

Now, after his subdued remark about the planes, he put back on his lip-lifting supercilious smile. Very consciously he lifted an eyebrow. “Well, I reckon if I’m goin’a get me that pistol, I better get with it,” he smiled at them. He looked at his watch. “They ought to be about primed, about nervous enough, by now,” he said judiciously, and then looked back up. “Anybody want to come along?”

“You’ll do better on your own,” Big Queen rumbled distantly. “Two guys after two pistols’ll be just twice as noticeable.”

“Guess you’re right,” Doll said, and sauntered off, a slender, small-hipped, really quite handsome young man. Queen stared after him, his Texas eyes veiled with dislike of what he could only see as affectation, and then turned back to Fife the clerk as Doll went out from between the bunks into the companionway.

In the companionway against the far bulkhead Mazzi and Tills still sat hugging their legs up, talking. Doll stopped in front of them.

“Ain’t you watchin the fucking fun?” he asked them, indicating the more or less crowded portholes.

“Ain’t interested,” Mazzi said gloomily.

“I guess it is pretty crowded,” Doll said, with a sudden lessening of his superciliousness. He bent his head and wiped the sweat out of his eyebrows with the back of his hand.

“Wouldn’t be interested if they weren’t,” Mazzi said, and hugged his knees up more closely.

“I’m on my way to get me that pistol,” Doll said.

“Yeah? Well have fun,” Mazzi said.

“Yeah; have fun,” Tills said.

“Don’t you remember? We talked about gettin a pistol one day,” Doll said.

“Did we?” Mazzi said flatly, staring at him.

“Sure,” Doll began. Then he stopped, realizing he was being told off, insulted, and smiled his unpleasant, supercilious smile. “You guys’ll wish you had one, once we get ashore, and run into some of them Samurai sabers.”

“All I want is to
get
ashore,” Mazzi said. “And off of this big fat sitting fucking duck we all sittin on out here on this flat water.”

“Hey, Doll,” Tills said, “you get around. You think we’re liable to catch an air raid today before we get off this damned boat?”

“How the fucking hell would I know?” Doll said. He smiled his unpleasant smile. “We might, and we might not.”

“Thanks,” Mazzi said.

“If we do, we do. What’s the matter? You scared, Mazzi?”

“Scared? Course I ain’t scared! Are you?”

“Hell no.”

“Okay then. Shut up,” Mazzi said, and leaned forward and thrust out his jaw, working his eyebrows up and down pugnaciously at Doll with what could only be called comic ferocity. It was really not very effective. Doll merely threw back his head and laughed.

“See you chaps,” he said and stepped over through the water-tight door in the bulkhead they leaned against.

“What’s all this ‘chaps’ shit?” Mazzi said.

“Ahh, there’s a bunch of Anzac Pioneers on this boat,” Tills said. “Guess he’s been hangin around them.”

“That guy just ain’t hep,” Mazzi said decisively. “He’s as unhep as a box. I can’t stand people who ain’t hep.”

“You think he’ll get a pistol?” Tills said.

“Hell no he won’t get no pistol.”

“He might.”

“He won’t,” Mazzi said. “He’s a jerkoff. ‘Chaps!’”

“Right now, I couldn’t care less,” Tills said. “Whether he ever gets a pistol, or whether anybody ever gets a pistol, including me. All I want is to get off this here fucking boat here.”

“Well you ain’t by yourself,” Mazzi said as another LCI clanged against the hull outside. “Lookit over there.”

Both men turned their heads and looked over into the bunk area and, hugging their knees nervously, observed the rest of C-for-Charlie going through its various suspension-of-imagination exercises.

“All I know,” Mazzi said, “I never bargained for nothin like this here when I signed up in this man’s army back in the old fucking Bronx before the war. How did I know they was gonna be a fucking war, hanh? Answer me that.”

“You tell me,” Tills said. “You’re the hep character around here, Mazzi.”

“All I know, old Charlie Company always gets screwed,” Mazzi said. “Always. And I can tell you whose fault it is. It’s old Bugger Stein’s fault, that’s who. First he gets us stuck off on this boat clean away from our own outfit where we don’t know a fucking soul. Then he gets us stuck way down in fourth place on the list to get off this son of a bitch. I can tell you that much. Churchez old Bugger Stein. Whatever it is.”

“There’s worse places than fourth, though,” Tills said. “At least we ain’t in seventh or fucking eighth. At least he didn’t get us stuck down in eighth place.”

“Well it ain’t no fault of his. He sure didn’t get us in no first place, that’s for sure. Look at the son of a bitch down there: pretending he’s one of the boys today.” Mazzi jerked his head down toward the other bulkhead, at the other end of the companionway, where Captain Stein and his exec and his four platoon officers squatted with their heads together over an orders map on the deck.

“So you see, gentlemen, exactly where we will be,” Captain Stein was saying, and he looked up from his pencil at his officers with his large, mild, brown eyes questioningly. “There will of course be guides, either Army or Marines, to help us get there with the least amount of trouble and time. The line itself, the present line, is, as I’ve shown you, up here.” He pointed with the pencil. “Eight and a half miles away. We will have a forced march, under full field equipment, of about six miles, in the other direction.” Stein rose, and the other five officers rose too. “Any questions, gentlemen?”

“Yes, sir,” said Second Lieutenant Whyte of the First Platoon. “I have one, sir. Will there be any definite order of bivouac when we get there? Since Blane here of the Second and I will probably be in the lead, I wanted to know about that, sir.”

“Well, I think we shall have to wait and see what the terrain is like when we get there, don’t you, Whyte?” Stein said, and raised a meaty right hand to adjust his thick-lensed glasses through which he stared at Whyte.

“Yes, sir,” Whyte said, suitably chastised, and reddening a little under it.

“Any further questions, gentlemen?” Stein said. “Blane? Culp?” He looked around.

“No, sir,” Blane said.

“Then that’s all, gentlemen,” Stein said. “For the moment.” He stooped and scooped up the map, and when he straightened back up he was smiling warmly behind the thick lenses. This was an indication that the official solemnity was over, that everybody could relax. “Well, how goes it, Bill?” Stein asked young Whyte, and slapped him warmly on the back. “Feel all right?”

“Little nervous, Jim,” Whyte grinned.

“How about you, Tom?” Stein asked Blane.

“Fine, Jim.”

“Well, I guess you better all of you have a look at your boys, don’t you?” Stein said, and stood with his exec, First Lieutenant Band, watching the four platoon officers go off.

“I think they’re all good boys, don’t you, George?” he said.

“Yes, Jim; I do,” Band said.

“Did you notice how both Culp and Gore were taking everything in?” Stein asked.

“I sure did, Jim. Of course they’ve been with us longer than the youngsters.”

Stein removed his glasses and in the heat polished them carefully with a large handkerchief, and then replaced them firmly on his face, adjusting and settling them over and over again with the thumb and fingers of his right hand on the frame, while he peered out through them. “I make it about an hour,” he said vaguely. “Or at most an hour and a quarter.”

“I just hope we don’t get any of those high level bomb groups before then,” Band said.

“I rather do too,” Stein said and made his large, mild, brown eyes grin behind their lenses.

Whatever Private Mazzi’s criticisms, and however valid or invalid they might be, Mazzi had been right about one thing: It had been Captain Stein who had given the order that C-for-Charlie’s officers would stay in the hold with the men this morning. Stein, whose nickname “Bugger” among his troops had come from the oft-quoted remark by a nameless private upon seeing his commander walk across a parade ground that he “walked like he had a cob up his ass,” felt that officers should be with their men on a day such as this, should share their hardships and dangers, rather than staying up topside in the club cabin where they had remained for most of the trip, and Stein had so informed his juniors. While none of them had looked too pleased about it, no one had commented, not even Band. And Stein was convinced that it could not help but aid morale. As he looked out across the crowded, sweating jungle of bunks and piping, where his men worked quietly without hysteria at checking and inspecting their equipment, he was even more convinced that he had been right. Stein, who was a junior partner with an excellent, large law firm in Cleveland, had taken ROTC as a lark in college, and had been caught early, over a year before the war. Luckily, he was unmarried. He had spent six months of astonishment with a National Guard outfit, before being shipped off to this regular division as a First Lieutenant and a Company Commander, after which he had been once passed over and had an old wornout Captain shipped in over him before he himself got his captaincy, during which terrible time he could only say over and over to himself, “My God, what will my father say,” because his father had been a Major in the First World War. Settling his glasses again, he turned to his First Sergeant whose name was Welsh and who was in fact of Welsh extraction, who had been standing nearby all the time, during this briefing, wearing a look of sly amusement which Stein did not fail to notice.