Battle Cry - Leon Uris [64]
Heavy Weapons passed, How Company. This was the bush league artillery support that each battalion carried. Eighty-millimeter mortars, wicked-looking .50-caliber machine guns, a communications cart filled with telephone equipment to link a line between mortars and the battalion command. These were larger boys. They had to be—to bear the weight of the machine gun barrels, the bandoliers and boxes of ammunition, the mortar plates and barrels.
Major Huxley nodded to Bryce.
“Left face.” We turned. “Forward harch!” And we fell in line and moved over the boondocks.
“Easy from Fresno White,” Marion called, “bring up the rear, over.”
“Roger, out.”
“All companies from Fresno White, throw out flank guards.”
The feet of eight hundred men, Huxley’s Whores, shuffled a slow cadence toward the gate that led them to the highway. The gate swung open, the advance party passed through. M.P.s stopped the flow of vehicles on the highway as the long line of double-filed men passed through. We took up place on either side of the road and as the rear guard closed the gate, the march was on.
Spanish Joe looked at me hopefully as I called for the first relief on the carts. No dice. He was going to get a gut full this trip, if never again.
We turned off the highway onto a dirt road that had led ten thousand Marines before us on a grind that would end twenty miles away in the wooden canyon. We were soon enshrouded in a cloud of dust. Then came the sweat, the eternal sweat which entices the heavy clay dust to stick to our faces. The first goddam mile is always the worst. That’s the mile when you’re fresh and alert and can feel the weight and the pain, before the numbness sets in.
Time check. Forty-six minutes down, fourteen to go. We were moving about two and a half miles an hour. A pretty good clip for full battalion in heavy marching order. Huxley must be out to find who are the sickbay soldiers and who are the Marines. I felt sorry for the rear guard; probably double timing to keep up.
I looked at Ziltch, the Major’s orderly. It was funny to watch the five-foot six-inch puppy taking three steps to his six-foot three-inch master’s one. He worshipped Huxley—he could have chosen a worse idol. The strange relation that existed between this man and this boy seemed something more than that of major to private—more like father and son. Huxley didn’t have any kids of his own. When he was a first looey in Iceland he had once told me of the feeling he had when he entered the ward of the crippled children’s hospital in San Francisco. He was playing in the Shrine East-West Game. The little kids were pretty swell, even with warped bones and casted bodies. Huxley told about his adopted girl friend, who waved an Ohio State pennant. She had given her hero a large red handkerchief on which she had embroidered the name: Sam Huxley, Ohio State. It wasn’t a very good job, but the best her crippled hands could do….
Huxley checked his watch. He took out his large red handkerchief, his good luck piece, and wiped some of the grime from his face.
Marion took the TBY from the Feathermerchant and put it on his own back. Ski almost left the ground when he lost the fifty pounds. Marion wavered a moment and fell into step again. Ski took the earphones, wiped out Marion’s sweat and put them on his own dripping face.
Sister Mary was a damned good man. We had the best walkie-talkie combination in the regiment. The ancient and dilapidated and nearly unworkable radios seemed to come alive under his hand and somehow, when he was on the command radio, every company was in touch with the other.
Corporal Banks of message center handed him a message. Ski read out the glad tidings. “Fresno White