The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

  When the spout of water had subsided so that they could see, there was nothing left of the LCI to be seen. At the spot where it had been a few figures bobbed in the water, and these rapidly became fewer. The two barges nearest them came about and made for the spot, reaching them before the little rescue boat that was standing by could get there. Losing way, they wallowed in the trough while infantrymen stripped off equipment and dived in to help both the injured and uninjured who had had no time to strip equipment and were being dragged under by it. The less seriously wounded and the uninjured were helped aboard the barges on little rope ladders thrown over the side by the pilots; the more seriously hurt were simply kept afloat until the rescue boat, which carried slings and baskets and was already on its way, could get there.

  On shore, the watching men—the lucky ones, as the barge pilots had said, because they were out of it—tried to divide their attention between this operation and the planes still overhead. The bombers, having made their run, turned out toward the channel and headed back north. They made no attempt at strafing, they were too busy protecting themselves from the fighters, and the antiaircraft crews on the ships and shore could not fire either for fear of hitting their own fighters. The whole operation, except for the dropped bombs themselves, had taken place up there, high up in the air. Slowly, sedately, the bombers headed back into the north to where a protective blanket of their own fighters would be waiting for them, growing slowly and steadily smaller, as before they had grown slowly and steadily larger. The fighters still buzzed angrily around them, and before they were lost to sight a few more fell. All during the action the defending fighters had been hampered by having to break off and streak back to the air strip to renew fuel or ammunition. Replenished, they would return. But the number of fighters actually engaged was never as large as it might have been. Apparently the bombers were allowing for this factor. At any rate, slowly they dwindled to specks again, then to invisibility. Then finally, the fighters began to return. It was over. On the beach the work of unloading, which had never ceased during the attack, went right on.

  Men who had been here longer and who were standing nearby to C-for-Charlie, which still waited—and watched—from the edge of the coconut grove, told them that there would probably be at least two more attacks, now, during the day. The main thing was to get the damned ships unloaded so they could get out of here and thus let things settle back peacefully to normal. The unloading was the most important thing of all. But it had to be finished by nightfall. The ships had to be out of here as soon as it got dark, fully unloaded or not, rather than risk night air attacks. If they weren’t fully unloaded, they would leave anyway.

  Already, long before the retreating bombers were out of sight, word had circulated around the beach that the first transport had been damaged by the same bomb which had destroyed the bargeful of infantrymen. This was an even more important reason for the ships to get out. The damage was slight, but the bomb had sprung some plates and she was taking water, though not enough that the pumps could not handle it. There had been some casualties aboard the ship, too, caused by bomb fragments or pieces of flying metal from the barge among the densely crowded men on deck; and one man, word had it, had had his face smashed in by a helmet blown from the head of some man in the barge: a complete, solid helmet, undented, undamaged. Such were the vagaries of existence, the word had it. Pieces of meat and chunks of shattered equipment had also been blown up onto the ship’s deck from the barge, the jagged riflestocks causing some little further injury. Apparently, word from the ship said, the bomb had not landed directly in the barge itself, but had hit right alongside its gunnel, between it and the ship. This was the reason for the blast damage to the ship. On the other hand, had it landed on the opposite side of the barge away from the ship, or even in the barge, the men on deck would have been bombarded with a great deal more meat and metal than they had been. As it was, the most of it had—because of the bomb’s position—been blown away from the ship across the water. The casualties on board the ship, the word said, had been seven dead and twenty-two injured, amongst which injured was the man who had had his face smashed in by the helmet. All of these were being cared for aboard in the ship’s hospital.

  C-for-Charlie heard this news with a strange feeling. This had been their ship, these men now dead and injured their sailing companions. The spot where the bomb fell had not been at all far from their own debarkation position. They listened to the word-of-mouth reports with a sort of mixture of awe and imaginative fear which they found completely uncontrollable: If the bombers had been a few minutes earlier. Or if they themselves had been only a few minutes later getting up on deck. Suppose one of the companies ahead of them had been much slower getting off? Suppose, for that matter, the bomb hadn’t landed some yards off in the water? Suppose it had landed that number of yards toward the rail? This sort of speculation was, of course, useless. As well as acutely painful. But a strong awareness of this uselessness did not seem to help to make the speculation cease.

  The survivors of the destroyed LCI were landed from the two barges and the rescue boat which had picked them up, not far away from C-for-Charlie company; so C-for-Charlie got to observe this action, too. With practical comments as to the extent of the various injuries in their ears from the nearby men who had been here longer, C-for-Charlie watched round-eyed as these men were tenderly led or carried up from the beach to where a field dressing station had been set up at dawn. Some of them were still vomiting sea water from their ordeal. A few were able to walk by themselves. But all of them were suffering from shock, as well as from blast, and the consummate tenderness with which they were handled first by their rescuers and then by the corpsmen was a matter of complete indifference to them and meant nothing. Bloodstained, staggering, their eyeballs rolling, the little party faltered up the slope of the beach to sit or lie, dazed and indifferent, and acquiescently allow themselves to be worked on by the doctors.

  They had crossed a strange line; they had become wounded men; and everybody realized, including themselves, dimly, that they were now different. Of itself, the shocking physical experience of the explosion, which had damaged them and killed those others, had been almost identically the same for them as for those other ones who had gone on with it and died. The only difference was that now these, unexpectedly and illogically, found themselves alive again. They had not asked for the explosion, and they had not asked to be brought back. In fact, they had done nothing. All they had done was climb into a barge and sit there as they had been told. And then this had been done to them, without warning, without explanation, perhaps damaging them irreparably; and now they were wounded men; and now explanation was impossible. They had been initiated into a strange, insane, twilight fraternity where explanation would be forever impossible. Everybody understood this; as did they themselves, dimly. It did not need to be mentioned. Everyone was sorry, and so were they themselves. But there was nothing to be done about it. Tenderness was all that could be given, and, like most of the self-labeled human emotions, it meant nothing when put alongside the intensity of their experience.

  With the planes which had done this to them still in sight above the channel, the doctors began swiftly to try to patch up, put back together, and save, what they could of what the planes had done. Some of them were pretty badly torn up, others not so badly. Some would yet die, so much was obvious, and it was useless to waste time on these which might be spent on others who might live. Those who would die accepted this professional judgment of the doctors silently, as they accepted the tender pat on the shoulder the doctors gave them when passing them by, staring up mutely from bottomless, liquid depths of still-living eyes at the doctors’ guilty faces.

  C-for-Charlie, standing nearby, and already counted off again into its true structural unity of platoons, watched this action at the aid station with rapt fascination. Each of its platoons and its company headquarters instinctively huddled together as though for warmth against a chill, seeking a comfort fr
om the nearness of others which was not forthcoming, five separate little groups of wide-eyed spectators consumed with an almost sexual, morbid curiosity. Here were men who were going to die, some of them before their very eyes. How would they react? Would some of them rage against it, as they themselves felt like raging? Or would they simply all expire quietly, stop breathing, cease to see? C-for-Charlie, as one man, was curious to see: to see a man die. Curious with a hushed, breathless awe. They could not help but be; fresh blood was so very red, and gaping holes in bared flesh were such curious, strange sights. It was all obscene somehow. Something which they all felt should not be looked at, somehow, but which they were compelled to look at, to cluster closer and study. The human body was really a very frail, defenseless organism, C-for-Charlie suddenly realized. And these men might have been themselves. So might those others, out there now under the water over which the LCIs still scurried, and who would not be searched out and raised until the cessation of the unloading offered time and opportunity.

  The wounded men, both those who would die and those who would not, were as indifferent to being stared at as they were to the tenderness with which they were treated. They stared back at their audience with lacklustre eyes, eyes which though lustreless were made curiously limpid by the dilation of deep shock, and if they saw them at all, which was doubtful, what they saw did not register. As a result, the whole of C-for-Charlie felt it, too: what all the others, with more experience, knew: These men had crossed a line, and it was useless to try to reach them. These had experienced something that they themselves had not experienced, and devoutly hoped they never would experience, but until they did experience it they could no longer communicate with them. An hour ago—even less than that—these had been like themselves; nervous, jumpy, waiting with trepidation at how they would behave, to be disembarked. Now they had joined company with—and had even gone beyond—those strange, wild-eyed, bearded, crazily dressed Marines and soldiers who had been fighting the Japanese here since August and who now stood around matter-of-factly, discussing professionally which of these wounds they thought might be fatal, and which might not.

  Even the army itself understood this about them, the wounded, and had made special dispensations for their newly acquired honorary status. Those who did not die would be entered upon the elaborate shuttling movement back out from this furthermost point of advance, as only a short time back they had been entered upon the shuttle forward into it. Back out, and further and further back, toward that amorphous point of assumed total safety. It was as though, if each man’s life in the army were looked upon as a graph, beginning at the bottom with his induction and rising steadily to this point, then this moment now—or rather the moment of the explosion itself, actually—could be considered the apex from which the line turned downward, back toward the bottom and his eventual discharge: his secret goal. Depending upon the seriousness of his condition and the amount of time required to heal him, his graph line would descend part, or all of the way, to the bottom. Some, the least injured, might never even get as far back as New Zealand or Australia, and might end their downward course at a base hospital in the New Hebrides and from there be sent back up again. Others, slightly more wounded, might get to New Zealand or Australia, but not back to the States, and so be sent forward again from there. Still others, more serious yet, might get to the States and yet not be discharged, so that they might be sent out again from there, toward this moving danger point of the front, either back this way, or to Europe. All of these graph lines would rise again, perhaps to an even higher apex. The dead, of course, would find that their graph lines stopped; at the apex itself, like those out there under the water, or else a little way below it like these men dying here.

  It could all be worked out mathematically, young Corporal Fife thought suddenly when he discovered these thoughts running through his mind, and someone ought to do it. It would require a tremendous amount of work though, with all the men there were in all the armies of the world. But perhaps an electric brain could be constructed that would handle it.

  At any rate, clearly the best way to be wounded, if one must be wounded at all, was to have a wound so bad that you would almost die, one that would leave you sick long enough for the war to get over, but which when you recovered from it would not leave you crippled or an invalid. Either that, or receive a minor wound which would incapacitate or cripple you slightly without crippling fully. Fife could not decide which he would prefer. He didn’t really prefer any, that was the truth.

  In the end, C-for-Charlie got to see three men die in the aid station, before the jeep with its route guide from regimental headquarters arrived to lead it to its bivouac. Of these three, two died very quietly, slowly sinking further and further into that state of unreality brought on by shock and by the ebbing of the functions so that the mind mercifully does not comprehend what is happening to it. Only one man raged against it, and he only for a moment, rousing himself briefly from his steadily encroaching hallucination to shout curses and epithets against what was happening to him and against everything which contributed to it, the doctors, the bomb, the war, the generals, the nations, before relapsing back quietly into the numbing sleep which would pass over into death with scarcely a transition. Others would die too here, certainly—as well as almost certainly still others on the plane out, or in the base hospital—but C-for-Charlie was not there to see them. They were already off on their six mile route march to their new bivouac.

  It was a march the like of which none of them had ever experienced before, and nobody had really prepared them for it. Though they had read newspaper accounts of jungle fighting. As they moved back inland through the coconut groves, the aid station near the beach was quickly lost to sight, though not to memory, and they found themselves coming suddenly into those tropic conditions they had heard so much about. Here where the sea breeze of the beach could not reach them, the moist humidity was so overpowering, and hung in the air so heavily, that it seemed more like a material object than a weather condition. It brought the sweat starting from every pore at the slightest exertion. And unable to evaporate in it, this sweat ran down over their bodies soaking everything to saturation. When it had saturated their clothing, it ran on down into their shoes, filling them, so that they sloshed along in their own sweat as if they had just come out of wading a river. It was now almost midday and the sun blazed down on them between the widely spaced trees, heating their helmets to such temperatures that the steel shells actually burned their hands and for simple comfort had to be removed and slung from packs, leaving them wearing only the fiber liners. They tramped along through a strange, heavy quiet caused by the humidity which damped the air with moisture so that sound waves did not travel but simply fell dead to the ground. There was so much water in the heavy, hanging air that the marching men had to gasp for breath, and then got very little oxygen or relief for their extra exertion. Everything was wet. The roads used by the transport were seas of soft mud churned up by the traffic, axledeep on the big trucks. It was impossible to march on—or in—them. The only possible way for marching men to move at all was to travel in two lines, one on either side, picking their way over the great rolls of drying mud, turned back as though by a plow, and the lumpish hummocks of grass between them. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from the disturbed grass hummocks to plague them in the quiet, heavy air. Several times they came upon jeeps mired down, with their smaller wheelbase, to their belly plates, vainly trying to extricate themselves; and their own jeep which was leading them had to pick its way very carefully through the worst of the muddy places.

  Everywhere around them as they moved along were great piles of stores and supplies of all kinds, stacked in great dumps thirty and forty feet high, and into which and out of which moved a constant traffic of the big trucks. They had to march quite some little time, before they got far enough inland for the supply dumps to cease.

  Trudging along the road edge on this incredible march and moving directly behind Captain Stein
and Lieutenant Band, First Sergeant Welsh, betweentimes wiping the sweat out of his eyes, could not stop thinking of the little band of wounded animals—because that was what they were, had been reduced to—that he had seen back at the aid station, and he kept muttering softly to himself over and over while grinning slyly at Fife: “Property. Property. All for property.” Because that was what it was; what it was all about. One man’s property, or another man’s. One nation’s, or another nation’s. It had all been done, and was being done, for property. One nation wanted, felt it needed, probably did need, more property; and the only way to get it was to take it away from those other nations who had already laid claim to it. There just wasn’t any more unclaimed property on this planet, that was all. And that was all it was. He found it immensely amusing. “Property,” Welsh muttered to himself too softly for anyone else to hear, “all for property,” and frequently he would take from his first sergeant’s musette, where he kept the Morning Report and other reports, a large Listerine bottle full of straight gin, from which he would pretend to take loud gargles for a nonexistent sore throat. He had three more full bottles, carefully and separately wrapped up in his blankets in his full field pack, which now hung heavily on his back. It was precious stuff. Because in a new, unknown terrain it would take him probably two whole days, possibly three, to ferret out and find a new source.