The Naked and the Dead (48 page)

            "If you give us the facts, Sergeant Lanning, it will have a very important bearing on your court-martial," Binner said.

            "Major, I don't know what to tell you," Lanning protested. He was a short rather stocky man with blond hair and pale-blue eyes.

            "The facts will be sufficient," Binner drawled in his sad voice.

            "Well, we went out on patrol, and since we'd gone to the same place the day before yesterday, I just coudn't see any point to it."

            "Was that for you to judge?"

            "No, sir, it wasn't, but I could see the men weren't too happy, and when we got out about halfway I just set my squad down in a little draw, and waited an hour, and then I came on back and gave my report."

            "And the report was completely false," Binner intoned. "You said you had been to a place to which. . .
in which
you hadn't even been within a mile of."

            In the midst of his anger, Cummings felt a mild contempt at the way Binner had mangled the sentence.

            "Yes, sir, that's true," Sergeant Lanning said.

            "You got the idea in precisely that manner, it just occurred to you, so to speak?"

            Cummings restrained himself from interrupting the questioning to speed it up.

            "I don't understand, Major?" Lanning asked.

            "How many other times have you dropped the ball on patrol?" Binner asked sadly.

            "This was the first time, sir."

            "What other sergeants in your company or battalion have been giving false and misleading patrol reports?"

            "None, sir, I never heard of any."

            The General walked up to him abruptly, and glared at him. "Lanning, do you ever want to go back to the States or do you want to rot over here in a prison camp?"

            "Sir," Lanning stammered, "I've been with the outfit for three years, and. . ."

            "I don't care if you've been with us for
twenty
years. What other sergeants have been giving false patrol reports?"

            "I don't know any, sir."

            "Have you got a sweetheart?"

            "I'm married, sir."

            "Do you want to see your wife again?"

            Lanning reddened. "She left me about a year ago, sir. I got a Dear John."

            The General's shoes made a dry scraping sound as he turned away. "Major, you can bring this man up for court-martial tomorrow." He paused in the doorway. "Lanning, I warn you, you'd better tell the truth. I want the name of every noncom in your company who's been doing this."

            "There weren't any I know of, sir."

            Cummings stalked out and walked across the bivouac, his knees weak with impotent anger. The cheek of Lanning, "There weren't any I know of, sir." The entire front was made up of noncoms like him, and the chances were that three-quarters of the reports they gave were false; probably even the line officers were faking their patrols. And the worst of it was that he could do nothing about it. If he was to bring Lanning up before a general court-martial, the sentence would be reviewed, and it would be common knowledge throughout the South Pacific that his men had become unreliable. Even if Lanning told him who the other noncoms were, he could take no action. The men who would replace them would probably be even worse. But he'd be damned if he'd send Lanning back to his company without any punishment. Let him wither on the stalk. They could wait until the campaign was over to bring him up to trial (if it ever ended) and in the meantime there could be any number of interrogations, any number of promises that he would be tried the next day or the day after. The General walked along, spurred by an angry satisfaction which fed itself. If that didn't break Lanning, there were other ways. But the men were going to learn if he had to rub their noses in the dirt that the line of their least discomfort lay in winning the campaign. They liked their bivouacs, did they? Well, there were methods of fixing that. Tomorrow there could be a general troop movement to one side or another, adjustments of a few hundred yards with new foxholes to be dug, new barbed wire to be laid, new tents to be put up. And if they started laying duckwalks again, and improving their latrines, there could be still another movement. It was the American's capacity for real estate improvement; build yourself a house, grow fat in it, and die.

            The discipline had to be tightened all through the division. If men were dicking off on patrols, then there were malingerers in the hospital. He'd have to send a memo down to Portable Surgical to crack down on all the doubtful cases. There was entirely too much coddling going on in the outfit, and there were too many men resisting his authority, thwarting him. Oh, they'd be happier with a new general in command, a butcher who would waste their lives to no purpose. Well, if they didn't perk up, they'd be having their butcher soon. There were always enough military hacks around.

            In a fury he came back to his tent, sat down at his desk, and found himself doodling with a pencil. He threw it down and stared with a febrile loathing at the map board by his cot. By now, it was a taunt to him.

            But something was wrong with the tent. Something was changed since Clellan had fixed it this morning. He turned around, gazed about the room with a feeling of inordinate anxiety.

            "God!" It came out as something between a grunt and a choked exclamation. A deep pang of pain and fear lanced through his chest. On the middle of his floor was the match and the cigarette butt, mashed into the duckboards in a tangled ugly excrement of black ash, soiled paper, and brown tobacco.

            There was a note for him, too, on the desk, which he had not noticed:

Sir,

            Waited for you but you didn't show up. I brought back the supplies you indicated.

Hearn.

            Then it was Hearn who had soiled his floor. Of course. Cummings walked over to the match and cigarette butt, picked them up with intense distaste and dropped them in a wastebasket. There was a little black ash left, which he scattered with his foot. Despite himself he felt obliged to keep sniffing his fingers although he loathed the odor of a dead cigarette.

            Deep in his bowels something had reacted and a twinge of diarrhea made him perspire. He reached over, picked up his field telephone, cranked it once, and murmured into the receiver, "Find Hearn and send him over to my tent." Then he rubbed vigorously at the flesh on the left side of his face, which seemed to have grown numb. "To do
that
." His rage was just beginning to function; a furious uncontrolled anger tightened his mouth, set his heart beating over-rapidly, and tingled in the tips of his fingers. Almost unbearable. He walked over to his refrigerator and poured himself a glass of water, which he drank with short distraught swallows. For an instant, deep beneath the currents of his rage, there was another feeling, an odd compound of disgust and fear perhaps, and something else, a curious troubled excitement, a momentary submission as if he had been a young girl undressing before the eyes of a roomful of strange men. But his rage choked this off, expanded inside him until it clotted all the conduits of his emotion, and left him trembling with an unendurable wrath. If he had been holding an animal in his hands at that instant he would have strangled it.

            And with it was another sort of fear, overt and aware; what Hearn had done was equivalent to a soldier's laying hands on his person. To Cummings it was a symbol of the independence of his troops, their resistance to him. The fear, the respect his soldiers held for him now was a rational one, an admission of his power to punish them, and that was not enough. The other kind of fear was lacking, the unreasoning one in which his powers were immense and it was effectively a variety of sacrilege to thwart him. The cigarette butt on the floor was a threat, a denial of him, as fully as Lanning's defection, or a Japanese attack on his lines, and he had to meet it directly and ruthlessly. The longer you tarried with resistance the greater it became. It had to be destroyed.

            "You want to see me, sir?" It was Hearn entering his tent.

            Cummings turned around slowly, and looked at him. "Yes, sit down, I want to talk to you." His voice had been cold and even. With Hearn before him, his anger became incisive, controllable, an instrument of his actions. With great deliberation he lit a cigarette, his hands steady now, and exhaled it leisurely. "It's been a long time since we've had a little talk, Robert."

            "Yes, sir, it has been."

            Not since the night of the chess game. And they were both aware of it. Cummings surveyed Hearn with loathing. Hearn was an embodiment of the one mistake, the one
indulgence
he had ever permitted himself, and it had been intolerable to be with him since then. "My wife is a bitch, Robert." Cummings writhed at the memory, revolted with himself for that temporary weakness. At that time. . .

            There was Hearn before him now, sprawled in the camp chair, his large body not nearly so relaxed as it seemed, his sullen mouth, his cold eyes staring back at him. For a while he had thought there was something in Hearn, a brilliance to match his own, an aptitude for power, the particular hunger that had meaning, but he had been wrong. Hearn was a vacuum with surface reactions, surface irritations. No doubt he had mashed the cigarette on an impulse.

            "I'm going to give you a lecture, Robert." Until now Cummings had had no idea of how he would proceed. He had trusted his instincts to direct him. And this was the way. Put it on the intellectual frame, let Hearn slip into it, be unaware that there was going to be an end product today.

            Hearn lit a cigarette. "Yes, sir?" He was still holding the match in his hand, and they both looked at it. There was a quite perceptible pause while Hearn fingered it, and then leaned forward to drop it in an ashtray.

            "You're remarkably neat," Cummings said sourly.

            Hearn's eyes lifted, searched his for an instant, wary, judging his answer. "Family upbringing," he said shortly.

            "You know, it seems to me there are things, Robert, you could have learned from your father."

            "I didn't know you knew him," Hearn said quietly.

            "I'm familiar with the type." Cummings stretched. Now the other question while Hearn was unready for it. "Have you ever wondered, Robert, why we're fighting this war?"

            "Do you want a serious answer, sir?"

            "Yes."

            Hearn kneaded his thighs with his large hands. "I don't know, I'm not sure. With all the contradictions, I suppose there's an objective right on our side. That is, in Europe. Over here, as far as I'm concerned, it's the imperialism tossup. Either we louse up Asia or Japan does. And I imagine our methods will be a little less drastic."

            "Is that your contribution?"

            "I don't pretend to read history in advance. I'll be able to give you the real answer in a century probably." He shrugged. "I'm surprised that you want my opinion, General." His eyes had become lazy again, studiedly indifferent. Hearn had poise. That was undeniable.

            "It seems to me, Robert, you can do a little better than that."

            "All right, I can. There's an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the. . . the, eh, trappings of the lower. We might easily go Fascist after we win, and then the answer's really a problem." He puffed at his cigarette. "I don't go in for the long views. For want of a better idea I just assume it's a bad thing when millions of people are killed because one joker has to get some things out of his system."

            "Not that you
really
care, Robert."

            "Probably not. But until you show me some other idea to replace it, I'll hold to this one."

            Cummings grinned at him. His anger had subsided to a cold effective resolve. Hearn was fumbling now, he had noticed that in him. Whenever Hearn had to search his ideas he was obviously uncomfortable, obviously trying to avoid the other conclusions.

            Hearn seemed absorbed for just a moment. "We're moving toward greater organization, and I don't see how the left can win that battle in America. There're times when I think it's Gandhi who's right."

            Cummings laughed out loud. "You know you couldn't have picked a more unperceptive man. Passive resistance, eh. You'd be good in that role. You and Clellan and Gandhi."

            Hearn sat up a little straighter in his chair. The noon sun, harsh now that the overcast had blown away, glinted cruelly over the bivouac, threw into bold relief the shadows under the flaps of the tent. About a hundred yards away, on a downhill slope through the sparse foliage, Cummings watched the chow line, two hundred and fifty men long, trudge slowly forward.

            "It seems to me," Hearn said, "Clellan's more in your line. And while we're on that you might tell him that the flowers are your idea." Cummings laughed again. That had taken effect then. He opened his eyes widely, conscious of the effect their bald white surfaces would give, and then he slapped his thigh in a facsimile of mirth. "Are you getting enough liquor, Robert?" Of course, that was why he had crushed the cigarette on the floor.

            Hearn made no answer, but his jaws quivered just perceptibly.

            Cummings sat back, enjoying himself. "We're wandering a little far afield. I was going to explain the war to you."

            "Yes, if you would." Hearn's sharp voice, slightly unpleasant, was exhibiting the least bit of irritation.

            "I like to call it a process of historical energy. There are countries which have latent powers, latent resources, they are full of potential energy, so to speak. And there are great concepts which can unlock that, express it. As kinetic energy a country is organization, co-ordinated effort, your epithet, fascism." He moved his chair slightly. "Historically the purpose of this war is to translate America's potential into kinetic energy. The concept of fascism, far sounder than communism if you consider it, for it's grounded firmly in men's actual natures, merely started in the wrong country, in a country which did not have enough intrinsic potential power to develop completely. In Germany with that basic frustration of limited physical means there were bound to be excesses. But the dream, the concept was sound enough." Cummings wiped his mouth. "As you put it, Robert, not too badly, there's a process of osmosis. America is going to absorb that dream, it's in the business of doing it now. When you've created power, materials, armies, they don't wither of their own accord. Our vacuum as a nation is filled with released power, and I can tell you that we're out of the backwaters of history now."