Once an Eagle (112 page)

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.”

There was a little pause and then all at once the stocky boy with the curly hair got up, yanked the casualty tag off the front of his jacket and said savagely: “All right, let's go, let's get it over with—Jesus Christ, they never leave you alone in this frigging lash-up …”

“What are you bitching about, Becker?” a rifleman named Saunders with both legs splinted called to him. “You been goldbricking your way all over the Pacific for two years and a half …”

“Yeah, what do you know about it?” Becker demanded hotly, but several other men grinned, and a thin, gangling soldier with glasses Damon didn't know, whose chest was heavily bandaged, got to his feet and said doubtfully, “I'll give it a try but I don't know.”

“Good boy.” Damon turned to Siebert. “Can he make it?”

The doctor gave him the same sharp, hostile glance. “How in hell should I know? All it can do is hemorrhage …” But now others were moving up around him, he was speaking their names, those that he remembered. Siebert was still staring at him angrily. He had to do this: he had to. There was no other way.

A field telephone man named Tampler was sitting on the ground; no wound was visible on him. “How about it, Tampler?” he asked. “Will you come along?”

Tampler looked up at him tearfully; his big frame seemed actually to have shrunk, and his hands were shaking in that tight, palsied tremor Damon knew all too well. “I can't, General,” he murmured. “I'll just—I won't be able to cut it. I know I won't …”

“All right, Tampler. You don't have to.” He moved on through the tent, entreating, exhorting, explaining, while the sound of firing crackled and thumped up the trail, building again, and still more wounded were brought in from outside, crowding the ragged tent further. He had guessed right: Murasse was pouring everything into the Babuyan assault.

“Hey, Damon!” He turned. Rossini, his belly and groin a mass of gauze, a bottle of plasma above his head, his thick, dirty face dreamy with morphine. “Hey, what do you think of the frigging cooks and bakers now?”

Harden your heart. “I think they're fine, Rossini. The best. I'll put them up against any outfit in the Pacific, any day.”

There they stood, over thirty of them, swaying on their feet, while young Ward of G-1 talked to them. Walking wounded, going back up because he had asked them to go. Because he had asked them to. They were filthy, the older ones had beards, they looked like half-starved old men—and not one of them was over twenty-seven. They were terrible, they were pitiful, they were magnificent; he was filled with awe and a kind of heartsick fright, watching them creep out of the tent to pick up weapons and ammunition.

He put his hand to his face. Christ, he was tired. They had to hold. They had to. Frenchy had pulled off his sideslip beautifully, the alley west of the Kalahe was solid. A bunch had broken through Agee's crowd just before dawn and were still wandering around somewhere behind them, but it was less than platoon strength; they weren't enough to do any real harm. The main thing was to break the back of the main force, chew them up as an effective unit. Anyway, he had guessed right. All they had to do was hold on, now. He'd have to make sure of adequate protection for the ammo parties. The recon company ought to be shifted—

“Filthy ghoul.”

A wan, white face on a cot behind him, the lower part of the body covered with a blanket, only one foot protruding. Only one. A plasma bottle with its tube feeding down to a slender, white arm. A supply corporal, what was his name? Bright blue eyes fixed on him with glassy force. “Had to come in here to get us, I notice …”

Damon stared at him in silence.

“—Not enough to slaughter everyone in sight—no,”—his voice was rising shrilly—“you've got to come in here and drag us out again—”

“Look, soldier—”

“—a filthy, bloody ghoul and I don't care who knows it—you think I care?
I'll
tell you, I'll tell the whole stupid world what a dirty, bullying ghoul—”

Damon took a step toward him. “Be silent!” he said with all the threat he could muster. He turned to a medic, conscious of the long battery of eyes. “Shut this man up, you hear?
Shut him up! …
”

He went out of the tent trembling with dread, holding his belly openly with one hand, unable to stop thinking now of Westy, trying to drive it out of his mind.

 

They were shouting
deep in the jungle: a single high-pitched voice, haranguing, and now and then an answering bark of approval, like some devil's litany. Brand, sitting behind the machine gun, thought savagely, Getting ready to try it again, getting up their nerve—and was filled with cold rage. Crouched near him in the long rectangular CP hole, the Old Man was saying to Cuddles Dickinson and Major Falk, the headquarters commandant:

“We've got to hold this line. Right here. There must be no faltering, no second thoughts, no talk of falling back. Impress that on your people.”

“Think they'll try it in broad daylight?” Falk asked.

“Yes. He's got to. He's got to keep going. He's in just as deep as we are now …”

Brand kept watching the General. He looked completely whipped; his shoulders sagged, his face was grimy and hollow and gray pouches of exhaustion lay under his eyes. He was sick, Brand knew—he'd gone and got him some more paregoric from Corrazzo, but he was still running badly. My God, he was tough; even when Brand himself had sunk into a brief, fitful, nap around three he'd wakened to find the Old Man gazing out into the jungle and talking to someone on the phone and giving the word to a runner. But now he looked all through: his eyes had receded under his brows to sharp, white points, and the heavy gray stubble on his cheeks made him look old and sad. But he was still functioning. He'd had the shakes after the fire fight up at the Hollow—the bad one, just before dawn; but here he was now, deftly loading a BAR magazine, forcing down the spring with his thumb, engaging a cartridge base, another, another, listening to Deacon Feltner, who was saying they were dangerously low on fifty-caliber ammunition and mortar shells.

Moisture dripped soddenly from the trees. Over by the river the spell was broken by scattered shots and the muffled crash of a grenade. If they hit us again, Brand thought tiredly, I don't know. Looking back southward from the gentle rise he could see through the screen of palms a slice of the sea beyond Babuyan and a transport, riding at anchor. “Lousy Navy bastards,” he muttered, and ground his teeth. With their dry sacks and three hots a day and movies and ship's stores and their freshwater showers … He thought of the afternoon on Benapei when the Old Man had come in sweaty and tired from that deal up at the Horseshoe to find the weird shower Brand had rigged for him out of a halved oil drum punctured and slung from a tree branch and two buckets full of water that tilted on ropes slung from other branches. The Old Man had stood under it soaping himself up and singing “Love Me and the World Is Mine.”

“Joe,” he'd said, “I'm going to put you in for the Navy Cross. Valor beyond the last call of duty. By God, the three guys I'd like to shake hands with are the three guys that invented the wheel, the mosquito net, and the shower.”

“How about gunpowder?” he'd asked, and Damon had grinned at him and made an obscene gesture, boyishly.

“Bugger all gunpowder. To the end of time.” And then he'd gone on singing. Well, the world wasn't his, not by a long shot; but she loved him all right, if he was any judge. Lieutenant Tanahill. He'd been surprised beyond all measure that night back at Dizzy Spa when he'd come back to get the Old Man's laundry and heard them talking inside the tent. For a moment he'd hung there, listening avidly—then had slipped away in confusion, a little guilty for having listened at all. It had upset him at first: Damon had struck him as way above something like that—open-handed with beer and passes, and he liked a drink himself when he could get one. But he hadn't seemed to need liquor or women the way most of the men out here did; as though he could shove it on the back burner where it couldn't get in his way—as though real fear or loneliness or nameless hunger could never reach him. Now he knew differently. The Old Man just didn't show it, that was all: he felt it, all right. He'd observed him once, reading his son's letters one night late, the visored fatigue cap low over his eyes. Watching, Brand had seen him pass a hand across his brow and eyes and go on reading. He kept them in a leather-cased envelope his daughter had given him for a birthday present. It was all cracked now, green and feathery from mildew, and several times Brand had been tempted to clean and soap it for him; but he was afraid the Old Man might be sore if he brought it up … and now Lieutenant Tanahill had been sent stateside. That bastard Massengale. More of his work.

Damon had come up beside him. “Still holding the convention?”

He nodded. “Thinking up some devilment.”

The perimeter was very quiet. Sunlight burned through the foliage, glinted now on a helmet, now on an empty case of belt ammunition, rifle swung. A shadow—some noncom—knelt by someone's hole, talking urgently; straightened and moved along. It was hard to imagine that so many men were here around him, motionless, sweating, waiting for the tiger to spring. Unlike most soldiers, Brand did not hate the jungle: its murky tangle concealed him as well as the Japanese that sought his life, and he could use cover better than the next man. But the waiting was hard. Perspiration crawled through his eyebrows and streaked his chest.