The Naked and the Dead (45 page)

            "It takes a lot for a guy to do it," he said again to Brown. The memories were uncomfortable, and yet they furnished him a deep pride. "If you want to get anywhere you got to know what the score is," he said.

            "Yeah, you got to know who to suck," Brown reminded him.

            "That's part of it," Stanley said coldly. Brown still had a few tools he could employ against him.

            Stanley gazed at the men sprawled on the beach, looking for a better answer to give Brown. He noticed Croft stalking along the edge of the beach, searching the jungle, and he watched him.

            "What's Croft up to?" he asked.

            "He probably saw something," Brown said. He was getting to his feet. All about them the men in the platoon were beginning to stir like cattle turning their heads toward a new sound or smell.

            "Aaah, Croft is always looking for something," Stanley grunted.

            "There's something doing," Brown mumbled.

            Just then Croft fired a burst into the jungle and dropped to the ground. The sound of the shots was unexpectedly loud and the men in the platoon winced, fell prostrate again in the sand. A Japanese rifle fired back, and the men began to fire indiscriminately into the jungle. Stanley found himself sweating so intensely that he could not focus the sights of his rifle. He lay there with his senses blurred, flinching unconsciously every time a bullet passed. It sounded like a bee humming past, and he thought with surprise, A guy can get hurt. He remembered immediately afterward the joke about that, and began to laugh weakly. Behind him, on the beach, he heard someone scream, and then the firing halted. There was a long uneasy silence among the men, and Stanley watched the air rise shimmering off the sand.

            At last Croft got cautiously to his feet, and darted into the jungle. At its edge he motioned for the men nearest him to approach, and Stanley stared at the sand and hoped Croft would not notice him. There was a pause, a wait of several minutes, and then Croft and Wilson and Martinez appeared from the brush, and came strolling back toward the beach.

            "We got two of them," Croft said. "I don't think they was any others or they'd have left their packs when they took off." He spat onto the sand. "Who got hit?" he asked.

            "Minetta did," Goldstein said. He was leaning over him, holding a first-aid compress against Minetta's leg.

            "Let's see it," Croft said. He ripped away Minetta's trouser and gazed at the wound. "Just a scratch," he said.

            Minetta moaned, "If you had it, you wouldn't say that."

            Croft grinned. "You're gonna live, boy." He turned around and looked at the men in the platoon, who had gathered about him. "Goddammit," he said, "let's spread out. They may be some other Japs messin' around near here." The men were talking and chattering with a nervous profuse relief. Croft looked at his watch. "We only got about forty minutes till the truck come for us. Jus' spread out on the beach and keep your eyes open. We ain't gonna do any more unloadin'."

            He turned to one of the landing-craft drivers standing beside him and asked, "You men on guard here at the dump at night?"

            "Yeah."

            "With those Japs I guess you'll stay awake tonight." Croft lit a cigarette, and walked over to Minetta again. "You'll have to stay here, boy, until the truck comes. Jus' hold that compress there, and nothin' is gonna happen to ya."

            Stanley and Brown lay on their stomachs, talking to each other and looking at the jungle. Stanley was feeling very weak. He tried to ignore his panic but he kept thinking of how safe they had felt when there had been Japanese so near to them. You never know when you're safe, he muttered to himself. He felt an intense horror which he repressed with difficulty. All his nerves seemed to have come apart. He felt he would say something absurd in a moment or so, and he turned to Brown and uttered the first thought in his mind, "Wonder how Gallagher took it?"

            "What do ya mean?"

            "You know, the Japs being killed, and him thinking of his wife."

            "Aaah," Brown said. "He didn't even connect it."

            Stanley looked at Gallagher, who was talking quietly to Wilson. "He seems to be coming around," Stanley said.

            Brown shrugged. "I feel sorry for the guy, but I'll tell you what, maybe he's lucky."

            "You don't mean that."

            "When you get rid of a woman, you never know when you're well off. I don't know Gallagher's wife, but he's not a big guy, he probably wasn't able to give her too much loving. Hell, they'll cheat on ya even when you do give 'em something to remember, so I wouldn't be too surprised if she had her little fling, especially in the first months when she knew the kid was coming and she wasn't taking any chances if she fooled around with anybody."

            "That's all you ever think about," Stanley muttered. He hated Brown for a moment. Brown's contempt for women stroked the jealousy, the fear that Stanley usually was able to control. For a moment or two, he was half convinced his wife was cuckolding him, and though he flung off the idea, he sat there troubled and nervous.

            "I'll tell ya something
I
think about," Brown said. "Just what happened right now. You're sitting around talkin' and
wham
something starts. You never know what's gonna hit ya. Y'think Minetta ain't scared now? He's learnin' what it's all about. Listen, I'll tell ya, they ain't gonna be a moment until I get back and touch my foot on the ground in the States before I stop believin' that I never know when I'm gonna get it. You stay over awhile and you're due, that's all."

            Stanley felt a nameless anxiety rising in him. Dimly, he knew that part of it came from fearing death, really fearing it for the first time, but he knew that it also swelled out of everything he had been thinking about before the skirmish had begun. It fed upon his jealousy and his indifferent love-making, it came from the nights at home when he had been sleepless and frantic. For some reason he found it painful suddenly to think about Gallagher and the abrupt way in which his wife had died. You look out for everything, he thought, and you still get hit from behind. It's a trap. Stanley felt a deep malaise. He stared about him, listening to some artillery fire in the distance, and the anxiety increased, became almost painful for a moment. He was sweating, close to whimpering. The heat of the day, the glare of the sand, and the nervous fatigue from the action, had combined to drain him of any strength. He was weak and terrified, and he didn't understand. Outside of a few uneventful patrols, he had experienced no combat. Yet now he was feeling an intense loathing and fear at the thought of having any more. He wondered how he could lead men in combat when he was so terrified himself, and yet he knew that he had to get another stripe, and then another, that he would force himself to move up. There was something wrong, basically upset in himself at that moment, and he muttered to Brown, "Goddam heat makes a man weak." He sat there, sweating damply. A vague oppressive horror bothered him.

            "You think you know all the angles, but you never do," Brown said. "Like before with that garage deal, you were lucky. You think we knew there were Japs? I'll tell ya, Stanley, it was the same with you there. How the hell did you know when something was gonna pop? It's the same with my old game, selling. There's tricks, there's ways to grab the big money, but you're never sure."

            "Yeah," Stanley said. He was not really listening. Stanley was feeling a diffused rebellion at the things that made him worried and envious, made him always ferret for some advantage. He did not know what caused it in himself, but without putting it into words he was brooding that there would be many nights through all the rest of his life when he would lie sweating and restive, prey to all the latest torments of his mind.

11

            The campaign had gone sour. After the week of successful advances that followed the failure of the Japanese attack across the river, Cummings had paused for a few days to strengthen his lines and complete his road net. It had been planned as a temporary halt before breaching the Toyaku Line, but the layoff was fatal. When Cummings started again, his tactics were as well conceived as they had ever been, his staff performances as thorough, his patrols as carefully planned, but nothing happened. The front had been given its first chance to solidify, and like a weary animal it had done even more; it had fallen asleep, it had hibernated. A deep and unshakable lethargy settled over the front-line troops.

            In the two weeks that followed the rest period, after a series of intensive patrols and strong local attacks, his lines had advanced a total of four hundred yards in a few sectors, and had captured a total of three Japanese outposts. Companies went out on combat patrols, engaged in desultory fire fights, and then retreated back to their bivouacs. The few times an important piece of terrain was taken, the men had relinquished it at the first serious counterattack. As a sure sign of the reluctant temper of the troops, the best line officers were becoming casualties now, and Cummings knew the type of engagement that signified. An attack would be made on some strong point, and the men would lag behind, the co-ordination would be poor, and it would end with a few men, a few good officers, and noncoms engaging a superior force while their support evaporated.

            Cummings made several trips to the front and found the men had bedded down. The bivouacs had been improved, there were drainage pits and overhead covers on the foxholes, and in a few companies duckwalks had been laid in the mud. The men would not have done this if they expected to move. It represented security and permanence, and it introduced a very dangerous change in their attitudes. Once they halted and stayed in one place long enough for it to assume familiar connotations, it was immeasurably harder to get them to fight again. They were dogs in their own kennel now, Cummings decided, and they would bark sullenly at orders.

            Each day that elapsed without any fundamental change on the front would only increase their apathy, and yet Cummings knew that he was temporarily powerless. After intense preparation, he had mounted a large attack with good artillery plotting, some Air Corps bomber support which had been granted only after much pleading, had thrown his tanks into it, his reserve troops, and after a day the attack had ground down to nothing; the troops had halted before the most insignificant resistance, had gained in one small sector perhaps a quarter mile. When they had done and the losses been counted, the minor alterations in his front line established, he had all of the Toyaku Line still before him, unbreached, unthreatened. It was humiliating. Indeed, it was terrifying. The communications from corps and army were growing progressively impatient. Soon, like a traffic jam, that pressure would be backed up all the way to Washington, and Cummings could imagine without difficulty the conversations that must be going on in certain rooms of the Pentagon. "Well, what's happening here, what's this, Anopopei, what's holding it up, whose division, Cummings, Cummings, well, get the man out of there, get someone else."

            He had known it was dangerous to rest the troops for a week, but it was a gamble he had had to take while he finished the road, and it had boomeranged. The shock cut deeply into the General's confidence. The process at most times was unbelievable to him, and he was suffering the amazement and terror of a driver who finds his machine directing itself, starting and halting when
it
desires. He had heard of this, military lore was filled with such horror tales, but he had never imagined it would happen to him. It was incredible. For five weeks the troops had functioned like an extension of his own body. And now, apparently without cause, or at least through causes too intangible for him to discover, he had lost his sensitive control. No matter how he molded them now the men always collapsed into a sodden resistant mass like dishrags, too soft, too wet to hold any shape which might be given them. At night he would lie sleepless on his cot, suffering an almost unbearable frustration; there were times when he was burning with the impotence of his rage. One night he had lain for hours like an epileptic emerging from a coma, his hands clasping and unclasping endlessly, his eyes staring fixedly at the dim outlines of the ridgepole of his tent. The power, the intensity of the urges within himself, inexpressible, balked, seemed to course through his limbs, beating in senseless fury against the confines of his body. There was everything he wanted to control, everything, and he could not direct even six thousand men. Even a single man had been able to balk him.

            He had made furious efforts for a time, launched that attack, had kept the troops patrolling constantly, but deep inside himself, unadmitted, he was becoming frightened. A new attack on which he had had Major Dalleson and the G-3 staff working for days had been called off several times already. Always there had been good superficial reasons -- a large shipment of supplies was due from a few Liberty ships in a day or two, or else he felt it tnore advisable to capture first some minor features of land which might seriously impede the attack. But actually he was afraid; failure now would be fatal. He had expended too much on that first attack, and if this one foundered, weeks and possibly months would accrue before a third major drive could be initiated. By that time he would be replaced.

            His mind had become dangerously lassitudinous, and his body had been troubled for some time by a painful diarrhea. In an effort to scour his ailment he had had officers' mess suffer the most rigid inspections, but despite the new standards of cleanliness his diarrhea continued. It was acutely difficult now to conceal his annoyance with the most insignificant details, and it was affecting everything about him. Hot wet days sloughed past, and the officers in headquarters snapped at each other, had petty quarrels and cursed the unremitting heat and rain. Nothing seemed to move in all the cramped choked spaces of the jungle, and it developed an attitude in which no one expected anything to move. The division was going subtly and inevitably to pot, and he felt powerless to alter it.