The Thin Red Line (10 page)

This was the last chore and since it was not yet nightfall, naturally a number of the more adventuresome wanted to have a look at the jungle. They had nothing to lose, they could not get any wetter. One of them was Big Queen, the huge Texan. Another was Private Bell, the former Engineer officer. A third was Pfc Doll, the proud pistol thief. In all they were twenty.

Doll swaggered over to his pal Corporal Fife, his rifle slung from his left shoulder with his thumb hooked in the sling, his right hand on the butt of his pistol. He was ready to go. His helmet and ammunition belt completed him. Everyone had already put away his stupid gasmask. They would have thrown them away, but were afraid they might have to pay for them.

“You comin with us to have a sweat at the jungle, Fife?”

Fife had just finished putting up his own sheltertent which he shared with his assistant, an eighteen-year-old from Iowa named Bead. Bead was smaller yet than Fife with large eyes, narrow shoulders, big hips, small hands, and was a draftee.

Fife hesitated. “I don’t know if I ought to. The Welshman might need me around here for something. We’re not all set up yet.” He looked off at the distant green wall. It would be a long walk in this rain, and a muddy one. He was tired, and he was depressed. His toes squelched in his shoes. Anyway, what would they find? Lot of trees. “I guess I better not.”

“I’ll go, Doll! I’ll go!” This from Bead, large eyes larger than usual behind his hornrimmed glasses.

“You ain’t invited,” Doll drawled.

“Whada you mean I ain’t invited? Anybody can go that wants to go, can’t they? Okay, I’ll go!”

“You’ll do no such a goddam thing,” Fife said curtly. “You’ll get your fat ass in the orderly tent and do some work, schmuckface. What do you think I fucking pay you for? Now git.” He jerked his head. “Go on.”

Bead did not answer but stumped off sourly in his customary slump-backed gait.

“You just can’t treat them decent,” Fife said.

“Better come along,” Doll said. He raised his lip and his eyebrow. “No tellin what we may run into or find.”

“I guess not.” Fife grinned. “Duty, you know.” But he was glad to get out of it so easily.

Doll raised his eyebrow and his lip further. “Fuck duties!” he said from the side of his mouth looking very cynical and knowledgeable. He turned and marched off.

“Have fun!” Fife called after him cynically. But once having decided he regretted that he was not with them as he watched them move off in the rain.

The coconut trees ended just beyond the edge of the bivouac. Beyond them there was nothing except flat open ground all the way to the jungle. Across this open space the distant green wall looked even more menacing than it had from within the groves. At the edge of the trees the men stopped to look at it. Then, still without raincoats but so soaked now they no longer thought about that, they approached the high wall of jungle curiously and gingerly in the rain. Rolls of mud formed on their feet, and they kept kicking them off.

They had all read about it for months now in the papers, this jungle. Now they were seeing it at first hand.

At first they only skirted it, cautiously. From a distance they made a funny sight: groups of wet men in the rain, moving skittishly up and down along the jungle edge, bending and looking and peering in here and there. It really was a wall; a wall of leaves; meaty green leaves jostling and elbowing each other, with hardly a minute opening anywhere between them. Peering at them Big Queen felt you might almost expect one of them to bite back at you if you shoved it. Spreading these—finally—and stepping through, taking the plunge as it were, they found themselves immediately enveloped in a deep gloom.

Here the rain did not fall. It was stopped high above by that roof of green shingles. From there it dripped down slowly, leaf to leaf, or ran down the stems and branches. Despite the heaviness of the downpour which now purred loudly in their ears from just outside, here there was only a low rustle of slow occasional dripping. Everything else was supremely quiet.

As their eyes adjusted, they became able to see huge vines and creepers hanging in great festooning arcs, many of them larger than young trees at home. Giant treetrunks towered straight up, far above their heads to the roof, their thin bladelike roots often higher than a man’s head. Every-where, every-thing, was wet. The ground itself was either bare dirt, slippery, slick, with wet; or else impenetrable tangles of deadfall. Here and there a few stunted straggly bushes struggled to maintain an almost lightless life. And saplings, totally branchless with only a few leaves at the top and hardly bigger around than the width of a pocketknife, strained to stretch themselves up, up, always up, to that closed roof and closed corporation a hundred feet above, where they could at least compete, before they strangled here below. Some of them that were no bigger around than the base of a whiskey shotglass had already attained a height equal to twice that of a tall man. And in all of this, nothing moved. And there was no sound save the rustle of the dripping moisture.

The men who had slipped through the protecting wall and come in here to see, stood rooted before the enormity their adjusting eyes disclosed. This was more than they had bargained for. Whatever else you could call this teeming verdure you certainly could not call it civilized. And as civilized men, it made them fearful. The toughest barroom brawler among them was fearful. Gradually, as they continued to stand without moving, vague, faint sounds began to make themselves heard again. High up in the foliage leaves rustled or a branch vibrated and there would be a twitter or a mad, raucous shout as some invisible bird moved. On the ground a bush would shake furtively as some minute animal moved away. And yet they saw nothing.

By entering the jungle they had been as suddenly and completely cut off from the bivouac and the company as if they had closed a door between two rooms. The suddenness and completeness of the shutting off dismayed them all. But by peering out between the leaves they could see the tall brown tents still standing among the white shafts of the cocopalms in the rain: see the distant greenclad figures still moving casually and securely about among them. This sight reassured them. They decided to go on.

Big Corporal Queen moved along with them saying nothing, or at least very little. Queen was aware of a strong reluctance to be separated from the others. This jungle wasn’t his meat. Back at the bivouac in the pouring rain Queen had been in his element and exultant. He had snorted and grinned and rubbed the rain into himself and his chest and clothes, and laughed loudly at the more reluctant ones who looked like drowned cats. Rain was something he knew about. Back home he had worked for a while as a hand on a ranch; he had been caught out in many a summer rainstorm, been forced to ride all day in them. He hadn’t liked it then; but when he remembered it now, he remembered it as though he had liked it, that it was manly, that it showed great endurance and strength. But this jungle was something else again. The indignant thought kept coming back to him that no American would ever let his woodlot get into any such condition as this.

Big Queen would not have admitted this mild fear of his to anyone, and in fact he did not actually admit it to himself. Instead he changed it around, made it acceptable, by saying to himself that he was on unfamiliar ground here and naturally would be uneasy until he learned his way around. But it could not have anything to do with fear because Big Queen had a reputation to maintain.

Big (just over six feet, with a 56-inch chest and arms and legs to match) and exceptionally strong even for this size Big Queen was one of the sights of the organization; a myth had grown up around him in C-for-Charlie company. And once Queen discovered it (he was rather slow about certain things which concerned himself) he had—with a strange welcoming sense of having at last found his identity—done everything he could to live up to it. Searched for, the origins of this myth would almost certainly be found among an amorphous collection of small men in the outfit, men who adored and longed for a size and strength they themselves would never have, and who in their admiration had let their creative imaginations run away with them. Whatever its source, it was now established as fact rather than myth, and believed by nearly everybody including Queen, that Big Queen was invincible both in heart and physique.

His reputation imposed certain obligations on Queen. For example, he must never do anything that even remotely resembled bullying. He no longer had fights, principally because nobody cared to argue with him. But there was more to it than that because he himself could no longer argue either. Not without looking like a bully imposing his opinions by force. He no longer expressed his opinion in discussions unless it was something of really great importance to him. Such as President Roosevelt whom he worshipped; or Catholics whom he hated and feared. And then he voiced it quietly and without insistence.

Remembering how to act required a great deal of Queen’s time and energy. He found himself having to think almost all the time. It tired him. And it was only when dealing with feats of strength and endurance that he any longer could let himself go and act without thinking. Sometimes he longed for them.

Right now he had another problem. Another obligation imposed by his reputation was that he must never seem to be scared. Thus he found himself in a position where he was forced to clump ahead through this damned undergrowth with an impassive face for the benefit of the others, while at the same time his imagination was cramming every footfall with all sorts of horrible results. Having an important reputation was sometimes harder than people thought. Terrible things.

Snakes, for instance. They had been told there weren’t any poisonous snakes on Guadalcanal. But Queen had acquired a more than healthy respect for rattlesnakes during his two years out in northwest Texas. His snakefear if anything was more unhealthy than healthy, carrying with it an almost uncontrollable tendency to freeze into a panicstricken target. And in the jungle his imagination kept presenting him over and over with a picture of his own shod, leggin’d foot falling heavily on a coiled mass of muscular life which would erupt into a writhing, clattering, jawpopping viciousness squirming under his boot, capable of striking completely through the canvas leggin, or through the shoe leather itself for that matter. He knew them. He had killed at least a hundred of them during his two years out there on that ranch, most of which had not bothered him. Only twice had he come upon them close enough to be struck at. All the others had merely lain there, coiled and suspicious, watching him beadily, tasting him with those forked tongues, while he got his pistol out. He hated them. And the fact that the Army said there weren’t any here didn’t prove it; he had never seen a more likely looking place for them.

Thus equipped, Big Queen lumbered on skirting the tangles of deadfall, hoping nobody could read from his face what he was thinking, silently cursing his imagination and wishing he did not have any, remembering the snakes of his past.

It was just then, about twenty yards in, that somebody discovered the bloodstained shirt. The man raised a shout and stopped. Instinctively they had spaced themselves out at five yard intervals as if in a skirmish line, although nobody had unslung his rifle. Now they converged. As they congregated the finder simply stood, a surprised look on his face, and pointed to a spot between two narrow, shoulderhigh roots of one of the huge trees. The rest clustered around and peered excitedly. Queen, having been the far right end of the line, was one of the last to arrive.

Another of the last to arrive was Private Bell, the former Engineer officer from the Philippines. He had been near Big Queen on the right. Heavily muscled himself, Bell nevertheless looked frail alongside Big Queen. Bell, however, was no stranger to jungles. After four months of living in the Philippine jungle (without wife) that eerie, other-planet look common to all jungles held no new emotional experiences for Bell. He had come along, taciturn and retiring, keeping his own counsel as was his way, more for purposes of botanical comparison than anything else; and he had none of the trepidity or excited compulsion to look, to see, which afflicted the others. It was an interesting thing which Bell had noted before about the American Army that wherever they went, and no matter what dangers they expected to encounter, they went prepared to look and, if possible, to record. At least a third of every outfit carried cameras, lens filters and light meters tucked away somewhere. The fighting tourists, Bell called them. They were always prepared to record their experiences for their children, even though they might be dead before they could have any. Bell himself, painful as the memory was for him—and for that very reason—wanted to see the similarities between this jungle and his own so-well-remembered one (without wife) of the Philippines. It was as predictable—and in his memory as exquisitely painful—as he had expected. But when he came up to the group and looked down at the cause of the excitement, he was on the same unfamiliar ground as the rest. He, like them, had never before seen material remains of a man killed in infantry combat.

It had taken sharp eyes to spot it. A crumpled ball of khaki the same color as the dirt lay at the apex of the angle of the roots. It did not look as if someone had deliberately deposited it there, but more as though somebody had stripped it off, wadded it and flung it—either the wearer himself or someone looking after him—and it happened to land there. A crusty, black stain camouflaged it even further into the jungle floor.

There was a spate of pointless, rather nonsensical comment, all of it oddly breathless, excited.

“Where you think he got it?”

“Is it American?”

“Fuck yes it’s American. The Japs don’t wear khaki like that.”

There was a peculiar tone of sexual excitement, sexual morbidity, in all of the voices—almost as if they were voyeurs behind a mirror watching a man in the act of coitus; as though in looking openly at the evidence of this unknown man’s pain and fear they were unwillingly perhaps but nonetheless uncontrollably seducing him.