The Naked and the Dead (13 page)

            Cummings stared at him blankly. "There's another approach to it, you know. I don't disagree with Conn. There's a hard kernel of truth in many of the things he says. As for example, 'All Jews are noisy.' " Cummings shrugged. "They're not all noisy, of course, but there's an undue proportion of coarseness in that race, admit it."

            "If there is, you have to understand it," Hearn murmured. "They're under different tensions."

            "A piece of typical liberal claptrap. The fact is, you don't like them either."

            Hearn was uneasy. There were. . . traces of distaste he could detect in himself. "I'll deny that."

            Cummings grinned again. "Or take Conn's view of 'niggers.' A little extravagant perhaps, but he's more nearly right than you suspect. If anyone is going to sleep with a Negress. . ."

            "A Southerner will," Hearn said.

            "Or a radical. It's a defense mechanism with them, bolsters their
morale."
Cummings showed his teeth. "For example, perhaps you have?"

            "Perhaps."

            Cummings stared at his fingernails. Was it disgust? Abruptly he laughed with sarcastic glee. "You know, Robert, you're a liberal."

            "Balls."

            He said this with a tense rapt compulsion as if he were impelled to see how far he could rock the boulder, especially when it had pinched his toes just a moment before. This was by far the greatest liberty he had ever taken with the General. And even more, the most irritating liberty. Profanity or vulgarity always seemed to scrape the General's spine.

            The General's eyes closed as if he were contemplating the damage wreaked inside himself. When he opened them, he spoke in a low mild voice. "Attention." He stared at Hearn dourly for a moment, and then said, "Suppose you salute me." When Hearn had complied, the General smiled slightly, distastefully. "Pretty crude treatment, isn't it, Robert? All right, at ease."

            The bastard! And yet with it, there was an angry reluctant admiration. The General treated him as an equal. . . almost always, and then at the proper moment jerked him again from the end of a string, established the fundamental relationship of general to lieutenant with an abrupt startling shock like the slap of a wet towel. And afterward always his voice like a treacherous unguent which smarted instead of salving the pain. "Wasn't very fair of me, was it, Robert?"

            "No, sir."

            "You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a
dastardly person.
That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're. . . you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it."

            "I've heard that idea before." Hearn moved his foot slowly.

            "Are we going into that attention business again?" The General chuckled. "Robert, there's a stubbornness in you which is disappointing to me. I had some hopes for you."

            "I'm just a bounder."

            "That's the thing. You are. You're a. . . all right, you're a reactionary just like me. It's the biggest fault I've found with you. You're afraid of that word. You've cast off everything of your heritage, and then you've cast off everything you've learned since then, and the process hasn't broken you. That's what impressed me first about you. Young man around town who hasn't been broken, who hasn't gone sick. Do you realize that's an achievement?"

            "What do you know about young men around town. . . sir?"

            The General lit a cigarette. "I know
everything.
That's such a fatuous statement that people immediately disbelieve you, but this time it happens to be true." His mouth moved into the good-guy grin. "The only trouble is, one thing remains with you. Somewhere you picked it up so hard that you can't shake the idea 'liberal' means good and 'reactionary' means evil. That's your frame of reference, two words. That's why you don't know a damn thing."

            Hearn scuffled his feet. "Suppose I sit down?"

            "Certainly." The General looked at him and then murmured in a completely toneless voice, "You're not annoyed, are you, Robert?"

            "No, not any more." With a belated insight he understood suddenly that the General had been riding a great many emotions when he ordered him to stand up. It was so difficult ever to be certain what went on in the General's head. Through their whole conversation Hearn had been on the defensive, weighing his speech, talking with no freedom at all. And abruptly he realized that this had been true for the General also.

            "You've got a great future as a reactionary," the General said. "The trouble is we've never had any thinkers on my side. I'm a phenomenon and I get lonely at times." There was always that indefinable tension between them, Hearn thought. Their speech was forced to the surface through a thick resistant medium like oil.

            "You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical." Outside the partially opened flap of the tent, the bivouac sprawled out before them, rank and cluttered, the raw cleared earth glinting in the early afternoon sun. It was almost deserted now, the enlisted men out on labor details.

            The General had created that tension but he was involved in it too. He held on to Hearn for what. . . for what reason? Hearn didn't know. And he couldn't escape the peculiar magnetism of the General, a magnetism derived from all the connotations of the General's power. He had known men who thought like the General; he had even known one or two who were far more profound. But the difference was that they did nothing or the results of their actions were lost to them, and they functioned in the busy complex mangle, the choked vacuum of American life. The General might even have been silly if it were not for the fact that here on this island he controlled everything. It gave a base to whatever he said. And as long as Hearn remained with him, he could see the whole process from the inception of the thought to the tangible and immediate results the next day, the next month. That kind of knowledge was the hardest to obtain, the most concealed in everything Hearn had done in the past, and it intrigued him, it fascinated him.

            "You can look at it, Robert, that we're in the middle ages of a new era, waiting for the renaissance of real power. Right now, I'm serving a rather sequestered function, I really am no more than the chief monk, the lord of my little abbey, so to speak."

            His voice continued on and on, its ironic sustained mockery spinning its own unique web, while all the time the tensions inside him flexed and expanded, sought their inexorable satisfactions in whatever lay between Hearn and himself, between himself and the five thousand troops against him, the terrain, and the circuits of chance he would mold.

            What a monster, Hearn told himself.

Chorus:

THE CHOW LINE

           
(The mess tent is on a low bluff overlooking the beach. In front of it is a low serving bench on which are placed four or five pots containing food. The troops file by in an irregular line, their mess gear opened and extended. Red, Gallagher, Brown and Wilson shuffle past to receive their rations. As they go by they sniff at the main course which has been dumped into a big square pan. It is canned Meat and Vegetable Stew heated slightly. The second cook, a fat red-faced man with a bald spot and a perpetual scowl, slaps a large spoonful in each of their mess plates.)

            RED: What the fug is that swill?

            COOK: It's owl shit. Wha'd you think it was?

            RED: Okay, I just thought it was somethin' I couldn't eat. (Laughter)

            COOK: (good naturedly) Move on, move on, before I knock-the-crap-out-of-you.

            RED: Take a bite on this.

            GALLAGHER: That goddam stew again.

            COOK: (shouting to the other cooks and KPs on the serving line) Private Gallagher is bitching, men.

            KP: Send him to officers' mess.

            GALLAGHER: Give me a little more, will ya?

            COOK: These portions are scientifically measured by Quartermaster. Move on!

            GALLAGHER: You sonofabitch.

            COOK: Go beat your meat. (Gallagher moves on.)

            BROWN: General Cummings, you're the best damn guy in the outfit.

            COOK: You looking for more meat? You won't get it. They ain't no meat.

            BROWN: You're the worst guy in the outfit.

            COOK: (turning to the serving line) Sergeant Brown is now passing in review.

            BROWN: As you were, men. Carry on, pip, pip. (Brown moves by.)

            WILSON: Ah swear, don't you ration destroyers know another way to fug up this stew?

            COOK: "When it's smokin', it's cookin'; when it's burnin', it's done." That's our motto.

            WILSON: (chuckling) Ah figgered you all had a system.

            COOK: Take a bite on this.

            WILSON: You got to wait your turn, boy. They's five men in recon is ahead of ya.

            COOK: For you, I'll wait. Move on, move on. Who're you to block traffic?

            (The soldiers file by.)

4

            By the end of the first month of the campaign, the front-line troops had advanced to the base of the peninsula. Beyond it the island extended on either side, and about five miles from the junction of the peninsula with the mainland, the mountains of the Watamai Range ran along parallel to the sea. The Toyaku Line was drawn up to the left of the peninsula on a fairly straight line running from the cliffs of the mountain range to the ocean. As the General expressed it to his staff, he had "to make a left turn off the avenue of the peninsula into a narrow street which has figuratively a factory wall on its right, a ditch on its left [the sea], and Toyaku in front of us."

            He conducted the pivoting operation with brilliance. There were many problems involved. He had to move his front line, stabilized at last, through a ninety-degree arc to the left, and it meant that, while the flank companies on the left who could anchor themselves by the sea would have to move only a half mile or so, the companies on the right would be obliged to wheel through a six-mile arc of jungle, and would be exposed through every hour of their march.

            He had two alternatives. The safer plan was to have the battalion on his right flank drive straight inland until it reached the mountains. A temporary line could then be drawn up on a diagonal, and slowly he could have the right wing turn and drive along parallel to the mountains until his lines faced Toyaku. But that would take several days, possibly a week, and there might be a great deal of resistance. The other project, far more dangerous, was to move his right flank in a direct thrust to the mountain cliffs which abutted the Toyaku Line. That way, the entire front could be pivoted in a day.

            But it was very dangerous. Toyaku undoubtedly would have a striking force ready to knife around the edge of the advancing troops, and turn their flank. During the entire day he would be pivoting his troops, the General would have an undefended right flank. He took the chance, and turned it into an advantage. On the day of the operation he withdrew a battalion from the road and kept them in reserve. He gave instructions to the commanders of the companies on the right flank to advance through the jungle without concerning themselves with their flank or rear. Their mission was merely to make the six-mile march through no man's land, and establish a defense position by that night at the mountain cliffs a mile away from the outposts of the Toyaku Line.

            The General guessed correctly. Toyaku sneaked a company of Japanese troops around the flank while the movement was in progress, but the General met them with his reserve battalion, and encircled them almost completely. For several days an extremely confused battle went on in the jungle behind the division's new lines, but by the end of that time, all but a few stragglers of the company Toyaku had dispatched into the division's rear had been killed. There were more snipers behind the lines, and once or twice a pack train was ambushed, but these were minor incidents. The General did not concern himself with that. After the pivoting operation he was far too busy establishing his new line. In the first two days the men on the front hacked out new trails, and laid barbed wire, cut fields of fire through the jungle, and established telephone communications with their flanks and rear. A few minor Japanese attacks caused the General no great worry. Four days went by after the movement, and then five. With each day the General strengthened his lines, and increased the speed with which he built the road to the front. He knew it would take him two weeks at least before the road could catch up to his troops and until then he could only increase his defenses. A major attack by Toyaku could still embarrass him, but it was a gamble he had to take.

            In the meantime he moved his headquarters bivouac. The division's task force had progressed almost twenty-five miles since the day they had landed, and by now the radio communication was difficult, the telephone wire had been extended seriously. He advanced the bivouac fifteen miles up the peninsula to another coconut grove just off the road. It was not as pleasant as the first headquarters had been on the beach, and the troops in headquarters company of the regiment had to spend several busy days clearing the brush between the trees, laying out barbed wire, digging new latrines, and setting up their tents and foxholes, but when they had finished the bivouac was not unlivable. It was much hotter, and little breeze filtered through from the jungle surrounding them, but there was a stream which ran just outside the oval encirclement of wire, and the men did not have to go far to bathe.