by James Jones
—There was an almost
standard remark the night
medic on duty would make to
the newly arrived patients
at the hospital. He said,
“If you want anything, just
whistle for it.”
(Memoirs 1918)—R.J. Blessing
Whistle
James Jones
This book is dedicated to every man
who served in the US Armed Forces in
World War II—whether he survived
or not; whether he made a fortune
serving, or not; whether he fought
or not; whether he did time or not;
whether he went crazy, or didn’t.
Bounce, and dance; bounce, and dance;
Jiggle on your strings.
Whistle toward the graveyard.
Nobody knows who or what moves your batten.
You’ll not find out.
—Ancient French Jingle
Trans. from the French by
the author
CONTENTS
Introductory Note by Willie Morris
A NOTE BY THE AUTHOR
BOOK ONE: THE SHIP
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
BOOK TWO: THE HOSPITAL
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
BOOK THREE: THE CITY
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
BOOK FOUR: THE CAMP
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
BOOK FIVE: THE END OF IT
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
A Biography of James Jones
Introductory Note by Willie Morris
James Jones died in the hospital in Southampton, Long Island, New York, on May 9, 1977, of congestive heart failure. He was fifty-five.
Whistle was to have had thirty-four chapters. Jones had completed somewhat more than half of Chapter 31 when he again became seriously ill. However, he had already plotted in considerable, and indeed almost finished detail his remaining material.
I was his friend and neighbor, and in tape recordings and conversations with me over several months prior to his death, he left no doubt of his intentions for the concluding three chapters. As late as two days before he died, he was speaking into a tape recorder in the hospital.
He planned for these last chapters to be relatively short. The ending of Whistle was firmly in his mind. All he lacked was time. Had he lived another month, I believe he would have written these chapters to his satisfaction. But he leaves what is essentially, by any judgment, a finished work.
In his note about this book, Jones has described his intentions on the scope of this work. This is the third novel in his war trilogy: From Here to Eternity (1951) being the first, then The Thin Red Line (1962), and now Whistle.
He was obsessed by Whistle. He worked on it off and on for a very long time. He kept coming back to it, and it kept “turning on its spit in my head for nearly thirty years.” After his first attack in 1970, he had two recurrences of his serious heart ailment, and I sensed he had a premonition that he was fighting against time to complete this book. For the last two years, in the attic of his farmhouse in Sagaponack, Long Island, he worked twelve to fourteen hours a day on it. He survived another attack in January 1977, and between then and his death he went back to writing several hours a day. As a precaution he also made the tape recordings and the notes.
Jones wished to have a few introductory words about why the name of his city in Whistle is Luxor, rather than Memphis, Tennessee. In his notes and in an earlier essay, he wrote:
Luxor in fact does not exist. There is no town of Luxor, Tennessee. There is no Luxor in the United States.
Luxor is really Memphis. I spent eight months there in 1943 in the Kennedy General Army Hospital. I was 22.
But Luxor is also Nashville. When I was sent back to duty from Kennedy General, I went to Camp Campbell, Kentucky, which was close to Nashville. Nashville supplanted Memphis as our liberty town. Luxor has recognizable traces of both. In my book I did not want to break off with the characters, love affairs, habitudes, hangouts, familiarities, and personal relationships of Memphis. For these reasons I was obliged to turn the real Camp Campbell into my Camp O’Bruyerre, and place it near Memphis.
So I have called my city Luxor and used the Memphis that I remembered. Or imagined I remembered. People who know Memphis will find my city disturbingly familiar. And then suddenly and even more disturbingly, not familiar at all. They should not think of it as Memphis, but as Luxor. Sole owner and Prop., Jas. Jones, who must also take full responsibility.
A brief explanation about the Epilogue:
In Chapter 31, there is a set of asterisks. This is the point that Jones reached in Chapter 31. As reconstructed from his own thoughts and language, and at his request, I have put down in considerable detail his intentions for the concluding three and a half chapters. Nothing has been included that he did not expressly wish for these chapters. The last, indented section of the Epilogue is the author’s own words, from a recording made only a few days before he died.
A NOTE BY THE AUTHOR
I first began actual work on Whistle in 1968, but the book goes back a much longer time than that. It was conceived as far back as 1947, when I was still first writing to Maxwell Perkins about my characters Warden and Prewitt, and the book I wanted to write about World War II. When I was beginning From Here to Eternity, then still untitled, I meant for that book to carry its people from the peacetime Army on through Guadalcanal and New Georgia, to the return of the wounded to the United States. A time span corresponding to my own experience. But long before I reached the middle of it I realized such an ambitious scope of such dimension wasn’t practicable. Neither the dramatic necessities of the novel itself, nor the amount of sheer space required, would allow such a plan.
The idea of a trilogy occurred to me then. Whistle, still untitled and—as a novel—unconceived, was a part of it. So when I began The Thin Red Line (some eleven years later) the plan for a trilogy was already there. And Whistle, as a concept, would be the third part of it.
Which of course it should be. It was always my intention with this trilogy that each novel should stand by itself as a work alone. In a way that, for example, John Dos Passos’ three novels in his fine USA trilogy do not. The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money will not stand alone as novels. USA is one large novel, not a trilogy.
I intended to write the third volume immediately after I finished The Thin Red Line. Other things, other novels, got in the way. Each time I put it aside it seemed to further refine itself. So that each time I took it up again I had to begin all over. My own personal experiments with style and viewpoint affected the actual writing itself.
One of the problems I came up against, with the trilogy as a whole, appeared as soon as I began The Thin Red Line in 1959. In the original conception, first as a single novel, and then as a trilogy, the major characters such as 1st/Sgt Warden, Pvt Prewitt and Mess/Sgt Stark were meant to continue throughout the entire work. Unfortunately the dramatic structure—I might even say, the spiritual content—of the first book de
manded that Prewitt be killed in the end of it. The import of the book would have been emasculated if Prewitt did not die.
When the smoke cleared, and I wrote End to From Here to Eternity, the only end it seemed to me it could have had, there I stood with no Prewitt character.
It may seem like a silly problem now. It wasn’t then. Prewitt was meant from the beginning to carry an important role in the second book, and in the third. I could not just resurrect him. And have him there again, in the flesh, wearing the same name.
I solved the problem by changing the names. All of the names. But I changed them in such a way that a cryptic key, a marked similarity, continued to exist, as a reference point, with the old set of names. It seems like an easy solution now, but it was not at the time.
So in The Thin Red Line 1st/Sgt Warden became 1st/Sgt Welsh, Pvt Prewitt became Pvt Witt, Mess/Sgt Stark became Mess/Sgt Storm. While remaining the same people as before. In Whistle Welsh becomes Mart Winch, Witt becomes Bobby Prell, Storm becomes John Strange.
After publication of The Thin Red Line, a few astute readers noted the similarity of names, and wrote to ask me if the similarity was intentional. When they did, I wrote back saying that it was, and explaining why. So far as I know, no critic and no book reviewer ever noticed the name similarity.
There is not much else to add. Except to say that when Whistle is completed, it will surely be the end of something. At least for me. The publication of Whistle will mark the end of a long job of work for me. Conceived in 1946, and begun in the spring of 1947, it will have taken me nearly thirty years to complete. It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us.
Paris, 15 November 1973
BOOK ONE
THE SHIP
CHAPTER 1
WE GOT THE WORD that the four of them were coming a month before they arrived. Scattered all across the country in the different hospitals as we were, it was amazing how fast word of any change in the company got back to us. When it did, we passed it back and forth among ourselves by letter or post card. We had our own private network of communications flung all across the map of the nation.
There were only the four of them this time. But what an important four. Winch. Strange. Prell. And Landers. About the four most important men the company had had.
We did not know then, when the first word of them came, that all four would be coming back to the exact same place. That is, to us, in Luxor.
Usually, it was us in the Luxor hospital who heard news soonest. That was because we were the largest individual group. At one point there were twelve of us there. It made us the main nerve center of the network. We accepted this responsibility without complaint, and dutifully wrote the letters and post cards that would keep the others informed.
News of the company still out there in those jungles was the most important thing to us. It was more important, more real than anything we saw, or anything that happened to us ourselves.
Winch had been our 1st/sgt out there. John Strange had been the mess/sgt. Landers had been company clerk. Bobby Prell, though busted twice from sgt and only a cpl, had been the company’s toughest and foolhardiest sparkplug.
It was strange how closely we returnees clung together. We were like a family of orphaned children, split by an epidemic and sent to different care centers. That feeling of an epidemic disease persisted. The people treated us nicely, and cared for us tenderly, and then hurried to wash their hands after touching us. We were somehow unclean. We were tainted. And we ourselves accepted this. We felt it too ourselves. We understood why the civilian people preferred not to look at our injuries.
We hospitalized knew we did not belong there in the clean, healthy areas. We belonged back out in the raging, infected disaster areas; where we could succumb, die, disappear, vanish forever along with what seemed to us now the only family we had ever had. That was what being wounded was. We were like a group of useless unmanned eunuchs, after our swinging pendants had been removed, eating sweetmeats from the contemptuous fingers of the females in the garden, and waiting for news from the seneschals in the field.
There was arrogance in us, though. We came from the disaster areas, where these others had never been. We did not let anyone forget it. We came from the infected zones, had been exposed to the disease, and carried the disease in us to prove it. Carrying it was our pride.
For our own kind, an insane loyalty flamed in us. We were ready to fight all comers and sometimes, drunk and out in the town, did fight them. We would fight anybody who had not been out there with us. We wore our Combat Infantryman badges to distinguish us, and nothing else. Campaign ribbons and decorations were considered contemptible display. All that was propaganda for the nice, soft people.
And the company had been our family, our only home. Real parents, wives, fiancées did not really exist for us. Not before the fanatical devotion of that loyalty. Crippled, raging, enfeebled, unmanned in a very real sense and hating, hating both sides of our own coin and of every coin, we clung to each other no matter where or how far the hospital, and waited for the smallest morsel of news of the others to filter back to us, and faithfully wrote and mailed the messages that would carry it on to the other brothers.
Into this weird half-world of ours the first news we had of the four of them came on a grimy, mud-smeared post card from some lucky-unlucky man still out there.
The card said the four of them had been shipped out to the same evacuation hospital, almost at the same time. That was all it said. The next news we got was that all four had been shipped back home on the same hospital ship. This came from the base hospital, in a short letter from some unlucky, or lucky, man who had been wounded but had not made the boat. Later, we received a letter from the company’s tech/sgt, giving more details.
Winch was being shipped back for some kind of unspecified ailment that nobody seemed to know much about. Winch himself would not talk about it. He had bitten through one thermometer and broken another, chased a hospital corpsman out of the compound, and gone back to his orderly tent where he was found slumped over his Morning Report book in a dead faint on his makeshift desk.
John Strange had been struck in the hand by a piece of mortar fragment which had not exited. The hand had healed badly, the wound becoming progressively more crippling. He was being sent back for delicate bone and ligament surgery and removal of the fragment.
Landers the clerk had had his right ankle smashed by a heavy-mortar fragment and needed orthopedic surgery. Bobby Prell had taken a burst of heavy-machinegun fire across both thighs in a firefight, sustaining multiple compound fractures, and heavy tissue damage.
This was the land of personal news we ached to hear. Could it be that we were secretly pleased? That we were glad to see others join us in our half-unmanned state? We certainly would have denied it, would have attacked and fought anyone who suggested it. Especially about the four of them.
There were quite a few of us sitting in the shiny, spotless, ugly hospital snack bar, having coffee after morning rounds, when Corello came running in waving the letter. Corello was an excitable Italian from McMinnville, Tennessee. No one knew why he had not been sent to the hospital in Nashville, instead of to Luxor, just as no one knew how his Italian forebears happened to wind up in McMinnville, where they ran a restaurant. Corello had been home once since his arrival in Luxor, and had stayed less than a day. Couldn’t stand it, he said. Now he pushed his way through to us among the hospital-white tables, holding the letter high.
There was a momentary hush in the room. Then the conversations went right on. The old hands had seen this scene too many times. The two cracker waitresses looked up from their chores, alarmed until they saw the letter, then went back to their coffee-drawing.
Rays of Southern sun were streaming through the tall plate glass from high up, down into all that white. In sunny corners lone men sat at tables writing letters, pref
erring the clatter and people here to the quiet of the library. There were five of us from the company at one table and Corello stopped there.
At once, men of ours sitting at other tables got up and came over. In seconds all of us in the snack bar had clustered around. We were already passing the letter back and forth. The patients from other outfits looked back down at their coffee and conversation and left us alone.
“Read it out loud,” someone said.
“Yeah, read it. Read it out loud,” several others said.
The man who had it looked up and blushed. Shaking his head about reading out loud, he passed the letter to someone else.
The man who took it smoothed it out, then cleared his throat. He looked it over, then began to read in the stilted voice of a student in a declamation class.
As he read the news, a couple of men whistled softly.
When he finished, he put it down among the coffee mugs. Then he saw it might get stained, and picked it up and handed it to Corello.
“All four of them at the same time,” a man who was standing behind him said hollowly.
“Yeah. The same day practically,” another said.
We all knew none of us would ever go back to the old company. Not now, not once we had been sent back to the United States, we wouldn’t. Once you came back to the States, you were reassigned. But all of us needed to believe the company would continue on as we knew it, go right on through and come out the other end, intact.
“It’s as if— It’s almost like—”
Whichever one of us it was who spoke did not go on, but we all knew what he meant
A kind of superstitious fear had descended over us. In our profession, we pretty much lived by superstition. We had to. When all of knowledge and of past experience had been utilized, the outcome of a firefight, or a defense or an attack, depended largely on luck. Awe of and reverence for the inexplicable, that heart of the dedicated gambler’s obsession, was the only religion that fit our case. We followed a God which coldly incorporated luck within Itself, as one of Its major tools. For a commander, give us the commander who had luck. Let the others have the educated, prepared commanders.
