Brown was relieved and decided he did not have to... Brown was relieved and decided he did not have to blame himselfHe stopped thinking about it
But Croft brooded over the event all dayLater, as they worked on the beach unloading supplies, he caught himself thinking of it many timesHis reaction was similar to the one he had felt at the moment he discovered his wife was unfaithfulAt that instant, before his rage and pain had begun to operate, he had felt only a numb throbbing excitement and the knowledge that his life was changed to some degree and certain things would never be the sameHe knew that again nowHennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directlyAll day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power
PART TWO
Argil and Mold
1
IN THE EARLY BRIEFINGS of his staff, Major General Edward Cummings, commander of the troops on the island, had described Anopopei by saying it was shaped like an ocarinaIt was a reasonably accurate imageThe body of the island, about a hundred and fifty miles long and a third as wide, was formed generally in a streamline with a high spine of mountains along its axisOn a line almost perpendicular to the main body of Anopopei, the mouthpiece,
chloe black chloe black a peninsula, jutted out for twenty miles
General Cummings's task force had landed on the tip of this peninsula, and in the first few days of the campaign had advanced almost five milesThe initial wave of assault troops had splashed out of their boats, run up the beach, and entrenched themselves at the edge of the jungleSubsequent waves passed their position and filed through the brush along trails the Japanese had cut previouslyThere was little resistance the first day or two, for the majority of Japanese had been withdrawn from the beach when the Navy shelling beganThe early advances were only briefly delayed by a minor ambush, or a temporary defense position set up along a ravine or across a trailThe troops pawed forward gingerly a few hundred yards at a time, sending out many patrols to examine the ground ahead before each company moved upThere was no front line for several days at leastLittle groups of men filtered through the jungle, fought minor skirmishes with still smaller groups, and then moved on againCumulatively there was a motion forward, but each individual unit moved in no particular direction at any given timeThey were like a nest of ants wrestling and tugging at a handful of bread crumbs in a field of grass
On the
omega deville watch third day the men captured a Japanese airfieldIt was a minor affair, a quarter-mile strip of cleared jungle with a small hangar recessed in the brush and a few buildings already destroyed by the Japanese, but the Pacific communiques included it, and radio announcers mentioned the victory toward the end of their news broadcastsThe airfield had been taken by two platoons who circled the jungle about it, routed the sole machine-gun squad still defending the clearing, and radioed back to Battalion HeadquartersThe nightly defense positions of the General's troops had some coherence for the first timeThe General established a front line a few hundred yards beyond the airstrip, and listened that evening to the Japanese artillery bombarding the fieldBy midmorning the next day his troops had moved forward another half mile up the peninsula, and the front had broken again into sluggish separate globules of mercury
It seemed impossible to maintain any sort of orderTwo companies might start in the morning with perfect liaison between their flanks, and by nightfall would be bivouacking a mile apartThe jungle offered far more resistance than the Japanese, and the troops tried to avoid it wherever they could, threading their way along creekbanks,
fendi spy zucca bag forging trails through the comparatively uncluttered wilderness of natural coconut groves, and moving with pleasure through the occasional clearings of kunai grassThe Japanese in response would shell the clearings at unpredictable hours, so that the troops avoided them finally, and blundered through the uncertain avenues which thinner patches of jungle might provide
In the first week of the campaign the jungle was easily the General's worst opponentThe division task force had been warned that the forests of Anopopei were formidable, but being told this did not make it easierThrough the densest portions, a man would lose an hour in moving a few hundred feetIn the heart of the forests great trees grew almost a hundred yards high, their lowest limbs sprouting out two hundred feet from the groundBeneath them, filling the space, grew other trees whose shrubbery hid the giant ones from viewAnd in the little room left, a choked assortment of vines and ferns, wild banana trees, stunted palms, flowers, brush and shrubs squeezed against each other, raised their burdened leaves to the doubtful light that filtered through, sucking for air and food like snakes at the bottom of a pitIn the deep jungle it was always as dark as the sky before a
chanel black tote bag summer thunderstorm, and no air ever stirredEverything was damp and rife and hot as though the jungle were an immense collection of oily rags growing hotter and hotter under the dark stifling vaults of a huge warehouseHeat licked at everything, and the foliage, responding, grew to prodigious sizesIn the depths, in the heat and the moisture, it was never silentThe birds cawed, the small animals and occasional snakes rustled and squealed, and beneath it all was a hush, almost palpable, in which could be heard the rapt absorbed sounds of vegetation growing
No Army could live or move in itThe men skirted the jungle forests, and moved through second-growth brush, past smaller woods of coconut treesEven here they could never see for more than fifty or a hundred feet ahead, and the early stages of the operation were conducted by groping movements of tiny groups of menThe peninsula was only a few miles wide at this point, and the General had two thousand men stretched across it, but there was little connection between themBetween one company of a hundred and eighty men and another, there was room for any number of Japanese troops to slip throughEven when the terrain was comparatively clear, the companies would not often try to set up a partial
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