Once an Eagle

  The voice was feline, tremulous, as if poised on the edge of laughter; but tensed now for anything out there beyond the perimeter Pritchard remained calm, listening intently.

  “Oh, boy. Now you’re going to get it … You know that? Soldier-boy?” In the dense, close air the words sounded extra-human, as if a hideous, epicene statue had been given voice. It’s not the same man, Pritchard thought quietly—not the same one who tried to impersonate Rodriguez; they’ve got two men who can speak English that well. They certainly have got it all over us in the matter of languages.

  “Soldier-boy, you’re going to die very soon. You know that? Oh yes. Very soon, now.” But as the voice went on, taunting, mocking them, it seemed less frightening. “Not much fun, is it, Yankee Doodle? Sitting there waiting to die?”

  “—You eat shit, Tojo!” someone shouted hoarsely on the left.

  “Thank you, soldier-boy,” the voice simpered. “Thank you so much.”

  “Keep the frigging change!”

  “All right,” Damon called mildly. “That’s enough of that …”

  “How about it?” Major Scholes said. “Work them over now?”

  “No,” the General answered. He might have been discussing a requisition to Corps for blankets or tentage. “They’re not all there yet. This is just to get us to fire prematurely, show them where our automatic weapons are. Won’t be long now.” And leaning forward Pritchard felt he could hear a dense, feathery rustling along the whole line. He was quivering with impatience, with exasperation.

  “Why don’t we—”

  There came a soaring, mounting shriek, grinding away into the jungle depths. Siren. He realized he had jumped, that even the General had started. It went on and on, rising and falling, piercing the last recesses of the brain, evoking memories of times back home with the cars pulling over and faces turning, and a night when the apartment house diagonally across from theirs had caught fire. People were standing in dressing gowns out on the sidewalk, gazing upward where firemen clung antlike to swaying ladders and here and there figures moved at the windows; flickering, gesticulating shadows.

  “Wonder where in hell they got that?” Major Scholes was saying to the General.

  “Siren for the fire brigade. Pulling everything in the book, aren’t they?” Pritchard felt Damon’s hand on his arm. “They’re coming up now. Hear them?”

  “I can’t hear anything with that God damn thing going … ” All the same, in spite of the siren’s wail and the firing off to the west, he could hear the crunch and susurrus of many men making their way through brush. And now the siren itself descended to a craking growl, and subsided. The taunting, feline voice had stopped. This is why they make you wait, Pritchard thought; wait and hurry, wait and hurry—to get ready for a rotten, stupid, maddening wait like this …

  “Mortars,” the General said crisply. Major Scholes relayed the order, and from behind them came the muffled pop-pop-pop and then in the jungle out ahead the crash of the shells exploding. Now screams and hoarse cries were audible.

  “Good,” Pritchard heard himself say. “Take it, you bastards. Take it!” He felt a taut, quivering rage against every Japanese who ever lived.

  There was a torch flaring, a blinding blue-white blaze of light, and he flinched, saw the clean red wires of tracers; they seemed to float straight at him and then curve up and away, gaining speed, burning their way through the night overhead. Now another one was firing in long, shuttling bursts. Trying for the gun got the five at the wire, he thought. He averted his head now, peering out sideways at the flickering glare.

  A hand tapped him on the arm and he looked up. “Flares,” Damon was calling to him. “Continuous.”

  He wheeled obediently and dropped the projectile into the tube, swung away from the painful air-compressed whunk! of the propellant, reached out and picked up his carbine. The General, his hands cupped to his mouth, swung his head from left to right and roared, “Commence firing! Commence fi—”

  His voice was drowned in the crash of gunfire. The night was laced in a crazy-quilt of tracers and the white darts of muzzle blasts: a terrible carnival, close at hand. Then with a flat crack the flare burst, the area was shot with light—and there they were, coming silently and steadily, their faces smooth and dark and glistening as if part of their helmets, their eyes incredibly long, theatrical slits in the inverted dawn of the flare. Coming in clots and clumps against the wire, hurling their bodies at it or slashing at it feverishly, their bayonets flickering, and here and there the short, fiery red arcs of thrown grenades. They were everywhere. For a wild, interminable instant Pritchard felt utterly paralyzed, defenseless, constrained to crouch helplessly in a hole and watch this brute, stubborn force sweep over them, destroy them all. It was too much, too much. Then the scene broke into a thousand crazy zebra stripes and colophons as the flare—Jesus the flare!—swaying, reached the trees; in an agony of dread he dropped in another shell, snatched up still another.

  “Not too fast, Harry,” Damon was saying, his face very close. “Pace them out, now.”

  “Right.” He turned and raised his carbine. The machine gun beside him clattered like a riveting machine drilling at an anvil, the Japanese danced and scuttled and came on with that terrible menacing intention, and the concerted fire from the perimeter brought them down. It was very hard to think. Think clearly in all this bedlam of screams and roars and swaying underwater glare. But he was free now: he was able to move. He raised his carbine, held it centered on a huge man in a nearly black uniform who had just snapped his fist against his helmet. Grenade. He’d hit him, he was certain he’d hit him but the big Imperial Marine armed another grenade with that quick flexing of his arm, the blow against his helmet, and threw again. Then all at once he fell as if caught on a trip wire and went down out of sight. Pritchard remembered the flare this time, got off another and went on firing, emptied the magazine. The Japanese had reached the first line of holes and were shooting into some of them, tossing grenades, but he felt no fear now, only an anger dry as dust and a tight, vengeful exhilaration, a sense of being mildly out of wind. Two men were locked together like kids wrestling in a playground, swaying and scuffling, and an officer in a tightly fitting tunic with a burnished helmet and a sword held levelly in his two hands was racing up to them. He fired, saw the officer jerk from the impact, right himself and continue past the two struggling figures, raising the sword above his head, a fearfully quick gesture; then tracers slanted into his chest and he sank gently to his knees, his teeth flashing in an anguished grimace, like a man mired in quicksand. Pritchard swung left to another group of four or five who were driving their bayonets down at a hole. A hand gripped his shoulder, hard. Damon, pointing behind him and to their right, where several men were running through the splotched shadows.

  “Stop them! Bring them back!”

  He understood instantly and nodded. Taking off. That was bad. Thing like that could turn into a rout, mustn’t happen. He leaped out of the hole, catching in the corner of his eye Brand feeding a belt into the machine gun, Scholes huddled in the forward edge of the pit, both hands cupped over the phone. Even as he got to his feet he could see another man scuttling off into the shadows.

  “You!” he yelled. “Come back here!” It was curious: he’d never been much as a runner—he’d been rather slow of foot, preferring sports where his solid bulk could have free play, such as wrestling and the hammer throw, at which he’d excelled. But now he overtook the stragglers as though they were chained to the trees. He snatched at a man’s collar and stopped him, caught another by the belt, and cried: “Where do you think you’re going?”

  The second man’s eyes rolled wildly. “—We can’t stay here, can’t stay—!”

  “Of course you can. You can and you will!”

  “No, no—we’ve got to pull back, I heard them say—”

  “You heard nothing of the kind! You were taking off. Now you cut that out, all of you …” They stood watching him, agitated and indeci
sive; he recognized one of them as a drafting clerk in G-2. “And you a sergeant!” he said hotly. The inanity, the sheer banality of his remarks astonished him. “Come on, now—get back to your holes!” One of the group started to run again, but he had worked his way around behind them and he stopped the soldier with a gesture. Tracers showered into the trees over their heads. The man who had spoken before gave an exclamation of uneasiness and started to move away again.

  “God damn your asses,” Pritchard roared, “—go back to your holes!” He waved his carbine at them. He wanted to howl with laughter, and at the same time he was filled with rage, standing here in the dark with all manner of ferocious destruction whining and moaning around them. “By Jesus, you’re in the Double Five and you’d better act like it …” Something struck a tree trunk immediately behind him with a monstrous crash and fragments sang through the air around them; the little group trembled and fluttered. There is no excuse for malingering or cowardice during battle. It is the task of leadership to stop it, by whatever means would seem to be the surest cure, always making certain that in so doing it will not make a bad matter worse. Paragraph 23.

  “Now I said get back there …!” He thought, I could shoot one of them right now, just like that—and the realization frightened him. The safety on his carbine was in the off position. “Come on now, God damn it—move!” Slowly he raised the carbine, keeping his finger well outside the trigger guard.

  “Ooh, don’t shoot, Cap,” a short, fat man with thick lips cried with fearful concern, holding up one hand. “No, don’t shoot, now …”

  “Then get going! They’re counting on you here—all of you …” He was pushing them now, a counselor with some reluctant kids on a hike through the rain. “All right, let’s move out.” At that moment a figure staggered out of the shadows, hand to his head. He was completely silent but in the fitful, splashed light of the flares they saw the side of his face and throat were coated slickly with blood. He threw them a single agonized glance and wandered away; but with the sight of him the little group went all to pieces again. The thin soldier who had spoken earlier murmured something and started backward. Pritchard seized him by the front of his fatigue jacket and shook him. “Where the hell are you going?” he demanded savagely. “Look, there’s another defense line a hundred yards down that trail with orders to blast anything that moves. Anything! So you can forget that … ”

  It wasn’t working: they looked at him with terrified entreaty, wavering. All the starch was out of them. “All right then—fuck you,” he snarled, “I don’t need you, nobody does—you no-good sons of bitches … You want to stay right here and get killed?” he taunted them bitterly, turning away now, leaving them. “Good! Go ahead—stay here, let everybody down. But by Christ, just wait till Sad Sam hears about this shit …!”

  They were following him. Incredibly! Stumbling after him through the crashing, burdensome dark. They associated him with safety now, that was it—they didn’t want him to leave them. Or was it Damon? “All right, now. That’s more like it,” he remarked. His words were lost in a perfect uproar of gunfire. The line up ahead looked like some devilish beach alive with fireworks displays, bonfires, figures that capered and shrieked with unholy glee. Faces looked up at them as they hurried past—faces that were angry, immensely surprised. He could hear someone cursing wildly.

  They were at their holes now, were jumping down into them; the fat boy was hunting feverishly for his rifle. A tall, bearded man with his helmet cocked crazily on the side of his head was shouting at them.

  “You in charge?” Pritchard yelled at him. “In charge of this detail?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Dizzy bastards took off on me—”

  “Then why didn’t you go after them? Now you keep them here, Mac—I’m not going to go chasing after them again …”

  “Ain’t you going to stay here?” the scrawny kid called up to him.

  “What? Don’t you think I’ve got better things to do than this?” But the boy’s face, drawn now with remorse and supplication, touched him. “I’ll be back,” he shouted. “You hold on tight, now …”

  He whirled away and broke into a low, crouching run toward the CP; he was filled with a laughing exultation. I got them, he thought. I went and got them and brought them back. That’s something, that’s at least a—

  He was down. On his side, sprawled. How had he got here? He tried to raise his arm to push himself off the ground and could not. He felt no pain at all: that was good. Stupid, he must have tripped over a root. That was the trouble with running around in the dark—

  He was conscious of a warm, sick, flooding sensation; wires and arcs of radiance swooped around him. Slowly he reached back with his left hand—encountered a long rent, moist and deep, under his side. Very deep. Hit. He knew a boundless slow surprise that gave way all at once to fright. “Chief!” he cried. But his voice he knew was no more than a murmur under the wire-shot din. The hot, sick flooding was worse: his back hurt now, and his side; but dully, remotely. It was drifting away. Something brushed against his face like stiff feathers. He had to get back to Damon. Had to. An aide’s place—

  He made the most mighty effort of his life to get up. The flooding rushed to a pouring torrent. The lights swept up tightly, swept down and away where he could not follow; and then darkness rushed in, and a vast silence.

  12

  “I’m just putting it up to you, boys,” Damon said. “I know you’re all ticketed, I know you’ve already done more than most. You know I won’t stop a single man if he wants to go down …”

  The wounded lay or crouched in little groups under the long tent, whose ripped and tattered canvas threw over them a fitful light. Here and there medics were working with stoic haste. The rows of men watched him, most of them too weary, too sick, too weak, too empty to hold any emotion whatever. So many: there always seemed to be more wounded than there actually were—as though misery could multiply itself in ways health could not. A high-velocity 47 exploded with a tumultuous crash twenty-five yards away, and the eyes of the wounded men shifted rapidly in the direction of the shell burst and then back to him again.

  “I’m asking for volunteers to go back up there with me. We need every man we can get up on the line and that’s God’s truth. If the line goes the beachhead goes, boys. And that’ll be all she wrote.”

  There was no response. A stocky, curly-haired boy with a compress on his neck looked at him, and then looked away. Doctor Siebert, the center of a compact knot of corpsmen working on a man’s thigh, threw Damon a quick, exasperated glance and went on working.

  It had gone hard with them all night long; very hard. They’d held twice; then around 2 A.M. the Japanese had broken through in company strength on the extreme right flank, against the jungle wall. He’d shifted some of Young’s people over there, the mortars had laid down a ferocious barrage, and finally they’d been able to contain it, and plug the hole. There were snipers all over the area now, hidden in trees or holes or piles of gear, but that was the least of their troubles. Then just after four the Japanese hit again and overran the left flank along the Kalahe. With first light he’d dropped back down the trail to Dick’s reserve line at Ilig.

  “We’ve got to hold on,” he said. “Just a little longer, boys. That’s all I’m asking you. Just those that feel they can make it.” He walked slowly through the tent, the points of sunlight raining on him in the dim, glaucous gloom. His guts clutched at him fiercely; he could feel the sweat glands on his forehead burn. His head ached from the incessant pounding of artillery fire. And at the back of his mind was the constant, burdensome sense of a mass of water mounting, cresting, exerting its sure, inexorable force against a worn and crumbling wall …

  “You mean we don’t get to sack in, General? After all we been through?”

  Sergeant Levinson, a mortarman, his left hand a bloody club of gauze, his handsome face compressed in a wry, twisted grin.

  “Hello, Levinson. How you making it?”

/>   “Can’t complain, General. Well, I can, but I guess it wouldn’t do one hell of a lot of good.”

  He made himself grin: a poor substitute. “No rest for the weary. How about it? Will you come back up with me?”

  Levinson watched him a moment. All at once he said very softly: “Is it that bad up there?”

  Everything was point of view. Levinson sat here among his fellow sufferers and waited mutely for the white, immaculate stillness of the hospital ship, the mugs of coffee, the soothing roar of the blowers. For them the battle was over: they had done what they could, someone else would have to worry about who did what and how. They knew only that they had been hit, that they were weak and in some pain, and that other men like themselves were on the line fighting this numberless, hated enemy who held all the land, all the cards, who would never let them alone. Only he, Damon, knew that there would be more assaults in force, that he’d committed nearly everything he had, that they were fearfully low on 60s for the mortars and 105s, that more than half the radios were knocked out, and that it would be four long hours before the armor could get over from the far end of Blue One.

  “Yes,” he answered. “It’s that bad.”

  Levinson looked away and sighed. “Oi weh.” He clucked his tongue like a forbidding housewife. “So much trouble on the house, and I been so good.” He got to his feet. The front of his jacket was spattered with his own blood. “Well—I can see somebody’s got to be Guinea Pig Number One.” He gave his wry, lopsided grin again. “All right. Give me a rifle. If some silly son of a bitch’ll come up and play first loader for me, I’ll fire it.”

  Damon felt a quick, deep surge of relief; he clapped the mortarman gently on the shoulder. “I’ll get you a case of beer when we secure this operation. That’s a solemn promise.”

  Levinson grinned. “I’m going to hold you to that.—All right, who’s up?” he demanded, looking around the tent. “I’ll be God damned if I’m going up there alone.”