The Long March BOOKS BY WILLIAM STYRON LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS THE LONG MARCH SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER The Long March [Illustration] WILLIAM STYRON RANDOM HOUSE · NEW YORK © Copyright, 1952, by William Styron All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited. Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Carl Weiss to _Hiram Haydn_ The Long March [Illustration] One noon, in the blaze of a cloudless Carolina summer, what was left of eight dead boys lay strewn about the landscape, among the poison ivy and the pine needles and loblolly saplings. It was not so much as if they had departed this life but as if, sprayed from a hose, they were only shreds of bone, gut, and dangling tissue to which it would have been impossible ever to impute the quality of life, far less the capacity to relinquish it. Of course, though, these had really died quickly, no doubt before the faintest flicker of recognition, of wonder, apprehension, or terror had had time to register in their minds. But the shock, it occurred to Lieutenant Culver, who stood in the shady lee of an ambulance and watched the scene, must have been fantastic to those on the periphery of the explosion, those fifteen or so surviving marines who now lay on the ground beneath blankets, moaning with pain and fright, and who, not more than half an hour before, had been waiting patiently in line for their lunch before the two mortar shells, misfired--how? why? the question already hung with a buzzing, palpable fury in the noontime heat--had plummeted down upon the chow-line and had deadened their ears and senses and had hurled them earthward where they lay now, alive but stricken in a welter of blood and brain, scattered messkits and mashed potatoes, and puddles of melting ice cream. Moments ago in the confusion--just before he had stolen off from the Colonel’s side to go behind a tree and get sick--Lieutenant Culver had had a