John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“In rushes!” shouts the sergeant. “Keep moving!”

There are whistles and bugle calls behind but now it is just rush and flop, rush and flop, desperate lunging forward then extending the Krag and diving to the ground. It’s a wildly uneven field with spiky pineapples in rows upon the churned earth and hard to navigate without tripping. Royal flops in a furrow and fires his first shot, not really using his sight but just pointing at the fort and pulling the trigger. Others are firing and the sergeant said to do whatever they did. The thick spat of a bullet near him and there is hot sticky fruit on his cheek and he is up and rushing forward again.

He can see something at the top of the hill, movement, behind the line of barbed wire staked in front of the rifle pits before the fort, and he fires again, trying to aim this time, if not at a person then at a spot a person might be in. The hill is steep, steeper than the sand dunes back in Tampa, Royal holding his rifle in one hand and using the other to grab roots, plants, anything to help haul himself up and something sprays his face again, not a pineapple this time but somebody, a wet part of somebody, men dropping, men stopping movement around him but he climbs upward, upward till he is exhausted and needs to lie with his face on the hot ground a moment, then roll on his back and let his lungs work. The dead can be exhausted, they can be thirsty, but they are never afraid. Royal drinks from his canteen and sees down the hill to the second line coming up past the bodies of the first, sees D Company double-timing forward on the right as flankers, then rolls and struggles upward again.

He reaches a little dip, a depression running across the hill for several yards in which Jacks and half a platoon are lying, and falls down beside them. The artillery has been firing from behind them all this time and finally it seems to have found the range, one shell blowing a breach in the barbed-wire fencing and the next blasting the front of the fort itself, snapping the flagpole off and sending the Spanish colors tumbling to the ground. The men around him cheer. Royal is heaving for breath and drenched in his own liquid and he burns his hand on the barrel of the Krag, hot only from the sun and not his few random shots and he drinks again as more men reach the dip and flop down. They are only a hundred yards from the first of the trenches now and the Mausers are cracking, bullets spanging off rocks and flicking up dirt in front of their faces and it is unthinkable that he will have to stand and go forward.

“Sharpshooters!” yells Jacks, who seems to be the ranking officer on this part of the hill. “Articulate fire! Get those loopholes in the fort, get those bastards in the pits!”

Sharpshooters have been designated back in Tampa and Royal is not one of them. He looks down the ragged line of soldiers, sees men pushing up on their elbows to sight and fire, some rising on a knee, pulling the trigger, working the bolt, rolling on their sides to reload. It is methodical, hot work, and he is suddenly filled with awe for these men and hopes some of them will survive.

Coop aims at the spot where the white hat had just been. Fuck em. Kill em. The hat reappears and he fires and it drops out of sight. He cranks the empty out and pans down the trench line searching for another. Take your time. Sons of bitches have been trying to shoot him all the way up the fucking hill, had hours to get the job done and here he still is so fuck them, kill them, blow their damn brains out. He empties his magazine once, twice, three times — yes they’re shooting back still but they better not pause to aim or he’ll put one in their Dago skull. He stops once to refill his cartridge belt, slow and steady, not dropping a round, and when the corporal beside him gets it he slithers over to use the body for cover, propping the Krag barrel on the dead man’s hip. They are taking fire from the left, from the blockhouses and the village and whatever passes high over the 4th is hitting them but that will have to come later. Now it is the fort, bullets pocking the stone front like hard rain on dusty ground, the fort that has to be taken before the men inside it can kill him.

The little ditch isn’t much cover, not with the crossfire from the blockhouses, and it’s Sergeant Cade who jumps up to scream Let’s go and all of them rise at once, up, screaming their Comanche yell, scrabbling up the last steep pitch of the hill through corn stubble, the 4th still pinned down but Company C filling in to the left, Coop firing and running and firing and running till he flops again just short of the first of the trenches and jams his barrel through the barbed wire to fire down into it. A man steps out into the doorway of the fort with a white flag and Coop drops him, then another picks it up and is torn apart by several shots down the line then the sergeants are screaming to cease fire. No fire from the fort now, though still from the blockhouses and the village to the left. Another rush comes up behind him, men yelling Let’s take it and Coop stands to join but is banged from behind into the barbed wire, wrapped by it, kicking and chopping with his Krag till he tears his skin away and rolls untangled into the firing pit on top of a carpet of dead men. All of them lying in their blue-striped, mattress-ticking uniforms with holes in their foreheads, jumbled on top of each other. Coop gets hold of his rifle and squirms to his knees and sees one still alive, weeping, sitting on top of the others with no weapon in hand. Coop jumps out of the pit and dashes to the fort.

There are dead men lying in the way and he runs over their bodies and slams hard against the front wall, then joins the others who have made it, firing a few rounds into the loopholes cut in the wooden window plugs then rushing for the doorway. He loses his feet just inside, hip cracking hard on the blood-slick floor, then stands and steadies himself. Bodies everywhere and a few on their knees begging not to be shot. Fuck them, Coop thinks, kill them, but he is out of ammunition.

Men from the 12th have come up behind the fort on the right and Sergeant Jacks waves at them to keep down, heavy fire sweeping across from the blockhouses now. The firing pits are filled with dead and more lie dead and dying amid chunks of stone blown off from the fort. A black-bearded civilian in a long coat, maybe a newspaper man, sits on the ground beside him with a hole in his shoulder and the dust-covered Spanish flag in a pile in his lap.

“I did it,” says the bearded man, looking dazed at the red and yellow cloth. “I did it for the Journal .”

Jacks scurries, bent low, a quick lap around the hilltop to see what’s left. He saw Lieutenant McCorkle get it at the beginning, saw Bevill go down in the pineapples and Gilbert knocked backward on the hill, but there are a lot of blue shirts up here and some of his people who have stripped to the waist in the heat. They’re taking heavy fire from the blockhouses and the town but the bulk of the firing line has made it and the 12th is here and the 4th and their own reserve companies hustling up and they hold the high ground now, can swing even higher and shoot down through the roof of the nearest blockhouse. No officer up yet, no telling what is happening with the main force at the San Juan Heights, no orders. He sees one of the rookies, Scott, crouching behind the fort wall next to another who is holding the side of his neck with a bloody hand and having a hard time breathing. The rookie’s cartridge belt is full.

“Take him back,” he yells to Scott, who is shaking hard but seems to understand. “If he can stand take him back down where they can do something.”

The rookie gives him a searching look. “Where do I take him?”

“Back the way we came. Somebody will know where the field hospital is.” The other one is shaking too, his eyes starting to glaze over.