The Naked and the Dead (25 page)

            His ancestors pushed and labored and strained, drove their oxen, sweated their women, and moved a thousand miles.

            He pushed and labored inside himself and smoldered with an endless hatred.

            (You're all a bunch of fuggin whores)

            (You're all a bunch of dogs)

            (You're all deer to track)

            I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF

6

            The battle that began on the night of the storm carried over well into the next afternoon. The attack recon had repulsed was only one of many similar assaults that sputtered up and down the river for hours, and ended at last in a breathless and dreary stalemate. Almost every one of the line companies was involved at one time or another, and each time the pattern was repeated. A group of thirty or fifty or a hundred Japanese would try to cross the river against a squad or platoon of American soldiers, entrenched in foxholes with automatic weapons. That night the Japanese had struck first at Cummings's left flank near the water, and then at dawn had engaged the two companies near the mountain bluffs where recon held the extreme right flank. After both had failed, Toyaku attacked in early daylight the center of the line, and succeeded in giving one company a bad mauling, and forced another to retreat almost back to 2nd Battalion headquarters. The General, still at headquarters battery of the 151st, made a quick decision, confirmed the tactics he had decided upon the preceding night, and sent out orders that the center of the line was to hold its positions.

            Toyaku was able to send four hundred men across the river and four or five tanks, before the General's artillery and counterattacks by companies on the edge of the gap made it too expensive to continue. At the most dangerous moment for Cummings, it was still no worse than the problem of ejecting the rump of a fat man who had broken a hole through the stuffing of a couch, and was not spluttering and wriggling his backside in an effort to escape. The General attacked with his reserves, concentrated all the division's artillery on a natural clearing into which the Japanese behind his lines had been forced, and with the aid of his tanks, which had been held in readiness at a point only a quarter mile from the Japs' deepest penetration, succeeded in puncturing the rump. It was the biggest battle of the campaign to date, and the most successful. By late afternoon of that day the Japanese striking force was shattered, and the survivors disappeared into the jungle again, and were either pinched off one by one during the week that followed or succeeded in making their way back across the river to their own lines. This was the second time the General had routed a force which had penetrated his lines, and he gave Hearn a little lecture about it. "This kind of thing is what I call my dinner-table tactics. I'm the little lady who allows the lecher beside me to get his hand way up under my dress before I cut off his wrist."

            Tag ends of the battle spouted for a few days, and there were many local fire fights and patrol clashes, but the General, with what Hearn had to admit was unerring instinct, had cut through the subsidiary clashes, the confusing and contradictory patrol reports, to understand that the battle as far as Toyaku was concerned was over after his smash at the middle of the line had been absorbed. The General spent the next day in re-establishing the hole in his lines, and diverting again his reserve to its work on the road. Two or three days later, after a lot of patrol activity, he made an unopposed advance of over a mile, which brought his front elements within a few thousand yards of the Toyaku Line. He estimated it would take him another two weeks to bring the road up to his front, and in another week the Toyaku Line should be breached. He was exceptionally easy to get along with the week after the battle, and as a symptom of that, he was continually feeding Hearn his private military maxims. "Toyaku's through in an offensive sense," he told Hearn. "When the over-all strategy of your campaign is defensive you can figure on losing about a fifth of your force in counteroffensives, and then you've just got to dig in. Toyaku frittered it away. The Japanese brood their way through campaigns; they sit around restless until the tension gets too great and then they erupt. It's a fascinating paradox. They have that game of theirs,
go,
which is all feverish activity, all turning of flanks, and encirclements, and then when they fight they act like wounded animals who roar down clumsily when the flies become too goading. It's not the way to work it. In an army whenever you have unnecessary precautions, men guarding sectors which don't demand it, or being idle for some other reason than that they need the rest, then you've acted immorally as a commander. The less duplication, the less wasted effort, the greater it follows will be the pressure you exert on your opponent. And the greater will be the opportunities that arise for you."

            As a corollary of this, he had set his headquarters troops to rebuilding their bivouac two days after the battle. The tents went up again, the gravel walks in the officers' portion of the bivouac were filled in again, and the General's own tent had a floor of duckboards. Officers' mess in this bivouac had a better location, but after the storm it was improved even more with secondary bamboo ridgepoles which held the sides straight. A consignment of fresh meat came in, and headquarters company's ration of it was divided equally. One half went to the one hundred and eighty enlisted men in the bivouac at the time, and the other half went to the thirty-eight officers in officers' mess. The General's electric refrigerator was uncrated, and was fed from the gasoline generator that created all the electric power for the bivouac.

            Hearn was disgusted. And once again he was bothered by one of the minor enigmas about the General. The meat business had been a flagrant injustice, one which Hobart as the G-4 in command of assigning supplies would be quite capable of committing, but Hobart had not been responsible. Hearn had been in the General's tent when Hobart had come up with a grin and told Cummings that some fresh meat had come. The General had shrugged and then given some unmistakable suggestions on how it should be divided. It was incredible. The General with his undeniable perception must have known what the effect would be on the enlisted men, and yet he had disregarded the resentments it would cause. It could not have been to satisfy his belly, for Hearn watched him pick tastelessly at the fresh meat during the meals that followed, and he almost always left his plate half filled. Nor could it have been from habit; the General was quite aware of what he was doing. He considered it effective. After Hobart had left, the General had looked at Hearn blankly, his great pale eyes quite expressionless, and then unaccountably he had winked. "Have to keep you happy, Robert. Perhaps if the meals are better you won't be indulging your temper so much."

            "Very thoughtful of you, sir." And the General had roared suddenly with an odd choked mirth that began with a cascade of chuckles, progressed through a choking fit, and ended with him sitting upright in his chair and hawking his sputum into his silk monogrammed handkerchief.

            "I think it's about time a recreation tent was set up for the officers' use at night," he said at last. "You're not too busy right now, Robert. I'll put you in charge of it."

            An odd commission. But Hearn understood it finally. He told the first sergeant of headquarters company to give him a detail of men, had them clear the roots and grass from a plot of ground, cover it with gravel, and erect a squad tent. When it was up, a deep rain trench was dug all around it. A double entrance was contrived at the front to make it a blackout tent, and some strips of canvas from a discarded tent were used to drape over the lashed corners so that no light could leak out at night. When they had finished with that, Hearn spent an afternoon having them cut bamboo and erect a few writing tables, and two game tables. He had commanded them sullenly through the entire project, quite aware of their resentment toward him, always able to overhear the bitter muttered remarks that were meant for him. The General had given him this assignment because he knew he would hate it, and for that reason Hearn was determined to do a perfect job. He became very finicky about sloppy items in the tent's construction, and once or twice had an argument with the sergeant in command of the detail. All very fine, but that seemed a little too shallow a satisfaction for the General.

            The lesson beneath the lesson appeared a little later. The soldier who had been assigned to the operation of the generator in the daytime had been given the officers' recreation tent as an additional chore. He was supposed to furl the side flaps in the morning and let them down at night and fasten the sides. He was also, since the noise of the generator was considered too loud to be used at night, supposed to fill all the Coleman lanterns with kerosene, and light them.

            Hearn went into the recreation tent one evening several days after it had been completed, and found it still dark. A few officers were groping around and swearing to each other. "Hey, Hearn," one of them called to him, "how about getting on the ball and giving us some light?"

            He stalked over to the pup tent of the recreation tent orderly, and bawled him out. "What's the matter, Rafferty, do you have too many jobs to handle?"

            "Jesus, Lieutenant, I'm sorry. I just forgot about it."

            "Well, all right, hop to it, don't stand there looking at me." Hearn had found himself about to yell, "Get on the ball, man, will you," and after Rafferty got out of his tent and went jogging over to the motor pool to get some kerosene, Hearn had looked at him with disgust. Stupid ass, he thought, and immediately afterward, with a shock, he realized the trace of contempt he was beginning to feel for an enlisted man. It was slight, barely apparent, and yet it was there. They had tried to balk him when they were building the tent, they had indulged every tiny advantage they could. They had done it before they even worked with him, before they knew him; they had accepted him with an instinctive and immediate distrust, and he resented it.

            Suddenly he knew the General's lesson. A new element had been added. In the past when he worked with enlisted men he had been tough because he considered his sympathies had no place in a particular job. When men worked they generally resented their leader. That was unimportant. He had not resented them.

            And now there were the beginnings of resentment. The General's point was clear enough. He was an officer, and in functioning as an officer for a long enough time he would assume, whether he wanted to or not, the emotional prejudices of his class. The General was reminding him that he belonged to that class. He remembered Cummings's pale baleful eyes staring at him blankly, and then the inexplicable wink. "Have to keep you happy, Robert." It was a little clearer now. Hearn had known ever since he had been with the General that if he wanted to he could easily rise to a field officer's rank by the end of the war. And there was an ambition in him which responded to that, an ambition he distrusted. Cummings recognized it, Cummings had effectively told him then that if he wanted to, if he was strong enough to overcome the distastes and prejudices he felt toward officers, he could satisfy that ambition.

            Understand your class and work within its limits. Marxist lesson with a reverse twist.

            It disturbed Hearn deeply. He had been born in the aristocracy of the wealthy midwestern family, and although he had broken with them, had assumed ideas and concepts repugnant to them, he had never really discarded the emotional luggage of his first eighteen years. The guilts he made himself feel, the injustices that angered him were never genuine. He kept the sore alive by continually rubbing it, and he knew it. He knew also at this moment that out of all the reasons why he had begun to quarrel with Conn in officers' mess, one of the vital ones had been that he was afraid of not really caring enough about what Conn was saying. It was true of too many of his reactions. And since his direct self-interest could only move him back toward the ideas of his father, there was no other direction for him to turn, unless there was some other emotional basis for continuing in his particular isolated position on the Left. For a long time he had thought there was one, for even a longer period he had sustained his politics because his friends and acquaintances in New York assumed them as a matter of course, but now in the isolation of the Army, under the searching critique of the General's mind, his fingers were being pulled from the chinning bar.

            He walked back to the recreation tent and went inside. Rafferty had filled the lamps and lit them, and already the evening influx of officers had begun. Two card games had been started, and several of the officers were beginning to use the writing tables.

            "Hey, Hearn, you want to come in on some poker?" It was Mantelli, one of Hearn's few friends in the headquarters.

            "All right." Hearn pulled up a chair. Since the tent had been set up, Hearn had spent his evenings here in unstated defiance of the General. Actually he found it dull and uncomfortable, for it became tremendously hot inside and the air filled quickly with cigarette and cigar smoke, but this was a part of the continual sparring that went on between the General and himself. The General had wanted him to build the tent -- all right, he would use it. But, tonight, after his realization about Rafferty, the idea of seeing the General gave Hearn an intimation of dread. There had been very few people he ever feared, but he was beginning to think he was afraid of the General. The cards came around to him, and he shuffled them and dealt, playing mechanically without much interest. He could feel himself perspiring already, and he stripped his shirt and hung it on the back of his chair. It went this way every evening. By eleven o'clock virtually all the officers were in their undershirts, and the tent stank of sweat and smoke.