The Naked and the Dead (16 page)

           
Wherever I may roam,

            On land or sea or foam,

           
You can always hear me singing this song,

            Show me the way to go home.

            It was almost dark, and in the lee of the truck underneath the coconut trees it was becoming difficult to see the men's faces. Toglio's mood deepened, became sad and gentle. He remembered how his wife had looked once trimming a Christmas tree, and a tear ran down his heavy fleshy cheeks. For a minute or so he felt completely removed from the war, from the rain, from everything; he knew that in a little while he would be having to consider where and how he would sleep, but for this brief moment he sang resolutely, wriggling his toes, letting all the soft sensuous memories that the songs evoked flow unresisting through his mind.

            A jeep came wallowing through the mud and came to a halt about thirty feet from them. He saw General Cummings and two other officers dismount, and he nudged Red to stop singing. The General was bareheaded and his uniform was completely wet, but he was smiling. Toglio looked at him with interest and some reverence. He had seen the General many times in the bivouac area but this was the first time he had been so close. "You men, you men here," the General shouted as he came near them, "how do you feel. . . wet?" Toglio laughed with the others. General Cummings grinned. "It's all right," he shouted, "you're not made of sugar." The wind ebbed, and in a more normal tone he said to a major and lieutenant who were with him, "I do believe the rain's about to halt. I just telephoned Washington, and the War Department assured me it was bound to stop." The two officers laughed vigorously, and Toglio found himself smiling. The General was a swell guy, a perfect example of an officer.

            "Now, men," the General said loudly, "I don't believe there's a tent that's still up in the area. As soon as the storm lifts, we'll try to bring up some ponchos from the beach, but I have no doubt some of you are going to be wet tonight. It's to be regretted, but you've been wet before. A bit of trouble has started up on the line, and some of you may spend the night in a far worse place." He paused for a moment, standing in the rain; then he added with a twinkle, "I assume that none of you left a guard post when the storm broke. If any of you are here who shouldn't be, you better get the hell back as soon as I leave." There was a snicker from the men. Since the rain had eased, most of the company had drifted over toward the truck where the General was talking. "Seriously, men, from what we heard before the communications went out, I've an idea there are going to be some Japs inside our lines tonight, so you better keep an extremely alert guard. We're fairly far back from the front, but we're not that far back." He smiled at them, got back into his jeep, followed by the officers, and drove out of the area.

            Red spat. "I knew we been havin' it soft too long. Two to one they send us out to catch a shit-storm tonight."

            Wilson nodded, shaking his head angrily. "When you have it good it don' pay to bitch. All those replacements wantin' to see combat, they're gonna change they mind."

            Toglio interrupted. "Gee, the General is a swell guy," he said.

            Red spat again. "They ain't a general in the world is any good. They're all sonsofbitches."

            "Listen, Red," Toglio protested, "where could you find a general like that who'd talk to a bunch of GIs? He's okay for my money."

            "He's a crowd-pleaser, that's all he is," Red told him. "What the fug business has he got tellin' us his worries? I got enough of my own."

            Toglio sighed and stopped talking. What a contrary guy Red was, he decided finally. It had stopped raining and he thought of going back to the remains of his tent. The idea depressed him, but Toglio would not allow himself to dawdle now that the storm was over. "Come on, we might as well fix up some way to sleep," he said.

            Red grunted. "It won't do you any good. We're gonna be up on the line tonight." With nightfall, the air was becoming sultry again.

            The General was worried. After the jeep pulled out of the motor pool he said to his driver, "Take us to headquarters battery of the one-five-one." He turned around to Major Dalleson and Lieutenant Hearn, who were squeezed together uncomfortably in the back seat. "If their line isn't in to Second Battalion we'll be doing some walking before the night is over." The jeep passed through an opening in the barbed wire and turned right onto the road that led toward the front. The General scrutinized it morosely. The mud was very bad and it would become worse. Now it was slimy and the jeep skidded and weaved from one side of the road to the other, but in a few hours it would become hard and gummy like clay, and the vehicles might bog down to their hubs. He gazed dully at the jungle on either side of the road. They passed a few Jap corpses decomposing in a ditch and the General held his breath. No matter how familiar that smell had become, he could never bear it casually. He made a mental note to have a burial detail police the road once this trouble was over.

            The night had come and with it a potential disaster. In the jeep motoring forward slowly through the darkness, Cummings had a sensation of being suspended in air. The steady drone of the motor, the silence of everyone in the vehicle, and the heavy wet rustling of the jungle seemed to strip him of everything but the quick absorbed functioning of his mind. Alone, settled by himself somewhere in space, he had to work this out. The storm had come with amazing rapidity, following in the wake of a Japanese attack. Ten minutes before the rain had begun, he had had a message from 2nd Battalion headquarters that a heavy fire fight had started before their lines. And then the telephone lines had been cut to pieces in the storm, his headquarters had been laid flat, and the radio would not function. He had no idea of what was happening at the front. By now Hutchins might have pulled back 2nd Battalion. The Japs, driven on with a kind of frenzy generated by the gale, could conceivably have penetrated his front line in any number of places. With no orders coming through to them, Lord knew what might happen. If only headquarters battery had its line open to the front.

            At least he had moved a dozen tanks up two days ago to 2nd Battalion. They would never have been able to make it on the road tonight, nor, for that matter, could they advance now, but if necessary, a defense position could be organized around them tonight. What chaos there could be. The entire line might be a series of isolated hedgehogs by tomorrow. And there was nothing he could do until he got to a telephone line. Anything could develop. In two days he might be back where he was when he started the pivoting operation.

            When he reached that telephone line, the decisions would have to be almost immediate. He reviewed the personalities of his line officers, remembered the distinguishing characteristics, if there were any, of different companies, even individual platoons. His acute memory reissued a spate of incidents and strength figures; he knew effectively where every gun and every man on Anopopei was placed, and all this knowledge passed in an undigested flow through his head. At the moment he was an extremely simple man. Everything in him was functioning for one purpose, and from experience, with a confident unstated certainty, he knew that when demanded of him all this information would crystallize into the proper reactions. If he built up enough tension his instincts would not fail him.

            And with all this there was an intense and primitive rage. The storm had thwarted him, and his anger took childish forms. From time to time a spasm of irritation washed over his concentration and muddied it. "Not a word about that storm," he would mutter to himself every now and then. "A meteorological corps which doesn't function. Army knew about it, but did they tell me? No report of the storm, none at all. What bungling or perhaps not bungling at all. They're trying to cross me."

            At that moment the driver stalled the jeep in a rut. Cummings turned toward him. He could have shot him, but instead he murmured, "Come on, son, we have no time for that." The jeep motor started again, and they continued on.

            His bivouac had been destroyed. That was the most painful fact of all. The dangers to the division occupied his mind, caused him a good deal of anxiety, but that was abstract. What hurt directly, personally, was the shambles in which he had left the bivouac. He felt a sense of grief almost, remembering how the rivulets had washed away the gravel walks, the way his cot had turned over, become impaled in the mud, the filth and wreckage of his tent. What a waste! It angered him again.

            "You better turn on your lights, son," he said to the driver. "This is going to take too long otherwise." If any snipers were near it would be like walking through a forest of thugs, carrying a candle. The General tensed pleasurably in his seat. Danger had a tang which made him appreciate the magnitude of his work. "You'd better cover the road on either side," he said to Hearn and Dalleson. They pointed their carbines out the open sides of the jeep, scanning the jungle. With the lights on, the foliage was silvery, more mysterious.

            Lieutenant Hearn fingered the magazine on his carbine, removed it, clicked it into position again, holding the small rifle in his large hands, the muzzle pointed toward the jungle. He was in a complex mood with many elements of excitement and dejection. After all the order, all the well-timed advances, the front might now have exploded into anything, and in the meantime their jeep wandered around like a nerve seeking for a muscle or organ to function upon. The General had once said to him, "I like chaos, it's like the reagents foaming in the beaker before the precipitation of the crystals. It's a kind of savory to me."

            Which was a crock of the well-known article, Hearn had decided at the time. The General didn't like chaos, or rather he didn't like it when he was in the beaker. The only ones who liked it were men like himself, Hearn, who really weren't involved.

            Still, the General had reacted well. Hearn remembered the first apathy that had caught them all when the storm abated. The General had stared at his muddy cot for almost half a minute, and then had scraped off a small handful of muck, which he kneaded in his fingers. That storm had cut the legs from them all, and yet the General had responded, made his incredibly urbane speech to the men, while everything in all of them had demanded tucking up one's tail and slinking off for some cover. That was understandable, however; the General had had to recover the connotations of his command.

            And now he was comprehensible too. Hearn knew from the tone of his politeness, the quality of his voice, that he was thinking of nothing at all but the campaign and the night ahead. It made the General another man, definitely the nerve end with no other desire than to find something to act upon.

            It depressed Hearn even as it elicited his admiration. That type of concentration was inhuman, the process beyond his scope. He stared glumly at the jungle before him, hefting the carbine in his hands again. It was possible that a Jap machine gun could be set up at the next bend in the road, or much more likely there might be a few Jap snipers with an automatic weapon or two. Their jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused gropings and unimportant dissatisfactions. And with him quite as casually would be lost a man who might be a genius, and an overgrown oaf like Dalleson, and a young nervous driver who was probably a potential Fascist. Like that. Turning a curve in the road.

            Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier. That was the thing, that was what caused this mood. Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and brave. And they were here on this road, a point moving along a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungle. And somewhere else a battle might be going on. The artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combat. None of it matched. The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were.

            He became conscious again of Dalleson's huge bulk against his own large body, and he stiffened a little. After a moment or two he fished a cigarette out of the breast pocket of his shirt and fumbled for a match.

            "Better not smoke," Dalleson grunted. "The jeep lights are on."

            "Yeah," Dalleson grunted and was silent again. He shifted his seat slightly in the cramped rear of the jeep, and was annoyed at Hearn for taking up so much room, for smoking. Dalleson was nervous. He wasn't worried in the least about an ambush. If it came, he would meet it coolly and acquit himself well. What bothered him was what they were going to do when they got to the 151st Artillery. He had the anxiety of a dull student who was going to enter an examination he dreaded. As the G-3, in charge of operations and training, Dalleson was supposed to know the situation as well as the General, if not better, and without his maps and papers Dalleson felt lost. The General might depend on him for a decision, and that would be fatal. He twisted again in the seat, sniffed gloomily at Hearn's cigarette smoke, and then bent forward and spoke in what he thought was a low voice, although it brayed out loudly, startlingly.

            "I hope everything's okay when we get to the one-five-one, sir," Dalleson shouted.

            "Yes," the General said, listening to the spinning humming sounds of the tires as the jeep splashed through the mud. Dalleson's bellow had grated on him. They had been driving for ten minutes with the headlights on, and his sense of danger had abated. He was worried again. If the line wasn't in, they would have to go riding through the mud for another half hour at least, and then there still might not be communications. The Japs might be breaking through at this moment.