From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [0]
James Jones
Edited and with an Afterword by George Hendrick
TO THE
UNITED STATES
ARMY
“I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
The deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.”
—RUDYARD KIPLING
Contents
Book One: The Transfer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Book Two: The Company
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Book Three: The Women
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Book Four: The Stockade
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Book Five: The Re-enlistment Blues
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
“The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.”
—EMERSON, Essays: First Series, History
Book One
The Transfer
Chapter 1
WHEN HE FINISHED packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.
He leaned his elbows on the porch ledge and stood looking down through the screens at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below with the tiers of porches dark in the faces of the three-story concrete barracks fronting on the square. He was feeling a half-sheepish affection for his vantage point that he was leaving.
Below him under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun the quadrangle gasped defenselessly, like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather slingstraps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoesoles, the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.
Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you.
In the earthen square in the center of the quad a machine gun company went listlessly through the motions of its Loading Drill.
Behind him in the high-ceiling squadroom was the muffled curtain of sound that comes from men just waking and beginning to move around, testing cautiously the flooring of this world they had last night forsaken. He listened to it, hearing also the footsteps coming up behind him, but thinking of how good a thing it had been to sleep late every morning as a member of this Bugle Corps and wake up to the sounds of the line companies already outside at drill.
“You didnt pack my garrison shoes?” he asked the footsteps. “I meant to tell you. They scuff so easy.”
“They’re on the bed, both pair,” the voice behind him said. “With the clean uniforms from your wall locker you didnt want to get mussed up. I pack your diddy box and extra hangers and your field shoes in the extra barricks bag.”
“Then I guess thats everything,” the young man said. He stood up then, sighing, not a sigh of emotion but the sigh that is the relaxing of a tension. “Lets eat,” he said. “I got an hour yet before I have to report to G Company.”
“I still think you’re makin a bad mistake,” the man behind him said.
“Yeah I know; you told me. Every day for two weeks now. You just dont understand it, Red.”
“Maybe not,” the other said. “I ain’t no tempermental genius. But I understand somethin else. I’m a good bugler and I know it. But I cant touch you on a bugle. You’re the