by James Jones
Fife did not sleep much either. But it was for a different reason than either Stein or Welsh. When he left Welsh, he hunted up a ration stack. His conviction that he would be dead tomorrow or the day after did not stop hunger. He ate a cold can of C ration Meat & Beans sitting on the ground outside his tent, mashing the solid food between his jaws with relish. Then he crawled in and lay down, his heart pounding when he suddenly thought about tomorrow. Die? Why, he had never seen Nice and Monte Carlo. It was twenty minutes after this little Bead, who had fallen out on the march today, came crawling in.
Fife had seen him earlier, down by the first platoon, visiting some kid draftee friend of his. When he heard him now, he rolled over with his face to the wall and pretended to be asleep. Bead scrambled in under the net without a word, and turned to his own side ignoring Fife in return.
They lay like that for a long time, in silence, while the camp settled down around them. Then they lay for an even longer time in the quiet that followed. The air in the tent was stiff with pretended sleep. Finally Bead moved. He rolled over and said in a hoarse voice:
“Well, what about it?”
Fife made no answer, and continued to pretend he was sleeping.
“I said, well what about it?” Bead said again finally, more harshly.
Fife did not answer.
“I don’t see that either one of us’s got anything to lose. Not by now. And it might be the last time of anything for both of us.” Bead’s voice was hoarse, as though it were being pulled out of him, and was not without a bitter undercurrent. His breathing was loud in the tent.
Fife still did not answer or move, and Bead said nothing further. He had rolled over and was now facing Fife’s back. He did not roll back. His breathing continued loud.
“I got one on, and you do too,” little Bead from Iowa said finally, with a kind of fierce honesty.
It was true. In a way that was answer enough. Slowly Fife rolled over toward him. They were now lying face to face, about a foot between them. Fife could just barely make out Bead’s face in the dim light. Bead’s pale blue eyes seemed to collect the meager light and illuminate his face with it.
“Well?” Bead said.
“Well what?” Fife said irascibly. “One of us has got to turn end for end.” What the hell? Bead had brought it up, let him do the turning. There was a rustle and Bead’s face disappeared from in front of him. Fife waited. Thoughtfully he ran his tongue over his unbrushed teeth. First Bead’s shoes, then his knees, appeared in front of his face.
Curiously enough, Fife during the next minutes was thinking about his girlfriend at the university in town whom he had never been able to seduce, remembering her vividly, almost physically. She was a large girl with heavy breasts, big thighs, muscular buttocks, and a protuberant mons Veneris, all of which he had felt through her clothes just once one passionate night, but never had seen. He had not been able to seduce her, but he had received four fervid love letters from her since the division left for combat. He had answered two, with appropriately tragic letters for a young infantryman about to die soon, but after the third the effort was too painful. It was easy for her to write that she now regretted she had not given herself to him when she had the chance; but for Fife to read it was almost unbearable. And long-range sympathy gained him nothing. Still, on occasion he liked to remember the way she had felt, through her clothes, better, richer, juicier, than any whore he had ever been to bed with.
Fife did not, on the other hand, like to remember how this business with Bead had got started. But there were times, like tonight, when he could not avoid it. It had started the second night on the island, in fact. The first night was the night of the day it rained so hard, also the first they had ever bunked together in a sheltertent. The second night was much drier; more comfortable. Bugger Stein still had not found the company’s big tents. It was Bead who broached the subject. He had come crawling in at a moment when Fife, already disrobed to his underwear, had been thinking ardently about girls. Fife was embarrassed, but Bead made no comment. However while he undressed he began to complain about what a hardship it was for him to be where he was denied the services of women. They had often been on pass together, Fife and he, and had gone up to the whorehouses together in the town where the division was stationed, and had Fife not noticed it? Well, he was a very horny type, little Bead said, and he needed lots of sex. At eighteen this may well have been true; and Bead had stated it many times before; but Fife could not help feeling Bead perhaps bragged a little. Anyway, for Bead, the worst thing about this whole war was that, he said. And what the hell could a guy do? Nothing, that was what. Beat it. Or do without. Unless guys helped each other out now and then. It was either that, or find yourself a queer cook or baker someplace, or it was nothing. Guys could help each other out, Bead supposed.
“You know, like the things you used to do together when you were kids in school,” he grinned, shyly.
That was all he said. He had finished undressing down to his shorts. Then he lay down on his own side of the tent, and went on talking about girls and whores in that almost childish tenor which at eighteen he had not yet lost. Finally he stopped talking also. There was a long pause. Then he rolled over to face Fife.
“Well, what do you say?” he said cheerfully. “Shall we help each other out? I’ll do it to you if you’ll do it to me.”
Fife had divined what was coming. Nevertheless he pretended surprise and confusion. But he already knew that he was going to accept. And Bead, finding that he was not rebuffed, now became more confident in his voice and in his salesmanship. Apparently it made no difference to him and did not worry him that he was suggesting something homosexual. And perhaps, being eighteen and just out of school, he didn’t see it that way. But that could not be entirely true, Fife speculated later, because as he started to crawl over to Fife’s side of the little tent he stopped and said:
“I just don’t want you to think I’m no queer, or nothing like that.”
“Well, don’t you get the idea I am, either,” Fife had answered.
Fife thought about his lost girl that time, too. He thought about her every time. There weren’t many more times. There was that first night, the second night on the island, and the following night which was the third night on the rock. On the fourth day the company’s tents were found, the puptents were struck, and everybody moved into the larger eight-man tents. After that, opportunity was lacking. Once, one single time, on an afternoon when Welsh was gone and there was no work for them to do, they had gone off for a walk in the jungle, knowing beforehand what they were going to do but not mentioning it, so that when it happened off there alone in the massive, high-arching jungle, it seemed to both of them to come as a complete surprise. But that was all, just those three times and this last one.
It had of course changed their relationship. Fife to his own surprise found himself becoming more and more authoritarian with his little assistant than he had ever dared be with anyone in his life. He gave him curt orders, cursed him out for the slightest thing, criticized him constantly, insulted him more and more frequently, used him as his perpetual butt; in short, more and more treated Bead as he himself hated to be treated by Welsh. Bead on the other hand seemed to understand this, and moreover accepted it as though he felt it in some way to be his due. He accepted Fife’s insults in silence, carried out his repeated orders as best he could, and received his constant criticism quietly without anger or answering back. And yet all this time Fife was not really angry at him for anything. Bead seemed to know this. Fife knew it, too. But his reaction was an emotional response he could neither understand nor control.
After Bead had gone off into a relaxed, profound sleep Fife lay wide awake staring into the darkness. He had given up trying to sort it all out. All he knew was that he did not feel guilty about what he did with Bead. He felt he ought to feel guilty. But the truth was that he didn’t. After all, what was the difference between doing the same things now that you did as a kid, and doin
g them when you were a freshman or sophomore. Only all the talk you had heard in the meantime about fairies and queers. Fife knew there were oldtimers in the army who had their young boyfriends whom they slept with as with a wife. In return, the young soldiers received certain favors from their protectors, not the least of which was more money to spend on women in town. None of this buggering was considered homosexual by anyone and authority turned a blind eye to it. But that was buggering. On the other hand there were the overt homosexuals, much increased since the drafting of civilians, whom everybody disliked, though many might avail themselves of their services. This was the type company commanders tried to get rid of whenever a levy of men was demanded. These two types constituted the extent of Fife’s knowledge. He could not honestly place himself among them, but was terrified that someone else might. On this night before his outfit went into its first combat he lay awake a long time, wondering whether he was a homosexual. Every now and then his heart would jump suddenly when he remembered he had never seen Nice or Monte Carlo. Anyway, he knew he liked girls.
Almost everyone was up at dawn. At the very first light which filtered down to them from the high trees men began crawling out, taking down their tents, rolling their packs. No orders had to be given them. Some, still afflicted with the American cleanliness complex, poured water from their canteens onto their toothbrushes to brush their teeth. Most did not. A few others remembered to powder their feet. There was very little horseplay, and a subdued air hung over everything in the dim green jungle light. Breakfast was a simple affair. There were C ration stacks around everywhere, and each man simply went to one of them when he felt like eating and took what he wanted. After eating, they settled down on their packs to wait.
Dawn had come shortly before five o’clock. It was after eight-thirty when an out-of-breath guide appeared with orders for them to move. While they had waited they could hear if not see other outfits moving invisibly into or out of other positions all around them in the jungle. Gasping infantry companies kept straggling past on the road. Now, led by the guide (who had regained his breath) they moved out onto the road behind a company from their own third battalion whom they recognized. They themselves knew nothing about what was happening.
The guide led them half a mile in half an hour. There he stopped, and pointed to a grassy place under some trees at the roadedge. This was where they were supposed to wait. They were supposed to drop their rolls and form combat packs, sit down and wait. He turned on his heel and left, going toward the front.
“But hey!” Stein protested after him. “There must be more instructions than that. I know what the dispositions are. I know what we’re supposed to do.”
“I don’t know nothin about none of that, sir,” the guide called back. “All I know I was suppose to bring you here and tell you what I tole you.”
“But won’t they send another runner for us?”
“I reckon they will. I don’t know. All I know is what I tole you. You’ll excuse me, sir, but I got to get back up there.” He turned and went on, disappeared around a bend in the road.
It was as though C-for-Charlie Company suddenly had dropped completely out of the world. With the disappearance of the guide they did not see another living soul. There had been companies marching both in front of and behind them. Now there were none. The one in front had gone on, the one behind evidently some other way. There had been jeeps loaded with supplies bucking through the mud. There was now nothing, not a vehicle. The road stretched before them totally deserted. And nothing came along it either. Even sound seemed to have ceased. Except for the normal jungle noises, they seemed to have dropped into a vacuum; and the only sound they could hear, one which their ears gradually became aware of, was the distant splashing and faint voices of men moving something up or down the river somewhere off behind the screen of jungle.
They unslung their packs and dismantled them, then settled down to wait. They waited another hour and a half—from nine to ten-thirty—before they saw another human, listening to the splashing and faint shouts from the river, staring at their neat, stacked rolls.
There was not much discussion of the situation while they waited, largely because nobody knew what it was. But they didn’t want to talk about it anyway, and preferred not to think about it. What little discussion there was employed a new word; simply, “Elephant.” During the past two days whenever the group of treeless hills C-for-Charlie’s regiment had been assigned to attack was mentioned, it was called The Elephant, or simply Elephant. Everyone was quick to pick the word up and use it, but nobody knew where it came from or what it meant.
In actual fact, the complex of hills had been named “The Dancing Elephant” by a young staff officer while studying an aerial photograph. Outlined on all sides by dark jungled valleys, the group of grassy hills did somewhat resemble an elephant standing on its hind legs with its forelegs up and its trunk above its head. The hind legs up to the belly were already held by the Marines, and the regiment’s attack (less the 3d Battalion, which had been given another objective) was to commence there and work its way up and across the rest of the group of hills to the Elephant’s Head. The Japanese had been felt out by reconnaissance and were known to hold at least two strong points in the Dancing Elephant from which it was believed they would contest vigorously any attack. One of these was a high, steep ridge running across the Elephant’s body at about the shoulder; the other was the Elephant’s Head itself, the highest point in the entire hill mass. From it the Elephant’s Trunk tapered down to the low jungled country, affording the Japanese a good supply route—and a good escape route, if they needed it. It was the high ridge at the Elephant’s Shoulder, which had been labeled Hill 209, that the 2d Battalion was supposed to be attacking today. But sitting on their suddenly deserted road, C-for-Charlie had no idea if they were doing it or not, and if they were, how they were faring, and—except for the officers and platoon sergeants—did not even know the hill’s designated number. Nor did many of them very much care.
John Bell was one of those who did. Bell had had enough infantry strategy and tactics to be interested generally. Besides, if his life was going to be in jeopardy because of this action, he wanted to know as much about it as he could. Anyway, sitting on this weirdly deserted road was singularly unnerving, and Bell wanted something to do. Discussing the action was as good as anything else.
Bell was in the second squad of the second platoon, which was the squad of young Sergeant McCron, the notorious motherhen. McCron was great when it came to looking after his draftee charges, but he knew next to nothing about tactics, and cared even less. Bell approached his platoon sergeant, Keck. Keck was an old Regular who had been sergeant of this same platoon since 1940. Bell learned nothing from him. Keck merely sneered at him irritably and told him that 2d Battalion was attacking a hill called 209 today at some place called The Elephant (Christ knew why), that beyond it was another hill called (appropriately enough) Hill 210 which they themselves would probably have to attack tomorrow provided 2d Battalion did not bog down today and, since they were in reserve today, what the hell difference did it make? All of this Bell already knew. Keck was one of those toughened field noncoms who preferred to leave the maps and planning to the officers until he himself could get on the ground and see just what little jobs his platoon would have to do. Bell appreciated this, but it didn’t help him any.
His own platoon officer Lieutenant Blane was sitting close by but Blane had always been distant to Bell. Undoubtedly this was because of Bell’s former status and Bell did not feel like asking Blane. Then he saw Culp of the weapons platoon sitting on a hummock further on. Culp the typical uncomplicated happy-go-lucky college football player had always been kind to him. Bell decided to ask him.
Culp appeared to be a little unnerved himself by the strangely deserted road and the waiting, because he seemed glad to talk. He was able to tell Bell that some bright young staff officer (who would probably make Lt Colonel out of his feat) had conceived the poetic
name of The Dancing Elephant, and with a stick drew him a rough map on the damp ground showing The Elephant’s salient features. When they had exhausted the topic—exhausted it to the point of mutual embarrassment, in fact—Bell went back to his squad, thinking it over. He decided there would be at least two rather nasty jobs of work in securing The Elephant. He had consumed twenty minutes. He sat down with his squad, thinking about his wife Marty and wondering what she was doing right now. It would be night now back in Columbus. Wouldn’t it? Suddenly a physical desire for her, a desire to take her and undress her and spread her out and look at her and mount her, so strong that it made his head begin to burn with a hot fever of flushed blood, passed over him and gripped him. It was so impossibly painful that he thought he must scream. Almost delirious with the fever of it, he could not make it go away. Immediately afterward he had a severe chill. Bell was not so delirious that he did not know what that meant. He made the tenth man in three days.
Malaria was not considered a hospitalizing ailment except in the most extreme cases, and Bell was not the only man present with beginning malaria when finally a solitary figure appeared around the bend of the still-deserted road in front of them. At the spot where they sat the road bore a slight upgrade to the bend ahead. At the bend it turned sharply downhill to the right. The figure trudged uphill around the bend breathing heavily, stopped momentarily on the level ground to breathe, then stopped a second time when he saw them. After a couple of deep gasps for air, the man came on at a quickened pace, already shouting.
