The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

  It would certainly end sometime, sure, and almost certainly—because of industrial production—end in victory. But that point in time had no connection with any individual man engaged now. Some men would survive, but no one individual man could survive. It was a discrepancy in methods of counting. The whole thing was too vast, too complicated, too technological for any one individual man to count in it. Only collections of men counted, only communities of men, only numbers of men.

  The weight of such a proposition was deadening, almost too heavy to be borne, and Bell wanted to turn his mind away from it. Free individuals? Ha! Somewhere between the time the first Marines had landed here and this battle now today, American warfare had changed from individualist warfare to collectivist warfare—or perhaps that was only his illusion, perhaps it only seemed like that to him because he himself was now engaged. But free individuals? What a fucking myth! Numbers of free individuals, maybe; collectives of free individuals. And so the point of Bell’s serious thinking finally emerged.

  At some unspecified moment between this time yesterday and this time today the unsought realization had come to Bell that statistically, mathematically, arithmetically, any way you wanted to count it, he John Bell could not possibly live through this war. He could not possibly go home to his wife Marty Bell. So it did not really make any difference what Marty did, whether she stepped out on him or not, because he would not be there to accuse her.

  The emotion which this revelation created in Bell was not one of sacrifice, resignation, acceptance, and peace. Instead, it was an irritating, chaffing emotion of helpless frustration which made him want to crawl around rubbing his flanks and back against rocks to ease the itch. He still had not moved his face from the rock.

  Beside him Witt, still kneeling and peering out, yelled suddenly. Simultaneously Doll yelled too from down at the other end.

  “Something’s comin!”

  “Something’s comin! Somebody’s comin at us!”

  As one man the line behind the ledge swept up and forward, rifles ready. Forty yards away seven pot-headed, bandylegged, starved-looking Japanese men were running down at them across an ungrassed area carrying hand grenades in their right hands and bayoneted rifles in their left. Keck’s Thompson, after his firing of almost all its ammo on the way up, had finally jammed, too. Neither gun could be unstuck. But the massed riflefire from the ledge disposed of the seven Japanese men quickly. Only one was able even to throw; and his grenade, a dud, landed short. At the same moment the dud grenade should have exploded, there was a loud, ringing, halfmuffled explosion behind them. In the excitement of the attack and defense they continued to fire into the seven bodies up the slope. When they ceased, only two bodies continued to move. Aiming deliberately in the sudden quiet, Witt the Kentuckian put a killing round into each of them. “You never can tell about them tricky suicidal bastards,” he said. “Even when they’re hit.”

  It was Bell who first remembered the explosion behind them and turned around to see what had caused it. What he saw was Sgt Keck lying on his back with his eyes closed, in a strangely grotesque position, still holding the ring and safety pin of a hand grenade in his right hand. Bell called out, and rushing to him, they rolled him over gently and saw that there was nothing they could do for him. His entire right buttock and part of his back had been blown away. Some of his internal organs were visible, pulsing busily away, apparently going about their business as if nothing had happened. Steadily, blood welled in the cavity. Gently they laid him back.

  It was obvious what had happened. In the attack, perhaps because his Thompsongun was jammed, but at any rate not firing his rifle, Keck had reached in his hip pocket to pull out a grenade. And in the excitement he had gotten it by the pin. Bell, for one, experienced a dizzying, near-fainting terror momentarily, at the thought of Keck standing and looking at that pin in his hand. Keck had leaped back from the line and sat down against a little dirt hummock to protect the others. Then the grenade had gone off.

  Keck made no protest when they moved him. He was conscious, but apparently did not want to talk and preferred to keep his eyes closed. Two of them sat with him and tried to talk to him and reassure him while the others went back to the line, but Keck did not answer and kept his eyes shut. The little muscles at the corners of his mouth twitched jerkily. He spoke only once. Without opening his eyes he said clearly, “What a fucking recruit trick to pull.” Five minutes later he stopped breathing. The men went back. Milly Beck, as the senior noncom present, was now in command.

  Stein had watched the silly little Japanese counter-attack from the top of the third fold. The seven Japanese men had come out from behind a huge outcrop, already running and already too close to the Americans for Stein to dare tell his one MG to fire. The counter-attack was doomed to failure anyway. What made them do it? Why, if they wanted to throw Stein’s platoon off the ridge, did they not come in force? Why just seven men? And why come across the open ground? They could have slipped down through the grass until they were on top of Keck and thrown the grenades from there. Were those seven men doing all that on their own, without orders? Or were they some kind of crazy religious volunteers who wanted into Nirvana, or whatever it was they called it? Stein did not understand them, and had never understood them. Their incredibly delicate, ritual tea service; their exquisitely sensitive painting and poetry; their unbelievably cruel, sadistic beheadings and torture. He was a peaceful man. They frightened him. When the riflefire from the platoon took care of the seven so easily, he awaited a second, larger attack, but knowing somehow intuitively that one would not come, and he was right.

  Stein had not thought anyone was wounded in the little attack, so he was surprised when the men all clustered around one figure on the ground. On the ridge they were slightly above his own height here, now, and at this distance—more than two hundred yards—it was impossible to tell who it was. Hoping desperately that it was not Keck, he called to Band to give him back his glasses, focused them, and saw that it was. Almost immediately a rifle bullet whooshed past him only inches from his head. Startled wide-eyed, he jerked down and rolled over twice to his left. He had forgotten to shield the lenses, and they had glinted. This time he cupped them with his hands, verified that it was Keck dead, then saw that Sgt Beck was looking at him—or anyway toward him—and making the Old Army hand-and-arm signal for “Converge on me.” He wanted reinforcements?! Thirty-five yards behind Stein another mortar shell exploded and somebody yelled. Again he ducked.

  Exertion, nervous exhaustion, and fear were wearing Stein down. When he looked at his watch, he could not believe it was after one. Suddenly he was ravenous. Putting down the glasses, he got out a bar of D Ration and tried to munch it but could not get it down because his mouth was so dry from lack of water. He spat most of it out. When he looked again with the glasses, Beck was again making his hand-and-arm signal. As he watched, Beck stopped and turned back to the ledge. Stein cursed. His little three-squad attack had failed, bogged down. They had not been nearly enough men. Stein very seriously doubted if he even had that many men. He had just watched two full platoons of B-for-Baker on the lefthand ridge come running back ftom a failed attack up the Bowling Alley in an attempt to outflank the right-hand grassy ridge. And Beck wanted reinforcements!

  That whole fucking outrageous ridge was one giant honeycomb of emplacements. It was a regular fortress. He himself was fast nearing the limbo of total mental exhaustion. It was hard to try and act fearless for your men when you were actually full of fear. And Beck wanted reinforcements!

  Stein had lain and watched Keck lead his three pitiful little squads up that goddamned ridge with tears in his eyes. Beside him George Band had lain and watched eagerly through the glasses, smiling toughly. But Stein had choked up, cried enough moisture so that everything blurred and he had to wipe his eyes out quickly. He had personally counted every one of the twelve to go down. They were his men, and he had failed in his responsibility to each one who fell. And now he was being asked
to send more after them.

  Well, he could give him the two remaining squads of 2d Platoon. Pull them back out and put the reserve 3d Platoon up on the crest to fire cover. That would work all right. But before he did it, he intended to talk to Col Tall and get Tall’s opinion and assent. Stein simply did not want that responsibility, not all alone. Rolling over, he motioned to Corporal Fife to bring him the telephone. God, but he was bushed. It was just then that Stein first heard from down in the little valley the first thin, piping yells.

  They sounded insane. What they lacked in volume, and they lacked a great deal, they more than made up in their penetrating qualities, and in their length. They came in a series, each lasting five full seconds, the whole lasting thirty seconds. Then there was silence under the high-hanging, jouncing racket of noise.

  “Jesus!” Stein said fervently. He looked over at Band, whom he found looking back at him with squinted, dilated eyes.

  “Christ!” Band said.

  From below, high and shrill, the series of yells came again. They were not screams.

  Stein was able to pick him out easily with the glasses, which brought him up very close, too close for comfort. He had fallen almost at the bottom of the slope, seventy-five or eighty yards, not far from the other one, the Mississippian Catt, who—seen through the glasses—was clearly dead. Now he was trying to crawl back. He had been hit squarely in the groin with a burst of heavy MG fire which had torn his whole belly open. Lying on his back, his head uphill, both hands pressed to his belly to hold his intestines in, he was inching his way back up the slope with his legs. Through the glasses Stein could see blue-veined loops of intestine bulging between the bloodstained fingers. Inching was hardly the word, since Stein estimated he was making less than half an inch per try. He had lost his helmet, and his head thrown back on his neck, his mouth and his eyes wide open, he was staring directly up at Stein as if he were looking into a Promised Land. As Stein watched, he stopped, laid his head flat, and closing his eyes he made his series of yells again. They came to Stein’s ears faintly, exactly in the same sequence as they had before. Then, resting a second and swallowing, he yelled something else.

  “Help me! Help me!” Stein heard. Feeling sick and dizzy in the area of his diaphragm, he lowered the glasses and handed them to Band.

  “Tella,” he said.

  Bank looked a long time. Then he too lowered the glasses. There was a flat, scared look in his eyes when he looked back at Stein. “What’re we gonna do?” Band said.

  Trying to think of some answer to this, Stein felt something touch him on the leg. He yelped and jumped, fear running all through his body like quicksilver. Whirling around, he found himself staring downslope into the fear-ridden eyes of Corporal Fife, who was holding out to him the telephone. Too upset even to be sheepish or angry, Stein waved him away impatiently. “Not now. Not now.” He began to call for a medic, one of whom was already on his way. From below the insane series of yells came again, identical, unchanging.

  Stein and Band were not the only ones to have heard them. The entire remainder of the 2d Platoon lying along the crest of the fold had heard them. So had the medic who was now running bentover along the slope to Stein. So had Fife.

  When his commander waved him away with the telephone, Fife had collapsed exactly where he was and flattened himself as low to the ground as he could get. The mortar shells were still falling at roughly one-minute intervals; sometimes you could hear their fluttery shu-ing sound for two seconds before they hit; and Fife was completely terrorized by them. He had lost the power to think reasonably, and had become a piece of inert protoplasm which could be made to move, but only when the proper stimuli were applied. Since making up his mind that he would do exactly what he was told, but exactly that and no more, he had lain exactly where he had been until Stein called him for the telephone. Now he lay exactly where he had dropped and waited to be told to do something else. This gave him little comfort, but he had no desire to see or do more. If his body would not work well, his mind could, and Fife realized that by far the great majority of the company were reacting like himself. But there were still those others who, for one reason or another of their own, got up and walked about and offered to do things without being told first. Fife knew it, because he had seen them—otherwise he wouldn’t have believed it. His reaction to these was one of intense, awed hero worship composed of about two-thirds grinding hate, and shame. But when he tried to force his body to stand up and walk around, he simply could not make it do it. He was glad that he was a clerk whose job was to take care of the telephone and not a squad noncom up there with Keck, Beck, McCron and the others, but he would have preferred to be a clerk at Battalion Hq back on Hill 209, and more than that a clerk at Regiment back down in the coconut groves, but most of all a clerk at Army Hq in Australia, or in the United States. Just above him up the slope he could hear Bugger Stein talking with the medic, and he caught the phrase “his belly blown open.” Then he caught the word “Tella”. So it was Tella who was yelling down there like that. It was the first concrete news Fife had had of anyone since the two dead lieutenants and Grove. He pressed his face to the dirt sickly, while Bugger and the medic moved off a few feet for another look. Tella had used to be a buddy of his, for a while at least. Built like a Greek god, never very bright, he was the most amiable of men, despite his career in life as a honeydipper in Cambridge Mass. And now Tella was suffering in actual reality the fate which Fife all morning had been imagining would be his own. Fife felt sick. It was so different from the books he’d read, so much more final. Slowly, in trepidation at even raising it that far, he lifted his head a fraction off the dirt to peer with pain-haunted, fear-punctured eyes at the two men with the binoculars. They were still talking. “Can you tell?” Stein asked, anxiously. “Yes, sir. Enough,” the medic said. He was the senior one, the more studious looking. He handed the glasses to Stein and put back on his spectacles. “There’s nothing anybody can do that’ll help him. He’ll be dead before they can ever get him back to a surgeon. And he’s got dirt all over his bowels. Even sulfa won’t fix that. In these jungles?”

  There was a pause before Stein spoke again. “How long?”

  “Two hours? Four, maybe? Maybe only one, or less.”

  “But, God damn it, man!” Stein exploded. “We can’t any of us stand it that long!” He paused. “Not counting him! And I can’t ask you to go down there.”

  The medic studied the terrain. He blinked several times behind his glasses. “Maybe it’s worth a try.”

  “But you said yourself nobody could do anything to help him.”

  “At least I could get a syrette of morphine into him.”

  “Would one be enough?” Stein asked. “I mean, you know, would it keep him quiet?”

  The medic shook his head. “Not for long.” He paused. “But I could give him two. And I could leave him three or four for himself.”

  “But maybe he wouldn’t take them. He’s delirious. Couldn’t you just, sort of, give them all to him at once?” Stein said.

  The medic turned to look at him. “That would kill him, sir.”

  “Oh,” Stein said.

  “I couldn’t do that,” the medic said. “I really couldn’t.”

  “Okay,” Stein said grimly. “Well, do you want to try it?”

  From below the set, unchanging series of yells, the strangely mechanical cries of the man they were talking about, rose up to them, precise, inflexible, mad, a little quavery toward the end, this time.

  “God, I hope he don’t begin to cry,” Stein said. “God damn it!” he yelled, balling a fist. “My company won’t have any fighting spirit left at all if we don’t do something about him!”

  “I’ll go, sir,” the medic said solemnly, answering the question of before. “After all, it’s my job. And after all, it’s worth a try, isn’t it, sir?” he said, nodding significantly toward the spot where the series of yells had now ceased. “To stop the yells.”

  “God,” Stein
said, “I don’t know.”

  “I’m volunteering. I’ve been down there before, you know. They won’t hit me, sir.”

  “But you were on the left. It’s not as bad there.”

  “I’m volunteering,” the medic said, blinking at his Captain owlishly.

  Stein waited several seconds before he spoke. “When do you want to go?”

  “Any time,” the medic said. “Right now.” He started to get up.

  Stein put out a restraining arm. “No, wait. At least I can give you some covering fire.”

  “I’d rather go now, sir. And get it over with.”

  They had been lying side by side, their helmets almost touching as they talked, and now Stein turned to look at the boy. He could not help wondering whether he had talked this boy into volunteering. Perhaps he had. He sighed. “Okay. Go ahead.”

  The medic nodded, looking straight ahead this time, then sprang up into a crouch, and was gone over the crest of the fold.

  It was all over almost before it got started. Running like some fleeting forest animal, his medic’s web equipment flopping, he reached the damaged Tella, swung round to face him up the hill, then dropped to his knees, his hands already groping at the pouch which held his syrettes. Before he could get the protective cap off the needle, one MG, one single MG, opened up from the ridge stitching across the area. Through the glasses Stein watched him jerk straight up, eyes and mouth wide, face slack, not so much with disbelief or mental shock as with sheer simple physiological surprise. One of the objects which had struck him, not meeting bone, was seen to burst forth through the front of him puffing out the green cloth, taking a button with it and opening his blouse a notch. Stein through the glasses saw him jab the now-bared needle, whether deliberately by design or from sheer reflex, into his own forearm below the rolled up sleeve. Then he fell forward on his face crushing both the syrette and his hands beneath him. He did not move again.