Hold Back the Night

Chapter Two

ONCE THE MEN were in their stride, the captain timed their progress, counting the cadence in his head, and was surprised to find that their pace was as good as you would expect from boys still in boot camp, well-nourished, fresh, and strong, hiking over the Carolina hills. His men of Dog Company might be bedraggled, and sick with weariness and apprehension, but they had been tempered to an inner hardness by the blowtorch of battle.

He saw nothing of the enemy, but he knew they were there. This new enemy was not orthodox. This new enemy did not expose itself except on ground, and at a time, of its own choosing. Then it rose, as if birthed on the spot by the mud of Asia, in full strength and ferocity. A five-star general had discovered this, the hard way, in Tokyo, and Mackenzie had discovered it, the hard way, at the reservoir. This new enemy slithered around your flanks, and stabbed your rear, and ate at your guts. You could not put your hands on him. It was like trying to strangle a jellyfish.

At the end of an hour, when he reached a turn where he had a clear field of fire on both flanks, and a precipice rising at his rear, he called, “Okay, take a break.” His men halted, and carefully laid down their weapons, in the manner of veterans, and then propped themselves against the rocks.

Mackenzie busied himself building a small pyre of pebbles and what loose earth there was, and Sergeant Ekland, sensing the captain’s intent, joined him and jabbed and scraped the iron earth with his bayonet. “Trick I learned from a fellow who was in the Aleutians,” the captain explained. “No fuel there, either.”

Then he called for the jericans, and emptied on the pyre a gallon from each. When the gasoline had soaked well into the stones and earth, he touched his lighter to it, and it blazed like a great torch. “Good for eight minutes, maybe ten,” the captain said. He stripped off his gloves and flexed his lean hands before the fire, and pushed back the hood of his parka and took off his helmet and his alpaca pile helmet-liner, and scratched his itching scalp. Then he squatted on the ground.

The men packed close around him, and he overheard a whisper, “He’s a hard bastard, but not dumb.” The corners of his mouth smiled, and he looked sideways at Ekland, and he saw that Ekland too had overheard, and was smiling behind the red beard. While they were separated by the tricky chasm between officers and men, the captain found that he and Ekland often thought alike, and acted alike. And while they never spoke of it, it was the captain’s belief that their aims and ideals were close kin—that both enjoyed the magnificent independence and occasional loneliness of free men.

Ekland said, “Sir, do you think we could split up a few of the cigarettes?”

“Okay,” the captain agreed. He broke out four cigarettes. “One to four men,” he said. He knew Ackerman didn’t smoke. They crowded the fire and burned up the cigarettes, inhaling deep, and when their fingers scorched they impaled the yellow ends on sharpened match sticks for a last puff. Mackenzie shared his cigarette with Ekland and Ostergaard and Joe Kato, the lazy Hawaiian boy whose surprising agility with languages made him a valuable asset in the linguistic morass of Asia, so that he had become a PFC and the unofficial interpreter for the captain. Captains weren’t assigned interpreters, but this captain, by the luck of orders, had one, and had found good use for him. Mackenzie had discovered America deficient in one technical weapon of war—the languages of other peoples.

Kato took the last drag on the captain’s cigarette, and said, “Sir, tell us more about that bottle of Scotch. Weren’t you ever tempted?”

“Yeah,” Beany Smith said. “How come you never drank it? Nothing big ever happen?”

Mackenzie laughed. “Big things happened-at least they seemed big at the time. Lots of times I almost opened it. I almost drank it at Guadalcanal, after I was hit when the Japs attacked on the Tenaru. I had shrapnel in my back, and I could hear the Japs prowling around in the night, and I had to lay there quiet, in my hole, until morning, and I almost drank it then.”

“Why didn’t you?” Beany Smith asked, somewhat awed.

“I wanted it bad enough, God knows. I didn’t have any morphine syrettes, and I was afraid to yell for the aid men. Every once in a while, that night, I’d hear a scream and a scuffle, and I knew that a Jap had fallen into somebody’s foxhole, and that one or the other was dead. I started to open the Scotch. I figured four or five drinks would put me out of pain. But I didn’t open it because I was afraid I’d drink too much and pass out, and a Jap would slip into my hole and murder me.”

“Like we were murdered at Ko-Bong,” Ostergaard said, and then realized that he had said something clumsy, and wished he hadn’t said it.

“Yes,” Mackenzie said, accepting the blame, “as we were murdered at Ko-Bong.”

Then Mackenzie told them of Guadalcanal, of the stinking jungle and the weird Banzai charges, and the uncertain days after the Navy lost four cruisers off Savo Island, and the thin-hulled transports fled the beach. He told how the lonely Marines lay in the mud while the Japanese battleships steamed past, hurling 14-inch shells down upon them, lording it over the night.

As Mackenzie talked he kept looking over the shoulders of his men, examining the cone-shaped hills on the other side of the gorge, and the road as far as he could see it. He noted that Ekland, like an experienced hunter in the field, always searching for signs of movement, did the same.

Mackenzie spoke of malaria, and dysentery, and jungle rot, and the crud. He told them of the foot-long centipedes that would creep between your belt and waistband in the night, and fasten on your thumb in the morning, and leave you screaming in agony like childbirth for a full day. He spoke of the leeches that fell from the trees to suck your blood, and the ants with a bite like hot pokers, and the wasps three inches long, and the three-foot lizards, and spiders big as dinner plates. He told of men brained by falling coconuts and rotten trees, and the stealthy crocodiles, and the stench of the enemy’s abandoned dead, so you retched before your morning coffee.

He made it sound as bad as it actually had been. That was his intention.

“Jeepers!” said little Nick Tinker. “That must’ve been rugged!”

“Them wild Japs!” said Beany Smith. “They must’ve been awful!”

“They were pretty shrewd,” the captain said, “and pretty tough. But we licked ’em on The ’Canal, and we won out in the end.” The flame in the earthen pyramid was dying in blue spasms, each weaker than the last. “All right!” Mackenzie commanded. “Off your butts and on the way!”

Mackenzie, walking in the van with the bottle snug in the sack-like pocket of his parka, wondered if the crags and hills ever would begin to lose height, and give him hope of the coastal plains beyond; but as far ahead as he could see the truculent hills brooded over the gorge. Ahead the road veered from the protection of the cliff, and twisted out to touch the winter-paralyzed stream that in flood had so brutally eroded this tortured land. He did not like the looks of it. He called Ekland. “What d’you think?” he said.

“It looks chancy, sir,” said Ekland.

“It does, doesn’t it? But there’s only one way to go, and that’s ahead.”

Yonder, where the road ran in team with the stream, Dog Company would be naked, exposed to fire and assault from every direction. But the point of danger was still a mile distant, and his mind returned to Kato’s question. There’d been another temptation, not long after Guadalcanal, that he’d omitted.

They’d sent him out of the fleet hospital in Noumea with a Purple Heart and a couple of other ribbons pinned on a uniform so fresh it still bore its warehouse creases. They gave him two weeks’ leave in Sydney.

Her first name was Kitty, and he was never quite sure of her last name and so he had not written her afterward. He met her on the last day of his leave. An artilleryman, hurrying back to the New Guinea front, introduced them during the lunch hour at Romano’s. When you were on leave in Sydney you rendezvoused for lunch, or a late breakfast with martinis, at Romano’s, just as you went to Prince’s at night. Now that he thought of it, he was pretty sure her last name was Turcott. That was it, Kitty Turcott, “more white and red than doves or roses are,” and stacked like a Venus in miniature to boot. It was strange that he should remember the name, after all the years, just now. Perhaps it was true that once you tucked a fact in your brain it was there for keeps, never truly lost.

He took her to Prince’s that night. All the Aussie girls at their table—the table of the First Marine Division—were attractive, but she was the prettiest, and vivacious and gay, almost, he thought, to the borderline of panic. She laughed the loudest and drank the most. It didn’t matter. He wanted her. They danced every dance in the tiny oval of the merry, noisy amphitheater, with the tables, immaculate in linen and silver and crystal, rising in concentric circles around them. She was a tantalizing, golden sprite, first pressing close to him, then fending him off with practiced grace. His share of the check was sixteen pounds, Australian, which did not seem exorbitant at the time.

At midnight the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then, “God Save the King,” and as they stood erect, her hand alive and warm on his arm, she whispered, “No more drink after twelve. Austerity, you know. I do wish I had another drink.”

“Know any place where we can get it?” Mackenzie had been a child during prohibition, but he remembered his dad’s tales of the speakeasies.

“We don’t have any bottle clubs in Sydney. We aren’t civilized. In London they have bottle clubs and therefore are civilized—so they say.”

He whispered, “I’ve got a bottle at the pub.” In Australia, you called your hotel a pub.

“Let’s get it,” she said, as the band rolled to its crescendo. “Let’s get it and go up to my flat.”

So they managed to find a cab in the brownout, and they went to the Hotel Australia and picked up a bottle—this bottle. The captain pressed it close to his side. It seemed crazy now, but it had seemed important at the time. On his last night in Sydney, it was important not to lose that golden, rounded, sprite of a girl, for in the morning he had to catch a SCAT plane back to the Solomons. SCAT. It meant Southern Cross Air Transport, the wildest, coolest, most reliable airline that ever took off nonchalantly with a two-ton overload. He wondered whether anyone beside himself remembered, and blessed, SCAT now.

Then the cab took them to her flat, on Point Piper, overlooking Lady Martin’s Beach and Rose Bay, and of course it had reminded him of San Francisco. It was not only the marine view. He remembered the advertisements in the San Francisco newspapers that always began, MARINE VIEW… A marine view in San Francisco might mean a slice of the bay an inch wide, but in Kitty Turcott’s apartment the marine view meant the whole wide sweep, through a curved picture window, of one of the magnificent harbors of the world. It was not only the marine view, but the flat itself. Just such an apartment, furnished with a flair for style and still in good taste, you might find in the newest buildings on Telegraph Hill. If you were lucky. It was surprising that two cities, and two peoples, could be separated by the whole thickness of the world, and yet be as close, in spirit, as cities split by rivers only, like Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Omaha and Council Bluffs. They were very close, San Francisco and Sydney, bound together by ties of language and humanity, and common blood and aspiration that transcended geography. When you looked out across the bay from Kitty’s flat, only the stars were different.

That’s what the flying machine had done for the world. Distance was not measured in miles, any longer, but in time. One day when they solved the problem of fuel supply for jets, Sydney would be a one-night hop from San Fran.

Mackenzie prowled Kitty’s flat, absorbing it, admiring it. There was a tricky bar built into the wall. When you touched a button it revolved and opened itself up. But all the bottles were empty.

The bookcases were full of books, and not merely used for knickknack shelves. They were books that a man enjoys in the shadow of the evening, or the insomniac hours just before the dawn. There were Maugham and Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and a beautifully bound set of C. S. Forester. There was Gunther and Pierre van Paassen, and Negley Farson, and the same edition of Kipling that Mackenzie had read from the time when he was twelve.

“Like it?” she asked. He realized that she had been following him, unobtrusive as a discreet sales girl.

“It’s perfect. I don’t want to leave.”

“Yet tomorrow you must leave.”

“Yes, tomorrow.”

Her eyes were desperate. “Well, the bottle.”

“Sure. The bottle.”

He unzipped the leather case, and brought it into the open, and she took it in her tapered fingers, and held it up delicately to admire, and revolved it slowly before a soft light. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one like this,” she said. “You Yanks do all right by yourselves, don’t you? All the cigarettes you want, and all the drink, and the fine uniforms and ribbons.”

“Oh, Scotch doesn’t rain from heaven. This is a very special bottle.” And he told her the story of the bottle of Scotch, but when he finished he found he’d spoken more of Anne Longstreet than of the bottle. He’d talked more of Anne than was proper or politic at the moment. Yet it was good for him. It emptied him. It was a cathartic.

Kitty listened well. She said nothing until all was ended, and then he saw she was crying, not loudly, but deeply. He took her hands. “What’s the matter, Kitty?”

“She must be a splendid girl, that Anne.”

“She’s okay.”

“Love her?”

“Yes. I love her.”

“Going to marry her?”

“I hope so. Sure I am.”

Kitty set down the bottle on the mirror top of the bar, and moved against him, and rubbed her perfumed, flaxen hair into his angular chin. “You’re a good type, Sam,” she said. “You’re like my chap. Same size. Same eyes. Same mouth. Same hopes.” She kissed him, delicately. “I don’t think Anne will mind. If my chap was with Anne, I’d be happy for him.”

He should have known there was another man involved. He said, “Your chap?”

She disentangled herself from his arms and went into the bedroom and came out with a photograph in a silver frame. “Here he is. Good, isn’t he?”

The man in the photograph wore the peaked cap of an Australian officer, and his face was lean, and he smiled both with his eyes and his mouth, and there was a suspicion of a mustache, as if he’d just started to grow it. The Australian officer was six or seven years older than Mackenzie. “Looks like a nice guy,” Mackenzie said.

“That’s my husband. My husband, Tom.”

Somehow this surprised him. He hadn’t classified Kitty as either a good girl or a bad girl, but simply as a playgirl, a gay feather whirling in the excitement on the periphery of war, and not for the solidity of marriage. “Where is he?” Mackenzie asked, not that he expected her husband to pop out of the closet, or make an unexpected entrance through a rear door, but still it was best to know.

She sniffed and laughed. “Not here, Yank. Not in Sydney. He was with the Eighth.”

“The eighth what?”

“The Eighth Australian Division. They were taken at Singapore—all of them—all who weren’t killed.”

Mackenzie said, “Ouch!” The thought of capture had always been more frightening to him than death. His worst fear, on Guadalcanal, had been that he would be wounded, and captured, and be slapped around and spat upon, and be afraid to fight back, and lose his dignity as a man. He said, “He’s safe, of course?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. Every night I listen.”

“You listen?”

“Yes. Every night the Jap wireless gives the names of five prisoners. Australian prisoners. Usually from the Eighth. I tell myself it’s silly for me to listen—that it’s only a trick to get me to take in their propaganda. They’re clever, those Japs. Yet every night I tune them in. I can’t help it.”

“What time do they broadcast?”

“There’s a program at two in the morning for us Aussies. That’s the one I always hear. Reception’s best, then, and I’m loneliest. Usually I’m lonely, that is. I don’t ask in every Yank, actually.”

He found a corkscrew in the bar, and was about to rip the seal on the bottle when she put her hand on his sleeve. “Don’t do it,” she said. “It isn’t necessary.”

He felt relieved, but he said, as a matter of form, “Sure you don’t want one, Kitty?”

“Not from that bottle, Yank. You hold that bottle fast.” She turned her face away. “I drink too much anyway. Not that it makes me forget anything.”

Just before two they went into the bedroom. Alongside the bed was a small, but powerful, Hallicrafter receiver, a present, she said, from someone in the OWI mission. They reclined on the rich, wine-colored satin of the coverlet, leaning back against the pillows propped against the wall, and tuned in JOAK, Tokyo, and listened to the smooth voice of a traitor. She was tense until the time came, at the program’s end, when the names of five live prisoners were announced. Major Turcott was not among them.

Then she relaxed, and he took her, and it was delightful, in a gentle, casual way. In the morning he caught the SCAT C-47, loaded with companions sated by Sydney, back to Noumea.

Now that he recalled her last name, he felt that he ought to write to Kitty and find out whether her husband ever did come back. He’d always be thankful to Kitty, for a number of things, and the most important of these was that she had not allowed him to open the bottle of Scotch. If he’d opened the bottle that night he’d have always felt guilty with Anne. A queer thought intruded. What if he had ever opened the bottle—ever, at all?

There was an alien and violent whoosh, the close crash of a shell like the snarl of an angry dog, and Mackenzie, even as his instinct and reactions forced him to throw himself on his face, knew that he was under mortar fire, and digging in was the wrong thing to do.

When they had you under mortar fire your only hope was to keep moving, and never give them a chance to zero in. He did not admire the Chinese tank tactics. Tanks shouldn’t be used simply, as mobile artillery, or conveyances for infantry. Tanks had a purpose of their own. And if he ever could bring their Mongol cavalry under the fire of heavy machine guns he’d soon teach them that horses were obsolete. And apparently they were novices at air war. But they knew artillery, and particularly they were adept with mortars, a simple weapon. They could plant a mortar shell in your hip pocket—if you stood still for them.

So the captain wasn’t standing still. “Come on, you men!” he shouted as he bounced from the ground. He began to run.

As he ran he swore at himself for allowing the warm luxury of recollection to betray him, and rob him of his normal caution. Here was the point of danger where the road ran alongside the ice-clad stream which he had noted a mile back. Here was the point of danger, and he had approached it with his thoughts in Australia. Somewhere in the hills to the north, a mortar crew had him under direct observation. As they watched him run down the road they would be adjusting their barrels. Another mortar shell crashed in behind him, and he could hear his men pounding and panting and sobbing close at his heels, but his mind was on the exultant Chinese officer who must be laying those guns.

The Chinese officer would have them pinioned in his glasses, and be figuring out a range to interdict them. The captain searched for cover. Four hundred yards ahead the road veered from its alliance with the stream, and joined the cliffs again, and disappeared around a jagged shoulder of rock. If he could reach that shoulder, that abrupt turn to the right in the road, he would be protected by the defilade of the hill. So the captain read the Chinese mortarman’s mind. It was necessary for the Americans to reach that point of safety. The Americans would stay on the road. Did not Americans always cling to the roads? So train the mortars to lay a barrage on the road, short of the cliff.

“This way!” the captain yelled. “Follow me!” He left the road and tore across the cracked alluvial flat, which was like an obstacle course, slick with powdered snow, where you didn’t dare trip, because you would be dead. He swerved directly for the cliff.

Behind him the mortars laid a neat pattern on the road, where Dog Company should have been, but wasn’t, and in a few minutes they were gathered together, gasping and wavering but there, under the protection of the hill.

Mackenzie leaned against a rock, his head cradled in his arms, breathing hard and trying not to let the men know that his legs were shaking, and weak, and he was about through. He did not wish to speak until he was more composed. Finally, he took a deep breath and turned and counted them. One was missing. Ackerman wasn’t there.

Beany Smith said, “Is the bottle okay, captain? You hit the ground real hard.”

Mackenzie reached into his pocket and brought out the bottle guard. He held it at arm’s length. He was aware that they all watched him, numbly. He turned it upside down and shook it. It didn’t tinkle or leak. “It’s okay,” he said, shoving it back into the parka. “What happened to Ackerman?”

“He was running right with me, sir,” said Nick Tinker. “He stumbled.”

“Hit?”

“I think so, sir.”

This was disaster. Ackerman was the bazooka man, and the bazooka was all Mackenzie’s artillery. It was his mortars, his 75-millimeter recoilless gun, and his other, lost bazookas all rolled into one thin tube. It was his sole effective weapon against enemy armor, or a road block, and he had no doubt that they would encounter armor, or a block, before they came out of this gorge. He rummaged in his musette bag, found his glasses, and crawled to a place between the rocks from where he could see, and not be seen.

First he swept the hills opposite, where the enemy was, but the enemy was invisible, as usual. In a way this was encouraging. If the enemy was assembling a force to storm his tiny party, then they had not yet gathered in what they considered sufficient numbers. The enemy was prodigal with men, as the Americans were with shell and bomb. Some thought the Chinese crazy, with their wild, bugle-heralded, chattering charges. He did not agree. America’s arsenal was rich in materiel. Red China’s and Russia’s was crammed with expendable bodies. America considered people important, and munitions expendable, but it was different on the opposite side. It was simply a matter of viewpoint.

He shortened the focus on his glasses and examined the area where the mortars had come in on them. His glasses picked up what he sought, a lonely figure grotesquely sprawled in a patch of snow beside the road. He focused on it for a full minute, until he was sure he saw the bazooka under Ackerman. In that minute the figure did not stir. He called Ekland. “Sergeant, come up here.”

Ekland crawled up until he was comfortable in a crevice just below. “We’ve got to have that bazooka,” the captain said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to send out one man. They may not want to waste a round on one man. Who do you think we should send?”

“Me, sir.”

Mackenzie thought it through. “No, sergeant, you can’t go. You know how to use cover, and I think you might make it there and back okay. But you might not. And I can’t afford to lose you. You’re too good with the BAR. And besides if anything happens to me I depend on you to take the company out.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you, sir.” Now that it seemed they had a chance, Ekland was dismayed by the thought that something might happen to the captain. Ekland was a technician, and had never commanded.

“Something could happen to me,” Mackenzie said. “It happened to the others.” This was a nasty thought at the moment—that every one of your junior officers, without exception, was dead; or a wounded prisoner perhaps craving death like a merciful drug; or in one case a probable coward and malingerer, skulking back to Tokyo and the warm safety of home. “Well, who do you think, then?” the captain demanded.

“Ostergaard,” the sergeant suggested. “He has what it takes.”

“Too big and unwieldy,” Mackenzie said. “Not fast enough.”

“Well, Beany Smith. He’s a tough little monkey.”

“I don’t think Beany Smith could make it there and back. He’s got guts, but how good are his legs? And can he hide himself? Do better, sergeant.”

“Well, then, sir, you’re going to laugh, but I’d say Tinker.”

“No, I’m not going to laugh,” Mackenzie said. “He’s got more resilience, and stamina, than any of us.” He called for Tinker, and Tinker scrambled up until he was beside Ekland.

Tinker looked, the captain thought, the way Tom Sawyer must have looked to Mark Twain, full of piss and vinegar, and excited and eager as if this foul and awful business was S.O.P. “Son,” the captain said, “think you can make like a Red Indian?”

Tinker grinned. “That’s the best thing I do. Out where I live, that’s all us ever did, make like Indians. That’s all there was to do, hunt, and trap.”

“Where do you live?”

“Oh, it isn’t any place much. It hasn’t got any real name, but people call it Hickory Switch. It’s near Hyannis, and Hyannis isn’t very far from Alliance.”

“Hyannis and Alliance what?”

“Nebraska, sir. In the sand hills.”

The captain grabbed Tinker’s shoulders, and pulled him up to where he could see the terrain through the niche in the rocks. “See Ackerman out there?”

“I think so. Yes, I see him.”

“Think you can get out there, and back, without getting shot?”

“Sure.”

Mackenzie had no way of knowing, but Tinker would without question do anything his captain suggested. The captain was Nick Tinker’s god. Most of the others thought their skipper a hard guy, but Tinker did not think him hard—not when Tinker compared him with his father and older brothers. To Tinker, the captain was fair, and even on occasion kind.

“Okay, son, I want you to go out there and get that bazooka that’s under Ackerman, and any rocket shells he may have strapped on his back. Be careful. Use concealment. Make like a Red Indian.”

“And Ackerman, sir?”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do for Ackerman.”