If we were to be victims, we were as firmly secured to our role as Isaac bound to the faggots. No day passed without accentuating it.
“Lieutenant, when are we getting off this island?”
“Search me. I don’t know.”
“Couldn’t you ask the Colonel?”
“What makes you think he knows?”
“This food is rotten, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, I know—but you’d better eat it.”
“I can’t take another mouthful of this wormy rice.”
“Eat it.”
“But how can they expect us to—”
“Eat it.”
“But it gags me.”
“Okay. Don’t.”
“I think I’ve got malaria. Here—feel my forehead.”
“Cheez—I think you’re right. It’s hot as hell. You oughta turn in to the sick bay.”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
“What’s the point? They’ll only give me some aspirin. If my fever gets real bad, they’ll only put me in a tent with the rest of the bad ones. They won’t let me go home. They won’t take me off the island. Nobody leaves. So what’s the point.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Sure I’m right. So I’d rather suffer among friends. I’m telling yuh—nobody’s leaving this island, not even in a pine box.”
“You can say that again. Ain’t we got our own cemetery?”
It was so lonely. It was the loneliness of the night watch, listening to the myriad moving things and straining to detect, beneath this irregular rhythm of nature, the regular sound of man. Loneliness. This was the pit that yawned beneath our yearning, our constant reproach of the world at large.
In another sense, in an almost mawkish sense, we had gotten hold of the notion that we were orphans. No one cared, we thought. All of America’s millions doing the same things each day: going to movies, getting married, attending college commencements, sales meetings, café fires, newspaper drives against vivisection, political oratory, Broadway hits and Broadway flops, horrible revelations in high places and murders in tenements making tabloid headlines, vandalism in cemeteries and celebrities getting religion; all the same, all, all, all, the changeless, daily America—all of this was going on without a single thought for us. This was how we thought. It seems silly, now.
But it was real enough, then, and I think we might have become unwarrantably bitter alongside that evil river, had there not come at last a tearing, liberating change; we were ordered to new positions.
We left the river. We left without notice. We swung our packs onto our backs and our guns onto our shoulders, and walked over the wooden bridge where the Tenaru doubles back, past the crocodile lair, and up a hill and down into the fields.
4
It was a respite. The fields were like a mid-week holiday that saves a job from drudgery. It was a recess, a winter vacation. Fear seemed almost to vanish. It was as though we were members of an archaeological mission, or a hunting party. Only the absence of lights at night reminded us of the triune foe: the dark, the jungle and the Jap.
Even the terrible heat in these stifling fields of kunai grass could not distress us, for we had built our machine gun pit twice the size of its predecessors on the Tenaru and could take refuge in its cool confines. Our pit was indeed a fort, perhaps as big as a kitchen, six feet or more down. Overhead were double thicknesses of logs, a few inches of dirt and a heavy sodding of wild grass which took root almost as soon as we had planted it and which, from a hundred feet distant, gave the pit the aspect of a hillock.
With our great field of fire rolling away from us like the vast un-harvested sea, and with our nasty network of barbed wire like a wicked shoal to ensnare the unwary, we felt that we need reckon with only a direct hit from a bomber or a battleship.
We retired behind our defenses to loaf and to nurse our “tropical ulcers.” This is a name which we conferred upon any running or festering sore, and most especially upon those which ate into the outer covering of the bone. There were few of us whose legs and hands were not dappled with these red-and-white rosettes of pain; red with blood, white with pus and often ringed with the black of feeding flies.
Yet, there was luxury in the fields. We had beds. A supply of Japanese rope had been discovered in our area. We made beds with it, driving logs into the ground to shape an oblong, and plaiting a mattress of the rope.
What comfort! Dry, warm, and above the ground. No mere voluptuary in his bed of feathers and satin, with his canopy stretching silkily overhead, with his bell-pull next to his hand and his mistress curled at his feet, could have surpassed us for pure pleasure.
Chuckler and the Hoosier slept alongside each other, erecting their beds only inches apart, as did all other watch mates, such as Runner and myself. Their beds were about a dozen yards distant in the scrub between the pits and the jungle. It seemed that almost every night, while Runner and I lay whispering to each other, we would hear the thunderous progress of a land crab through the brush. We would hear, too, the snoring of the Hoosier, and we would cease to whisper and wait.
Then there would be silence, like the pause between notes of music. It would be broken, simultaneously, by an indignant shriek from Hoosier, a shout of laughter from the Chuckler and an unbelievable clatter-and-crash that was the land crab scuttling to safety.
“Dammit, Chuckler, it ain’t funny.”
“Whatsa matter, Chuckler? What happened?”
That would be Runner, his voice strangled with suppressed laughter.
“It’s the crab again. Hoosier’s crab. It came through again and cut the rope and pinched Hoosier’s ass.” Hoosier’s reply shocked the night.
But laughter rose up to assuage the injury, great shouts of it leaping skyward until even the aggrieved Hoosier could not remain aloof.
Now how can a man be frightened with things like this happening around him?
Our airplanes had begun to challenge Japanese supremacy in the air above us. Aerial dogfights raged daily over Henderson Field, and because we were in such proximity to the airstrip, many were above our pits. But we had now such a well-developed fear of airplanes that we would not come aboveground so long as the bombers lingered or the shrapnel of anti-aircraft bursts kept falling.
Only Scar-Chin persisted in what had once been a general delight in watching the show. He sat on the roof of the pit, ejaculating like a child at the circus, stirring not a foot even when the thump of the bombs was dangerously close, or when we in the pit below could hear the tinkle of falling shrapnel or the whizz of bomb fragments. He supplied us with a running description of the battle.
“Oh, boy—there goes one!” We would hear the shriek of a plunging plane. Then a shattering blast. “Oooh. That must have been a five-hundred-pounder. Hey, Chuckler, Lucky—c’mon up. You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“The hell we don’t,” Chuckler growled, and then, raising his voice, “Whaddya mean—there goes one? Whose?”
“Ours.”
We would exchange raised eyebrows. The Runner, or someone, would shake his head. “The bastard doesn’t care who wins!”
“Look at them! Look at them! They’ve got them. They’ve got them on the run. The Japs are running—they’re taking off.”
Sometimes, in exasperation, or when the bombs came closer than usual, someone would shout up to him, “C’mon down here, Scar-Chin. C’mon, you crazy bastard, before you get your ass blown off.”
Scar-Chin would chortle, “What’s the difference? They can knock it off down there, too. Makes no difference where you are. If you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. When your number comes up, that’s it, brother. So why worry?”
There was no arguing with him, nor with his fellow fatalists. Kismet was all the fashion on Guadalcanal. You could hear them saying, It Is Written, in a hundred different ways: “Why worry, you’ll go when your time comes.”—“Poor Bill, it mu
st have been his time to go.”—“Phew! I sure thought that one had my number on it.”
There is almost no argument against fatalism. Argue until you are weary, but men like Scar-Chin still lounge among the falling bombs. Tell them they don’t believe it, when they say, “You go when your time comes.” Suggest that it is they, through their own foolhardiness, who choose the time. Impress upon them that they are their own executioner, that they pull their own name out of the hat. Remind them that even if it is fatalism that they want—as opposed to common sense—they still must choose it: they must even choose no choice.
It is a fine argument, an excellent way to pass the time while the bombs fall and Scar-Chin—that disturbing fatalist Scar-Chin—lounges above without a word of rebuttal, himself alone among the exploding steel.
On a hot day, I withdrew from the mud-floored pit to the thin shade of the scrub, where I threw myself face downward to nap. I awoke with the earth trembling beneath me. I awoke sweating with fear. The earth quivered and I knew it to be an earthquake. I was horrified that the earth might open beneath me and swallow me up; I was disappointed that it did not, that I saw no great fissures. Perdition must be like this; the earth opening, the final betrayal, the nothingness under the feet and the eternal wailing plunge.
My belly was rumbling so with hunger and gas that the Runner complained he could not sleep at night. He mistook it for the faraway thunder of enemy battleships. One night I awoke to hear him scrambling from his sack and racing for the pit.
“Everybody up!” he shouted. “Everybody up! It’s the battleships again!”
“Hey, Runner,” I hollered at him. “Get back here, before you blow your top. That’s no battleship—that’s my belly.”
He came back, cursing me half-heartedly, a sort of sheepish, hopeless imprecation.
Of course, Runner had good cause to fear battleships whenever he heard a muffled rumbling. While we were in the fields, the shelling from the sea rose to a thunderous pitch. The earth would quiver beneath those blows, and they were nearer here than on the river.
The first salvo was as sudden and unexpected as an earthquake. No one ever heard its ghostly pah-boom, pah-boom far out to sea, nor heard the rushing of projectiles through the air until that triple, tearing crash of the detonating shells rent sleep as the screech of braking tires rends the serenity of the living room.
Hateful cursing in the dark, feet pelting to the pit, struggling and jostling at the entrance like New Yorkers in the subway. Another night lost, another sleep conceded to the enemy. They were still whittling us.
We had been nearly two and a half months on Guadalcanal the night the worst shelling came, and I remember it chiefly because it was the night I nearly panicked.
The crash of the first shells tore so suddenly into a deep sleep that I could not control myself. It seemed they had exploded in my back pocket; the next ones surely would make bits of me.
I clawed frantically at my mosquito net. I tried to butt my way through it, tried to bull through gossamer. Then the next cluster landed, no nearer than the first; I drew breath and lay stock-still for a moment, as though to straighten out of the panting pretzel into which panic had twisted me.
Deliberately, I reached beneath me to clutch the mosquito net at the bottom of the fold and lift it free. Carefully, I climbed out. Determinedly, I stood erect. Then I kicked myself in the behind and walked to the pit.
It was the worst shelling, but I slept through it.
Having regained control of myself, having been spared the stigma of a public funk, I was completely confident and relaxed. I was unafraid, so I slept.
Chuckler found papayas on the banks of the Ilu.
We ate them in the morning before chow, while the cool of the night and the morning’s moisture was in them.
Lieutenant Ivy-League heard of them, asked for some, and seeing we had finished them, organized a papaya party to go in search of these succulent melons.
But there were no more papayas on the banks of the Ilu. Instead we found something better. Our papaya parties became swimming parties. We would station sentries on the farther bank and take our pleasure in that wonderful river. It was the same one in which we had bathed and drunk the day of our landing; still swift, still cold, still a delight to hot and sweating flesh.
The tropics has its own anodynes, what the modern world calls “built-in.” Such are the cool milk of the coconut or the swift-running little rivers that come dancing down from the hills. Streams like the Ilu and the Lunga kept us in health. I have no statistics to support me, but my own observations were that those of us who bathed frequently in them were those least afflicted by ulcers or malaria.
But our rediscovery of the Ilu came too late. We had had only a week of her charms, when we were notified to stand by to move out. We were going to new positions.
“The army’s here.”
“Like Hell!”
“I’m telling you, they’re here. I saw them myself.” It was the Chuckler, expostulating angrily with one hand, while the other clutched a white sack slung over his shoulder. “I was down the beach—at Lunga Point. I saw them land.”
“What’s in the sack?” asked the Runner.
The Chuckler grinned. He squatted on his haunches in the manner we had when there was nothing to sit on and the ground was muddy, and he began to laugh.
“I never saw anything like it. I was down on the beach right where the Lunga runs into the bay and I saw their ships. Some of them were still coming ashore in L.C.T.’s, and there was a whole bunch of them in the coconut grove there when suddenly somebody hollers ‘Condition Red!’ Poor bastards, I felt sorry for them. They’d had a rough time the night before. That big naval shelling was for them. I heard the Japs got here too late to sink their transports, so they threw the stuff into the airfield, anyway. It didn’t hit the doggies, but it sure scared hell out of them.
“Anyway, they was in no condition for an air raid. They started digging and scrambling around. One of their officers gets a bright idea and the next thing you know they’re all taking off for cover in the jungle.”
Chuckler’s face crinkled.
“You shoulda seen it. It was the damndest thing. No sooner are the doggies gone, when a whole raggedy horde of Gyrenes comes running out of the jungle. It was like it was staged. The doggies vanish into the jungle on one side, the planes come overhead and start bombing the airport and these raggedy-assed marines come slipping out of the jungle on the other side and start looting everything the doggies left behind. Then Condition Yellow comes and they melt right back into the jungle. The coconut grove looked like a cyclone hit it. When the doggies came back, half their stuff was gone.”
It was a great joke on the dog-faces and the sort of comedy marines enjoy most.
“You mean you was just watching this all the time?” asked the Hoosier disbelievingly.
“Hell no! I just watched ‘em pour out of the jungle. When I seen what they were doing, I joined in.”
“What’d you get?”
The Chuckler opened his bag—also stolen—and disclosed his swag. It was the plunder of a judicious thief. No frippery, no useless ornament or artifices of that artificial world back home, like electric shavers or gold rings or wallets, nothing but solid swag of the sort that was without price on our island, things like socks or T-shirts or bars of soap or boxes of crackers. That was what the Chuckler stole, and we applauded him as the men of Robin Hood might have sung the praises of Little John upon his return from a light-fingered excursion into Nottingham Town.
It was but a few hours before we learned that this very army outfit was going to take our place in the lines. We were glad to hear it. Their arrival on Guadalcanal meant that we were no longer surrounded. Henceforth, contact with the outside world would be common. The fate of Wake Island no longer haunted us. Our navy was back. The worst that could happen to us now was Dunkirk.
So we were glad to see the soldiers when they came trudging up to our pits. They came af
ter another air raid; a very close one. But the Thing had not infected them yet. War was still a lark. Their faces were still heavy with flesh, their ribs padded, their eyes innocent. They were older than we, an average twenty-five to our average twenty; yet we treated them like children. I remember when two of them, having heard of the Ilu, immediately set off for it, picking their way through the barbed wire, like botanists off on a field trip.
I shouted at them to come back. I cannot say exactly why I shouted; perhaps because they seemed not to show the proper respect for danger.
The barbed wire seemed to them an obstacle course, the enemy jungle a picnic ground. Their curiosity was childlike, their very backs bespoke trust, and they mocked my own dark memories of this island.
“Get the hell back here,” I shouted, and they returned.
Their officer said, “What’s wrong?” and I replied, with exaggerated concern, “Some bombs landed out there. They may be delayed action.” He was gratified, and thanked me. “Thank God for somebody who knows these things.” It made me feel like a prig.
So we said good-by. We left them in the fields. We let them take possession of our magnificent field of fire and our solid pits and our precious sleeping sacks of rope, our barbed wire and the Ilu, and we climbed onto waiting trucks.
We had lived on the sands of the beach, and mud of the river bank, the trampled kunai of the fields, and now we were going to the coral of the ridges.
Up, up and up we went, around and around, climbing roads that seemed to coil about our ridge like a spiraling serpent, until we came to the uppermost level and they told us to get down.
That was how we came to the Ridge.
5
The Ridge rose like the backbone of a whale from the dark and wind-tossed sea of the jungle around us. It rose to command a panoramic view, not only of the bay but of all northern Guadalcanal.
Lieutenant Ivy-League was urging us on, half trotting in front of us, as though he were the football coach coming onto the field before the lumbering, equipment-laden varsity. He led us down to the extreme southern point of the whale, where the snout curved down into the jungle. We had been given an extra machine gun to operate. He divided our squad into two.