Gone to Soldiers (92 page)

They heard that the Army and the Marines were almost at war down below. The Army hadn't advanced with the Marines, but had dug in and waited for the Marines to do all the work, leaving their flanks exposed forward, where the Army in the middle was supposed to be. Marines called soldiers doggies and affected to despise them, just as the Army considered the Marines low-life. In this operation, however, tough shit to the Army, for they were under the command of a Marine general for once, Holland Smith.

That night a huge banzai was launched below. Thousands upon thousands of Japs came streaming through the lines. General Smith had warned that a banzai attack was imminent, but the doggies had not closed up their lines and the Japs just blasted on through, cutting them to ribbons and sending stragglers storming into the hills. Up on Mount Tapotchau, they could tell the Japs had broken through the lines below but they could only see exploding shells. Jack muttered, “It sounds like the Japs have got back as far as the Tenth Marines Artillery—looks like a bloody mess down there.”

At dawn they watched through glasses trying to figure out what the hell was happening. Their shared nightmare was that the Japs had many more troops than they were supposed to have and had launched a major offensive. Even Sergeant Zeeland was edgy and remarked how few bodies they had found the first days when they were advancing. The glasses went from hand to hand. Zeeland grumbled, “Tell me what I'm seeing. I'm going crazy.”

Jack looked astonished that the sergeant would admit there was anything he didn't know backwards, but he lifted the glasses and searched where Zeeland was pointing. “Marie nous sauve,” he said. “It's the charge of the cripples!”

When Murray focused the glasses, he saw what everyone was looking at. A line of wounded men, of amputees leaning on sticks, of men with arms in slings, in tattered bandages, with heads completely bandaged so that they were blind and had to be led by the hand, were coming to attack, some armed, some holding bayonets mounted on sticks, some cradling what were probably grenades in arms embedded in plaster casts. They were moving up as best they could to join the banzai attack, which Murray could see had finally ended deep into Allied lines.

He had no time to appreciate the view, because they were given orders to march down double time and join the mopping-up operations, back into the line to replace the casualties of the charge, which had decimated companies. When they finally got down the mountain, a matter of four hours instead of the three days it had taken them to get up, Murray looked at the scene and could not believe it. The field in front of the 10th Marines Artillery gun emplacements looked like raw hamburger. Exhausted marines had fallen asleep on piles of corpses, because there was noplace free of maimed bodies and bloody slime. The mangled dead were piled on the mangled dead. Few had been shot. Most had been hit by shells directed flat along the ground like machine-gun fire, as the artillerymen fought for their lives. He thought not even at Tarawa had he seen so many bodies. There the bodies had floated in the surf and he realized in retrospect how clean a death that was, the blood draining out, the flesh washed. Here mud and blood and pulverized muscle and organs made a hellish stinking muck seething with flies. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine snow, nothing but snow. Then hearing a rifle bark nearby, he hit the bloody muck headlong.

For two days they cleaned up pockets of stragglers from the great banzai charge, but it became apparent that that pile of rotting meat that was being bulldozed into trenches had been the army of General Saito. The general's body was found near a cave that had been his headquarters by troops that were driving the few remaining Japanese soldiers into the extreme north of the island. After ordering the suicide of his army, General Saito had committed hara-kiri, then been finished off by an aide with a bullet to the brain.

They moved out to assist in the final mopping-up way in the north. That end of the island was rugged terrain. Now that the charge was over, marines were saying how lucky they were it had happened, because the Japs could have gone on fighting from defile to cave to flinty hill all the way to the cliffs that rose sharply above the sea, cliffs of limestone and coral, jagged and straight down: Marpi Point. As the marines converged, Murray guessed there were fewer soldiers than civilians left. Mostly civilians were milling around the point, a lot of them women with children and babies in arms. The marines took up positions on the edge of the plateau.

Some Marine nisei came up with bullhorns and called in Japanese for the civilians to surrender, that they would not be hurt. The Jap soldiers were yelling at them too from the caves where they were holed up. At least everyone didn't look terrified. Some kids were playing catch in a circle. From the brush, he watched them for a moment, there on the cliffs with the wind whipping the girls' black hair and the sea rising up the horizon so blue it hurt his eyes, and then one of the children missed. As the grenade exploded and the children were torn apart and their burst bodies hurled through the air, the men around him all groaned as one and Murray understood what game the children played.

A woman dressed in a sea green kimono looking like a big shiny butterfly ran with her baby in her arms to the cliff and hurled herself over, crying out something. A family group, father, mother, two little boys, went forward together holding hands and leaped off. Murray could hear more bullhorns from below the cliffs, where gunboats were circling. More and more people were running forward. He saw a man swing an infant through the air and dash its head against a stone. Then a woman took the corpse and shuffled slowly toward the cliff to walk off into space and fall.

An older woman unbound her long iron grey hair as if getting ready for bed and then stepped off the cliff, primly holding her skirts together as she fell straight down. A man grabbed up a baby and ran off, his legs still wheeling in the air as he seemed to hang a moment and then plummeted. The women's fall was slowed by their kimonos billowing around them, so there was a ghastly incongruous grace to their descent, as if they were large blossoms in lavender, in maroon, in pale gold, in sky blue floating.

As he stared, a woman carrying a little girl ran back and forth, back and forth, frantic as a trapped puppy with her ivory kimono glinting in the sun. She would run up to the edge of the cliff and then embrace the little girl she held and turn away. She did this over and over until finally she backed from the cliff, swung around and began running straight toward the brush where Murray's company was dug in. “Come on,” the guys started yelling to her, “that-a-girl, come on!”

A machine gun sputtered from the caves. The woman jerked as the bullets tore through her, almost cutting her in half. She fell and lay crumpled, red soaking the ivory of the kimono. Neither she nor the child moved again.

“Bastards,” Reardon said. “Killing their own women. They just ain't human. We've got to clean those yellow bellies out of there.”

They did eventually clean the soldiers out of the caves, but it was too late. Hundreds of women, men and children leaped from the cliffs. The sea below was so choked that the propellers of the boats were blocked with flesh. Murray felt numb. Standing among the bodies that littered the grass at the cliff tops, he looked down into the sea of bodies below and again he vomited. How can we see all this and go on living?

A moment later he was following Jack uphill, where one of the new guys, called Tiny because he was six feet four and broad, was shouting that he had found a cache of booze in one of the caves. What all the men wanted more than anything else was to be dead drunk, and Murray felt at one with the guys around him. Never before in his life had that happened to him. Always he had been odd man out, the intellectual, the sensitive one, the Jew; but now he felt as if he were part of an animal bigger than himself, an ant in a colony who moved to the same chemical signals as the ant beside him and the ant before and behind. Sake called them. Sake promised numbness. If he would never forget the sight of that ivory kimono glistening as the woman ran toward them carrying her daughter and then the bullets tearing through her flesh, if he would never forget the green kimono floating like the wings of a Polyphemus moth as the woman turned and turned in the air plunging toward the sea and the rocks, if he would never forget the children in the sunlight tossing the dark ball between them until they all blossomed into fire and burning flesh, then the sake promised that soon, soon, he would remember but not feel.

They knew they were breaking regulations and did not give the faintest damn, as they uncorked the bottles, squatting in the cave where the corpses still lay in their blood puddled around their weapons. They knew that there were still hundreds of remnant soldiers sniping in the brush. They did not give a shit. I am one of them, Murray thought, drinking the sake down and feeling its warmth spread in his belly. I am no more, no less. The best is not to feel anything.

Wearily, Jack winked at him—contact less exhausting than speech—and he winked back. Some of the men were going through the pockets of the corpses, looking for souvenirs. The gunny, Reardon, stooped into the cave and shook his head at them. Then instead of giving them hell, he reached for a bottle and sagged against the far wall, shoving the remains of a kid whose legs had been blown off aside with his boot. “Aw shit,” he said. “This is one asshole island.”

JACQUELINE 9

An Honorable Death

9 juin 1944

I can scarcely write because two of my fingers are broken and splinted, and my left arm is in a sling, but here I am on Montagne Noire. Sometimes I think surviving is a duty; sometimes, a fate. Jeff has not arrived yet. I am awaiting news. It is a nuisance to be disabled at a time as busy and critical as this, as the battle for France goes on everyplace!

Two of the guards raped me. The third one didn't. The others said he was queer, but he said he was afraid of catching a disease, that I was probably a prostitute the American had picked up. I didn't believe his reason and neither did the other two, because they laughed at him. When they took me back to the cell, they were still making jokes while he opened a different cell. I knew from what he said that they had found out Jeff is American, which puts him in danger of being shot as a spy.

I knew the cell was different because, first, I had counted the doors going in, and second, this cell was on the right, not the left. I lay on the floor where they threw me. Then I crawled up on the straw mattress. Through the window I could see only pale lavender sky. I will admit I was crushed with despair and horror and I wept for a long time, until my eyes were sore and my sinuses blocked. I had nothing to wipe my nose on but my dress, already smeared with blood and their filthy semen, and my own urine, for I had wet myself when they tried to force me the first time.

I lay on the cot a long time like a stepped-on bug, blaming myself for our walking into their trap. I should have known. I berated myself bitterly for being distracted with our argument, with his presence. The presence of a man you love is a constant demand for attention, even when such attention is dangerous and inappropriate, and I am no more able to resist that demand than any other woman. I heard them taking someone out. They might come back again for me at any moment. I saw Maman and Rivka going hand in hand to the deportation train, and I had to act. I sat up and felt myself over. My face was covered with blood from my nose. It was sore and swollen but I did not think it was broken. Mostly I was bruised. My vagina was bleeding. I wished they had left me my underpants. They had been so busy raping me, they had not yet beaten me badly, although I was sure that would come later. I began examining my cell.

The door was firmly locked, solid wood set in a metal frame. The outer wall of the ancient building was made of stone. I scrambled up to hang on the bars and peer out. My cell overlooked a side street from one floor up. When I had looked out of the window of the cell I had been in before, I had looked into a courtyard. I began to wonder if the guard who had not taken part in the rape had perhaps done me a little favor, because the side street was much better than the courtyard, if I could get out. It was far to jump, but not suicidal. I could survive it, I knew I could.

I managed to scramble up and crouch on the narrow window ledge. A sentry passed below about every ten minutes, although not with regularity. Finally I figured out sometimes he just came to the corner and looked and did not bother walking the length of that side. Several times he stopped just around the corner on my side and smoked. I could smell his cigarette.

The glass had long since broken on that window in one of the many air raids that eliminated glass all over the city. Pressing my head cautiously against each gap in the bars, I found that the bar nearest the right hand had the largest gap between bar and wall, as if it had been pushed somewhat awry while the cement was still wet. The stone was not completely square. High up, the gap was even wider. It did not look large enough for a big cat to wriggle out, but I thought of the space a baby is born through, and I thought it was worth trying. But not yet. It was still the long pale mauve twilight. I was playing a game all this time of being perfectly still whenever the sentry was near and then working feverishly on the bars when he was around the corner.

I heard the gate at the end of the hall crash open and I flung myself down and ran to my cot. My heart began pounding so loudly my body shook. This time I listened to where they went. It was Margot they were bringing back, and then they took Jeff. He called out to me as he was taken down the hall, but I did not want to call the guards' attention to the fact that I was in a different cell than they had put me in originally, so I did not answer. Maybe the guard who had put me in here would also help Jeff. I felt bad at not answering Jeff, but I feared, irrationally but powerfully, that if I spoke and he heard my voice, he would instantly know I had been raped.