Chapter 49
You are beginning to hear the sound of rifle shots,
sometimes wide apart and sometimes in a continuous
mmmcrackle, like
a flame taking hold of a dry log. Occasionally the
shooting is joined by protracted machinegun bursts, or is
strikingly underlined by exploding hand grenades and eruptive
mmmmortar shells,
and beyond them you hear the artillery from the beach
as the guns continue to drop their loads of H.E.
There is an odd, frightening beauty in motion against fixity.
Howitzer projectiles arch gracefully like a chorus girl's gilded heel,
then blow up the simile, strewing syllables in little bits.
And the rush of bursting traffic overhead produces strange
mmmembroidery
until concussion somersaults your blood so that it flows
mmmbackwards
and you see your bulging heart with eyes turned in.
The boys must be moving out. They must have gotten
orders to resume the advance. Through the lens of imagination
you see them going forward, crouching, running, dodging,
mmmcreeping, falling.
There's your company, your platoon, your squad. There's
mmmCaptain MacDonald
and Lt. Nixon, Lloyd, Graham, Chapman, Ivey, Whitney.
mmmAnd there's --
no, not Lindstrom. And not Egan either, or Shearer, or
Simmons or the Mouse. But wait a minute. Who says
they're not there? And who says you're not there, either?
Sure, you're there. Everybody's there. Everybody contributes
mmmsomething. The thought
of the dead and wounded makes it easier for fighting
men to kill. It's a push. It's a shove. They've
seen their buddies die horribly, and that's the most pitiable
sight in all human experience. When the dust of horizontal
heroes can mingle with charging feet, the dead lie still.
This is the showdown, all right. This is the payoff.
We'll win. Sure, we'll win. Everybody is certain of victory
and no one thinks of losing. Everybody fights with a
cold wrath and nobody fears death. The closer it comes
to them the less they fear it. And that is
because they are alive and the very function of being
alive is to repeat over and over again, "Death is
not for me, death is not for me. Others may
die, but I will go on indestructibly. I will live."
But do they ever stop to realize in how many
places a man can be hit? Head, neck, shoulders, arms,
hands, chest, ribs, stomach, abdomen, groin, back, buttocks,
mmmthighs, knees,
legs, feet. And did they ever see a wounded man
suffer? No, it isn't the heart that dies last, it
is the eyes. Two small eyes, each about a quarter
of an inch in diameter, covering in all a total
area of no more than just a fraction. And yet
they can hold every single bit of misery the world
has ever had without spilling so much as a tear.
Well, then call it an occupational hazard. There are causes
of death, just as there are causes of life. Battle
is a cause of death and should be considered along
with cancer, tuberculosis and pneumonia and any other
mmmfatal disease.
And who here can place any value whatever on life
when the mere incidence of oblivion can reduce it from
the pinnacle of pricelessness to a few coppers' worth of
minerals and dross, salt and fertilizer? That's the rate of
exchange in universal currency, and if you speak of
mmmimponderables
or potentials or any other set of values, nobody will
know what you are talking about because all they can
recognize is the basic and the tangible reality of non-existence.
With a bit of practice almost anyone can be extinct.
* * *
