From Here to Eternity (30 page)

corps was remote he noticed, all faceless figures and remote, a background for our Company, where every face was a face he knew so that the sameness of uniform did not matter, even enhanced the individuality of the faces, each face with its special orbit that revolved around the central sun of Captain Holmes (dead star, he thought, but then maybe The Warden is our sun), asteroid faces, not big enough for a private orbit, too small to be classed as planets (like Dhom, or Champ Wilson, or Pop Karelsen, or Turp Thornhill, Jim O'Hayer, Isaac Bloom, Niccolo Leva - good names, he thought, good old American names - or like the new man Mallaux who was a coming featherweight, or Old Ike Galovitch - was Ike a planet? Ike was more like a third rate moon). Looking down through the screens he could see the asteroid face of Readall Treadwell, that was one of them, Readall Treadwell (christened "Fatstuff" but who was no more fat than Man Mountain Dean was fat) who could hardly read any, let alone read all, but whose solid endurance at carting around the BAR he never got to fire was almost legend. He could see Crandell "Dusty" Rhodes (christened "The Scholar") whose scholarship consisted solely of always turning up with a genuine diamond ring or a real honest-to-God antique Roman coin he was willing to let go to you because you were a friend. He could see "Bull" Nair (alias "The Stud"). These were all part of it, he felt, looking down; important parts, as small memories are important parts of the life of a man, parts of your chosen heritage, even of your destiny maybe, small functioning parts of this tiny solar system that is the company that is lost among the galaxies of regiments that make up this universe that is the Army, the parts that give meaning to the only universe you know, he thought, the only universe you want, because it is the only one you ever found a place in yet. And now you are rapidly losing that. "Come on, Angelo," he said, watching the knot of noncoms clustered around the baldheaded, sandhog shouldered Dhom who towered over Chief Choate even, "we better get our asses down there." "Man, you look sick," Angelo said as they fell in with the 1st Platoon. "Not sick," Prew said, looking at him sideways under the hat brim low over his eyes. "Just hung over." But it was not the head, he thought, be honest, you've fallen out for drill with bigger heads than this before and always laughed them off. Four hours drill under a hot sun with a head on was as much a part of soldiering as was musketry with a half pint hidden in your belt to help you shoot, or as were forced practice marches with a Listerine mouthwash bottle full of saki on your hip. Soldiering and drinking have always been blood brothers. But what, he thought, is soldiering? The very, very odd thing was that all this that was costing him, in the Army, had not a thing to do with soldiering. There should be something important, there, he told himself. Reality, he thought. To know the real from the illusion. Man, man, I think you're off your nut, but he could not shake off this new sense of separateness. The knot of noncoms on the green broke up, the giant Dhom going front and center and the others doubletiming back to their platoons. Standing out in front alone and looking very soldierly Dhom gave them right shoulder sounding very soldierly and the rifles moved and were smartly slapped in unison very satisfyingly soldierly, but even this did not free him from this agonizing separateness that was worse than any loneliness, this feeling that he knew a thing the others did not know. They marched at attention out the northwest truck entrance and across the intersection where the well-bucked MP was directing the heavy early morning traffic and where they were given route step and somebody in the back began the ancient hallowed dialogue of the Infantry. "Who won the War?" "The MPs won it," came the answer. "How'd they win it?" "Why, their mothers and sisters laying for Liberty Bonds." The tall, handsome, statuesque MP flushed deeply, and as they passed Post Theater #1 someone broke into the Regimental Song and the rest took it up, singing the words the regimental yearbook never printed. "Oh, we wont come back to Wahoo any more. No, we wont come back to Wahoo any more. We will fuck your black kanaky, We will drink your goddamned saki, BUT we wont come back to Wahoo any more." And Chief Choate in his deep rich basso took his favorite line of the break alone. "Kiss me, Charlie, theres some barley, Runnin down my leg." And the voice of authority spoke through the brassy soldierly throat of S/Sgt Dhom. "Can that, you men, or you can march at attention. Theys liable to be ladies present around here." And this was soldiering, the column of marching men that was George Company moving on out Kolekole Pass Road toward drill between the rows of tall old elms that lined the road on either side exuding an abiding permanence, but Pvt Robert E. Lee Prewitt was untouched, the old shiver was not in his spine, because the soldiering 'that once was the only real was now obviously the illusion, since the real lay somewhere hidden below its realistic camouflage.

CHAPTER 19

No OFFICERS appeared at drill all morning, even for the usual look-see. It developed into a sort of general Tell-Off-Prewitt field day with first one noncom then another carrying the ball. They gave him a good going over. He had not up to then believed that anything could hurt a man so much, without actually resorting to physical pain. He was, he realized, learning a considerable bit about pain lately. In the first period Dhom, the calisthenics master (by virtue of being trainer to the boxing squad), read him off over a silent 36-count side straddle hop exercise and had him to do it again alone (as was customary with the awkward squad) while the Company rested. Prew, who had not miscounted a side straddle hop since getting out of recruit drill, did it, perfectly, and was asked to do it once again and this time try to get it right and then warned (as was customary with the awkward squad) to look alive or find himself on extra duty. Prew knew Dhom, and had never much cared for him. It was Dhom who had once, during a Retreat formation, bulled his way into ranks like a bowling ball making a strike and punched a young recruit in the jaw for talking; he came near getting busted over that one, though never, of course, near enough to worry over. But on the other hand, it was also Dhom who last fall during the annual 30-mile hike had carried four extra rifles and a BAR the last 10 miles to bring G Company in one hundred percent present, the only company in the Regiment to make it. And also, it was Dhom whose perpetual henpecking by his greasy Filipino wife had become a company institution. Back at the barracks, talking to The Chief, Prew had dismissed being hurt. Being hurt had not entered into it then. Harlan County boys are born with a facility for standing physical pain, if they live at all, and he was proud of his tested capacity, confident in the belief that they could doubletime him forever and work him till he dropped but they could never break that endurance that was the only thing his father had bequeathed him. He saw it as a simple battle of wills on a physical plane - which in a way it was. But it was also more than that, and this he had not seen. He had not seen that these men meant anything to him. Long ago, at Myer, when he first quit fighting to get in the Bugle Corps and saw how they all construed this to be lack of guts, he had had to reluctantly put aside his hope of ever being understood. This caused a certain loneliness but he accepted that because, he told himself, it was probably that in the first place that made him want to bugle. Then later, when they dropped him from the Bugle Corps because he got the clap and nobody of his many friends stepped forward to go to bat for him and try to get him reinstated, this had increased his loneliness, but it also hardened his invulnerability. And now, being invulnerable since there was nothing left for them to hurt, he had been quite sure that these men meant nothing to him. What he had forgotten, of course, was that these men were men and, being men, could not help but mean something to him, who was also a man. What he had forgotten momentarily was that he was a man, and that these men were, in effect, the same men who had come silently out on the porches last night (only last night, it was) to listen to his Taps. These men were, in effect, the disembodied voice that had come across the quad from Choy's, the abstract spokesman for them all, saying proudly, "I told you it was Prewitt." How this could be, he did not know. He could see this was going to be a hard thing to understand. What he had forgotten entirely was that though he had matched them for his faith in comradeship and understanding and had lost, he still had his faith in men kicking around somewhere, and that this was where they could still reach him. It did not take the hurt long in getting started. During the second period which was Old Ike's close order he was called down twice, first for missing a pivot on a column movement (during which at least the two men in front of him were also out of step), then second for fouling up on a triple rear march-right flanking movement (during which the entire company except for the first two ranks of four became a shambling mob eating its own dust and cursing). Both times Ike called him out of ranks indignantly and read him off, spraying Prew's shirt with a fine mist of old man's Slavic spit, and after the second reading off sent him with a noncom across the road to the chemical warfare's quarter-mile track to doubletime seven laps with his rifle at high port (as was customary with the awkward squad). When he came back sweating heavily but silent, all the men of the jockstrap faction glared at him indignantly (as was customary with the awkward squad) while the men of the non-jockstrap faction did not look at him at all but intently studied the modernistic outlines of the new chem warfare barracks. Only Maggio threw him a grin. It was really very interesting. In a close order drill the caliber of this one (for which Ike Galovitch was famous) being told off for such niceties of execution in the midst of so much fumbling was really laughable. So Prew laughed. The whole thing was quite a triumph of imagination over matter. The men slouched through Ike's close order without snap or smartness, the commands in Ike's perverted English seldom understandable and often given on the wrong foot, at least a third of them always out of step with Ike's uneven cadence. Ike, in commanding, seemed to fluctuate between a chaste uncertain modesty and a grotesque and Mussolini-ish rage of self-assurance. Neither of these was conducive to a snappy drill, and to any man who had ever soldiered it was not only agony, it was unbelievable, it was the ultimate prostitution of soldiering, the greatest sin ever perpetrated by a boiler-orderly. For the third period they marched up toward the Pack-train to the big sloping field where the bridle path began, just above the golf course where they would watch several religious foursomes of officers (and a couple giggling atheistic threesomes of officers' wives) all playing their morning devotional round. This field was the customary scene of a traditional lecture on cover and concealment given by Sgt Thornhill, during which lying on their bellies in the shade of the big oaks that lined the field the Company gave themselves over to the enchantments of mumblety-peg and the study of the bottoms of the officers' wives and daughters as they bounced around the field on saddles, and during which this morning Turp Thornhill, a long stringy ferret-headed jawless man from Mississippi with 17 yrs serv, who was not a jockstrap man, or even a non-jockstrap man, gave Prewitt a reading off for inattention. And sent him down with a noncom to the nearest track for seven more laps of the best, at high port. It was at this time that Maggio's flair for sympathy cost him seven laps himself, when Ike Galovitch saw him make the holy mystic sign to Prew (the one where you close the fist, extend the middle finger, and jab the air) as Prew was leaving, and being incensed at this disrespect for discipline and justice, sent Maggio along this time too. It went on. And still on. And then further on. First one noncom then another trying his skill, as if they were all bucking to become recruit instructors to the gook draftees that were beginning to come in now from the peacetime draft. Even Champ Wilson, the lordly ring killer, the cold eyed, the always silent, the perpetually indifferent, condescended to give him a mechanical reading off during a dry-run trigger-squeeze firepower exercise, because, The Champ said, he was not distributing his fire properly. Prew leaned on his rifle muzzle and listened to this one as he had listened to the other ones, the only thing you can do with a telling off, but now he was only half hearing what The Champ was saying. Because he was not there now. He was standing with The Champ but his mind was thinking of the problem. He could see it all in his mind, unfolding like a film run off the reel between the hands, each picture following the other logically and with a beginning at the one end and an ending at the other, one two three, right down the line. The only trouble was you could not see the beginning now as it was lost in all the tangled swirls of celluloid on the floor, and you could not see the ending because it was still on the turning reel. He remembered though that out of all of them the only noncoms who would not take their turn at booting this brand new ball around were Chief Choate and Old Pop Karelsen, both known openly as his friends. But even they had been offered plenty of chances. But like the non-jockstrap Pvts they preferred to stare uncomfortably off into the middle distance. Or watch the dazzling purity of the slow moving glaciers that were the fair weather cumulus cloud formations, white mountains high above dark mountains. Well, what did you expect them to do, he thought, rise in mutiny and deliver you? You must surely realize you are not being forced into anything, dont you? You are doing all of this of your own free will, you know, he told himself. Yes sir, you are that, he thought, that you are. Free will, he thought. There is free will. And then there is free love, dont forget free love. And then also there is free - let me see, free what? Free politics! Nope, not free politics. Well, free what then? Why, free beer, of course. Of course, free beer. Free will, free love, free beer. But this now is free will. Your own free will, thats doing this. Not them thats doing this. They are merely offering your free will a free choice. Kindly but logically, seriously but without malice, a free choice for your free will. 1) You can go out for boxing. 2) You can not go out for boxing and you can blow up and fight back; in that case you go to the Stockade. 3) You can neither go out for boxing nor blow up and fight back; in which case you can continue to suffer indefinitely this unpleasantness that hurts you because you are sensitive and an artistic bugler, instead of an artistic fighter which would have made it very simple. And, if you continue in this unpleasantness which you are free to choose and which is without malice, but which shows no promise of letting up, the logical sequence will be company punishment for inefficiency plus extra duty plus restrictions plus, eventually inevitably, the Stockade. Now if we reduce these fractions we have on the one hand, go out for boxing; and, on the other hand, we have go out for the Stockade. Since you are an artistic bugler (instead of an artistic fighter, like The Champ here) we can cancel out the first. So, reducing still further, we have 1) go out for the Stockade; or, 2) go out for the Stockade. The choice is up to you, a rather restricted choice but nevertheless a choice, presented to your free will unemotionally logically without partisanship, and without personal malice or meanness of spirit. He would, he thought, much have preferred that they hate him, that they band together in the sacred name of Home&Country and oppress him with the mace of Law&Order. As, say, the Nazis do the Jews, for instance. Or as the English do the Indians. Or as the Americans do the Negroes. Then he would have been a hated human, instead of an unhated number (# ASN 6915544, all present and accounted for). But then a man cant have everything. You did not ever really believe they would do it to you, did you? No, you didnt. Because you know damn well you could never have done it to one of them, having suffered as you have from an overdeveloped sense of justice all your life, not to mention being a hotly fervent espouser of the cause of all underdogs all your life (probably because you have always been one, I imagine). But he had always believed in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had learned it, not from The Home, or The School, or The Church, but from that fourth and other great moulder of social conscience, The Movies. From all those movies that had begun to come out when Roosevelt went in. He had been a kid back then, a kid who had not been on the bum yet, but he was raised up on all those movies that they made then, the ones that were between '32 and '37 and had not yet degenerated into commercial imitations of themselves like the Dead End Kid perpetual series that we have now. He had grown up with them, those movies like the very first Dead End, like Winterset, like Grapes of Wrath, like Dust Be My Destiny, and those other movies starring John Garfield and the Lane girls, and the on-the-bum and prison pictures starring James Cagney and George Raft and Henry Fonda. He had only been a green kid but he had learned from all those pictures to believe in fighting for the underdog, against the top dog. He had even made himself a philosophy of life out of it. So that he had gone right on, unable to stop believing that if the Communists were the underdog in Spain then he believed in fighting for the Communists in Spain; but that if the Communists were the top dog back home in Russia and the (what would you call them in Russia? the traitors, I guess) traitors were the bottom dog, then he believed in fighting for the traitors and against the Communists. He believed in fighting for the Jews in Germany, and against the Jews in Wall Street and Hollywood. And if the Capitalists were top dog in America and the proletariat the underdog, then he believed in fighting for the proletariat against the Capitalists. This too-ingrained-to-be-forgotten philosophy of life of his had led him, a Southerner, to believe in fighting for the Negroes against the Whites everywhere, because the Negroes were nowhere the top dog, at least as yet. It must be a great temptation though, he thought, being top dog. Of course you dont know. You have never been one. But you can imagine how it would be. All you have to do is imagine you are an officer. You can imagine that. It was, he realized, a very flighty philosophy, a chameleon philosophy always changing its color. You were a Communist one day and the next day you were an anti-Communist. But then this was a very flighty age, a chameleon age in which the chameleon lived perpetually upon a bright Scotch plaid. So that so what if maybe today you are a Capitalist and tomorrow an anti-Capitalist? And maybe this minute cry over downtrodden Jews and the next minute cry against sadistic Jews? So what? It is a very irrational and emotional philosophy. Well, this is a very irrational and emotional age. I think that your philosophy puts you right in step with life in these United States and life in this disunited world. But where, you ask, does it put you politically? What are your politics? I think we can dispense with that question, he told himself. It is a wrong question, one that implies you have to have some kind of politics, and is therefore an unfair question because it
restricts your answer to what kind of politics. It is the kind of question a Republican or a Democrat or a Communist would ask you. And anyway, you cant vote, you are in the Army, they wouldnt be interested in you. Yes, I think we can reject that question. But if we had to answer it, truthfully, under oath (let us suppose that Mr Dies and his Un-American Activities Committee called you up because you refused to go out for boxing), then I would say that politically you are a sort of super arch-revolutionary, the kind that made the Revolution in Russia and that the Communists are killing now, a sort of perfect criminal type, very dangerous, a mad dog that loves underdogs. Thats what I would say you were. But you better not tell that to anybody unless you have to, Prewitt. They'll put you in the nut ward. Because here in America, he thought, everybody fights to become top dog, and then to stay top dog. And maybe, just maybe, that is why the underdogs that get to be top dogs and there is nothing left for them to fight for, wither up and die or else get fat and wheeze and die. Because they no longer got anything to fight for but to stay top dog, to keep what they already got. All of which, Prewitt, does not do you a whole hell of a lot of good - except to make you feel a little better - since the way things look now it is very unlikely that you will ever get to be top dog and have to worry about getting fat and wheezing. If you were worrying about getting fat and wheezing, all this doubletiming that is sweating you like a nigger at election would ease your mind of that. Maybe they are doing you a favor and do not know it. Well, dont tell them, thats all. Dont ever let them know it. What a business. You go along trying to mind your business and be yourself and bother nobody and look what happens to you. Yes, look what happens. You get mired in up to your ass in something. Grown men, seriously pushing each other around, over the burning question of whether or not a certain man should or should not go out for a boxing squad. It seemed so silly, suddenly, that it was hard to Believe that absolutely serious results for you could ever come out of it. Yet he knew that those results could and would come out of it for him. You cant disagree with the adopted values of a bunch of people without they get pissed off at you. When people tie their lives to some screwy idea or other and you attempt to point out to them that for you (not for them, mind you, just for you personally) that this idea is screwy, then serious results can always and will always come out of it for you. Because as far as they care you are the same as saying their lives are nothing and this always bothers people, because people prefer anything to being nothing, look at the Nazis, and that is why they tie their lives to things. Why dont you, he thought, tie your life to something, Prewitt? To a tree, perhaps. It would save us all a lot of trouble and discomfort. A sort of sullen stubbornness of dull rebellion began to rise up in him. He had plans for Payday, and this very serious foolishness might very easily turn out to have an extra KP in it for him on Payday. All right. If they want to play, well we will play. Hate they like, hate they will get. We can hate as well as the next one. We were pretty good at it once, in our youth. We can bruise and burn and maim and kill and torture, and call it kindliness and thoughtful discipline, just as subtly and intangibly as the next one. We can play the game of hates and call it free enterprise of competition between individual initiatives, too. That was the only way to handle this. We will hate, and we will be the perfect soldier. We will hate, and we will obey every order perfectly and to the letter. We will hate, and we will not talk back. We will not break a single rule. We will not make a single mistake. We will only hate. Then let them take it and carry it from there. They will have to search hard to find any offense to charge this one with. He hung on sullen hatefully to that role the rest of the morning. And it worked. They were puzzled. They were perplexed. They were obviously deeply hurt because he hated them, and because he was so perfect as a soldier. Some of them even got angry at him; he had no right to react like that. He was like a damnfool bulldog that has got his teeth into a man simply because the man has beat him, and cannot be swung loose or kicked loose or pulled loose or beaten loose but only made to let go by the cutting of his jaw muscles, which in this case happened to be illegal. He grinned to himself, tautly and ecstatically, because he knew he had them where it hurt, and because he knew now for sure they could not do him in by Payday, and because for a moment he had wild visions that maybe this might even cure them, next time, and continued to hang on, his only dim hope of any relief at all centered in the coming of the afternoon and fatigue. But as it turned out he got no relief then either. As it turned out, at fatigue, he not only lost the lead he had gained at drill, he went in the hole. It was his own fault. He was on Ike Galovitch's home labor detail. He had had for a long time now the habit of hanging around in the barracks until the last minute before falling out for fatigue. This was so that he would be on the very end of the line, in order to circumvent The Warden's little game of Break It Off In Prewitt. The last half, or last third, of the Company - depending on the daily demands for fatigue labor that came down from Regiment - was always put to some job of policing in the Company Area and Ike Galovitch, by a standing order to The Warden from Capt Holmes, always had charge of this home use labor section. If Prew was on the end of the line, it was as if he were off limits to The Warden, and he would always get off with this. He would never get the cushy details, like the Officer's Club detail or the golf course detail, but neither would he get the trash truck or the butcher shop. The Warden could easily have simply reversed the order of the Company and started with the other end, or if he wanted, just have held the worse detail back until the very last, after partitioning off Ike's labor for home use. But he had learned that Warden would not do that, that that old private line of equity, drawn with such sharpness with such close secrecy that it was wholly invisible to everyone but Warden, would not let the big man take advantage of the situation in that way. Every time Prew would forget and fall in with the first half The Warden would be right there waiting savagely joyously with the worst detail the day's crop offered, but as long as Prew was at the other end he was safe. It was, Prew often thought, as if The Warden had applied to his whole life the principle which applied to all other games of sport - that laying down of certain arbitrary rules to make success that much harder for the player to attain, like clipping in football or traveling in basketball, or in the same way, as he had read someplace, that sporting fishermen would use the light six-nine tackle in fishing for sailfish instead of the heavy tackle that makes it easy for the novice, thereby imposing upon themselves voluntarily the harder conditions that make the reward worth more to them. But where the fishermen only did it on their days off or on vacation, to gain some obscure satisfaction that the cut-throat business ethics of their lives no longer/\ gave them, The Warden applied it to his whole life, and stuck by it. Prew knew he stuck by it because, after figuring it out, he had at times, when he felt in the mood, accepted the gambit and played the game by falling in at the head and trying to outwit Warden into giving him an easy detail, and once, the only time he made him miss, Warden had made it a point of giving him the Officers' Club detail for the whole next week, as if penalizing himself, with as great a relish as when he penalized Prewitt. It was fun, and it broke up the monotony of living, and there was a closeness between him and The Warden, an understanding, tacit, never spoken of, but closer and stronger than even what he felt for Maggio. And whenever he did not feel like playing he would fall in at the end and Warden would not touch him. It was like King's X in tag as a kid, except here it was not abused, it was honored. (Maybe that was what it was about The Warden: honor; yet Maggio had honor too, and was with him more often and had done more for him, than Warden, yet there was not as warm a closeness, not as great a love.) He did not understand it, but on this day he did not feel like playing. After The Warden had read off the details, Old Ike lined his detail up and called them to attention as the other details scattered, marching off across the quad, the feet scuffing reluctantly and the shoulders sagging wearily as they dragged the heavy, food-full, nap-hungry bellies off to work. "Now tooday," Ike told his boys, his long lippy ape's jaw thrust out commandingly at them, "we are going da inside of dis barricks to clean up. Hupstairs and donstairs all the windows wash and polishing. An of da dayroom an poolroom and CQ's corridor da walls to scrub. Da Gomny Gmandr will inspect tomorrow all of it so you want to do it right and none of the goldbricking I want to see. Hokay. Hany queshuns?" All of them had done this same job at least five times before. There were no questions. "Dan coun hoff!" Ike bawled, raising his chest proudly like a bellows to make room for his close order voice. "Da ones hupstairs and donstairs da windows take. Da twos on da walls will work." They counted off. Prewitt and Maggio, who had deliberately fallen in one man apart, were both twos. The ones started for the supply room to get their rags and bars of sandsoap in the yellow wrappers labelled Bon Ami under the picture of the cuddly little fluffy chick that always outraged all of them with an unspeakable affront because as soldiers their lives had become such a close alliance with the grit of sandsoap. Sgt Lindsay, a fair-to-middling bantamweight, had charge of the ones. The twos started for the kitchen for the GI soap and brushes. Corp Miller, a worse-than-mediocre lightweight and Champ Wilson's running mate, had charge of the twos. "Hey you," Ike bawled. "You Prewitt Maggio. To me here come, wise guys. How you men both twos are?" "You counted us off, Ike," Angelo said. "You think a fast one can over Old Ike pull?" Ike said, glaring at them suspiciously out of the little red eyes behind the hairy brows. "Over my face the wool you can not stretch. I ham separating you two men together. You Maggio go hupstairs the ones wit. Tell Sargint Lindsay to Treadwell send back down the twos wit. Dis a fatigue, not no hold ladies sewing circle or vacation. In charge am I of dis detail and I work want not loafing. See?" "I'll see you later," Angelo said disgustedly. "Okay," Prew said, with the unruffled equanimity of the perfect soldier. "Hokay," Ike bawled. "Move. Not all day. You Prewitt go back the twos wit and dont sometime figur on getting by with from me, see? I be around all time keep eye on you, see? You aint so tough smart guy as maybe think." Ike was as good as his word. He made his headquarters in the corridor hallway where the twos had set up the one-by-eight on the two stepladders they used for scaffolding, and where Prew was working, first standing on the board, then sitting on it, then kneeling on the floor, washing down swath after swath of the pebbly plaster wall from floor to ceiling. "Dis a fatigue, not vacation, Prewitt," Ike informed him, grinning wolfishly with the long sallow ape's jaw, from time to time. "I got my eye on you." And he had. When Prew climbed down to rinse his rag, when he went outside to change the water in his bucket, when he turned around to resoap his GI brush - Old Ike would be there in front of him, watching suspiciously hopefully with the little sharp eyes in the sanguine bullethead like red buttons reflecting firelight on a lumberjack's plaid shirt. "Dis a fatigue, not vacation, Prewitt." But Ike's hopes were groundless. Prew had been having a lot worse than that all morning, and had weathered it by playing perfect soldier. Ike's efforts were almost pathetic, compared to the imaginative variety that, say, Dhom could give to the riding of a man. This could not get under his skin, not the sharp smell of the dirty soapy water, nor his own white water-wrinkled fingers, nor the stale cracker smell of the wet wall plaster. It was not, strangely, until Capt Dynamite Holmes came bouncing in from across the quad, freshly showered, shaved, shampooed, and shined, his big boots gleaming - it was not till then that all these things suddenly got under Prewitt's skin. "Hello there, Sergeant Galovitch," Holmes grinned, stopping in the doorway. "Atten HUT," Ike bawled, making two distinct words of it, and bracing his bigfooted longarmed missinglink's body into an arch-backed travesty of it proudly. The men went on working. "Everything under control, Sergeant?" Holmes said fondly. "Are you getting this place slicked up for me tomorrow?" "Yes, Serr," Ike grunted, uncomfortably because still bracing solidly, his thumbs along the seams of his trousers, somewhere down around his knees. "Slickem up. Everyting I am doing just like the Gomny Gmandr saying." "Good," Holmes grinned fondly. "Fine." Still grinning fondly, he stepped over to inspect the wall, and nodded. "Looks fine, Sergeant Galovitch, A-1. Keep up the good work." "Yes, Serr," Ike grunted worshipfully, still bracing. The narrow shouldered barrel ape's chest expanded out until it looked about to burst and Ike saluted, stiffly, grotesquely, looking as if the hand would.knock his eye clear out. "Well," Holmes grinned fondly. "Carry on then, Sergeant." He went on into the orderly room grinning and Old Ike bawled "Atten HUT' again, making it two words again, and the men still went on working. Prew went on rubbing his rag over the pebbly plaster he had just washed and that suddenly sickened him now, feeling his jaws tighten reasonlessly. He felt as if he had just witnessed the sodomitic seduction of a virgin brunser who had liked it. "All right, you men there," Ike hollered proudly, moving slabfooted up and down behind them. "You men I want on the ball to get, see? Just begause da Gomny Gmandr comes around is to stop working no escuse. Pis a fatigue, not vacation." The men still went on working, wearily ignoring this new outburst because they had been expecting it, as they wearily ignored the other outbursts, and Prew went with them, suddenly suffocating in the wet plaster smell that enveloped him. He wished he had a pair of bright and shining boots. "You Prewitt," Ike hollered angrily, not finding anything else to criticize. "Lets looking a life. Dis a fatigue, not vacation for a seminaries of lady. I got to tell you all ready times too many. Now looking a