The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

  It was on the jeep ride back to Division Hospital that Fife saw, for the first time in a very long time, the young Captain who was the Regimental S-1, and who had once turned down—or sent back to Bugger, anyway—Fife’s application for OCS Infantry. He was standing with a bunch of other staff officers beside the road, and he recognized Fife or Fife would never have noticed him. He did not, of course, know Fife’s name. But he did recognize his face beneath all the bandages and dried blood, and, after he was hailed, Fife thought that was pretty good for an officer on the Regimental staff. After all, one could not expect to be known by name to everyone in the world.

  Fife was riding beside the driver, now that he had been reclassified as “walking wounded,” and there were four litter cases hanging on the frame behind them. The young Captain, whose name Fife knew—and in fact, would never forget for the rest of his whole life (however long that might be)—left the group when he saw Fife and came toward them.

  “Hey! Aren’t you from Charlie Company?”

  “Yes, Sir.” A sudden emotion blossomed and burst in Fife like some miniature explosion, a perfect little miniature of the explosion which had caused his own wound, perhaps. “Yes, Sir! I sure am!” He was very aware of how wounded he looked. And the Captain couldn’t know he would not be evacuated.

  They were back down off the hills now, back in the mud of the jungle, though they hadn’t yet crossed the river, and the jeep was moving slower than a man could walk, so that the Captain as they came toward him could turn and walk alongside.

  “How’s it going up there?”

  “Terrible!” Fife cried. “Just terrible!”

  “Well.” It was obviously not the answer the S-1 had expected.

  “They’re knocking the shit out of us!” Fife cried maliciously.

  “How’s Lt Whyte making out?”

  “Dead!”

  The young S-1 Captain recoiled a little as if he had been struck, his eyes disturbed. “How about Lt Blane?”

  “Dead!”

  The S-1 had chosen to ask about the only two injured officers, as Fife had suspected he would, since he knew he was friends with them. The Captain had stopped following now, and was standing motionless beside the road. All the others in the gossiping group had turned and were listening too.

  “Keck’s dead!” Fife cried. “Grove’s dead! Spain” (the other rifle platoon sergeant) “ ’s wounded!”

  “Well what about Captain Stein,” the S-1 called. “We were good friends, you know.”

  Fife swung himself around in the jeep seat to yell it back to him. “He was all right when I left! But he’s probly dead too by now!” The Captain didn’t answer. Fife swung back around in the seat, strangely satisfied—in a grinding, unsatisfied, miserable kind of way. The fuckers, never getting shot at, and with their shitty private club kind of atmosphere which they copied so carefully from the fucking British. Did they ask about anybody except officers?

  There were several other small triumphs on the way down, as when groups of rear-area troops stopped their work to stare at the jeep and its cargo with widened eyes and Fife would flash them all a wolfish grin out of his blood-caked face. But through all of these, despite his enjoyment of the role, there was still the grinding misery of his knowledge that it was only an act, that he was not in fact the future evacuee whom all of the wide-eyed rear-area troops so obviously envied. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he began to blubber again. The driver, in a guilty, eyes-intent-upon-the-road silence, mercifully did not say anything to him, and finally he got himself stopped.

  At the Division Hospital he was put in a hastily erected eight-man pyramidal tent with three others, none of whom knew each other or him, and they all sat around groaning or sighing to themselves in silence. Slowly the tent filled up, until two new cots were added in the center alongside the pole making a total of ten wounded. None of them saw a doctor that evening, though there were plenty of orderlies running around helping them, and when it came time for evening chow those of them who could walk lined up in the familiar coconut trees for their ration of the fried Spam and dehydrated potatoes served in the tin compartmentalized hospital plates. After the meal there was a great deal of searching through the milling throng in the late light while each man tried to find members of his own outfit. Fife was able to find four members of C-for-Charlie but none of them had any later news of the company than he himself had. After that they all sat around smoking cautiously and waiting for the night air raids. When the mosquitoes finally drove them all back to their tents long after the raids had ceased, he did not even try to sleep but lay mulling over and over the events of the day and his bad luck at getting a head wound. It would have been difficult to sleep anyway because in his own tent or in one of the tents nearby someone woke up every few minutes screaming or with a loud strangled yell. The one time he did doze off, he woke up yelling too.

  Fife’s interview with the doctor next day was short and succinct. After probing his head, making the colored lights dance again, he came around in front to tell him with a big, pleased grin that not only was it not fractured, it was not even a greenstick fracture—only a big gouge in Fife’s thick, tough, American skull. He seemed to expect Fife to share his pleasure with him, and the physical toughness of American skulls seemed to be important to him. Lt Col Roth (Fife had heard him so addressed by an orderly) was a big meaty man with beautiful, perfectly silver, wavy hair (which matched his silver oak leaves) and the heavy, wellpadded face of a very successful bigcity doctor. He had a deep, heavy, authoritarian voice and eyes of cold blue steel—“eyes of steel” which, Fife thought with a cold inward infantryman’s sneer, he would like to see looking at the business end of a bayonet and see how they looked. He had been hoping desperately they would find him worse than Doc Haines had predicted, and he guessed this and his despair showed in his face, but he tried to hide it from this man.

  “That’s fine, Sir,” he said. “But, you see, I lost my glasses.”

  “You what?” Col Roth said, his steel eyes widening and getting more steely. “You lost what?”

  “My glasses. When I was hit.” Fife was aware of the half-guilty, three-quarters-anguished look on his own face, but he had worn glasses since he was five, and he could just barely make out the facial features of someone ten feet away, and he did not intend to stop now. “I can’t see to do hardly anything without them.” He deliberately did not say Sir.

  Col Roth made no attempt to conceal his contempt and disdain. He did not shout the word coward, but he looked as though he would like to. “Soldier, we’ve got badly wounded men dying all over the place here. What do you expect me to do about your glasses?”

  “Well, I won’t be any good to anybody without them,” Fife said. He did not ask the obvious followup question. But then there was no need to.

  Col Roth had stepped behind him and was rather roughly putting a small compress bandage on his head with adhesive tape.

  “What’s your name again, Soldier?” he asked ominously.

  “Fife, Sir. Corporal Geoffrey P,” Fife said, feeling that now the paperwork of bureaucracy would eventually and inevitably descend upon him and mark him forever—which of course was what Eyes of Steel wanted him to think.

  “Well, Corporal,” Col Roth said coming around in front again and not hiding his contempt, “you’ll have several days to recuperate and convalesce here before you go back to your outfit. I’m going to forget all about this. You must know as well as I that we have no facilities here for making glasses. I don’t like malingering, or malingerers. But we need soldiers, even the worst kind. If we have the time, we’ll try and give you an eye examination and send to Australia for glasses for you. However, they may be a long time reaching you,” he said with a distasteful smile. “That’s all. You may go.”

  Fife saw that he had a choice. He could go on protesting about his eyes and take the consequences or he could shut up and accept the insult, and something about the ponderous selfsatisfied setmindedness of Eyes
of Steel warned him not to press. “Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” he said getting up and trying to put all his hatred in his eyes. He left without saluting. Only when he was outside did he begin to brood over the possibility that if he had gone on protesting this Lt Col might actually have shipped him out, and that he had let himself be talked down. Later that same day, strolling around the hellish, moaning compound looking for someone from the company who was new and could give him news, he found Storm sitting on a cot staring glumly at the blue-edged hole in the back of his hand.

  The Division Forward Hospital had been set up at the junction of two of the main thoroughfares of mud in the coconut groves so that the ambulances and jeeps from the front could get to it easier. Unfortunately, no one had noticed or considered important the fact that this junction was no more than six or eight hundred yards from the seaward side of the airfield, the prime target of the airraids; and while the hospital was never once hit by bombs, perhaps reenforcing the opinion of the planners, no statistical inquiry was ever made concerning the wear and tear on the nerves of the patients, all of whom had been wounded at least once. Despite this constant source of complaint, the hospital was well equipped and functioned very well under the circumstances. The installation consisted of two large three-masted circustype tents capable of holding upwards of a hundred men plus smaller tents for operating and treatment, plus now as an emergency measure a large number of pyramidal tents due to the unexpectedly high incidence of casualties. It was in one of the big dim circustype tents that Fife, who could not bear sitting in his own hastily erected, whopper-jawed, out-of-plumb pyramidal tent, came upon Storm.

  Fife was overjoyed to see him. Despite his own current, very serious problems. Having been in the Company Headquarters himself, Fife had associated with Storm and his kitchen force more than he had with most of them in the company. And Fife had always felt that Storm liked him—at least, anyway, Storm had protected him from Welsh on several occasions.

  Storm for his part was glad to see Fife, too. For one thing he had been sure back up there, watching Fife walk away with all that blood running out of him, that Fife would be dead soon, and that his walking away was only one of those last gasp reflexes that headless chickens sometimes display in dying. Also Fife was the first C-for-Charlie man Storm had seen since entering this miserable, groaning hellhole of the damned which the Army called a hospital. And right now any familiar face was welcome, in this buzzing, susurrus, crowded, haunted place. He had never much cared for Fife one way or the other, never much paid him any attention, but now he began pouring out all the news of the company Fife wanted to hear: what had happened on the rest of the first day after Fife had left, what had happened on the second day. But when Storm told him they had taken The Elephant’s Head before noon on the second day—today—it was clear to him that Fife found it very hard to believe, if not impossible. And he was right. Fife himself could remember only total and complete holocaust, Armageddon, and he had expected them all to be dead—or at least ninety percent of them—before they ever got to the top of that hill. And he said as much. Nevertheless it was true, Storm said glumly inspecting his hand, and the casualties for the second day when added to the 25% of the first day still only made up a grand total of one-third of the company. This was, Storm felt and so did most of the guys, because Bugger Stein had taken them down around behind them and outflanked and surprised the position.

  “But he wanted to do that the first day!” Fife said remembering suddenly with terror the third fold and the phone he’d held for Stein.

  “I know.” Then Storm went on to tell him how Bugger had been relieved by Shorty Tall.

  Fife was properly incensed, or at least he tried to be. He was watching Storm and listening, blinking his eyes and nodding at the proper moments, but it was clear to Storm he hardly saw or heard anything Storm did or said. Probably he was still preoccupied with being wounded. Storm didn’t blame him for that, but it was like talking to a dead man.

  Storm had had some traumas and rude awakenings of his own, but being wounded was not one of them. And neither was Stein’s relief by Colonel Tall. Storm had predicted that one to himself with pinpoint accuracy. As for being wounded, in his case that was such a little thing and counted for so very little that it hardly mattered. The explosion of the knee mortar—if that was what it was, and everybody said so—had not been close enough to shake him up, and the entry of the fragment had not hurt the slightest bit. Storm’s traumas came from other things. Chief among them was the feeling that he was letting the company down by coming back down here with this hand. And next in line to that was the way he and the others in the party he had come down with had treated the Jap prisoners they had brought down with them. His rude awakening was an awakening to the fact that he did not want any part of any more combat, here or anywhere.

  Storm had killed four Japs up there today during the breakthrough to Tall and the mopping up afterward, and had enjoyed every one of them. Only one of the four had had even the remotest chance of killing him, and that was all right with Storm too. That was fine. But his four Japs, each one of whom he remembered distinctly, were the only things that he had enjoyed during the whole four days C-for-Charlie had spent at the front. He had been scared shitless all the rest of the time. And the pageant, the spectacle, the challenge, the adventure of war they could wipe their ass on. It might be all right for field officers and up, who got to run it and decide what to do or not do. But everybody else was a tool—a tool with its serial number of manufacture stamped right on it. And Storm didn’t like being no tool. Not, especially, when it could get you killed; and fuck organization. Combat was for foot sloggers and rifle platoons, and he was a messergeant. He felt sorry, and perhaps even a little guilty, to have left the company and come back down here with his ‘wounded’ hand. But for a sensible man that was the only thing for it and that was all there was to it. If this hand didn’t get him clean away from this fucking island, he would go back to being a messergeant. He would cook hot food for them and get it to them—if he could. But he would not carry it himself. That, the carriers could do. A lot of people were going to come out of this war alive, more than got killed, and Storm intended to be one of them if he possibly could. Why, even that trip down from up there—which he should have been very pleased over, should have enjoyed immensely—had been ruined by those Jap prisoners they had had to bring down with them.

  He had come down with the next party to leave after the one Bugger Stein left with. Stein’s party was the last of the stretcher parties, and most of the walking wounded cases had gone down long before. A few like himself and Big Queen had elected to stay till the mopping up was finished. There were seven of these, four from Baker Company three from C-for-Charlie, and with four unwounded men they were told off to act as guards to a party of eight prisoners—half of the total number taken. In this way Tall could free more unwounded men to remain up on the line for the anticipated night counterattack.

  It was great to be leaving with a night counterattack expected (though Storm felt a momentary sharp thrust of guilt) and everything went off well at the start. Queen’s flesh wound in his left upper arm was beginning to stiffen up, and he was not as chipper and energetic as he had been during the fighting at the bivouac. But just before leaving he roused himself to brightness again. “I’ll be back!” he cried in his bull voice. “I’ll be back! It’ll take more than a little old flesh wound to keep me from comin back to old C-for-Charlie! I don’t care where they send me! I’ll be back if I have to stowaway on a replacement boat!” A few C-for-Charlie men who were watching the departure grinned and waved and cheered, and Brass Band who was there came over to shake hands with Queen—with unnecessary showiness, Storm felt. Storm had no idea why Big Queen had elected to stay behind for the mopping up when he could have gone down earlier. As for himself, he had stayed because he was already planning to parlay this hand wound into an evacuation, if he could, which would take him as far back from this Rock as he could milk out of it
; and he wanted to leave a good impression on his old outfit when he left it perhaps forever.

  The eight Japanese prisoners were a sorry, sicklooking lot. Feeble, stumbling, they shambled along appearing to be totally benumbed by their experiences, and looking as though they would not have had the energy or the will to escape even if they were guarded by just one GI. All of them were suffering from dysentery, jaundice and malaria. Two of them (just why, no one ever learned) were stark bareass naked, and it was one of these who finally collapsed and caused all the serious trouble. When Big Queen came over to kick him to his feet, he just lay vomiting and shitting at the same time, leaving two yellow trails of liquid behind him as each kick slid him sideways a few feet further down the path. Half-starved, his ribs and shoulder bones showing starkly through his sick-looking yellow skin, he looked more like some lower grade type of animal and really did not appear to be worth saving. Neither did the other seven, who now squatted on their haunches in patient numb resignation under the eyes of their guards. Some Lieutenant who spoke a little Japanese had learned from them that they had all been living off lizards and the bark off of trees for the past couple of weeks. On the other hand, the party was under the strictest personal orders from Colonel Tall to see that all of these men got back to Regimental Intelligence alive for questioning.