The Naked and the Dead (84 page)

            Nevertheless, things had changed. Reynolds had sent him a confidential memo that Army might not frown completely on the Botoi idea now, and when he saw them he could maneuver it. That type of favor was manageable.

            In the meantime he had been playing the fraud with himself, he knew. All day as he had sat in the operations tent, reading the reports that had come in, he had been a little annoyed. He had felt like a politician on election night, he thought, who was watching the party candidate win and feeling chagrined because he had tried to nominate another man. The damn thing was unimaginative, stale, any commander could have mounted it as successfully, and it would be galling to admit that Army was right.

            But of course they weren't. There was going to be trouble ahead, and they refused to accept it. For a moment Cummings thought of the reconnaissance patrol he had sent to the other side of the mountain, and he shrugged. If that came off, if they brought back a report of some value, if indeed he could manage to send a company over their route, and pull off the Botoi Bay invasion that way, it would be fine, impressive. But there were too many chances against it. The best thing was to dismiss Hearn's patrol from his calculations until it returned.

            Despite all his internal objections he had been busy, he had given all his attention to the advance, concentrated on all the reports that came in. It had been exhausting, demanding work, and by nightfall he was tired, needed some diversion. Almost always when the division was in action he found it stimulating to tour the front daily, but at night now it would be impossible for him to inspect the infantry positions. He decided instead to visit his artillery bivouacs.

            Cummings phoned for his jeep and driver, and about eight P.M. he set out on the road. The moon was almost full. He relaxed in the front seat of the jeep, and watched the play of the headlights against the jungle foliage. They were far enough behind the lines to avoid blacking out, and the General smoked idly, feeling the wind wash pleasantly against his face. He felt drained, yet still tense; the passing sentient traces of the ride, the sound of the motor, the jouncing against the seat cushions, the smell of his cigarette, lulled him, caressed his nerves like a warm lapping bath. He began to fell cheerful and pleasantly empty.

            After a fifteen-minute ride, they reached a battery of 105s off the side of the road. On an impulse he told his driver to turn in, and the jeep jounced over a crude culvert made by aligning empty gasoline drums in a ditch and covering them with earth. The wheels sloughed through the mud of the motor pool, and they came to a halt on a stretch of relatively dry earth. The guard at the entrance had phoned the Captain, who came up to the jeep to meet the General.

            "Sir?"

            Cummings nodded. "Just looking around. How's the battery coming?"

            "Fine, sir."

            "Service battery was supposed to bring up two hundred rounds about an hour ago. You get them?"

            "Yes, sir." The Captain paused. "Have your touch on everything, don't you, sir?"

            This pleased Cummings. "Have you told the men how successful the battalion concentration was this afternoon?" he asked.

            "I did say something about it, sir."

            "You can't emphasize it enough. When the men have completed a good fire mission, it's smart to tell them so. It's good for the men to have a sense of participation."

            "Yes, sir."

            The General strode away from the jeep with the Captain tagging at his side. "Your routine orders are for harassing fire every fifteen minutes, is that correct?"

            "Since last night, sir."

            "How're you resting your cannoneers?"

            The Captain smiled deprecatingly. "I've cut the gun crews in half, sir, and each half-squad is on for an hour, firing four missions. That way the men miss only an extra hour's sleep."

            "I think that's a pretty good setup," the General agreed. They crossed a small clearing which contained the battery mess tent and the orderly room tent. In the moonlight the tents were silver, and their roofs sloped upward precipitously to give them the appearance of miniature cathedrals. They passed through, and walked along a footpath which cut for fifty feet through a patch of brush. On the other side the four howitzers were extended in a short battery front, not more than fifty yards separating the two flank pieces, their nozzles pointing above the jungle in the direction of the Japanese lines. The moonlight played over them in random mottled patches, tracing over the barrel and trails the stippled outline of the leaves above. Behind the guns five squad tents were dispersed irregularly in the brush, almost blending into the deep shadows of the jungle. This was virtually the entire battery: the motor pool, the supply and mess, the howitzers, and the tents. The General surveyed it, scrutinized the few cannoneers who sprawled between the trails of one of the 105s, and had a mild nostalgia. For a moment or two he was weary, felt an unimportant passing regret that he could not be a cannoneer himself with only his belly to be filled, and nothing more odious to consider than the labor of digging a gun emplacement. A curious uncharacteristic mood mounted in him, and furnished a new kind of self-pity, a gentle indulgent one.

            In the squad tent he could hear an occasional burst of laughter, a few raucous jeers.

            Always, he had had to be alone, he had chosen it that way, and he would not renege now, nor did he want to. The best things, the things worth doing, in the last analysis had be done alone. The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful. Cummings stared at the vast dark bulk of Mount Anaka, visible in the darkness as a deeper shadow, a greater mass than the sky above it. It was the axis of the island, its keystone.

            There's an affinity, he told himself. If one wanted to get mystical about it, the mountain and he understood each other. Both of them, from necessity, were bleak and alone, commanding the heights. Tonight, Hearn might have negotiated the pass, be traveling under the shadow of Anaka itself. He felt an odd pang, composed of anger and expectation, not quite certain whether he wanted Hearn to succeed. The problem of what he must do with him eventually was still not settled, could not be unless Hearn did not come back. And again he was uncertain what he felt, was mildly troubled.

            The Captain disturbed his reverie. "We're going to fire in a minute, sir. Would you like to watch?"

            The General started. "Yes." He strolled beside the Captain to the artillery piece about which the cannoneers were grouped. As they approached, the men finished adjusting the piece, and one of them loaded the long slim shell into the breech. They became silent, stiffened, as Cummings approached, standing about awkwardly, their hands behind their backs, uncertain whether to come completely to attention. "At ease, men," Cummings said.

            "All set, DiVecchio?" one of them asked.

            "Yeah."

            The General looked at DiVecchio, a short squat man with his sleeves rolled up, and a tangle of black hair covering his forehead. City-runt, the General thought with a mixture of condescension and contempt.

            One of them giggled roughly out of embarrassment and constraint. They were all conscious of him, terribly conscious, he realized, like youths outside a cigarette store, ill at ease because a woman was talking to them. If I had just walked by, they would have muttered, perhaps even jeered at me. It gave him an odd sharp pleasure almost thrilling.

            "I think
I'll
fire the gun, Captain," he said.

            The cannoneers stared at him. One of them was humming to himself. "You men mind if I fire the gun?" the General asked pleasantly.

            "Huh?" DiVecchio asked. "Naw, why no, sir."

            The General walked over to the position of No. 1 man outside the trails by the elevating mechanism, and grasped the lanyard. It was a foot-length of cord with a knob at the end. "How many seconds, Captain?"

            "Fire in five seconds, sir." The Captain had looked at his watch nervously.

            The knob of the lanyard hefted pleasantly in the General's palm. He stared at the complicated obscured mechanism of the breech and the carriage springs, his mind hovering delicately between anxiety and excitement. Automatically he had posed his body in a relaxed confident posture; it was instinctive with him to appear unconcerned whenever he was doing something unfamiliar. The mass of the gun, however, troubled him; he had not fired an artillery piece since West Point, and he was remembering not the noise nor the concussion, but a time in World War I when he had been under an artillery barrage for two hours. It had been the most powerful single fear of his life, and an echo of it now was rebounding through his mind. Just before he fired he could see it all, the sharp detumescent roar of the gun, the long soaring plunge of the shell through the night sky, its downward whistle, and the moments of complete and primordial terror for the Japanese at the other end when it landed. An odd ecstasy stirred his limbs for a moment, was gone before he was quite aware of it.

            The General pulled the lanyard.

            The muzzle blast deafened him momentarily, left him shaken and numb by its unaccustomed force. He felt rather than saw the great twenty-foot flambeau of flame that discharged from the muzzle, heard dumbly the long billowing murmurs of the discharge through the dark closeted aisles of the jungle. The balloon tires, the trails were still vibrating gently from the recoil.

            It had all taken a fraction of a second. Even the backward blast of wind had passed him, roiled his hair and closed his eyes before he was conscious of it. The General was recovering his sense-impressions by degrees, clutching at them in the wake of the explosion like a man chasing his hat in a gale. He took a breath, smiled, heard himself say in an even voice, "I wouldn't like to be at the other end." He noticed the cannoneers, the Captain, after he spoke. He had said it because a part of his mind always considered the objective situation; consciously he had been unaware of the men about him as he talked. He strode away slowly, drawing the Captain with him.

            "Artillery is a bit more impressive at night," he murmured. His poise was addled slightly. He would not have said this to a stranger if he were still not absorbed in the impact of firing the howitzer.

            "I know what you mean, sir. I always get a kick out of firing the battery at night."

            Then it was all right. Cummings realized he had almost made a slip. "Your battery seems in good order, Captain."

            "Thank you, sir."

            But he was not listening. The General was paying attention to the silent rhapsodic swoop of the shell, was following it in his mind's eye. How long did it take? Perhaps half a minute? His ears were alerted for the sound of its explosion.

            "I never quite get over it, sir. It must be bloody hell at the other end."

            Cummings was listening to the dull muted tones of the explosion, miles away in the jungle. He saw in his mind the bright destroying bouquet of flame, the screams and the rent iron singing through the air. I wonder if it killed anyone? he thought. He realized the tenseness with which he had been waiting for the shell to land by the weak absorptive relief that washed through his body. All his senses felt gratified, exhausted. The war, or rather,
war,
was odd, he told himself a little inanely. But he knew what it meant. It was all covered with tedium and routine, regulations and procedure, and yet there was a naked quivering heart to it which involved you deeply when you were thrust into it. All the deep dark urges of man, the sacrifices on the hilltop, and the churning lusts of the night and sleep, weren't all of them contained in the shattering screaming burst of a shell, the man-made thunder and light? He did not think these things coherently, but traces of them, their emotional equivalents, pictures and sensations, moved him into a state of acute sensitivity. He felt cleaned in an acid bath, and all of him, even his fingertips, was prepared to grasp the knowledge behind all this. He dwelt pleasurably in many-webbed layers of complexity. The troops out in the jungle were disposed from the patterns in his mind, and yet at this moment he was living on many levels at once; in firing the gun he was a part of himself. All the roaring complex of odors and sounds and sights, multiplied and re-multiplied by all the guns of the division, was contained in a few cells of his head, the faintest crease of his brain. All of it, all the violence, the dark co-ordination had sprung from his mind. In the night, at that moment, he felt such power that it was beyond joy; he was calm and sober.

            Later, returning to his headquarters in the jeep, he was in an excellent mood. His body was still keyed, still the least bit feverish, but the excitement it caused him went beyond restlessness, and charged his brain to intense activity. Yet it was random casual thought; he amused himself the way a child would sport in a toy store if given complete freedom to touch everything and cast it away when tired. Cummings was not unconscious of the process. Any new physical action always aroused him, infused his perceptions.

            When he reached his tent, he looked cursorily at the few dispatches that had collected in his absence. He had no taste at this moment for going through them, for performing the detailed labors of digesting and committing to memory the important portions. For an instant he stepped outside his tent and breathed the night air again. The bivouac had become silent, almost ghostly, and the moonlight illumined the mists in the clearing, covered the foliage with a tenuous silver netting. In his mood everything familiar seemed unreal. How alien the earth is at night, he sighed.

            In the tent, he hesitated a moment, and then unlocked a small green filing cabinet on the side of his desk, removing from it a heavy notebook bound in black like a law ledger. It was a journal in which he had jotted down his private ideas for many years. There had been a time when he had told them to Margaret, but after the first year or two of their marriage, when they had turned away from each other, the importance of the journal had increased, and in the years that had followed he had filled many ledgers, sealed them, and stored them away.