The Thin Red Line by James Jones Page A

cheer: “Your outfit’s lucky. Old Nippy’ll be comin along in—” he looked at his waterproof watch— “in about another fifteen minutes.”
    “How do you know?” Doll’s squad sergeant, whose name was Field, asked.
    “We just got the news from the air strip,” the assistant pilot smiled.
    “But, well won’t they try to get the ships out?”
    “Can’t. Not enough time. We’ll just have to go on unloading.” The information didn’t seem to bother the assistant pilot much, but Doll, who was wearing his new pistol proudly, gripped the gunnel to keep his balance in the jouncing, swaying barge and looked back at the dwindling ship with the greatest sense of relief he had ever felt in his life. He devoutly hoped he would never see that old tub again in his lifetime, or any other ship—save one; and that was the one that would take him off this island.
    “In this business you take them as they come,” the assistant pilot said.
    “But won’t the fighter planes—” Field started to say.
    “They’ll try. They always get some of them. But some always get through.”
    “Hey, Terry, jerk the lead!” the barge pilot called in a harassed voice.
    “Aye, sir,” the assistant called back dryly. He went aft.
    Ahead of them in the barge the island had got steadily larger, and now they could make out individual men scurrying around huge piles of stores. Doll stared at them. They got slowly bigger. Doll continued to stare. He was fascinated by something he could not even put a name to. What made men do it? he wondered suddenly, awed. What kept them there? Why didn’t they just up and leave, all go away? All he knew was that he was scared, more scared, and in a different way, than he had ever been in his life before. And he didn’t like it, any of it.
    “Grab holt and prepare to land!” the barge pilot shouted at them. Doll did. In a couple of moments the barge grated, cleared and rushed on, grated again, lurched, ground on noisily a few more feet and stopped, and Doll was on Guadalcanal. So were the rest of the men in the same barge, but Doll did not consider that. The front ramp, handled by the talkative assistant pilot, had already begun to fall almost before the barge was stopped.
    “Everybody out!” the barge pilot shouted. “No transfer slips!”
    There still remained two feet of water beyond the end of the ramp, but it was easy enough to jump; and only one man, who slipped on the metal of the ramp, landed in the water and got one foot wet. It wasn’t Doll. The ramp was already rising, as the barge went into reverse and pulled back out to go for another load. Then they were trudging through the sand up the long beach, trying to pick their way across it through the streams of men, to where Bugger Stein and Lieutenant Band were assembling the company.
    Corporal Fife had, of course, been in the barge which brought off the company headquarters. Their barge pilot had told them substantially the same thing Doll’s had: “Your outfit’s lucky. The Jap’s on his way.” The transports must have been spotted, he said. But they were getting off just ahead of time, he said, so they’d be safe. The main thought uppermost in Fife’s mind was that everything was so organized, and handled with such matter-of-fact dispatch. Like a business. Like a regular business. And yet at the bottom of it was blood: blood, mutilation, death. It seemed weird, wacky, to Fife. The air strip had got the news, by radio from a plane apparently, and had transmitted it to the beach, where the barge pilots were all informed—or else informed themselves and each other—and presumably the crews as well as the army commanders, if not the troops themselves, on board the ships were told, too. And yet there was nothing anybody could do about it, apparently. Except wait. Wait and see what happened. Fife had looked around at the faces in the barge covertly. Bugger Stein betrayed his nervousness by continually adjusting his glasses, over and