by James Jones
C-for-Charlie Company’s march was one of seven and a half miles. At eleven in the morning, with a last look back at the slit trenches, kitchen fly and tied-down storage tents which served them as home, they moved out for the road edge to await a gap in the stream of moving men. They arrived at their assigned guide point at seven-thirty and nearly dusk, half dead, and by eight were encamped there in the jungle beside the road. Over forty-five percent of them had fallen out; and the last of the stragglers, heat prostrations and breakfast vomiters did not cease coming in till after midnight.
It was an incredible march. No one in C-for-Charlie, including the old timers who had hiked in Panama and the Philippines, had ever experienced anything like it. Early in the morning Bugger Stein had had hopes—had dreamed—of bringing his company in full strength without a man missing; of being able to go up to the battalion commander and report to him that he for one was all present and accounted for. When the head of the column, with Stein still shakily in the lead, turned in off the road, Stein could only laugh at himself bitterly.
Tired and shaky and still sweating after checking the platoon areas, he walked alone along the road to the battalion CP further up ahead nearer the river, to report.
He had had a strange hystericky encounter with his clerk Fife on the march. It had upset Stein, then had made him hotly furious with injured ego. Now it colored his blue mood as he walked along the road in the gathering twilight. The whole thing was strange. To take eight and a half hours to march seven and a half miles was strange enough. Add to that the terrain and it was stranger still: that march through the coconut groves with those people standing around watching like a bunch of frustrated gravediggers: after that striking the Trail and marching inland always between two crowding, gloomgreen, bird-chattering walls of jungle. They had been marching almost six hours by then, and everyone was near-hysterical. At the front of the column four of the cook force had already fallen out, and two of the company headquarters: little Bead and a new man, a draftee named Weld who because of his age had been attached to the headquarters group as a sort of combination runner and assistant clerk. All these were somewhere behind. Overhead, birds squawked or made piercing, ironic whistles which seemed specifically directed at the marchers.
Fife had been complaining for some time in a gasping, painful, wildly emotional voice that he didn’t think he could go on. Then, after a ten break, he had not gotten up right away with the rest. Stein had turned to him thinking to help, to encourage.
“Up you come, Fife. Come on, boy. You don’t want to give up now. Not after you’ve made it this far. On those poor old aching feet.”
The reaction he got was startling. Fife did not get up. He leaped up. As if stabbed in the ass with a needle. On quivering legs, quivering all over, he broke out in a mad fit of rage and abuse.
“You! You tell me! Whadda you tell me! I’ll be walking when you’re on your back! I’ll be going when you and all these other guys—” his head described a wild arc—“are on your knees and out! You and any other goddamned officer!” With trembling fingers he was getting back into his pack.
“Shut up, Fife!” Stein had said sharply.
“Any goddamned fucking officer in the world! I’ll walk till I drop dead—and when I do, I’ll be ten feet in front of your dead body! Don’t you ever worry about me quitting!”
There had been more of this sort of talk. Staggering in his pack, Fife had lurched out onto the edge of the road. He did not shut up.
Stein had not known what to do. It was up to him to make an issue or not make one. Fife was past the point of caring. Stein knew the theory of slapping an hysterical man back into his senses, but he had never actually done it himself. He was a little hesitant to try it, fearing that somehow it might not work. Or of course he could have put him under arrest and charged him. He had plenty of charges. Stein decided to do neither. In silence he walked to his place at the head of the column and raised his arm and the company moved out.
They were marching in two lines now, here on this narrower road in the jungle, one line on either side. Two files behind him Stein could hear Fife as he continued to curse and rage. Nobody else seemed to care, or paid much attention, they were all too tired. But Stein could not be sure he had not lost face with his company by deciding to ignore Fife. This tormented him and inside his helmet his ears burned. He maintained his silence. After a while Fife ceased of himself. The column marched in silence. On the other side out of the corner of his eye Stein could see Sergeant Welsh. (He had sent Band to the rear to try to cut down the straggling.) Welsh marched along with his head down, communing with some element of himself, and looking as though he were out for a walk and had felt no fatigue all day. He took frequent gargles from his Listerine bottle of gin, which infuriated Stein. As if Welsh was fooling anybody. At the side of the road in the thick leaves, almost in Stein’s ear, some mad tropic bird screamed at them irritably, then whistled shrilly as though it had seen a woman.
His anger when it came on him, marching, had not come until some little time after Fife subsided. But when it came it was potent. His neck swelled and his whole head burned inside his helmet. He was so furiously angry it blurred his eyes until he feared he would trip and fall down and lie there and howl senselessly. He hated them, all of them. You break your ass trying to look after them, be a father to them. And all they do is hate you for it, and for being an officer, with a hard, ignorant, stubborn endurance.
Fife had not fallen out.
Stein continued along the twilit road. He was sunk in a morose melancholy. To be honest, he had to admit he carried a certain guilt about Fife. He had always had rather mixed feelings about him. That he was an intelligent boy he had no doubt. And he had made him corporal nine months back because of this, and because he did his work well—even though this meant an assistant squad leader had to remain a Pfc. In addition to this, Stein had allowed Fife two mornings a week off to attend some courses at the university in the town where the division was stationed, when the new law giving free tuition to servicemen first came out.
He liked the boy. (And he thought he had proved that.) But he could not help feeling Fife was emotionally unstable. He was flighty, and inclined to be overimaginative. Highly emotional, he lacked the ability to control his emotions which might have given him good judgment. Of course he was still only a boy. But after all he was twenty. Stein did not know his background in detail, but he felt that somewhere along the line (mother feelings; defeated father competition; suchlike) Fife had become a case of arrested adolescence. There were so many like that in America today. In the Civil War men of twenty had led regiments, even divisions. In practice in the company none of this made any difference. The boy did his work and except for an occasional angry flare-up at Welsh (for which nobody could be blamed!) kept his mouth shut. But it was because of all this that Stein had felt he could not wholeheartedly recommend Fife for Officers’ Candidate School.
Back when War Department was deep in its campaign to get talent entered in the ninety-day OCS, Stein had encouraged a number of his high school graduates and more intelligent noncoms to apply. Almost all were accepted and all but two graduated with commissions. One day in the orderly room, in a moment of inspiration coupled to a misdirected desire to do good works, he had suggested to Fife that Fife apply for the Administrative School—as distinct from the Infantry School, because given Fife’s personality as Stein read it, Stein did not believe Fife would make a good infantry officer. Fife’s first reaction was to balk and refuse; and Stein should have left it at that. But to Stein it was obvious that Fife was imitating his hero Welsh who, whenever he was approached about OCS, merely snorted and looked as though he were going to spit on the floor. So later Stein tried again; because he felt it was for the good of the Army, as well as Fife.
The second time was what tore it. It still made Stein angry to think about it. The second time he was asked Fife said he had changed his mind, that he would apply, but that he would not apply to the
Administrative School; if he was going to be an officer at all, he said with some highly tragic emotionality Stein did not clearly understand, he wanted to be an infantry combat officer. Stein did not know what to do. He did not want to come out and tell Fife to his face he didn’t believe he would make a good infantry officer. This was the position he had got himself in by trying to do good works, to help the Army and Fife.
In the end he helped Fife fill out his application and signed it and sent it in. After all, every soldier had a legal right to apply. But Stein did not feel he himself had any moral right to be dishonest in his recommendation. He sent in his character analysis of Fife and his honest opinion, which was that he did not think Fife would make a good infantry officer. It was the only thing he could see to do.
The application came back immediately. To it was affixed a note from the Regimental S-1 saying: What the hell? Don’t give me all this Pro and Con crap, Jim. If you don’t think a soldier will make a good Officer, why the hell send me his application? I got more papers than I can take care of now. Stein was again angered, as well as embarrassed, this time. If the son of a bitching S-1, whom Stein knew well as a drinking buddy at the club, didn’t know every soldier had a legal right to apply, he was stupid; and if he did know it, he was immoral. Once again Stein was placed in the position of not knowing what to do. He filed the application away without mentioning it to Fife, and once again tried to get him to apply for the Administrative School. Fife refused. He said he preferred to wait until he heard from the first one, and that was what he proceeded to do: wait, angering Stein yet again.
The worst of it all was that Fife found the application, with Stein’s character analysis of him, and the S-1’s note. Two weeks before they were to leave they cleaned out all their papers. Fife, cleaning out Stein’s personal files, found it in a bunch of other papers. Stein, sitting at his desk, had reached out and grabbed it, saying it was something of his, and had locked it away. But not before, Stein was sure, Fife had had a good chance to run through it. At any rate Fife had looked at him with a very odd look on his face. As usual Welsh was there grinning, missing nothing. But then, with another of those high—and usually tragic—emotionalities which Stein could never fully understand though he could sense them, Fife went on with his work and said nothing. And he had not said anything, from that day to this. Had never mentioned it. But of course it didn’t take any great feat of brainwork to know that this was basically what was behind his outburst of today. The enlisted man’s viewpoint! It was this unfairness which angered and so infuriated Stein.
Now, though, he felt only blue. It was always a shock to rediscover how much enlisted men hated you, because you tended to try to forget it. And tomorrow he would be taking them in. He felt very inadequate. Especially when he recalled how badly the march had gone today. He had been horrified and shocked by what had happened. None of his officers or platoon sergeants had fallen out on him. They knew better than to. But when Stein thought about the number of big, tough men in his outfit who had given up, or for that matter simply fainted dead away, it left him with a dark foreboding for the future. When an undermuscled, essentially puny man like himself could keep going and these guys could not, it did not speak well for the conditioning of his company, physical or mental. He had tried to do the best he could by them in training, God knew. Great God, what would the heat and exhaustion and tension of combat itself do to them! He did not, of course, when he reported, say anything to the battalion commander about any of this; and when he did report, he discovered to his surprise that his forty-five percent straggling was in fact the best mark made in the battalion. It did not make him feel any better. He accepted the battalion commander’s rather sour congratulations with a tired grimace. Then he walked back along the darkening road looking slowly and with thoughtful care at the tall trees and fat-leafed jungle undergrowth.
With a flashlight Stein held a briefing for his officers and platoon sergeants in front of his little sleeping tent. It made his heart feel funny in his chest to be doing it. First Battalion would be in reserve most of the morning unless called. In the afternoon they would move forward to take over the positions on the hills which 2d Battalion was supposed by then to have gained. In the reflected glow of the flash on the map Stein studied their faces. Welsh was there of course, but the clerk Fife who should have been on hand in case Stein needed him, was nowhere to be seen. Probably he was embarrassed. Well, it didn’t matter. He didn’t need him. And there was no tactical reason why Fife should hear the dispositions. Stragglers were still coming in. Stein had already resigned himself to the fact that he was not going to get much sleep tonight.
The reason Fife was not present at Bugger Stein’s briefing was because he had gone for a walk in the jungle. It had nothing to do with embarrassment. Not only was Fife not embarrassed by his outburst of the afternoon, he was rather proud of it. He had not thought he was that brave. And the reason he had gone for a walk in the jungle alone had to do with the fact that, having pleased and surprised himself with his own courage like that, he had then discovered that it was all meaningless anyway.
When compared to the fact that he might very well be dead by this time tomorrow, whether he was courageous or not today was pointless, empty. When compared to the fact that he might be dead tomorrow, everything was pointless. Life was pointless. Whether he looked at a tree or not was pointless. It just didn’t make any difference. It was pointless to the tree, it was pointless to every man in his outfit, pointless to everybody in the whole world. Who cared? It was not pointless only to him; and when he was dead, when he ceased to exist, it would be pointless to him too. More important: Not only would it be pointless, it would have been pointless, all along.
This was an obscure and rather difficult point to grasp. Understanding of it kept slipping in and out on the edges of his mind. It flickered, changing its time sense and tenses. At those moments when he understood it, it left him with a very hollow feeling.
Because from somewhere down in the lowest bottom of his mind there had risen a certain, sure knowledge that tomorrow, or at least within the next few days, he would be dead.
This had filled Fife with such a huge sadness that he forgot all about the dispositions conference and simply walked off by himself, into the jungle to look at all the things which would continue to exist after he had ceased to. There were a lot of them. Fife looked at them all. They remained singularly unchanged by his scrutiny.
It really made no difference what he did, or whether he did anything. Fife did not believe in God. He did not disbelieve in God. It was just that it was a problem which did not apply to him. So he could not believe he was fighting this war for God. And he did not believe he was fighting it for freedom, or democracy, or the dignity of the human race. When he analyzed it, as he tried to do now, he could find only one reason why he was here, and that was because he would be ashamed for people to think he was a coward, embarrassed to be put to jail. That was the truth. Why it was the truth, when he had already proved to himself that it made no difference what he did or whether he did anything, he could not say. It was just the fact.
Fife had unslung his rifle when he left the camp, because they had been warned there might be Japanese infiltrators this close to the front. He had not seen anything move anywhere, but as the dusk in the jungle deepened he began to get a little bit edgy. He knew this ground had been fought over only a week ago, but from the look of it he might have been the first man ever to set foot here. And yet some man, another American, might have been killed here where he himself now stood. Fife tried to imagine it. He gripped his rifle tighter. The eerie stillness of the jungle thickened around him as the daylight failed. Quite suddenly Fife remembered they would be posting sentries around the camp tonight. Hell, he might get shot by some triggerhappy sentry. Without waiting longer, and forgetting about his conviction that he would be dead soon so that nothing mattered, he turned and started legging it back to camp, glad to be returning to the presence of his own breed.
The sentries had not yet been posted. The sergeant in charge of the guard was just rounding them up. Fife stared at them a moment wildly, as if they were not real, thinking how narrowly he had escaped being killed by one of them with his foolish emotionalism, then reported to Stein’s sleeping tent. There he was told by Welsh, who was preparing to bed down nearby, to take the hell off and go to bed.
For a moment, just for a moment, Fife thought of asking him for something, some assurance. He wanted to. But then he realized he did not know what to ask him for, or how to phrase what he wanted to say, or even what that was. After all, what assurance could be given? He didn’t want anyone to think he was a nervous sissy, or a coward. So instead of speaking, he shrugged elaborately at Welsh, though feeling that his face did not look right, looked too scared, and turned and walked away.
Welsh, who was sitting crosslegged in front of his tent with his rifle across his knees, stared after him with crinkled eyes until the boy limped from sight around a tree. From beneath the black brows the eyes themselves glinted. So the kid was finally learning how important he was to the world. Welsh sniffed. Taken him long enough. It was a concept any intelligent child ought to understand readily. Only, they just didn’t like to. So now he was learning it the hard way. Hurts, don’t it. Scares you a little bit, hunh. Shock to the system. Make anybody constipated. In a way Welsh sympathized with him. But there was nothing he could do about it. Nor anybody else. Except advise him to go back and get born dumb. Property, kid; all for property. Everybody dies; and what’s it all about? In the end, what’s everything about? What remains? Property. Welsh went back to cleaning and checking his rifle. He had aleady gone over his new Thompsongun and the pistol he had pre-empted from MacTae’s supplyroom. And if they had handed out sawed-off shotguns, he would have had one of those. He had to hurry with the rifle, it was almost too dark. Satisfied finally, he held it up in both hands and sighted along it off through the trees. Give him the Garand anytime. Let the romantic kids have the Springfields and spotweld BAR clips on them. The Marines had to do that. He’d take the Garand. Give him the firepower, and you could keep your pinpoint accuracy. This was going to be the age of firepower, not accuracy. Welsh dropped the rifle back onto his thighs and dangled his hands from his knees. He wished he had something to fuck tonight. A goat would do. Or a clean old man. Crosslegged, his rifle across his lap, Welsh sat and stared off into the dark trees.
