The Naked and the Dead (12 page)

            There was a kind of guilt in being an officer. They had all felt it in the beginning; out of OCS the privileges had been uncomfortable at first, but it was a convenient thing to forget, and there were always the good textbook reasons, good enough to convince yourself if you wanted to be quit of it. Only a few of them still kicked the idea of guilt around in their heads.

            The guilt of birth perhaps.

            There was such a thing in the Army. It was subtle, there were so many exceptions that it could be called no more than a trend, and yet it was there. He, himself: rich father, rich college, good jobs, no hardship which he had not assumed himself; he fulfilled it, and many of his friends did too. It was not true so much for the ones he had known at college. They were 4-F, or enlisted men, or majors in the Air Corps, or top-secret work in Washington or even in CO camps, but all the men he had known in prep school were now ensigns or lieutenants. A class of men born to wealth, accustomed to obedience. . . but that made it incorrect already. It wasn't obedience, it was the kind of assurance that he had, or Conn had, or Hobart, or his father, or even the General.

            The General. A trace of his resentment returned again. If not for the General he would be doing now what he should have done. An officer had some excuse only if he was in combat. As long as he remained here he would be dissatisfied with himself, contemptuous of the other officers, even more contemptuous than was normal for him. There was nothing in this headquarters, and yet everything, an odd satisfaction over and above the routine annoyances. Working with the General had its unique compensations.

            Once again, resentment, and the other thing, awe perhaps. Hearn had never known anyone quite like the General, and he was partially convinced the General was a great man. It was not only his unquestioned brilliance; Hearn had known people whose minds were equal to General Cummings's. It was certainly not his intellect, which was amazingly spotty, marred by great gaps. What the General had was an almost unique ability to extend his thoughts into immediate and effective action, and this was an aptitude which might not be apparent for months even when one was working with him.

            There were many contradictions in the General. He had essentially, Hearn believed, a complete indifference to the comforts of his own person, and yet he lived with at least the luxuries which were requisite for a general officer. On invasion day, after the General landed on the beach, he had been on a phone almost all day long, composing his battle tactics off the cuff, as it were, and for five, six, eight hours he had directed the opening phases of the campaign without taking a halt, indeed without referring once to a map, or pausing for a decision after his line officers had given him what information they possessed. It had been a remarkable performance. His concentration had been almost fantastic.

            Once in the late afternoon of that first day, Hobart had come up to the General and asked, "Sir, where do you want to set up headquarters bivouac?"

            And Cummings had snarled, "Anywhere, man, anywhere," in shocking contrast to the perfect manners with which he usually spoke to his officers. For that instant the façade had been peeled back, and a naked animal closeted with its bone had been exposed. It had drawn a left-handed admiration from Hearn; he would not have been surprised if the General had slept on a bed of spikes.

            But two days later, when the first urgency of the campaign was over, the General had had his tent location moved twice, and had reprimanded Hobart gently for not having picked a more level site. There was really no end to the contradictions in him. His reputation in the South Pacific was established; before Hearn had come to the division he had heard nothing but praise for his techniques, a sizable tribute for those rear areas where gossip was the best diversion. Yet the General never believed this. Once or twice when their conversation had become very intimate, Cummings had muttered to him, "I have enemies, Robert, powerful enemies." The self-pity in his voice had been disgustingly apparent and quite in contrast to the clear cold sense with which he usually estimated men and events. He had been advertised in advance as the most sympathetic and genial officer in a division command, his charm was well known, but Hearn had discovered quite early that he was a tyrant, a tyrant with a velvet voice, it is true, but undeniably a tyrant.

            He was also a frightful snob. Hearn, recognizing himself as a snob, could be sympathetic, although his own snobbery was of a different order; Hearn always classified people even if it took him five hundred types to achieve any kind of inclusiveness. The General's snobbery was of a simpler order. He knew every weakness and every vice of his staff officers, and yet a colonel was superior to a major regardless of their abilities. It made his friendship with Hearn even more inexplicable. The General had selected him as his aide after a half-hour interview when Hearn had come to the division, and slowly, progressively, the General had confided in him. That in itself was understandable; like all men of great vanity, the General was looking for an intellectual equal, or at least the facsimile of an intellectual equal to whom he could expound his nonmilitary theories, and Hearn was the only man on his staff who had the intellect to understand him. But today, just a half hour ago, the General had fished him out of what was about to explode into a dangerous situation. In the two weeks since they had landed he had been in the General's tent talking with him almost every night, and that sort of thing would get around very quickly in the tiny confines of this bivouac. The General had to be aware of it, had to know the resentments this would induce, the danger to morale. Yet against his self-interest, his prejudices, the General held on to him still and, even more, exerted himself in unfolding the undeniable fascination of his personality.

            Hearn knew that if it were not for the General he would have asked for a transfer long before the division had come to Anopopei. There was the knowledge of his position as a servant, the unpleasant contrasts always so apparent to him between the enlisted men and the officers. There was most of all the disgust for the staff officers he concealed so unsuccessfully. It was the riddle of what made the General tick that kept Hearn on. After twenty-eight years the only thing that interested him vitally was to uncover the least concealed quirks of any man or woman who diverted him. He had said once, "When I find the shoddy motive in them I'm bored. Then the only catch is how to say good-bye." And in return he had been told, "Hearn, you're so goddam healthy, you're nothing but a shell."

            True, probably.

            In any case it was not easy to find the shoddy motive in the General. He owned, no doubt, most of the dirty little itches, the lusts for things which were unacceptable to the mores of the weekly slick-paper magazines, but that did not discount him. There was a talent, an added factor, a deeper lust than Hearn had run across before, and, more than that, Hearn was losing his objectivity. The General worked on him even more than he affected the General, and Hearn loathed the very idea. To lose his inviolate freedom was to become involved again in all the wants and sores that caught up everybody about him.

            But even so there was a wry isolated attention with which he watched the process unfolding between them.

            He saw the General about an hour later in his tent. Cummings was alone for the moment, studying some air operations reports. Hearn understood immediately. After the first two or three days of the campaign, when no Japanese air attacks had developed on Anopopei, it had been decided at higher levels to remove the squadron of fighter planes that had been assigned to the campaign and had operated from another island over a hundred miles away. They had not been of great use but the General had been hoping that when the airfield he had captured was enlarged for the Air Corps, he could use that air support against the Toyaku Line. It had enraged him when the airplanes had been shunted to another campaign, and that had been the time when he had made his remark about enemies.

            He was studying the theater air operations reports now to find out if any aircraft were being used needlessly. In another man it would have been absurd, a self-pitying castigation, but with the General it was not. He would absorb every fact in the report, probe the weaknesses, and when the time came and the captured airfield was ready, he would have a strong series of arguments, documented by the reports he studied now.

            Without turning around, the General said over his shoulder, "You did a damn fool thing today."

            "I suppose so." Hearn sat down.

            The General moved his chair about slightly, and looked thoughtfully at Hearn. "You were depending on me to bring you out of it." He smiled as he said this, and his voice had become artificial, slightly affected. The General had many different types of speech; when he spoke to enlisted men he swore slightly, made his voice a little less precise. With his officers he was always dignified and remote, his sentences always rigidly constructed. Hearn was the only man to whom he spoke directly, and whenever he did not, whenever the down-to-junior-officer-level affectation slipped in, it meant that he was very displeased. Hearn had once known a man who stuttered whenever he was telling a lie; this on a more subtle level was as effective a clue. The General was obviously furious that he had had to come to Hearn's support in such a way that headquarters would talk about it for days.

            "I guess I did, sir; I realized that afterward."

            "Will you tell me why you behaved like such an ass, Robert?" Still the affectation. It was almost effeminate. The General had given Hearn when he first met him an immediate impression of very rarely saying what he thought, and Hearn had never had occasion to change his mind. He had known men who were casually like him, the same trace of effeminacy, the same probable capacity for extreme ruthlessness, but there was more here, more complexity, less of a congealed and overt personality to perceive comfortably. The General at first glance did not look unlike other general officers. He was a little over medium height, well fleshed, with a rather handsome sun-tanned face and graying hair, but there were differences. His expression when he smiled was very close to the ruddy, complacent and hard appearance of any number of American senators and businessmen, but the tough good-guy aura never quite remained. There was a certain vacancy in his face, like the vacancy of actors who play American congressmen. There was the appearance and yet it was not there. Hearn always felt as if the smiling face were numb.

            And his eyes gave him away. They were large and gray, and baleful, like glass on fire. On Motome there had been an inspection before the troops boarded ship, and Hearn had walked through the ranks behind the General. The men trembled before Cummings, stammered out their replies in hoarse self-conscious voices. Three-quarters of it, of course, came from talking to a general, but Cummings had been so genial, had attempted so fully to put them at their ease, and it had not worked at all. Those great eyes with the pale-gray irises had seemed almost blank, two ovals of shocking white. Hearn remembered a newspaper article which had described the General as having the features of a genteel intelligent bulldog, and the article had added a little lushly, "in his manner are combined effectively the force, the tenacity, the staying power of that doughty animal with all the intellect and charm and poise of a college professor or a statesman." It was no more accurate than a newspaper story ever was, but it underlined a favorite theory about the General which Hearn had. For that reporter he had been The Professor, as he had been The General, The Statesman, The Philosopher, to any number of different men. Each of those poses had been a baffling mixture of the genuine and the sham, as if the General instinctively assumed the one which pleased him at the moment, but beyond that was driven on, was handed a personality garment by the unique urges that drove him.

            Hearn leaned back in his chair. "All right, I suppose I was an ass. So what? There's a kind of pleasure in telling somebody like Conn where to shove it."

            "It was a completely pointless thing to do. I suppose you considered it some kind of indignity to have to listen to him."

            "All right, I did."

            "You're being very young about it. The rights you have as a person depend completely upon my whim. Just stop and think about that. Without me you're just a second lieutenant, which I suppose is the operative definition of a man who has no soul of his own. You weren't telling him
to shove it"
-- the General's distasteful pronunciation of "shove it" italicized the phrase -- "
I
was, in effect, telling him, and I had no wish to do so at the time. Suppose you stand up now while you're talking to me. You might as well start at first principles. I'm damned if I'm going to have people walking by and seeing you sit here as if this division were a partnership between you and me."

            Hearn stood up, conscious of a sullen boyish resentment in himself. "Very well," he said sarcastically.

            The General grinned at him suddenly with some mockery. "I've heard the kind of filth Conn purveys for a good many more months than you have. It's boring, Robert, because it's pointless. I'm a little disappointed that you reacted on such a
primal
level." His voice flecked delicately against Hearn's mounting annoyance. "I've known men who've used filth until it became a high art. Statesmen, politicos, they did it for a purpose, and their flesh probably crawled. You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved."

            Perhaps. This was something Hearn was beginning to believe. But instead he muttered, "My range isn't as long as yours, General. I just don't like to be elbowed."