Waves of Darkness
by CORD MEYER, JR.
THEY lay in a hole just wide enough to lie in side by side, and not more than a foot deep. They had arranged that one should keep guard while the other rested. Every two hours they changed.
Lying on his stomach the lieutenant was able to prop himself up with his elbows to see over the mound of dirt. He held the Thompson gun in his arms and kept two grenades in readiness by his right hand. The even breathing of his friend comforted him with the knowledge that he was not alone. During the day, physical action and the necessity for decision occupied his mind. Now he had nothing to do but wait and watch. Each minute of waiting made the next more difficult.
He tried to remember the surrounding terrain as it had looked before the light failed. He looked for the broken stump of a coconut tree and the large boulder whose relative position he had deliberately impressed on his memory as he dug his hole. He had memorized the harmless shadows so that he might know the shadows of the real enemy for whom he waited. A heavy layer of clouds obscured the tropic stars and he could see nothing but the formless night, isolating in worlds apart each small hole with its occupants.
He continued to stare into the blackness with wideopen, unblinking eyes, and found fear crouched menacingly at the end of every corridor of thought. He deliberately attempted to lose his fear, and the hysteria that mounted in his heart, in another emotion, and strove to awaken lust by summoning up pornographic memories. It proved a poor substitute, and he could find hardly a passing interest in the indecent scenes that he paraded before his mind’s eye.
Then he attempted to rationalize his fear. What was he afraid of, he asked himself. Death, was the simple answer. He knew that it might come at any moment out of the dark, carried on the bayonets of a banzai charge or dealt skillfully by the well-placed hand grenade of an infiltrating scout. He could not deny this fact on which his fear nourished and grew. It was inevitable that the enemy would attack during the night. They must know how thinly the line was held and that they would never again have such an opportunity. It was merely a question of time.
Most of his companions had a superstitious faith in their own luck. No matter how great the odds, the vast majority of his men always preferred to believe that though others might fall, they would not. It was only on the basis of this conviction that they found the courage for the risks they had to take. He preferred to think death inevitable. By absolving himself of all hope prior to each battle, he had found himself prepared for the most desperate eventualities. Now, with an effort of the will, he urged his mind down this accustomed path of reasoning. He stripped the night of its hideous pretensions to find only death, an old familiar companion. Though his fear remained, it became controllable, and this was all that he asked.
He turned his head sharply toward the sound of a gun fired offshore. An illuminating shell burst overhead with a soft popping sound, like the breaking of a Fourth of July rocket. For fear of being silhouetted against the light, he allowed only his eyes and the top of his helmet to project above the rim of dirt. He knew the shell was fired from a friendly destroyer lying off the beach, but it must have been ordered because of the suspicion of enemy movement. With a scarcely audible hissing the flare settled slowly down.
The blasted coconut trees cast deceptive shadows that danced in slow rhythm as the flare swayed to and fro in its descent. The unearthly, pallid light accentuated rather than dispelled the threat of horror that the night held. It was impossible to distinguish shadow from substance. Every small depression in the ground was filled with darkness, and the line of thick jungle growth some sixty yards ahead presented an impenetrable question. He could make out nothing for certain. Each natural object assumed enormous and malevolent proportions in the shadows that lengthened toward him. He felt as if he were lost in the evil witch forest of some ancient folk tale and he shivered involuntarily.
With his finger on the trigger, he longed to let go a burst of fire in defiance, but restrained the impulse. In the game he played, the one who first revealed his position became the hunted and was lucky to escape with his life. The flare settled on the ground and burned up brightly for a moment. Then the night surged back. It was as if he sat in a theater where the scenes are silently shifted in the dark. Even more than before, the darkness seemed a curtain behind which some fantastic tragedy waited. Again the destroyer fired and a shell burst.
He glanced behind him and saw the village they had paid for so dearly during the day. It sprawled desolately beneath the uncertain light. No roof remained, and only a few of the walls stood upright, like the remnants of a decaying skeleton. It seemed an archaeological curiosity from the long-vanished past instead of a place where men had lived fortyeight hours ago. When the naval bombardment began, the natives had fled to the hills and left their town to the foreigners who fought in a war the inhabitants could not understand and the outcome of which could leave them no different than before. He guessed that there were many who had fought bravely, on both sides, who understood it all no better than the natives and had as little stake in eventual victory. The flare sank to earth behind the village. Ghastly, still as the dead that lay among its wreckage, he saw it in the flare’s sick light as the symbol of all war.
The ship fired three more shells at irregular intervals. He waited for the fourth in vain. Each silent minute seemed a tiny weight added on a scale that slowly tipped toward destruction. He allowed himself to think of the dawn and looked hopefully for the long, thin streak of gray in the east, as if by some special dispensation the sun might rise six hours early. The day appeared infinitely remote, and he thought of it as one dreams of some distant and charming country which one has no real hope of ever seeing.
The small sound of a stick broken near-by focused all his senses. He twisted his body quickly and brought the Thompson gun to bear in the direction from which the sound came. He held his breath and the blood drummed in his ears. His friend felt the movement and inched over onto his stomach. Together they stared fruitlessly into the blackness. Gradually the tension left his limbs, and he allowed his breath to escape softly.
“Guess it was nothing.”
“Sand crabs probably. What time is it?”
Cupping his watch in his hands, as if the slightest wind might blow out the light, he made out the tiny green figures. It was four minutes past one.
“Past time. Your turn,” he said.
He felt for the two grenades and put them into the hands of his friend. Without words they traded weapons.
He rolled over on his back. Unbuckling his chin strap, he rested his head in the leather harness of the helmet and stretched out his legs. There was hardly room for them, and he pushed his feet into the soft dirt at the end of the shelter trench. His breathing came easier. He was aware that there was just as much danger as ever, but he liked the feeling that he was no longer directly responsible. There was nothing now that he could do to prevent their being surprised, and his eyes closed. He did not attempt to sleep. Perhaps after two or three nights like this one, he thought, he would be tired enough. But not yet.
A cold, thin rain began to fall. He buttoned his dungaree jacket to the throat and hugged his body. There was nothing to do but lie there under the open sky. The earth in the narrow hole turned slowly to a sticky mud, and his clothes clung to him. A long spasm of shivering shook him. He wondered whether it was caused by cold or fear. The rain seemed a wanton addition to his misery. Slanting down, it pinned him to the earth.
For a moment he was overwhelmed by self-pity.
But gradually the rain no longer seemed directed especially against him. He felt its huge indifference and imagined how the tiny drops fell on all that lay without shelter beneath the night. The rain merged with the saltier oblivion of the sea, each drop leaving a transient ripple on its broad impassive face. It seeped down to the roots of the tropic plants and nourished that abundant life. With an equal carelessness it streaked the dirt on the faces of the living and washed the blood from the bodies of the friends he’d lost. He imagined the rain falling through the dark on their upturned, quiet faces.
2
SLOWLY he went over in his mind the names of the men of his command. Of the platoon of forty-four who had climbed up the steep beach in the morning, thirty remained to dig their holes in the evening. The bodies of the others lay behind to mark the path of the advance.
The lieutenant could form no continuous picture of what had happened. With terrible clarity a particular scene would present itself, only to be replaced by another equally sharp but unrelated vision. It was as if he watched magic-lantern slides whose logical order had been completely disarranged.
He saw himself crossing a rice paddy and signaling his first squad to follow. There was the familiar whistle of an approaching shell and he flattened himself. When he looked up, the three men who had been carrying the machine gun lay sprawled in the open field. He ran back but they were past help. In the awkward attitudes of death, they looked like small boys who had flung themselves down to cry over some little sorrow. He wondered at the brute chance that chose them and left him alive.
He saw again the still body of one of the enemy collapsed against the wall of a trench with his head thrown back. The man was obviously dead, but in a moment of childish bravado he lifted his carbine and fired a bullet through the throat. The body did not move, and the high-cheekboned Oriental face continued lost in its impenetrable dream. A thin fountain of dark blood sprang from the hole in the throat and spilled down over the wrinkled uniform.
He stood staring and ashamed, feeling that he had wantonly violated the defenseless dead. One of his men walked past him and stood over the corpse. Casually and with a half smile he swung his rifle butt against the head, which wobbled from side to side under the impact. Jocularly, as if death were an intimate joke they shared together, his man addressed the corpse. “You old son of a bitch,” he said, and there was a note of admiration in the remark.
He remembered standing behind a tank trying to direct its fire. A great bull whip seemed to crack by his ears and he fell to the ground as if some enormous hand had jerked him roughly by the shirt front. Scrambling to cover, he ripped open his dungaree jacket and found only a small welt. With resignation, for he understood that he could not continue to escape, he climbed to his feet. The bullet had torn through his breast pocket and cut the tip of the cigar he carried there. Though his fingers trembled, he lit the cigar with a melodramatic gesture and pretended a courage that he did not feel.
The day came crowding back. Again he was lying beside Everett, the youngest man in his platoon, under the remorseless sun. The boy had been shot through the abdomen and chest. A medical corpsman joined him and together they attempted to stop the flow of blood. Because of the continuous enemy fire, they had to keep close to the ground while they wound the bandage around the body. The flies gathered. The boy’s head arched backward. His mouth was wide-open, gasping for air. Both the lieutenant and the corpsman knew in their hearts that there was no hope for the wounded man, but they tightened the bandages mechanically, as one might shut a house at evening to keep the night out.
“I’ve got to leave,” he said to the corpsman, who kept waving the flies away with one hand while he felt the failing pulse in the boy’s wrist. “Has he got any chance?”
“Always a chance, Lieutenant,” was the cheerful reply. “ Now if we had him on a good clean operating table we’d bring him round in no time.” The corpsman smoothed the hair back from the wet forehead with a tender gesture. Then, realizing there was no operating table and no need for professional optimism, he shook his head wordlessly and finally added, “I’ll keep the flies away. They bother him.”
When some time later the lieutenant returned the corpsman had gone to other duties and Everett lay dead and alone, the bandages dark with his blood. He had liked Everett best of all his men, and because of the boy’s youthfulness felt particularly responsible for him. He remembered a letter he’d had to censor, which Everett had written to his mother just before the landing. It was full of hope and assurances that there was no need to worry. Now the body was covered with flies and already he thought he could detect the odor of decay. He caught the slight form under the armpits and dragged it to where a low bush cast a dark pool of shade. The feet, dragging limply, left two furrows in the sandy soil. Opening the pack, he took out the poncho and wrapped it carefully around the body, and stuck the rifle, bayonet first, into the earth as a marker for the burial detail.
Out on the oil-smooth sea the battleships and transports stood silhouetted against the burning sky. As he stared at them, he was surprised to find his vision blurred with tears. An unreasoning indignation shook him against all who had placed Everett where he lay. For the frightened enemy that shot Everett and was probably already dead he had pity. “But I wish,” he thought, “that all those in power, countrymen and enemy alike, who decided for war, all those who profit by it, lay dead with their wealth and their honors and that Everett stood upright again with his life before him.”
3
THEN the present claimed him. His friend was shaking him gently by the shoulder and whispering, “Listen.” The rain had stopped but the earth still smelled of it. Then he heard. Overhead there was the beating of tremendous wings. He twisted quickly onto his belly and pressed his face into the dirt as the night’s stillness exploded. The shell landed well to their rear. Then, like pond water gradually rearranging itself after it has been disturbed, the fragments of silence fell back into place.
Quickly he buckled on his helmet. He listened. Sharp and distinct came the sound for which he waited. It was the crack of a gun, but the pitch was higher than that of the destroyer’s and the sound came from inland. Slowly he counted the seconds before the shell reached them. Then again the great wings beat overhead, only this time louder and more insistently. “The angel of death passing,” he thought. The shell crashed to their rear still, but closer.
“Goddamn them, George. They’re walking the stuff in on us.”
“Must, have somebody spotting for them right near,” was the almost inaudible reply.
Because the unknown and imagined were more terrible than the known, he found relief in the certainty that the enemy’s plans were no longer a total mystery. After adjusting their artillery fire onto the thinly defended line with a single gun, they obviously intended to open a barrage with all their batteries and probably follow it closely with a banzai charge.
The distant gun fired once again. The enforced inaction became almost intolerable. They must cower in their holes while the invisible enemy deliberately found the mathematical formula for their destruction. Each explosion closer than the last was like the footfalls of some enormous beast. The shell crashed in front of them this time instead of behind. The trap was set. In order to spring it the enemy gunners had only to split the difference between the range settings on the last two shots.
“Bracketed,” George said.
It did not enter his head to pray. His mind was washed vacant by fear, and long fits of trembling ran through his body as he clutched the wet earth. The enemy batteries opened fire simultaneously and sent their shells curving through the night. Enough presence of mind remained for him to raise himself just off the ground with his elbows and toes in order to avoid the dangerous shock of a near miss.
The barrage fell on them. It ripped and plowed the earth into smoking craters and lit the night with the hot flash of the explosions. The deep roar of the shellbursts mingled with the high, despairing wail of jagged splinters of steel flung at random against the night. Indiscriminately the shells dropped.
A near miss erupted in a geyser of flame and sound close to their hole. His head rang with the concussion, and the fine earth sifted down over their bodies. The stinging smell of the high explosives lingered in his nostrils for a moment to remind him how tenuous was his hold on life. The casual purposelessness of the destruction appalled him. One moment you lived and the next you were snuffed out like an insect — no courage, no skill, no strength, could make one iota of difference. He pinned his faith on the narrowness of their small hole and endured, helpless and insignificant.
As suddenly as it had begun the barrage lifted. Softly he worked the bolt of his weapon back and forth to assure himself it was ready. “If they’re going to come, they’ll come now,” he thought. By contrast the silence was more profound than ever and stretched like a precarious bridge from minute to minute, until the beating of his heart seemed to fill the world. The darkness pressed down on him, and the air itself seemed too thick to breathe. Tightening his grip on the weapon, he noticed that his hand was wet and slipped along the smooth wood of the stock.
“What in hell are they waiting for?” his friend murmured.
He did not answer. With a detachment that astonished him, he found himself suddenly able to look down on the spectacle as if he were no longer involved in it. On the one side, he saw his countrymen lying in their scooped-out holes with their backs to the sea, each one shivering with fright yet determined to die bravely. On the other, the poor peasantry from which the enemy recruited his soldiers were being herded into position like cattle, to be driven in a headlong charge against the guns. For a moment it appeared impossible to him that what was about to take place could actually occur. Adult human beings of the civilized world did not slaughter one another. There must be some mistake which could be corrected before it was too late.
What if he should get out of his hole and explain the matter reasonably to both sides? “Fellow human beings,” he would begin. “There are very few of us here who in private life would kill a man for any reason whatever. The fact that guns have been placed in our hands and some of us wear one uniform and some another is no excuse for the mass murder we are about to commit. There are differences between us, I know, but none of them worth the death of one man. Most of us are not here by our own choice. We were taken from our peaceful lives and told to fight for reasons we cannot understand. Surely we have far more in common than that which temporarily separates us. Fathers, go back to your children, who are in need of you. Husbands, go back to your young wives, who cry in the night and count the anxious days. Farmers, return to your fields, where the grain rots and the house slides into ruin. The only certain fruit of this insanity will be the rotting bodies upon which the sun will impartially shine tomorrow. Let us throw down these guns that we hate. With the morning, we shall go on together and in charity and hope build a new life and a new world.”
4
A SINGLE rifle shot interrupted his imaginary eloquence. “ What a fool I am! ” he thought. Suspended in that last moment when the whole black wall of the night seemed a dam about to break and engulf him, he felt utterly helpless. All the events of the past seemed to have marched inevitably toward this point in time and space, where he lay shivering between an implacable enemy and the indifferent sea. To object or to struggle was like shouting into a big wind that tears the words from the corners of one’s mouth before even oneself can hear them. He, his friend, his countrymen, the enemy, were all dying leaves cast on the black waters of some mysterious river. Even now the current ran faster and the leaves whirled toward the dark lip of destruction.
The echoes of the rifle shot were lost now, and the wave of silence mounted and hung poised. Catching his tongue between his teeth, he held himself rigid to prevent the trembling. Then, at last, the night was fulfilled, and the listeners had their reward. A longdrawn-out cry of furious exultation rose from the line of jungle growth, wavered, then rose higher in barbaric triumph.
“Now,” his friend breathed.
A crescendo of rifle fire swept down the line in answer. The steady rattle of machine guns sounded in his ears. Rocked by conflicting emotions, hoping all, fearing all, confused by the roar of sound, he knew nothing but that he must defend himself. An illuminating shell burst. In its brief light he could make out figures stooped and running. Smoke swirled from his machine guns and obscured the scene with monstrous shapes. Flame from the muzzles leaped against the dark. Holding his weapon ready, he could find nothing to shoot at. The strange foreign voices, high with excitement, seemed all about him.
A bullet snapped overhead. He ducked instinctively. Near-by, a man screamed in the universal language of pain and he could not tell if it was friend or enemy. All human thought and emotion withered and died. Animal-like, he crouched, panting. Like a cornered beast run to earth at last, he awaited the fierce hunters. He could hear them at their savage work, uttering harsh, short cries of triumph, and he imagined them plunging the long bayonets through the twisting bodies of his companions. He could see nothing.
Then a voice began shouting, running the words together in an incomprehensible stream of speech. The firing faded to sporadic rifle shots.
“They’re falling back,” whispered his friend incredulously.
It was true. The high tide of the attack had rolled to the edge of the foxholes, wavered while a few grappled hand to hand, and then drifted back into the dark. In the battalion combat report long afterward it would read, “In the Battalion’s first night ashore, C Company repelled a local counterattack in its sector and suffered minor casualties.” For him, there had been such noise, confusion, and terror that he knew nothing for certain except that by some miracle he survived. He had not fired a shot. Gradually the tension left his limbs and he was aware again, almost gratefully, of physical discomforts, the wet clothes and the mud. He would have been willing to believe the attack a fevered nightmare if it had not left behind it appalling evidence. The cries of the wounded rose in supplication or diminished to low continuous moans of incoherent agony.
His watch showed half past one, and his friend shook his head in disbelief. Settling himself on his back again he could feel his heart still pounding. It seemed longer than ever to the dawn. The enemy might well attempt another mass attack, and the danger of infiltration was continuous. Looking up into the apex of the night, he noticed that the clouds were thinning and that a few stars shone with a cold, implacable brilliance. Full of a sweet regret, gentler times came back to him when in another land the stars had seemed close and warm. Now it appeared as far to that land as it was to the stars, and as improbable a journey.
5
ABRUPTLY, a heavy object bounced in the hole and rested against his right leg. It lay there and gave off a soft hissing sound. Though he moved with all the speed in his body, he felt in a dreamlike trance and seemed to stretch out his hand as a sleepwalker toward the object. His fingers closed around the corrugated iron surface of a grenade, and he knew that it was his own death that he held in his hand. His conscious mind seemed to be watching his body from a great distance as with tantalizing slowness his arm raised and threw the grenade into the dark. In mid-flight it exploded and the fragments whispered overhead. Another bounced on the edge of the hole and rolled in. He reached for it tentatively, as a child reaches out to touch an unfamilar object.
A great club smashed him in the face. A light grew in his brain to agonizing brightness and then exploded in a roar of sound that was itself like a physical blow. He fell backward and an iron door clashed shut against his eyes.
He cried aloud once, as if through the sound the pain that filled him might find an outlet to overflow and diminish. Once more a long, rising moan was drawn from him and he lifted his hands in a futile gesture as though to rip away the mask of agony that clung to his face. Then, even in that extremity, the will to survive asserted itself. Through the fire that seemed to consume him, the knowledge that the enemy must be near-by made him stifle the scream that rose in his throat. If he kept quiet they might leave him for dead, and that was his only hope.
There was no time yet to wonder how badly he had been hurt. Like a poor swimmer, he struggled through the successive waves of pain that crashed over him. There would be a respite and then, again, he would be engulfed, until the dim light of consciousness almost went out. He pressed his hands to his temples, as if to hold his disintegrating being together by mere physical effort. His breath came chokingly. He allowed his head to fall to one side and felt the warm blood stream down his neck. There were fragments of teeth in his mouth and he let the blood wash them away.
It did not seem possible that anyone could have done this to him without reason. In a world on the edge of consciousness, he forgot the war and kept thinking that there must be some personal, individual explanation for what had happened. Over and over he repeated to himself, “Why have they done this to me? Why have they done this to me? What have I done? What have I done?” Like an innocent man convicted of some crime, he went on incoherently protesting his innocence, as if hoping that heaven itself might intervene to right so deep a wrong.
At last he became calmer. Hesitantly, he set out to assess the damage done his body. The pain was worst in his face, but to investigate it was more than he yet dared. His right arm moved with difficulty, and blood slipped down his shoulder. It seemed that his ears were stuffed with cotton or that he stood at the end of a long corridor to which the sounds of the outside world barely penetrated.
From a great distance he heard a heavy thud on the ground, as of a fist pounded into the earth. There was another even heavier, followed by silence. He attempted to form the name of his friend with his lips. “George,” he tried to whisper, but no sound came. He could see nothing, but in the loneliness of his pain reached out his hand. It seemed that a gradually widening expanse of darkness separated him from everything in the world, but that if he could only make contact with his friend it would be easy to find the way back. His fingers touched a dungaree jacket and felt the warm body beneath it. His hand moved upward, until suddenly he withdrew it. There was no need to search further.
A flood of the kindest memories obliterated momentarily the knowledge of his own misfortune. The empty body beside him had housed the bravest and the simplest heart. Between them there had been an unspoken trust and the complete confidence that comes only after many dangers shared together. If he had met him years later he would have had to say simply, “George.” They would have shaken hands and the years between would have been nothing at all. Now, cold and impassable, stronger than time, stood death, and a hopeless, irremediable sense of loss flowed through him. The noise that at first had attracted his attention must have been the last despairing movement of his friend. Gently, he wiped the blood from his hand on his trouser leg. A long spasm of pain recalled him to his own condition.
Gratefully, he noticed that the edge of the pain was dulled. It continued to flow through his body, but his conscious self seemed to be slightly removed from it. The occasional rifle shots appeared to come from further and further away. His right arm had lost almost all power of movement. With care, he rested it across his stomach. While sufficient strength remained, he determined to know the extent of the damage done his face. Truth was never more terrible than at that moment when, fearfully, he raised his left hand to trace the contours of his personal disaster. As delicately as a blind man touches the features of one he loves, he ran his fingers over the lineaments of the face he did not know. Though there was considerable blood, the bones of his chin and nose seemed intact.
Then at last there was no choice. The fear whose existence he had refused to admit grew monstrous and possessed his mind. Tightly he cupped his hand, without touching the eye itself, over his left eye and suddenly withdrew it. He repeated the process with the other eye. There was no change in the even texture of the dark. It remained impenetrable, unrelieved by the slightest glimmer of starlight. One hope remained and he clung to it as the condemned believe to the last in the hope of pardon. It might be that the clouds had returned and that the complete blackness was not his alone, but shared by all. There was a way of finding out. For a moment he hesitated, and then with cold fingers touched his left eye. There was no eye there, only a jelly-like substance peculiarly sensitive to the touch.
A long sigh escaped his lips. The evidence was undeniable and the sentence pronounced. He did not care to investigate the other eye. Even the idea of touching again that useless jelly revolted him. With slow reluctance his mind accepted the full meaning of his loss. The emotional portion of his being continually revolted against the real event and kept asserting the reality of a world where such things do not happen. It was an almost irresistible temptation to reject the whole experience as an illusion. He felt that he would almost welcome madness if it could save him from his empty tomorrows. But little by little his reason forced him to understand.
“Blind,” he whispered at last. “Oh, my God, my God.” It was not a prayer so much as the expression of the bitterest despair. In all its poverty his life as it would be appeared before him. All other things, he felt, — the mutilation of his face, the loss of his limbs, — would have been endurable, but not this: the dark dragging hours, the mocking blackness of his nights, the loneliness of a world where people are only voices which if beautiful are more bitter to hear, the unassuageable regret provoked by every memory of the lighted past, the cheerful self-sacrifice of kind relations to goad the sense of his own parasitic uselessness, and always the mind growing more deformed in its crippling attempts to escape the dark of prison.
6
THE memory returned of how as a boy he had almost drowned. It seemed that again he struggled upward through the black water. An illusory hope filled him that he could break the confines of the dark that pressed down on him as the ocean had so long before, but the excitement passed quickly. Above this ocean no sunlight flashed on white waves. It was infinite, and extended in blank perspective from that moment to the day of his death, when, he thought, one form of eternal night would be exchanged for another devoid of anguish and regret. Behind the sightless eyes, his mind would burn down like a fire in a room the guests have left until, mercifully, darkness was all.
There was nothing in those weary years that he wished to have, nothing for which he cared to wait. He felt a strange and brotherly companionship with the dead. The fact that such friends as he had known were gone seemed a warm assurance that death could be no terrible disaster. Their presence in that other world into which he drifted lent it a familiarity that the world of the living lacked, and took all fear from the journey he was about to make. Deliberately, he felt for his weapon.
He could not find the gun. Perhaps the explosion had blown it out of reach. The difficulty he had finding it allowed him a moment of indecision. What a spectacle he would make in the morning! The others who had died had done so bravely in the performance of what they had considered to be their duty. Death crowned their boyish honor, but would remain his shame, for he perceived well enough that he wished to die because he could not endure the pain and feared the dark years to come. He guessed that many during the long war had endured a life more unbearable than his. If they had not been happy, they had been admirable by the courage that they brought to their misfortune, and the knowledge of his own weakness was bitter.
A solitary, stubborn pride refused him the oblivion for which he longed, just as so often before, far more than any fear of social disgrace, it had forced upon him the consistent series of decisions that led inevitably to where he lay. Why did he enlist in so dangerous a service? Why did he refuse the job with the artillery or with the regimental staff, where one could afford to hope? Asking himself these questions, he knew there was no logical answer.
Certainly he had always expected this, or something like it. Not because he believed the war was fought for any cause worth dying for. Rather, he saw the war clearly as the finished product of universal ignorance, avarice, and brutality. A little out of adolescent vanity, but more because he had failed to become a conscientious objector, as he ought to have done, he chose to accept the consequences in an effort to redeem by personal valor a lost consistency of purpose. From the monotony and occasional violence, he had saved only his courage intact, and now he stood to lose it in a final ignominious act. Giving up his search for the weapon, he accepted his dark fate.
7
THERE was no way to tell the passage of time. It might have been hours or minutes since he had been hit. Whenever he tried to move his right arm the blood would start running again. Body and mind seemed to be drifting further apart. It was not the pleasant sensation of slipping gradually off to sleep. He seemed to fight the slow effect of a drug that paralyzed his limbs but left his mind active.
Occasionally he would test himself by raising his left arm. It became heavier, and the translation of wish into action grew more difficult. All sounds reached him from very far away, as if he were listening on a faulty telephone connection. Like one dying of cold, he abandoned himself to the slow change that was taking place, and hoped that death would not be too long in coming. He was sure now that he was dying, and was grateful that nature would accomplish what he had hesitated to do himself.
In the certainty that he would soon leave the world, he looked down from a great height and was glad that he was done with it. With a new severity, he contemplated the few short years of his life to discover some strand of meaning running through the trivial sequence of days and nights stretching back to the earliest memory. There was nothing in those transient joys to interest him, and even the moments of love or insight that he had once valued seemed entirely inconsequential when weighed against the vast extent of the descending night. Life seemed so poor a thing that he smiled to himself at having feared to lose it.
There was no hatred in his heart against anyone, but rather pity. He considered the shortness of man’s days, the pointlessness of his best hopes in comparison with the certainty and conclusivencss of death, and could see him only as a poor creature struggling for a moment above a forever escaping stream of time that seemed to run nowhere. It would have been better for man, he felt, if he had been given no trace of gentleness, no desire for goodness, no capacity for love. Those qualities were all he valued, but he could see they were the pleasant illusions of children. With them men hoped, struggled pitifully, and were totally defeated by an alien universe in which they wandered as unwanted strangers. Without them, an animal, man might happily eat, reproduce, and die, one with what is.
Above him he imagined the imperturbable stars swinging on their infinite wanderings to God knows what final destination, and the knowledge of how slight a ripple there would be when he slipped beneath the surface of reality reconciled him easily to oblivion . Part of a prayer from his schooldays returned: “When the shadows lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done, then in thy great mercy, O Lord, grant us a safe lodging and peace at the last.” A safe lodging he would have as his body decayed to feed the rich jungle growth, and his mind the peace of nothingness as its precarious balance dissolved like a soap bubble into air.
Without hope or fear, he waited for death. It was a long time later, he guessed, when he felt a tear run down his cheek. Where his right eye should be there was a smarting itch that made him wish to rub it.
Surprise wakened him from the dreamy state into which he had fallen. There must be more of his right eye left intact than he thought. In the depths of his consciousness stirred an indefinite hope. He tried to work the lid but there was no movement. The beating of his heart echoed the expectation he hardly dared admit. Starting to raise his arm he let it drop. What difference could it make? Bereft of all desire and convinced of the futility of existence, he had no cause now to disturb that profound indifference. It was his strength. Hope was weakness and could bring only a vain regret and the despair he had renounced. Reasonably he knew all this, but it did not stem the rising flow of excitement.
With gentle, inquiring fingers he touched the tissues of the right eye. It was swollen shut, but beneath the dried blood on the lid he could feel the rounded form of the eyeball. Hardly aware of the pain, he forced the lid open roughly and searched the blackness above him for a sign. Gone was all indifference. Light was life, and the possibility of hope both intoxicated and appalled. All that he was, hung poised in dreadful suspense on the frail miracle he awaited.
Then down the long corridor of the night it swam into his vision. Out of focus, it trembled for a moment hazily, and then burned steady and unwinking. Fearing that he might have created it out of the intensity of his wish, he let his lid close and then forced it open again. The star still lay in the now soft and friendly dark. It flooded his being like the summer sun. He saw it as the window to Hope. Another appeared, and another, until the whole tropic sky seemed ablaze with an unbearable glory. Joyful tears rose in his heart. Gently, he permitted the torn lid to shut. Warm on his cheek and salty in his mouth were the tears of his salvation.