Free The Thin Red Line by James Jones Page B

and by the ebbing of the functions so that the mind mercifully does not comprehend what is happening to it. Only one man raged against it, and he only for a moment, rousing himself briefly from his steadily encroaching hallucination to shout curses and epithets against what was happening to him and against everything which contributed to it, the doctors, the bomb, the war, the generals, the nations, before relapsing back quietly into the numbing sleep which would pass over into death with scarcely a transition. Others would die too here, certainly—as well as almost certainly still others on the plane out, or in the base hospital—but C-for-Charlie was not there to see them. They were already off on their six mile route march to their new bivouac.
    It was a march the like of which none of them had ever experienced before, and nobody had really prepared them for it. Though they had read newspaper accounts of jungle fighting. As they moved back inland through the coconut groves, the aid station near the beach was quickly lost to sight, though not to memory, and they found themselves coming suddenly into those tropic conditions they had heard so much about. Here where the sea breeze of the beach could not reach them, the moist humidity was so overpowering, and hung in the air so heavily, that it seemed more like a material object than a weather condition. It brought the sweat starting from every pore at the slightest exertion. And unable to evaporate in it, this sweat ran down over their bodies soaking everything to saturation. When it had saturated their clothing, it ran on down into their shoes, filling them, so that they sloshed along in their own sweat as if they had just come out of wading a river. It was now almost midday and the sun blazed down on them between the widely spaced trees, heating their helmets to such temperatures that the steel shells actually burned their hands and for simple comfort had to be removed and slung from packs, leaving them wearing only the fiber liners. They tramped along through a strange, heavy quiet caused by the humidity which damped the air with moisture so that sound waves did not travel but simply fell dead to the ground. There was so much water in the heavy, hanging air that the marching men had to gasp for breath, and then got very little oxygen or relief for their extra exertion. Everything was wet. The roads used by the transport were seas of soft mud churned up by the traffic, axledeep on the big trucks. It was impossible to march on—or in —them. The only possible way for marching men to move at all was to travel in two lines, one on either side, picking their way over the great rolls of drying mud, turned back as though by a plow, and the lumpish hummocks of grass between them. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from the disturbed grass hummocks to plague them in the quiet, heavy air. Several times they came upon jeeps mired down, with their smaller wheelbase, to their belly plates, vainly trying to extricate themselves; and their own jeep which was leading them had to pick its way very carefully through the worst of the muddy places.
    Everywhere around them as they moved along were great piles of stores and supplies of all kinds, stacked in great dumps thirty and forty feet high, and into which and out of which moved a constant traffic of the big trucks. They had to march quite some little time, before they got far enough inland for the supply dumps to cease.
    Trudging along the road edge on this incredible march and moving directly behind Captain Stein and Lieutenant Band, First Sergeant Welsh, betweentimes wiping the sweat out of his eyes, could not stop thinking of the little band of wounded animals—because that was what they were, had been reduced to—that he had seen back at the aid station, and he kept muttering softly to himself over and over while grinning slyly at Fife: “Property. Property. All for property.” Because that was what it was; what it was all about. One