The Naked and the Dead (26 page)

            "Those cards are gonna be hot for me tonight." Mantelli grinned, his small mouth twisted around a cigar.

            The babel of chatter was dense already, saturated in the smoke. Somewhere, far off in the jungle, some artillery fired once, the sound thudding in Hearn's head like a jaded angry nerve. Division's nightly smoker, he muttered to himself.

            He had played only a few hands with moderate luck when there was an interruption. The General for the first time had come into the tent. "Attention!" somebody bawled.

            "At ease, gentlemen," the General murmured. He stared about the tent, his nostrils wrinkling faintly at the odor. "Hearn," the General called.

            "Sir?"

            "I need you." He waved his hand slightly, his voice brisk and impersonal. While Hearn was still buttoning on his shirt, he left the tent.

            "Go ahead, run to poppa," Mantelli grinned.

            Hearn was angry. Normally, the fact that the General had come to him would have been pleasing, but the General's voice had humiliated him. For a moment he actually considered remaining in the tent. "I'll get back that money later," he said to Mantelli.

            "Not tonight, huh?" one of the other officers at the table gibed.

            "My master's voice," Hearn said.

            He finished buttoning his shirt, kicked his chair back into place, and walked through the tent. In one corner a few officers were drinking up one of their ration bottles of whisky.

            He heard them singing and then he was fumbling with the folds of the double curtain at the blackout exit. After the lights inside, he was blinded as he emerged into the dark cool air, so blinded that he almost collided with the General, who had been waiting for him.

            "Sorry, I thought you'd gone on ahead," Hearn muttered.

            "It's all right." The General strolled slowly toward his own tent, and Hearn constrained his pace to keep from walking too fast. Had the General heard him say "My master's voice"? Aaah, to hell with him.

            "What do you need me for, General?"

            "We'll discuss that when we get to the tent."

            "Yes, sir." Between them for the moment there was some antagonism. They walked on in silence, their feet crunching into the gravel walk. Only one or two men passed by them in the darkness; with the night, almost all activity halted in the bivouac. About them in the rough ellipse of their area Hearn could feel almost tangibly the ring of enlisted men sitting in their foxholes on guard. "Quiet tonight," he muttered,

            "Yes."

            At the entrance to the General's tent, another collision occurred. Hearn halted at the tent flaps to allow the General to precede him, and Cummings in turn put his hand on Hearn's back to indicate that he was to go first. They both started at once, and Hearn sideswiped the General, felt him recoil a foot or two from the weight of Hearn's big body. "Sorry." There was no answer for a moment, and in a little spasm of anger Hearn separated the flaps and walked in ahead. When Cummings followed, his face was extremely pale and his lower lip showed the indentation of two teeth. Either the collision had hurt him more than Hearn had thought or he was disturbed enough to pinch his lip. But why? It would be more characteristic for Cummings to find amusement in the situation.

            Still defiant, Hearn sat down without permission. The General seemed about to say something and then was silent. He took the other chair, which faced his desk, shifted it slightly to face Hearn, and stared at him impassively for almost a minute. He had an entirely new expression on his face, one Hearn had never seen before. The bald gray eyes with their immense and startling white pupils seemed dulled. Hearn had the impression that he could touch the surface of Cummings's eyeballs, and the eyes would not blink. In the slight pinch of his mouth, the constriction of the muscles at all the vertices of his face, there seemed a curious pain.

            With a little shock, Hearn wondered at the tensions that had made the General seek him out. It must have been humiliating. Even more, there was no artifice about it now, no suggestion of work for him on the General's clean furled desk. Hearn stared at the map of Anopopei that lay tacked to a large drawing board. The ocarina on which the General played his little tune.

            Once again Hearn realized how barren was the General's tent. Wherever he was, on Motome, in his ship's cabin, or here, he never seemed to live in a place. The tent was so austere. The cot looked un-slept in, the desk was bare again, and the third and unoccupied chair rested at perfect right angles to the larger of the two foot lockers. The tent floor was bare and clean, unmarred by mud. The light of the Coleman lantern threw long diagonals of light and shadow across all the rectangular objects of the tent, so that it looked like an abstract painting.

            And Cummings still stared at him with that inexplicable gaze as if he did not know him at all. Like the pulse of their blood, some artillery sounded again in the distance. "I was wondering, Robert," the General said at last.

            "Yes, sir?"

            "You know, I don't know a damn thing about you really." The voice was flat and colorless.

            "What's the matter, have I been stealing your whisky?"

            "Perhaps you have. . . figuratively." What the hell did that mean? The General leaned back in his chair, the next question a little too casual. "How's the recreation tent going?"

            "Fine."

            "The Army still hasn't figured out a way to change the air in a blackout tent."

            "Oh, it stinks over there all right." So the General had been lonesome for him. Poor little rich boy. "I can't complain, though, I've cleared a hundred bucks out of the poker games."

            "In two nights?"

            "No, three."

            The General smiled thinly. "That's right, it was three nights."

            "As if you didn't know."

            The General lit a cigarette and extinguished the match with a slow wave of his hand. "I assure you, Robert, there are a few other concerns in my mind."

            "I didn't say there weren't."

            The General glared at him with a deliberate, self-conscious unveiling of his eyes. "You've got so damn much cheek you're going to die before a firing squad someday." The voice had been a suppressed bellow, and with acute surprise Hearn saw that the General's fingers were trembling. The suspicion of an idea almost defined itself in his head and then was lost like a piece of thread that misses the eye of a needle and wavers fragilely before collapsing.

            "Sorry."

            And this too seemed the wrong thing to say. The General's mouth was white again. Cummings leaned back in his folding chair, took a long puff of smoke, and then abruptly beamed at Hearn with a fatherly genial air, incredibly counterfeit. "You're still a little annoyed at me about the meat, aren't you?" he asked.

           
Annoyed.
The General had used that word once before. An odd word at this time. Was he in the driver's seat now? It was a little eerie to feel that the General was coming to him, a little uncomfortable. And instinctively his mind clamped down, became grudging and aware as if soon he would be asked for something he did not want to grant. The General would never put a handle to their relationship. At times they had the easy tacit friendship that many generals had with their aides, field officers with their orderlies. And there were all the other moments when they were much closer -- the discussions, the occasional bits of gossip. There was also the antagonism between them. And he couldn't find the bone on which all this was grafted.

            "I suppose I am annoyed," Hearn said at last. "The rooking the enlisted men got on their meat isn't going to make them love you any."

            "They'll blame Hobart or Mantelli or the mess sergeant. That's hardly to the point anyway. You don't really care, you know that."

            Damn if he'd give anything away free. "If I did, you certainly couldn't understand it."

            "I imagine I could. I probably have a normal allotment of decent impulses."

            "Hah."

            "You don't think, Robert. The root of all the liberals' ineffectiveness comes right spang out of the desperate suspension in which they have to hold their minds."

           
Right spang out of it!
It was almost pleasant to find a bit of mid-western earth in all the polished and refracted facets of the General's speech. "Name calling is always easy," Hearn muttered.

            "Oh, think, man, will you? If you ever followed anything through to the end, not one of your ideas would last for an instant. You think it's important to win this war, don't you?"

            "Yes, but I still don't get the tie-up with the meat."

            "Well, then, follow me out in this. And you're going to have to take my word, for I've made a study. When I was your age, a little older, the type of thing that preoccupied me was what makes a nation fight well."

            "I imagine it would be a kind of identity between the people and the country whether it's for good reasons or bad."

            The General shook his head. "That's a liberal historian's attitude. You'd be surprised what a tiny factor that is." The lamp was beginning to sputter and he reached over to adjust the valve, his face lit rather dramatically for a moment by the light source beneath his chin. "There are just two main elements. A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past."

            "That's the whole works, huh?"

            "There's one other big factor I've played with for a time. If you're fighting in defense of your own soil, then perhaps you're a little more effective."

            "Then you come back to my point."

            "I wonder if you know how complicated that is. If a man fights on his own soil, it's also a great deal easier for him to desert. That's one problem I never have to consider on Anopopei. It's true the other thing overweighs it, but stop and think about it. Fondness for a country is all very lovely, it even is a morale factor at the beginning of a war. But fighting emotions are very undependable, and the longer a war lasts the less value they have. After a couple of years of war, there are only two considerations that make a good army: a superior material force and a poor standard of living. Why do you think a regiment of Southerners is worth two regiments of Easterners?"

            "I don't think they are."

            "Well, it happens to be true." The General placed his fingertips together judiciously and looked at Hearn. "I'm not peddling theories. This is observation. And the conclusions leave me, as a general officer, in a poor position. We have the highest standard of living in the world and, as one would expect, the worst individual fighting soldiers of any big power. Or at least in their natural state they are. They're comparatively wealthy, they're spoiled, and as Americans they share most of them the peculiar manifestation of our democracy. They have an exaggerated idea of the rights due themselves as individuals and no idea at all of the rights due others. It's the reverse of the peasant, and I'll tell you right now it's the peasant who makes the soldier."

            "So what you've got to do is break them down," Hearn said.

            "Exactly. Break them down. Every time an enlisted man sees an officer get an extra privilege, it breaks him down a little more."

            "I don't see that. It seems to me they'd hate you more."

            "They do. But they also fear us more. I don't care what kind of man you give me, if I have him long enough I'll make him afraid. Every time there's what you call an Army injustice, the enlisted man involved is confirmed a little more in the idea of his own inferiority." He smoothed the hair over his temple. "I happen to know of an American prison camp in England which'll be a terror once we invade Europe. The methods used will be brutal, and it's going to cause a stink eventually, but it happens to be necessary. In our own back yard we have a particular replacement depot where an attempt was actually made to kill the Colonel in command. You aren't capable of understanding it, but I can tell you, Robert, that to make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder. Men in prison camps, deserters, or men in replacement camps are in the backwaters of the Army and the discipline has to be proportionately more powerful. The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates."

            "Where do I fit into this?" Hearn asked.

            "You don't yet. There are such things as papal dispensations." The General grinned at him, lit another cigarette. Almost entirely muted, a burst of laughter from the recreation tent filtered through the bivouac to them.

            Hearn sat forward. "You take the man who's out on guard right now, and listens to that laughter. It seems to me there'd come a time when he'd want to turn his machine gun around."

            "Oh, eventually. The time soldiers start doing that is when an army is about defeated. Until then, the hate just banks in them, makes them fight a little better. They can't turn it on us, so they turn it outward."

            "But you've a big gamble there," Hearn said. "If we lose the war, you've produced a revolution. It seems to me in terms of your interest it would be better to lose the war by being overgood to the men, and avoid the revolution afterward."

            Cummings laughed. "That would be one of your liberal weeklies, wouldn't it? You're an ass, Robert. We're not going to lose the war, and if we did, you don't think Hitler would grant a revolution, do you?"

            "Then what you're saying is that you people can't lose the war either way."