The Naked and the Dead (8 page)

            Mantelli giggled. He was smoking a cigar which looked incongruous on his thin face. "Croft, suppose I was to give you those seven men? Who the hell would hand me a piece of toilet paper in the morning?"

            Croft gripped the desk and glared down at him. "It's one thing to kid around, Cap'n, but I know my rights and the platoon ought to get that fifth man. All they'll use him for over at Operations 'n' Intelligence is to sharpen pencils."

            Mantelli giggled again. "Sharpen pencils.
Goddam!
Croft, I don't think you got a good opinion of me." The evening air was blowing in from the beach, rustling the pyramidal tent flaps. At the moment there was no one else in the orderly room. "Listen," Mantelli went on, "I know it's a damn shame your platoon's short, but what can I do?"

            "You can give me that fifth man. He's assigned to the platoon, and I'm the platoon sergeant. I want him."

            Mantelli scraped his feet on the dirt floor of the tent. "What do you think happens over at Operations? Colonel Newton walks in, and by God there's a piece of work ain't done, and he sorta sighs, and says, 'Things are going too slow here,' and damn if I don't hear about it. Croft, wake up, you ain't important, the only thing that counts is to have enough clerks to keep a headquarters going." He rolled his cigar tentatively in his mouth. "Now that we got the General and all his staff right in our bivouac, so you can't spit without hitting a court-martial, they need even more men out of your platoon. If you don't shut up I'll put you to cleaning typewriter ribbons."

            "Cap'n, I don't care. I'm gettin' that other man if I gotta go see Major Pfeiffer, Colonel Newton, General Cummings, I don't give a damn. The platoon ain't gonna be hanging around the beach forever, and I want all the men I can get."

            Mantelli groaned. "Croft, if you had your way, you'd be picking through the replacements as if you were buying horses."

            "You're damn right I would, Cap'n."

            "Oh, Jesus, you guys never give me a minute's rest." Mantelli leaned back and kicked the desk once or twice with his foot. Out through the tent flaps he could see the beach framed through a clump of coconut trees. Far in the distance an artillery piece fired once.

            "You gonna give me that extra man?"

            "Yeah. . . yeah. . . yeah." Mantelli squinted. On the sand, not a hundred yards away, the replacements were erecting their pup tents. Far off in the harbor a few Liberty ships at anchor were disappearing in the evening haze. "Yeah, I'll give him to you, the poor sonofabitch." Mantelli flipped through a few sheets of paper, ran his finger down a column of names, and underlined one of them with his nail. "His name's Roth, and his MOS is clerk. You'll probably make a hell of a rifleman out of him."

            The replacements remained on the beach for another day or two. The evening after Croft had talked to Captain Mantelli, Roth walked forlornly through the replacement bivouac. The man with whom he was bunking, a big good-natured farm boy, was still over at another tent with his friends, and Roth didn't want to join them. He had gone along the previous night and, as it usually happened, he had felt left out of things. His bunkmate and his bunkmate's friends were all young, probably just out of high school, and they laughed a lot at stupid jokes and wrestled with each other and swore. He never knew what to say to them. Roth felt a familiar wistful urge for somebody he could talk to seriously. He realized again there wasn't anyone he knew well among the replacements -- all the men with whom he had come overseas had been separated from him at the last replacement depot. Even then, it wasn't as if they had anything special about them. They were all stupid, Roth thought. All they could think about was getting women.

            He stared gloomily at the pup tents scattered over the sand. In a day or two he would be sent up to his new platoon, and the thought gave him no joy. A rifleman now! It was such a dirty trick. At least, if they hadn't told him he was going to be a clerk. Roth shrugged. All the Army wanted you for was cannon fodder. They even made riflemen out of men like himself, fathers, with poor health. He was qualified for other things, a college graduate, familiar with office work. But try and explain it to the Army.

            He passed a tent where a soldier was pounding some stakes into the sand. Roth paused, and then recognized the man. It was Goldstein, one of the soldiers who had been assigned with him to the reconnaissance platoon. "Hello," Roth said, "you're all occupied, I see."

            Goldstein looked up. He was a man of about twenty-seven with very blond hair and friendly serious blue eyes. He stared intently at Roth as if he were nearsighted, his eyes bulging slightly. Then he smiled with a great deal of warmth, cocking his head forward. Because of this and the staring concentration of his eyes he gave an immediate impression of great sincerity. "I'm just fixing my tent," Goldstein said now. "I was thinking and thinking about it today, and I finally decided what the trouble was. The Army never designed tent pins to be used in sand." He smiled enthusiastically. "So I cut some branches off a bush, and I'm making stakes out of them now. I bet it'll hold up in any kind of a wind." Goldstein's speech was always earnest but a little breathless as if he were afraid of being interrupted. Except for the unexpectedly sad lines which ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth, he would have looked like a boy.

            "That's quite an idea," Roth said. He couldn't think of anything to add, and he hesitated for a moment, and then sat down on the sand. Goldstein kept working, humming to himself. "What do you think of our assignment?" he asked.

            Roth shrugged. "It's what I expected. No good." Roth was a small man with an oddly hunched back and long arms. Everything about him seemed to droop; he had a long dejected nose and pouches under his eyes; his shoulders slumped forward. His hair was clipped very short and it accentuated his large ears. "No, I don't care for our assignment," he repeated a little pompously. Altogether, Roth looked like a frail mournful ape.

            "I think we were pretty lucky," Goldstein said mildly. "After all, it isn't as if we're going to see the worst kind of combat. I hear a headquarters company is pretty good, and there'll be a more intelligent type fellow in it."

            Roth picked up a handful of sand and let it drop. "What's the use of kidding myself?" he said. "The way I look at it, every step in the Army turns out to be worse than you expected, and this is going to be the worst of all." His voice was deep and sepulchral; he spoke so slowly that Goldstein became a little impatient for him to finish.

            "No, no, you're too pessimistic," Goldstein told him. He picked up a helmet and began to use it as a mallet on one of the stakes. "If you'll excuse me for saying so, that's no way to look at it." He pounded several times with the helmet and then whistled sadly. "Very poor steel in these," he said. "Look at the way I dented it just hitting in a stake."

            Roth smiled a little contemptuously. Goldstein's animation irritated him. "Aaah, it's all very well to talk," he said, "but you never do get a break in the Army. Look at the ship we came over on. They had us packed in like sardines."

            "I suppose they did the best they could," Goldstein suggested.

            "The best they could? I don't think so." He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. "Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It's to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That's the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they're superior." Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound.

            Goldstein held up his hand. "But that's why
we
can't afford to have such an attitude.
We're
fighting against that." Then, as if his words had rubbed against a bruised part of his mind, he frowned angrily and added, "Aaah, I don't know, they're just a bunch of Anti-Semiten."

            "Who, the Germans?"

            Goldstein didn't answer right away. ". . . Yes."

            "That's one approach to it," Roth said, a little pontifically. "However, I don't think it's as simple as that." He went on talking.

            Goldstein did not listen. Gloom had settled over him. He had been cheerful until a moment ago, and now suddenly he was very upset. As Roth talked, Goldstein would shake his head from time to time or make a clucking sound with his tongue. This had no relation to what Roth said. Goldstein was remembering an episode which had occurred that afternoon. Several soldiers had been talking to a truck driver and he had heard their conversation. The truck driver was a big fellow with a round red face, and he had been telling the replacements which companies were good and which were not. As he meshed his gears and started to pull away he had shouted back, "Just hope you all don't get in F Company, that's where they stick the goddam Jewboys." There had been a roar of laughter, and someone had yelled after him, "If they stick me there, I'm resigning plumb out of the Army." And there had been more laughter. Goldstein flushed with anger recalling it. But more, he felt a hopelessness even in his rage, for he knew it would do him no good. He wished he had said something to the boy who had answered the truck driver, but the boy didn't matter. He was only trying to be smart, Goldstein thought. It was the truck driver. Goldstein saw again his brutal red face, and despite himself he felt fear. That
grobe jung,
that peasant, he said to himself. He felt an awful depression: that kind of face was behind all the pogroms against the Jews.

            He sat down beside Roth and looked off moodily at the ocean. When Roth finished talking, Goldstein nodded his head. "Why are they like that?" he asked.

            "Who?"

            "The Anti-Semiten. Why don't they ever learn? Why does God permit it?"

            Roth sneered. "God is a luxury I don't give myself." Goldstein struck the palm of his hand with his fist. "No, I just don't understand it. How can God look down on it and permit it? We're supposed to be the chosen people." He snorted. "Chosen! Chosen for
tsoris!"

            "Personally, I'm an agnostic," Roth said. For a time Goldstein stared at his hands, and then he smiled sadly. The lines deepened about his mouth, and he had a sarcastic indrawn look on his lips. "When the time comes," he said solemnly, "they won't ask you what kind of Jew you are."

            "I think you worry too much about those things," Roth said. Why was it, he asked himself, that so many Jews were filled with all kinds of old wives' tales? His parents at least were modern, but Goldstein was like an old grandfather full of mutterings and curses, certain he would die a violent death. "The Jews worry too much about themselves," Roth said. He rubbed his long sad nose. Goldstein was an odd fellow, he told himself; he was enthusiastic about almost everything to the point of being a moron, and yet just start talking about politics or economics or about anything that was current affairs, and like all Jews he would turn the conversation to the same topic.

            "If we don't worry," Goldstein said bitterly, "no one else will."

            Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was one, but that was unfair; it wasn't as if he took an interest, it was just an accident of birth. "Well, let's stop talking about it," he said.

            They sat watching the final brilliant striations of the sunset. After a time, Goldstein looked at his watch and squinted at the sun, which was almost entirely below the horizon. "It's two minutes later than last night," he told Roth, "I like to keep track of things like that."

            "I had a friend once," Roth said, "who used to work at the weather bureau in New York."

            "Did he?" Goldstein asked. "You know I always wanted to do work like that, but you need a good education for it. I understand it takes a lot of calculus."

            "He did go to college," Roth admitted. He preferred a conversation like this. It was less controversial. "Yes, he went to college," Roth repeated, "but just the same he was more lucky than most of us. I'm a graduate of CCNY and it never did me any good."

            "How can you say that?" Goldstein asked. "For years I wanted to be an engineer. Think of what a wonderful thing it is to be able to design anything you want." He sighed a little wistfully and then smiled. "Still I can't complain. I've been pretty lucky."

            "You're better off," Roth assured him. "I never found a diploma any help in getting a job." He snorted bitterly. "Do you know I went two years without any job at all. Do you know what that's like?"

            "My friend," Goldstein said, "you don't have to tell me. I've always had a job, but some of them are not worth mentioning." He smiled deprecatingly. "What's the use of complaining?" he asked. "Taken all together, we're pretty well off." He held out his hand, palm upward. "We're married and we have kids -- you have a child, don't you?"

            "Yes," said Roth. He drew out his wallet, and Goldstein peered through the evening light to discern the features of a handsome boy about two years old. "You've got a beautiful baby," he said, "and your wife is very. . . very pleasant looking." She was a plain woman with a pudgy face.

            "I think so," Roth said. He looked at the pictures of Goldstein's wife and child, and returned the compliments automatically. Roth was feeling a gentle warmth as he thought of his son. He was remembering the way his son used to awaken him on Sunday mornings. His wife would put the baby in bed with him, and the child would straddle his stomach and pull feebly at the hairs on Roth's chest, cooing with delight. It gave him a pang of joy to think of it, and then, back of it, a realization that he had never enjoyed his child as much when he had lived with him. He had been annoyed and irritable at having his sleep disturbed, and it filled him with wonder that he could have missed so much happiness when he had been so close to it. It seemed to him now that he was very near a fundamental understanding of himself, and he felt a sense of mystery and discovery as if he had found unseen gulfs and bridges in all the familiar drab terrain of his life. "You know," he said, "life is funny."