west2031

@@@@@He gathered the platoon around him, and divided them into three teams of four"We're gonna cut trail," he told them"To start you can aim about ten yards to the left of that treeEach team is gonna work about five minutes, and then get spelled tenThey ain't any reason why we gotta be all day doin' this, so let's not be fuggin-offYou can take ten before you start, and then, Brown, you begin it with your men They had to slash a route through a quarter mile of dense brush, through vines and bushes and bamboo groves, around trees, and into the thickest bramblesIt was slow, tedious workTwo men labored side by side, hacking with their machetes at the net of foliage, trampling underfoot what they couldThey progressed at a rate of about two yards a minute, working quickly through a thinner patch of brush only to halt and chop inch by inch at a tangle of bambooIt had taken them three hours to advance up the river, and by noon, after two more hours of hacking a trail, they had added only a couple of hundred yardsBut they did not mind it; each man had to work only two or three minutes in a quarter hour, and they were shedding their fatigueWhen they were not working they lay on the trail resting and jokingThe fact that they had gone so far cheered them; they assumed instinctively the open hills would present no problemsAfter toiling through the muck and water of the stream, after being convinced so many times they would never reach its end, they were proud and pleased to have managed it, and for the first time some of them were optimistic about the success of the patrol Roth and Minetta were wretched, howeverMinetta was in poor condition from his week in the hospital, and Roth had never been very strongThe long march up the river had fagged them brutally; overtired, the rest periods did them little good and laboring on the trail was tortureAfter thirty seconds, after three or four slashes with his machete, Roth was unable to raise his armThe machete felt heavy as an axHe lifted it with both hands, dropped it feebly on the branch or vine before himEvery half minute, the knife slipped out of his sweating nerveless fingers and went clattering to the ground Minetta's fingers had begun to blister and the handle of the machete rasped against his palm, rubbed sweat into all the sores on his handHe would attack a bush violently and clumsily, forcing himself into a rage at its stubbornness, and then he would halt, winded, cursing between his sobs at the dank pappy mesh of verdure before himHe and Roth worked side by side, cramped together in the narrow aisle of the t