The Naked and the Dead (27 page)

            "You people, you people," the General parroted. "That's a bit of Marxism, isn't it, the great big capitalist conspiracy. Just how do you know so much about Marxism?"

            "I've played around with it."

            "I doubt it. I doubt if you
really
have." The General pinched the butt of his cigarette reflectively. "You're misreading history if you see this war as a grand revolution. It's power concentration."

            Hearn shrugged. "I'm a poor history student, I'm no thinker, I just think it's bad sense to have men hating you."

            "Again I say it's not important if they're afraid of you. Robert, stop and think, with all the hate there's been in the world, there have been surprisingly few revolutions." He ticked his chin softly with his fingernail, a little sensuously, as if he were absorbed in the scraping sound of his beard. "You can even see the Russian revolution as a space-organization progress. The machine techniques of this century demand consolidation, and with that you've got to have fear, because the majority of men must be subservient to the machine, and it's not a business they instinctively enjoy."

            Hearn shrugged again. This discussion had taken the form it invariably assumed. The more intangible and inchoate criteria he tried to use still had value, but to someone who thought like the General, his ideas would appear no more than sentiment, false sentiment, as Cummings had told him so many times. Still he made an effort. "There are other things," he said quietly. "I don't see where you can dismiss the continual occurrence and re-forming of certain great ethical ideas."

            The General smiled slightly. "Robert, politics have no more relation to history than moral codes have to the needs of any particular man."

            Epigrams and more epigrams. He felt a certain revulsion. "General, by the time you get done after this war, working out the next bigger
consolidation,
the American in the 'forties is going to have the same kind of anxiety that the Europeans had in the 'thirties when they knew the next war would finish them."

            "Probably. The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety."

            "Aaahr." Hearn lit a cigarette, and found with surprise that his hands were shaking. The General was transparent for this single moment. Cummings had begun this argument purposely, had re-established the poise, the unique superior adaptation he had been lacking, for whatever reason, when they had entered the tent.

            "You're too stubborn ever to give in, Robert." The General stood up and walked over to his foot locker. "To tell you the truth. I didn't ask you over here for a discussion. I thought perhaps we might have a game of chess together."

            "All right." Hearn was surprised, a little uneasy. "I don't think I'll give you much of a battle."

            "We'll see." The General set up a small folding table between them, and began placing the pieces on the board. Hearn had talked to him about chess once or twice, and the General had spoken vaguely of playing, but Hearn had discounted it. "You really want to play?" he asked.

            "Certainly."

            "If someone walks in, it'll be a pretty sight."

            The General grinned. "Clandestine, eh?" He had finished arranging the pieces, and he picked up a red and a white pawn, hid one in each of his fists and then extended them for Hearn to choose. "I'm rather fond of this set," the General said genially. "It's hand-carved ivory, not really so dear as you'd think, but the man who made it is a pretty indisputably a craftsman."

            Hearn, without comment, picked the red pawn, and after replacing them the General made the opening move. Hearn gave a conventional response, settled his head comfortably in his large hands, and tried to study the board. But he found himself nervous. He was feeling both excited and depressed; the conversation had troubled him, and he was bothered by the fact that he was playing chess with the General. It made everything between them more overt. There seemed something vaguely indecent about it, and he entered the game with a feeling that it would be disastrous for him to win.

            He played through the first few moves rather carelessly. He was really not thinking at all, listening instead to the occasional muted rumble of the artillery, the steady absorbed flickering of the Coleman lantern. Once or twice he thought he heard the foliage soughing in the bivouac outside, and the sound made him gloomy. He caught himself staring at the rapt simple concentration on the General's face. His expression was similar to the one he had assumed on the beach invasion day, or on the night they had driven in the jeep, and again it was impressive in its force and direction.

            Hearn woke up to realize he was in trouble after only six moves. Sloppily, without any real consideration, he had violated a principle by moving his knight twice before his development was completed. His position was not yet dangerous, the knight was only in the fourth rank, and its squares of retreat could be opened easily enough, but the General was opening with an odd attack. Hearn began really to study the game. By now the General could win by completing his development and extracting all the juice out of the slight positional advantage he would have on completion. But it would be a long contest, and the end game would undoubtedly be difficult. Instead the General was launching a pawn attack which would be very embarrassing if it failed, for Cummings's development would be backward, and his king's pawns would have to be opened.

            Hearn pondered his responses, and lost himself quickly in the dizzying heights of chess, where he held the entire position in one portion of his mind while investigating the numerous answers the General might make to each move, and the correspondingly more complex replies he himself could manage. Then he would relinquish that approach and try to discern the variations that might arise from moving another piece.

            Yet it was hopeless. With almost frightening skill, Hearn felt himself being harassed, then threatened, then strangled by the advance of the General's pawns. Hearn had been on his college chess team, and at different periods in his life he had been tremendously interested in the game. He was a good enough player to realize how very good the General was, good enough to understand something of a man's nature by the style in which he played, and the General had been brilliant in his conception, and coldly efficient in extracting every possible advantage from the slight superiority he had had at the beginning. Hearn conceded on the twenty-fifth move after losing a knight and a pawn in exchange for two pawns, and sat back in his chair fatigued. The game had caught him, piqued his interest, and he felt a sullen desire to play again.

            "You're not bad," the General said.

            "I'm fair," Hearn muttered. Now that the.game was over, he was aware once more of the jungle sounds outside the tent.

            The General was putting the pieces back in the box, seeming to cherish each one with his fingertips before placing it in its green plush container. "This is really my game, Robert. If I have a single passion, it's chess."

            What did the General want of him? Hearn felt suddenly badgered; their discussion, this game, seemed to follow out of some inexorable want behind the well-groomed and unresponsive features of the General. An inexplicable mood caught Hearn, and his sense of oppression returned, magnified a little. The air in the tent seemed heavier somehow.

            "Chess," Cummings stated, "is inexhaustible. What a concentration of life it is really."

            Hearn's sullenness was increasing. "I don't think so," he said, listening to the accents of his own clear sharp voice with something like distaste. "The thing about chess that used to intrigue me, and ended by being just boring, is that there's nothing remotely like it in life."

            "Just what do you think warfare is essentially?"

            They were off again. Hearn wanted to avoid a discussion this time, he was weary of being maneuvered by the General. He felt stubborn. For an instant he felt like striking the General, seeing the gray hair suddenly messed, the General's mouth leaking blood. The impulse was powerful and momentary. When it left, he felt merely badgered again. "I don't know, but warfare certainly isn't chess. You might make a case for the Navy, where it's all maneuvering on open flat surfaces with different units of fire power, where it's all Force, Space and Time, but war is like a bloody football game. You start off with a play and it never quite works out as you figured it would."

            "It's more complicated, but it comes to the same thing."

            Hearn slapped his thigh with sudden exasperation. "By God, there're more pages to the book than you've read. You take a squad of men or a company of men -- what the hell do you know about what goes on in their heads? Sometimes I wonder how you can have the responsibility of sending them out on something. Doesn't it ever drive you crazy?"

            "That's where you're always missing the boat, Robert. In the Army the idea of individual personality is just a hindrance. Sure, there are differences among men in any particular Army unit, but they invariably cancel each other out, and what you're left with is a value rating. Such and such a company is good or poor, effective or ineffective for such or such a mission. I work with grosser techniques, common denominator techniques."

            "You're up so damn high you don't see anything at all. The moral calculus on anything is too involved ever to be able decently to make a decision."

            "Nevertheless, you make the decisions and they work out or they don't."

            There was something unclean about having a conversation like this, while somewhere out on the front a man might be rigid with terror in his foxhole. Hearn's voice was a little shrill as if that terror were somehow communicated to him. "How do you work out something like this? You have men who have been away from America for a year and a half. How can you calculate whether it's better so many be killed and the rest get home faster, or they all stay over here, and go to pot, and have their wives cheat on them. How do you tot up something like that?"

            "The answer is, I don't concern myself with that." The General ticked his beard again with his fingernail. He spoke after a little hesitation. "What's the matter, Hearn? I didn't know you were married."

            "I'm not."

            "Leave a girl behind, get a Dear John?"

            "No, there're no loose ends in back of me."

            "Then why all this concern about women 'cheating'? It's in their nature to do that."

            Hearn grinned with a sudden relish, a little amazed at his own audacity. "What's the matter, sir, speaking from personal experience?" He remembered immediately afterward that the General was married, apparently a piece of minor information, for the General had never spoken about it, and he had learned it from some other officer. He regretted the statement he had just made, however.

            "Maybe from personal experience, maybe," the General said. His voice changed abruptly. "I'd like you to remember, Robert, that every liberty you take is with my sufferance. I think you went a little too far."

            "I'm sorry."

            "You can shut up."

            Hearn was silent, watching the General's face, which was remote. His eyes had contracted, looked almost as if they were supporting something about ten inches from his face. Two spots of white had formed beneath his lower lip, almost directly under the corners of his mouth.

            "The truth is, Robert, my wife is a bitch."

            "Oh."

            "She's done just about everything she could to humiliate me."

            Hearn was amazed, and then revolted. That self-pity had appeared again in Cummings's voice. You didn't go around telling things like that, at least not in that tone of voice. Apparently, there was the General and there was the General. "Well, I'm sorry, sir," he mumbled at last.

            The Coleman lantern was dying, and its flickers threw long shifting diagonals of light through the tent. "Are you, Robert, are you really? Does anything ever touch you?" For that single instant the General's voice was naked. But he extended his arm and adjusted the lantern again. "You know you're really inhuman," the General said.

            "Perhaps."

            "You never grant a thing, do you?"

            Was
that
what he meant? Hearn stared into his eyes, which were luminous at the moment, almost beseeching. He had an intuition that if he remained motionless long enough the General would slowly extend his arm, touch his knee perhaps. No, that was ridiculous.

            But Hearn stood up with a sudden agitated motion, and walked a few steps to the other end of the tent, where he stood motionless for a moment, staring at the General's cot.

            His cot. No, get away from there, before Cummings grabbed that interpretation. He wheeled around, and looked at the General who had not moved, had sat like a large and petrified bird, waiting. . . waiting for what must be indefinable.

            "I don't know what you mean, General." His voice fortunately was crisp.

            "It doesn't matter." The General looked at his hands. "If you have to take a leak, Robert, for God's sake go outside and stop pacing around."

            "Yes, sir."

            "We never did finish that argument."

            This was better. "Well, what do you want me to admit, that you're a God?"

            "You know, if there is a God, Robert, he's just like me."

            "Uses the common denominator techniques."

            "Exactly."

            Now, they could talk talk talk. And yet for the moment they were quiet. Between them at this instant was the uncomfortable awkward realization that they did not like each other at all.