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By Root 9226 0

the particular place from which the sounds were coming. But they seemed to originate everywhere, and he had no idea of their distance and what caused them. He heard something rustle, and he turned his rifle clumsily in that direction, and waited, the sweat breaking out on his back. For an instant he was tempted to shoot, blindly and furiously, but he remembered that that was very dangerous. "Maybe they don't see me either," he thought, but he did not believe it. The reason he did not fire was for fear of what Sergeant Brown would say. "If you fire without seeing anything to aim at, you just give away the position of your hole, and they'll throw a grenade in on you," Brown had told him. Roth trembled. He was beginning to feel resentful; for some time he had been convinced that the Japs were watching him. Why don't you come on? he wondered desperately. By now his nerves were so taut that he would have welcomed an attack.

He pressed his feet into the thick mud of the hole, and, still looking into the jungle, picked some mud off his boots with one hand and began to knead it like a piece of clay. He was unconscious of doing this. His neck had begun to pain him from the tension with which he held himself. It seemed to him that the hole was terribly open and that there was not enough protection. He felt bitter that a man should have to stand guard in an open hole with only a machine gun before him.

There was a frantic scuffling behind the first wall of jungle and Roth ground his jaws together to keep from uttering a sound. The noises were coming closer like men creeping up, moving a few feet and then halting, before approaching another few feet. He fumbled around the tripod of the machine gun to find a grenade, and then held it in his hand wondering where to throw it. The grenade seemed extremely heavy, and he felt so weak that he doubted if he could hurl it more than ten yards. In training he had been told the effective range of a grenade was thirty-five yards, and he was afraid now that he would be killed by his own grenade. He replaced it beneath the machine gun, and just sat there.

His fear had to ebb after a time. For perhaps half an hour he had been waiting for the noises to develop into something, and when nothing occurred, his confidence began to come back. He did not reason that if there were Japs they might spend two hours in advancing fifty yards toward him; because he could not bear the suspense, a part of him assumed that they could not either, and he became convinced there was nothing in the jungle but some animals scurrying about. He lay back in the hole with his shirt against the damp rear wall, and began to relax. His nerves calmed slowly, rousing to a pitch of fear again every time some sudden noise came out of the jungle, but still becoming more and more composed like a receding tide. After an hour had passed he grew sleepy. He thought of nothing, listened only to the profound pendant silence of the wood. A mosquito began to sing about his ears and his neck, and he waited for it to bite him so that he could crush it. It made him think that there might be insects in the hole with him, and his body began to crawl, and for a few moments he was certain an ant was traveling down his back. It recalled to him the roaches that had infested the first apartment he had had when he was married. He remembered how he had reassured his wife, "There's nothing to worry about, Zelda. I can tell you from my studies that the roach is not too vicious a pest." Zelda had got some idea that there must be bedbugs also, and no matter how many times he reassured her, "Zelda, roaches eat bedbugs," she would start up in bed, and grasp him with fear, "Herman, I know there's something biting me."

"But I tell you that's impossible."

"Don't tell me about your roaches," she would whisper angrily in the darkened bedroom. "If roaches take care of bedbugs they have to get into the bed to do it, don't they?"

Roth felt a mingled pleasure and wistfulness in remembering. Their life together had not been all that he had hoped. There were so many