The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  BEE-YOWWWW! . . . BEE-YOOWWWW! Some dirt snapped at his face from the ricochets. Croft was not conscious of feeling it. He had the surface numbness a man has in a fight. He flinched at sounds, his mouth tightened and loosened, his eyes stared, but he was oblivious to his body.

  Croft fired the gun again, held it for a long vicious burst, and then ducked in his hole. An awful scream singed the night, and for an instant Croft grinned weakly. Got him he thought. He saw the metal burning through flesh, shattering the bones in its path. ‘AHYOHHHH.’ The scream froze him again, and for an odd disconnected instant he experienced again the whole complex of sounds and smells and sighs when a calf was branded. ‘RECON, UP . . . UP!’ he shouted furiously and fired steadily for ten seconds to cover their advance. As he paused he could hear some men crawling behind him, and he whispered, ‘Recon?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Gallagher dropped into the hole with him. ‘Mother of Mary,’ he muttered. Croft could feel him shaking beside him.

  ‘Stop it!’ He gripped his arm tensely. ‘The other men up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Croft looked across the river again. Everything was silent, and the disconnected abrupt spurts of fire were forgotten like vanished sparks from a grindstone. Now that he was no longer alone, Croft was able to plan. The fact that men were up with him, were scattered in the brush along the bank between their two machine-guns, recovered his sense of command. ‘They’re going to attack soon,’ he whispered hoarsely in Gallagher’s ear.

  Gallagher trembled again. ‘Ohh. No way to wake up,’ he tried to say, but his voice kept lapsing.

  ‘Look,’ Croft whispered. ‘Creep along the line and tell them to hold fire until the Japs start to cross the river.’

  ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ Gallagher whispered.

  Croft felt like striking him. ‘Go!’ he whispered.

  ‘I can’t.’

  The Jap machine-gun lashed at them from across the river. The bullets went singing into the jungle behind them, ripping at leaves. The tracers looked like red splints of lightning as they flattened into the jungle. A thousand rifles seemed to be firing at them from across the river, and the two men pressed themselves against the bottom of the hole. The sounds cracked against their eardrums. Croft’s head ached. Firing the machine-gun had partially deafened him. BEE-YOWWWW! A ricochet slapped some more dirt on top of them. Croft felt it pattering on his back this time. He was trying to sense the moment when he would have to raise his head and fire the gun. The firing seemed to slacken, and he lifted up his eyes cautiously. BEE-YOWWWW, BEE-YOWWWW! He dropped in the hole again. The Japanese machine-gun raked through the brush at them.

  There was a shrill screaming sound, and the men covered their heads with their arms. BAA-ROWWMM, BAA-ROWWMM, ROWWMM, ROWWMM. The mortars exploded all about them, and something picked Gallagher up, shook him, and then released him. ‘O God,’ he cried. A clod of dirt stung his neck. BAA-ROWWMM, BAA-ROWWMM.

  ‘Jesus, I’m hit,’ someone screamed. ‘I’m hit. Something hit me.’

  BAA-ROWWMM.

  Gallagher rebelled against the force of the explosions. ‘Stop, I give up,’ he screamed. ‘STOP! . . . I give up! I give up!’ At that instant he no longer knew what made him cry out.

  BAA-ROWWMM, BAA-ROWWMM.

  ‘I’m hit, I’m hit,’ someone was screaming. The Japanese rifles were firing again. Croft lay on the floor of the hole with his hands against the ground and every muscle poised in its place.

  BAA-ROWWMM. TEEEEEEEE! The shrapnel was singing as it scattered through the foliage.

  Croft picked up his flare gun. The firing had not abated, but through it he heard someone shouting in Japanese. He pointed the gun in the air.

  ‘Here they come,’ Croft said.

  He fired the flare and shouted, ‘STOP ’EM!’

  A shrill cry came out of the jungle across the river. It was the scream a man might utter if his foot was being crushed. ‘AAAIIIIII, AAAIIIIII.’

  The flare burst at the moment the Japanese started their charge. Croft had a split perception of the Japanese machine-gun firing from a flank, and then began to fire automatically, not looking where he fired, but holding his gun low, swinging it from side to side. He could not hear the other guns fire, but saw their muzzle blasts like exhausts.

  He had a startling frozen picture of the Japanese running toward him across the narrow river. ‘AAAAIIIIIIIIIIH,’ he heard again. In the light of the flare the Japanese had the stark frozen quality of men revealed by a shaft of lightning. Croft no longer saw anything clearly, he could not have said at that moment where his hands ended and the machine-gun began; he was lost in a vast moil of noise out of which individual screams and shouts etched in his mind for an instant. He could never have counted the Japanese who charged across the river; he knew only that his finger was rigid on the trigger bar. He could not have loosened it. In those few moments he felt no sense of danger. He just kept firing.

  The line of men who charged across the river began to fall. In the water they were slowed considerably and the concentrated fire from recon’s side raged at them like a wind across an open field. They began to stumble over the bodies ahead of them. Croft saw one soldier reach into the air behind another’s body as though trying to clutch something in the sky and Croft fired at him for what seemed many seconds before the arm collapsed.

  He looked to his right and saw three men trying to cross the river where it turned and ran parallel to the bluff. He swung the gun about and lashed them with it. One man fell, and the other two paused uncertainly and began to run back toward their own bank of the river. Croft had no time to follow them; some soldiers had reached the beach on his side and were charging the gun. He fired point blank at them, and they collapsed about five yards from his hole.

  Croft fired and fired, switching targets with the quick reflexes of an athlete shifting for a ball. As soon as he saw men falling he would attack another group. The line of Japanese broke into little bunches of men who wavered, began to retreat.

  The light of the flare went out and Croft was blinded for a moment. There was no sound again in the darkness and he fumbled for another flare, feeling an almost desperate urgency. ‘Where is it?’ he whispered to Gallagher.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shit.’ Croft’s hand found the flare box, and he loaded the gun again. He was beginning to see in the darkness, and he hesitated. But something moved on the river and he fired the flare. As it burst, a few Japanese soldiers were caught motionless in the water. Croft pivoted his gun on them and fired. One of the soldiers remained standing for an incredible time. There was no expression on his face; he looked vacant and surprised even as the bullets struck him in the chest.

  Nothing was moving now on the river. In the light of the flare, the bodies looked as limp and unhuman as bags of grain. One soldier began to float downstream, his face in the water. On the beach near the gun, another Japanese soldier was lying on his back. A wide stain of blood was spreading out from his body, and his stomach, ripped open, gaped like the swollen entrails of a fowl. On an impulse Croft fired a burst into him, and felt the twitch of pleasure as he saw the body quiver.

  A wounded man was groaning in Japanese. Every few seconds he would scream, the sound terrifying in the cruel blue light of the flare. Croft picked up a grenade. ‘That sonofabitch is makin’ too much noise,’ he said. He pulled the pin and lobbed the grenade over to the opposite bank. It dropped like a beanbag on one of the bodies, and Croft pulled Gallagher down with him. The explosion was powerful and yet empty like a blast that collapses window-panes. After a moment, the echoes ceased.

  Croft tensed himself and listened to the sounds from across the river. There was the quiet furtive noise of men retreating into the jungle. ‘GIVE ’EM A VOLLEY!’ he shouted.

  All the men in recon began to fire again, and Croft raked the jungle for a minute in short bursts. He could hear Wilson’s machine-gun pounding steadily. ‘I guess we gave ’em something,’ Croft told Gallagher. The flare wa
s going out, and Croft stood up. ‘Who was hit?’ he shouted.

  ‘Toglio.’

  ‘Bad?’ Croft asked.

  ‘I’m okay,’ Toglio whispered. ‘I got a bullet in my elbow.’

  ‘Can you wait till morning?’

  There was silence for a moment, then Toglio answered weakly, ‘Yeah, I’ll be okay.’

  Croft got out of his hole. ‘I’m coming down,’ he announced. ‘Hold your fire.’ He walked along the path until he reached Toglio. Red and Goldstein were kneeling beside him, and Croft spoke to them in a low voice. ‘Pass this on,’ he said. ‘We’re all gonna stay in our holes until mornin’. I don’t think they’ll be back tonight but you cain’t tell. And no one is gonna fall asleep. They’s only about an hour till dawn, so you ain’t got nothin’ to piss about.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go to sleep anyway,’ Goldstein breathed. ‘What a way to wake up.’ It was the same thing Gallagher had said.

  ‘Yeah, well I just wasn’t ridin’ on my ass either, waitin’ for them to come,’ Croft said. He shivered for a moment in the early morning air and realized with a pang of shame that for the first time in his life he had been really afraid. ‘The sonsofbitch Japs,’ he said. His legs were tired and he turned to go back to his gun. I hate the bastards, he said to himself, a terrible rage working through his weary body.

  ‘One of these days I’m gonna really get me a Jap,’ he whispered aloud. The river was slowly carrying the bodies downstream.

  ‘At least,’ Gallagher said, ‘if we got to stay here a couple of days, the fuggers won’t be stinkin’ up the joint.’

  The Time Machine:

  SAM CROFT

  THE HUNTER

  A lean man of medium height but he held himself so erectly he appeared tall. His narrow triangular face was utterly without expression. There seemed nothing wasted in his hard small jaw, gaunt firm cheeks and straight short nose. His gelid eyes were very blue . . . he was efficient and strong and usually empty and his main cast of mind was a superior contempt toward nearly all other men. He hated weakness and he loved practically nothing. There was a crude unformed vision in his soul but he was rarely conscious of it.

  No, but why is Croft that way?

  Oh, there are answers. He is that way because of the corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because the devil has claimed him for one of his own. It is because he is a Texan; it is because he has renounced God.

  He is that kind of man because the only woman he ever loved cheated on him, or he was born that way, or he was having problems of adjustment.

  Croft’s father, Jesse Croft, liked to say, ‘Well, now, my Sam is a mean boy. I reckon he was whelped mean.’ And then Jesse Croft, thinking of his wife who was ailing, a weak woman sweet and mild, might add, ‘’Course Sam got mother’s milk if ever a one did, but Ah figger it turned sour on him ’cause that was the only way his stomach would take it.’ Then he would cackle and blow his nose into his hand and wipe it on the back of pale-blue dungarees. (Standing before his dirty wood barn, the red dry soil of western Texas under his feet.) ‘Why, Ah ’member once Ah took Sam huntin’, he was only an itty-bitty runt, not big enough to hold up the gun hardly . . . but he was a mean shot from the beginning. And Ah’ll tell ya, he just didn’t like to have a man interfere with him. That was one thing could always rile him, even when he was an itty-bitty bastard.

  ‘Couldn’t stand to have anyone beat him in anything’.

  ‘Never could lick him. Ah’d beat the piss out o’ him and he’d never make a sound. Jus’ stand there lookin’ at me as if he was fixin’ to wallop me back, or maybe put a bullet in mah head.’

  James Jones

  NO CHOICE

  A novel of graphic realism, filmed by Terence Mallick in 1998, James Jones’s The Thin Red Line (1963) is the story of American soldiers fighting against the Japanese, in the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942. The following episode describes in tragicomic fashion Private Bead’s first encounter with a Japanese soldier – in quite unusual circumstances.

  AT JUST ABOUT five o’clock he had had to take a crap. And he had not had a crap for two days. Everything had quieted down on the line by five and at the aid station below them the last of the wounded were being cared for and sent back. Bead had seen other men taking craps along the slope, and he knew the procedure. After two days on these slopes the procedure was practically standardized. Because every available bit of level space was occupied, jammed with men and equipment, crapping was relegated to the steeper slopes. Here the process was to take along an entrenching shovel and dig a little hole, then turn your backside to the winds of the open air and squat, balancing yourself precariously on your toes, supporting yourself on the dirt or rocks in front of you with your hands. The effect, because of the men below in the basin, was rather like hanging your ass out of a tenth-floor window above a crowded street. It was an embarrassing position to say the least, and the men below were not above taking advantage of it with catcalls, whistles or loud soulful sighs.

  Bead was shy. He could have done it that way if he’d had to, but because he was shy, and because now everything had quieted down to an unbelievable evening peace after the terror, noise and danger of the afternoon, he decided to have himself a pleasant, quiet, private crap in keeping with the peacefulness. Without saying anything to anyone he dropped all of his equipment by his hole and taking only his GI roll of toilet paper, he started to climb the twenty yards to the crest. He did not even take an entrenching tool because on the other side there was no need to bury his stool. Beyond the crest he knew that the slope did not drop precipitously as it did further to the left, but fell slowly for perhaps fifty yards through the trees before it plunged in a bluff straight down to the river. This was where D Company had caught the Japanese patrol earlier in the day.

  ‘Hey, bud, where you going?’ somebody from the 2nd Platoon called to him as he passed through.

  ‘To take a shit,’ Bead called back without looking around and disappeared over the crest.

  The trees began three yards below the actual crest. Because the jungle was thinner with less undergrowth here at its outer edge, it looked more like the columnar, smooth-floored woods of home and made Bead think of when he was a boy. Reminded of times when as a Boy Scout he had camped out and crapped with peaceful pleasure in the summer woods of Iowa, he placed the roll of paper comfortably near, dropped his pants and squatted. Halfway through with relieving himself, he looked up and saw a Japanese man with a bayoneted rifle moving stealthily through the trees ten yards away.

  As if feeling his gaze, the Japanese man turned his head and saw him in almost the same instant but not before, through the electrifying, heart stabbing thrill of apprehension, danger, disbelief, denial, Bead got a clear, burned in the brain impression of him.

  He was a small man, and thin; very thin. His mudslicked, mustard-khaki uniform with its ridiculous wrap leggings hung from him in jungledamp, greasy folds. Not only did he not wear any of the elaborate camouflage Bead had been taught by movies to expect, he did not even wear a helmet. He wore a greasy, wrinkled, bent-up forage cap. Beneath it his yellow-brown face was so thin the high cheek-bones seemed about to come out through his skin. He was badly unshaven, perhaps two weeks, but his greasy-looking beard was as straggly as Bead’s nineteen-year-old one. As to age, Bead could not form any clear impression; he might have been twenty, or forty.

  All of this visual perception occurred in an eyewink of time, an eyewink which seemed to coast on and on and on, then the Japanese man saw him too and turning, all in one movement, began to run at him, but moving cautiously, the bayonet on the end of his rifle extended.

  Bead, still squatting with his pants down, his behind still dirty, gathered his weight under him. He was going to have to try to jump one way or another, but which? Which side to jump to? Am I going to die? Am I really going to die now? He did not even have his knife with him. Terror and disbelief, denial, fought each other in him. Why the Japanese did not simply fire the rifle he did not k
now. Perhaps he was afraid of being heard in the American lines. Instead he came on, obviously meaning to bayonet Bead where he sat. His eyes were intent with purpose. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, which were large, but were well formed and not at all protruding as in the posters. Was it really true?

  In desperation, still not knowing which way to try to jump, all in one movement Bead pulled up his pants over his dirty behind to free his legs and dived forward in a low, shoestring football tackle when the Japanese man was almost on him, taking him around the ankles, his feet driving hard in the soft ground. Surprised, the Japanese man brought the rifle down sharply, but Bead was already in under the bayonet. The stacking swivel banged him painfully on the collarbone. By clasping the mudcaked shins against his chest and using his head for a fulcrum, still driving hard with his feet, the Japanese man had no way to fall except backward, and Bead was already clawing up his length before he hit the ground. In the fall he dropped the rifle and had the wind knocked out of him. This gave Bead time to hitch up his pants again and spring upward once more until, kneeling on his upper arms and sitting on his chest, he began to punch and claw him in the face and neck. The Japanese man could only pluck feebly at his legs and forearms.

  Bead heard a high, keening scream and thought it was the Japanese begging for mercy until finally he slowly became aware that the Japanese man was now unconscious. Then he realized it was himself making that animal scream. He could not, however, stop it. The Japanese man’s face was now running blood from the clawing, and several of his teeth had been broken back into his throat from the punches. But Bead could not stop. Sobbing and wailing, he continued to belabour the unconscious Japanese with fingernail and fist. He wanted to tear his face off with his bare hands, but found this difficult. Then he seized his throat and tried to break his head by beating it on the soft ground but only succeeded in digging a small hole with it. Exhausted finally, he collapsed forward on hands and knees above the bleeding, unconscious man, only to feel the Japanese immediately twitch with life beneath him.