The Naked and the Dead (17 page)

            There
had
to be communications. Without them. . . without them, it would be as though he were in the middle of a game of chess and someone had blindfolded him. He could guess what his opponent's next move would be and answer it, but it would be more difficult to predict the next move, and the next, and he might be making responses which were wasted, if not fatal. The jeep sloughed around a curve, and as it came out of the turn its headlights shone on the startled eyes of a soldier behind a machine gun in an emplacement by the side of the road. The jeep pulled up to him.

            "What the hell do you guys mean coming down the road with your lights on?" he shouted. He saw the General and blinked. "Sorry, sir."

            "It's all right, son. You're right, it's bad business, breaking one of my own orders." The General smiled, and the soldier grinned back. The jeep turned off the road into the lane which led to the bivouac of headquarters battery. Everything was dark in the area, and the General paused for a moment to orient himself. "The blackout tent is over there," he said, pointing, and the three officers set off and walked through the darkness, stumbling over the roots and shrubs of the imperfectly cleared ground. The night was very black with a tense quality about it that kept the officers from saying anything. They passed only one man in the fifty yards to the blackout tent.

            The General pushed aside the flaps and groped with distaste inside the dark safety corridor. The tent had obviously blown down, been dragged in the mud, and then erected again. The inside walls were slimy. At the end of the safety corridor he pushed aside a second set of flaps and walked inside. An enlisted man and a captain were sitting at a desk.

            The two men sprang to their feet. "Sir?" the Captain said.

            The General sniffed. The air was extremely moist and foul. Already a few drops of sweat were forming on his forehead and back. "Where's Colonel McLeod?" he asked.

            "I'll get him, sir."

            "No, wait a minute," the General said. "Can you tell me if the line to Second Battalion is in from here?"

            "Yes, sir, it is."

            The General felt a deep relief. "Ring them for me, please." He lit a cigarette and smiled at Lieutenant Hearn. The Captain picked up the receiver out of a field telephone box, and cranked three times. "We have to relay it through B Battery, sir."

            "I know," the General said shortly. It was the one subject on which the General ever showed annoyance; there was not a facet of the operations of the division with which he was not familiar.

            In a minute or two, the Captain handed the phone to the General. "Second Battalion, sir."

            "Give me Samson," the General said, using the code name for Lieutenant Colonel Hutchins. "Samson, this is Camel," he said, "I'm talking from Pivot Red. What's happening? Are your lines through to Paragon White and Paragon Blue?"

            "This is Samson. Yes, our circuits are open." The voice was faint and distant and there was a buzzing in the earpiece. "Short," the General muttered.

            "We've been trying to get you," Hutchins said. "We stopped the attack on Paragon White B and C, and at Paragon Red E and G." He gave the co-ordinates. "Personally I think it was a feeler, and they're going to try again tonight."

            "Yes," the General said. He was busy estimating the possibilities. They would have to be reinforced. First Battalion of the 459th, Infantry which he had been holding in reserve and working on the road, could be moved up in two hours, but he would have to leave at least a company and a detached platoon behind for reserves. The attack might come sooner than that. The General debated, and decided finally to move up only two companies from 1st Battalion, save the other two for covering any retreat which might be necessary, and strip headquarters and service companies of all available platoons. He glanced at his watch. It was eight o'clock now. "Samson," he said, "at about 2300, Potential White Able and Dog will reach you by convoy march route. They are to make contact with Paragon White and Paragon Red where they will be used according to opportunity. I'll direct that as the occasion demands." Everything was extremely clear to him at this moment. The Japanese would be attacking tonight, probably against the entire line, but certainly against the flanks. The storm would have delayed Toyaku's troops in reaching their assembly points, and chances were he would be unable to bring many tanks up. It could not be a probing attack, searching for weaknesses in the line. With the mud and the sluggish maneuvering that would involve, Toyaku would have to drive at a few points, and hope he could break them. This, the General felt, he could handle. "We're going to have some extremely powerful local attacks tonight," he said into the mouthpiece. "I want you to contact all line units and instruct them to hold their ground.
There is to be no general retreat."

            "Sir?" The voice at the other end of the phone was doubtful.

            "If the Japs can penetrate, let them. The companies on the flanks of any gap in the line are to hold their positions. I'll court-martial any officer who pulls back his unit for tactical reasons. Anything that gets through us will be handled by the reserve."

            Dalleson was bewildered. The one decision he had made was that, with a newly established line and a few powerful Japanese thrusts on tap for the night, the safest thing would be to pull back the troops a mile or two, and attempt to delay the attack until morning. He felt a deep gratitude now that the General had not asked his opinion. He had assumed immediately that the General was right and he was wrong.

            Hutchins was speaking again. "What about me? Will I get any men?"

            "Powerhouse will reach you at 2330," the General said. "You will deploy them between Paragon Red George and Paragon Red Easy at the following co-ordinates: 017.37 -- 439.56, and at 018.25 -- 440.06." The General assigned these positions from a mental image of his battle map. "As additional support, I'm going to send you a reinforced platoon from Paragon Yellow Sugar. They're to be used for pack train and lateral communication with Paragon White, and if possible afterward as rifle support at Paragon White Baker or Cat. We'll work that out as things go along. I'm going to set up a temporary CP here for the night."

            Everything flowed out of him easily now, his decisions quick and instinctively just, he believed. The General could not have been more happy than he was at this moment. He hung up, and gazed for a moment at Hearn and Dalleson, feeling a quiet impersonal affection for them both. "Going to be a lot doing tonight," he murmured. Covertly, he noticed the artillery captain and the enlisted man looking at him almost in awe. With something like gaiety he turned to Dalleson.

            "I promised Hutchins a reinforced platoon. I'm going to send up Pioneer and Demolition, but we'll have to add a squad to that from some other platoon."

            "How about I and R, sir?"

            "Fine, we'll give it to recon. Now, work out some march orders. Quickly, man!" He lit a cigarette and turned to Hearn. "I suggest you pick us up some cots, Lieutenant." Hearn was no bother to him at this moment.

            In the battle that followed that night, Dalleson's suggestion to add a squad from recon to the pioneer and demolition platoon was the only contribution he made.

5

            Roth dreamt that he was catching butterflies in a lovely green meadow when Minetta wakened him for guard. He grumbled and tried to go back to sleep, but Minetta kept shaking him. "All right, all right, I'm getting up," he whispered angrily. He rolled over, groaned a little, got on his hands and knees, and shook his head. "Three hours' guard tonight," he realized with dread. Morosely he began to put on his shoes.

            Minetta was waiting for him in the machine-gun emplacement. "Jesus, it's spooky tonight," he whispered. "I thought I'd be on forever."

            "Anything happen?"

            Minetta gazed out at the black jungle before them. It was just possible to discern the barbed wire ten yards beyond the machine gun. "I thought I heard some Japs sneaking around," he muttered, "so keep your ears open."

            Roth felt a sick fear. "Are you sure?"

            "I dunno. The artillery's been going steady for the last half hour. I think there's a battle going on." He listened. "Wait!" A battery fired a few miles away with a hollow clanging sound. "I bet the Japs are attacking. Jesus, recon is gonna get caught right in the middle of it."

            "I guess we're lucky," Roth said.

            Minetta's voice was very low. "Yeah, I dunno. Being doubled up on guard ain't so good either. Wait, you'll see. Three hours on a night like this is enough to make you flip your lid. How do we know that the Japs won't break through, and before your shift is over they'll be attacking right here? We're only ten miles from the front. Maybe they'll have a patrol out here."

            "This is serious," Roth said. He remembered the way Goldstein's face had looked when he was making his pack soon after the storm. Goldstein was up there now, seeing combat. Roth had an odd sensation. He might even be killed. Any of them -- Red, Gallagher, Sergeant Croft, Wyman, Toglio, or Martinez or Ridges or Wilson; they were all up there now, right in the middle of it. Any one of them could be gone by tomorrow. It was horrible the way a man could be killed. He wanted to tell Minetta some of this.

            But Minetta yawned.
"Jeez,
I'm glad this is over." He started to go and then turned back. "You know who you wake up?"

            "Sergeant Brown?"

            "That's right. He's sleeping on a blanket with Stanley over there." Minetta indicated the direction vaguely.

            Roth muttered, "Just five of us on this part of the perimeter. Think of it, five men having to hold down a whole platoon's part of the perimeter."

            "That's what I mean," Minetta said. "We ain't getting any break. At least there's a lot of men where the first squad is." He yawned quietly. "Well, I'm going," he said.

            Roth felt terribly alone after Minetta left him. He gazed into the jungle, and got into the hole behind the machine gun as silently as he could. Something like this was beyond him, he told himself; he didn't have the nerves for it. This took a younger man, a kid like Minetta or Polack, or one of the veterans.

            He was sitting on two cartridge boxes, and the handles cut into his bony rump. He kept shifting his weight, and moving his feet about. The hole was very muddy from the evening storm, and everything about him felt damp. His clothes had been wet for hours, and he had had to spread his blankets on the wet ground. What a way to live! He would have a cold by morning, he was certain. He'd be lucky if it wasn't pneumonia.

            Everything was very quiet. The jungle was hushed, ominous, with a commanding silence that stilled his breath. He waited, and abruptly the utter vacuum was broken and he was conscious of all the sounds of the night woods -- the crickets and frogs and lizards thrumming in the brush, the soughing of the trees. And then the sounds seemed to vanish, or rather his ear could hear only the silence; for several minutes there was a continual alternation between the sounds and the quiet, as if they were distinct and yet related like a drawing of some cubes which perpetually turn inside-out and back again. Roth began to think; there was some heavy thunder and lightning in the distance, but he did not worry about the threat of rain. For a long time he listened to the artillery, which sounded like a great muffled bell in the heavy moist night air. He shivered and crossed his arms. He was remembering what a training sergeant had said about dirty fighting and how the Japs would sneak up behind a sentry in the jungle and knife the man. "He'd never know at all," the sergeant had said, "except maybe for one little second when it was too late."

            Roth felt a gnawing, guttish fear, and turned around to look at the ground behind him. He shuddered, brooding over such a death. What an awful thing to happen. His nerves were taut. As he tried to see the jungle beyond the little clearing past the barbed wire, he had the kind of anxiety and panic a child has when the monster creeps up behind the hero in a horror movie. Something clattered in the brush, and Roth ducked in his hole, and then slowly peeked above it, trying to discern a man or at least some recognizable object in the deep shapes and shadows of the jungle. The noise stopped, and then after ten seconds began again. It was a scratching urgent sound, and Roth sat numb in the hole, feeling nothing but the beat of his pulse throughout his entire body. His ears had become giant amplifiers and he was detecting a whole gamut of sounds, of sliding and scraping, of twigs cracking, of shrubs being rustled, which he had not noticed before. He bent over the machine gun, and then realized that he didn't know whether Minetta had cocked it completely or left it half-loaded. It meant that he would have to pull back the bolt and release it in order to be certain, and he was terrified of the noise it would make. He took up his rifle, and tried to loose the safety lever quietly, but it clicked into place quite audibly. Roth flinched at the noise, and then gazed into the jungle, trying to locate the particular place from which the sounds were coming. But they seemed to originate everywhere, and he had no idea of their distance and what caused them. He heard something rustle, and he turned his rifle clumsily in that direction, and waited, the sweat breaking out on his back. For an instant he was tempted to shoot, blindly and furiously, but he remembered that that was very dangerous. "Maybe they don't see me either," he thought, but he did not believe it. The reason he did not fire was for fear of what Sergeant Brown would say. "If you fire without seeing anything to aim at, you just give away the position of your hole, and they'll throw a grenade in on you," Brown had told him. Roth trembled. He was beginning to feel resentful; for some time he had been convinced that the Japs were watching him. Why don't you come on? he wondered desperately. By now his nerves were so taut that he would have welcomed an attack.