The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead Page B

abandoned warehouse and another on a goose-feather mattress in a half-destroyed house and another night they billeted in a disused church.
    Higher still, they crossed the terrestrial ice of the freezing plain, the frost line, and pushed even higher as anxious to find its source. There was only cold and more cold. On one side was the Yellow Sea and on the other the Sea of Japan. It was a war-torn country, five hundred miles long and two hundred miles wide. When they reached the next plateau a blast of extreme cold was sweeping across the land and causing much suffering to the sparse population and would continue to do so through the teeth of that season.
    They paused again. Stretched along the roadway were shacks made of lumber and concrete block. Daylight was a rapidly declining element as the sun hurried from the sky earlier each day. It would be colder than any cold he’d ever experienced in his life. When they stopped, they paced and beat their chests with their fists. They did not fall out in the ditches and along the berms because the sweat of march sapped their body heat, and sitting down to stand up again required more effort than worth sparing. It became as if a single electric nerve ran through them. It diminished their hunger and tightened the muscles in their shoulders. It clarified their vision and made their hearing more acute. It coursed beneath their thinking minds and for some it became their minds and washed away the thoughts of all other possibilities in the world of life except cold.
    They marched on and as they marched there was the singularity of them, the short-time self-sufficiency of men laden with war gear walking a mountain road in a foreign land. As Henry climbed the road, it was as if he were held aloft on the palm of a great outstretched hand buffeted by cold and wind, a bringer of death. Canteens began to ice and freeze and split. Bolts froze in the weapons. There were hobbling men with blackened toes inside their boots and hands cracking open with chilblains.
    The numbers of the Korean laborers began to dwindle, and the farther north they pushed they melted into the countryside. Men with short time left to serve began to lag or hide in caves until they could hitch a ride to the rear and the sea and home.
    Lew turned around to walk backward against the snow stinging like shot pellets. He held out his canteen and Henry took a drink. His body shook for the solution of water, grapefruit juice, and the sick-bay alcohol it contained.
    “That’s candy for you,” Lew said, and then he said, “This fucking road’s getting longer all the time.” His remark traveled backward and forward and across the road and continued until it returned to him and he agreed with silent assent as if it were a true spoken wisdom.
    “Something is out there,” Henry said.
    “No shit, Sherlock.”
    “Devine,” Gunny growled, and Lew turned back around.
    It was then a man, a ragged Korean soldier, passed south through the middle of their column. He stared in concentration at the space just before him where in seconds his body would be. His face held no expression but was scraped off on one side and on the other side his head shaved and bandaged. In a little while, there was another, unarmed and wounded in no apparent way, but similarly stared out in front as if a pilgrim inexplicably denied and sent back to his former life.
    “The little cocksuckers,” someone said, and a grumbling coursed the line.
    Then they were coming in a silent, determined stream and there was no more judgment from the marines. Coming down from the north were ranks of the bloodied and they passed through them, some shoeless and their feet black and making a clacking sound as they walked, and yet they kept marching in the direction of the long distant harbor. Some collapsed and fell in the road, staining it with their blood, and an aid station was established alongside the road dispensing blood, water, and morphine and then continuing them on