The Naked and the Dead (58 page)

            Dalleson began by estimating the number of trucks that would be necessary to move the invasion troops from their front line positions down to the beach. Since the frontal attack would undoubtedly be in progress then, it was impossible to decide now which troops could be used. That would depend on the future situation, but it had to be one of the four rifle battalions on the island, and Dalleson separated it into four isolated problems, allotting a different number of trucks for each possibility. There would be trucks needed for the land attack, and the assignment of them could be handled by G-4. Dalleson looked up and scowled, staring at the clerks and officers in his tent.

            "Hey, Hearn," he shouted.

            "Yes?"

            "Bring this over to Hobart, and tell him to work out where we can draw the trucks from."

            Hearn nodded, took the piece of paper Dalleson handed him, and strolled out of the tent, whistling to himself. Dalleson watched him with a puzzled and slightly belligerent expression. Hearn irritated him slightly. He could not express it, but he was a little uncomfortable with him, a little uncertain. He always had the feeling that Hearn was laughing at him, and he had nothing concrete to fasten it upon. Dalleson had been a little surprised when the General had transferred Hearn, but it had been none of his affair, and he had assigned Hearn to supervising the draftsmen in their map overlays, and forgot about him almost entirely. Hearn had done his work well enough, quietly enough, and with over a dozen men in the tent almost all the time, Dalleson had paid little attention to him. Or at least at first. Lately it seemed as if Hearn had introduced a new humor. There was a kind of sour snickering at the more boring and meaningless procedures now, and once Dalleson had overheard Hearn saying, "Sure, old Blood and Guts puts the outfit to bed. He doesn't have any children, and dogs don't take to him, so what do you expect?" There had been a burst of laughter which stopped abruptly when they saw he had overheard, and since then Dalleson had had the idea that Hearn had been talking about him.

            Dalleson mopped his forehead, turned back to his desk, and began to work on the embarkation and debarkation timetables for the invasion battalion. As he progressed he chewed his cigar with relish, pausing every now and then to probe his mouth with one of his large fingers whenever some tobacco leaves had lodged in his teeth. From time to time, out of habit, he would look up and stare about the tent to check whether the maps were in place and all the men were working at their desks. When the phone would ring, he would pause, waiting for someone to answer, shaking his head blackly if it took too long. His own desk was set at an angle to one of the corner uprights, and whenever he wished he could have a fair view of the bivouac. A little wind had sprung up, and it quivered faintly the trodden grass under his feet, cooled all the red spacious areas of his face.

            The Major had been one of many children in a poor family, and he considered himself lucky to have finished high school. Until he had joined the Army in 1933 he had been bogged down by a series of missed opportunities and plain bad luck. His ability for hard sustained work and complete loyalty had been relatively unnoticed because as a young man he had been shy and taciturn. But in the Army he had made a perfect soldier. By the time he became a noncom he brought a painstaking thoroughness to all the details he supervised, and his further promotions came quickly. But if the war had not started, Dalleson would probably have remained a first sergeant until retirement.

            The influx of draftees made him an officer, and he moved quickly from second lieutenant to first lieutenant to captain. In training he had commanded his company well; they had good discipline, they turned out well for inspections, and their marching was precise. Above all, it was said that they had pride in their outfit. Dalleson always harped on this, and his speeches on the company street had been a source of much mockery. "You're the best fuggin soldiers in the best goddam company of the best goddam battalion of the best goddam regiment. . ." and so forth, but behind their mockery the soldiers realized his sincerity. He had a way with a cliché. It was only natural he should have been promoted to major.

            Only it was as a major that Dalleson's troubles had begun. He found that he seldom had any direct contact with enlisted men, he had to deal almost exclusively with officers, and it left him somewhat beached. For the truth was that he was uncomfortable with officers; even as a captain he had considered himself three-quarters an enlisted man, and he missed the days when his easy profanity was appreciated by the men. As a major he had to watch his manners, and he never was quite certain what to do. He felt himself at last -- secretly, without admitting it to himself -- miscast for the job. He was a little overwhelmed by the high rank of the men with whom he collaborated; he was depressed at times by the responsibilities of his work.

            The fact that he was the G-3 had contributed to his discomfort. The G-3 of a division is in charge of operations and training on the division commander's staff, and to be completely effective he must be brilliant and thorough, quick and yet capable of a great deal of detail work. In another division Dalleson probably would not have lasted, but General Cummings had always taken a more direct interest in operations than the average division commander; there were very few plans he did not initiate, practically no military actions no matter how small which he did not personally approve. In such a situation, the Major's stint of blacking in the shadows in the General's drawings did not demand all the talents of a G-3. The Major had been able to survive; indeed, he had the example of his predecessor, a lieutenant-colonel, who had been masterfully suited for the job, but had been transferred precisely because of that -- he had begun to assume some of the functions the General preferred to keep for himself.

            The Major floundered through his work, or more exactly, he sweated through it, for what he could not supply in brilliance he was determined to produce in hard work. In time he mastered the daily procedures, the mechanisms of Army planning, the forms he had to fill out, but he was always uneasy. He feared the slowness of his mind, the unconscionable time it took him to make a decision when he had no paper before him and time was pressing. Nights like the one he had spent with the General when the Japanese attacked tormented him if he allowed himself to think of it. He knew that he could not have disposed his troops with even a fraction of the ease and dispatch with which the General had managed it over the field telephone, and he wondered how he would have managed if the General had left it to him. He was always afraid that a situation would develop in which he would have to call upon the more dazzling aptitudes that his position demanded, and which he did not have. He would have preferred any other job but that of G-3.

            Yet the Major never thought of asking for a transfer; nothing could have been more repugnant to him. He had always possessed an intense loyalty to his commander if he felt the man was a good officer, and no one had ever impressed him more than the General. It was inconceivable to Major Dalleson that he should desert the General unless he was ordered to; he would, if the bivouac had been overrun by Japanese troops, probably have died defending the General in his tent. It was the only romantic attitude in his heavy mind and body. And besides this, the Major had his ambition to sustain him. It was, of course, a very backward ambition; the Major had no more hope of becoming a general than a rich merchant in the Middle Ages might have dreamed of becoming king. The Major wanted to make lieutenant-colonel, or even conceivably colonel before the war ended, and in his position as G-3 he was entitled to that. His reasoning was simple; he had every intention of remaining in the Army after the war and he judged that if he rose as high as lieutenant-colonel the chances were very good that in the postwar Army he would be demoted no lower than captain. Out of all the ranks it was the one he preferred the most next to top sergeant, and he felt a little wistfully that it would not be very correct for him to become an enlisted man again. So, unhappily, he continued to wrestle with his job as the chief of operations.

            Now as he completed the timetables he turned with reluctance to the march orders that would be necessary to remove a battalion from the line and divert them to the beach. In itself it was not too complicated a process, but since he didn't know which battalion would be removed, he had to draw up four sets of withdrawal orders and work out the subsidiary movements of the troops who would have to fill the gap in each case. It kept him busy through most of the afternoon, for, although he assigned part of it to Leach and his other assistant, it was necessary to check their work, and the Major was very thorough, very slow.

            He finished that at last, and sketched a tentative march order for the invasion battalion once it had landed at Botoi. Here there was no precedent for him to follow -- the General had sketched the outline of the attack, but he had been a little vague. From experience, Dalleson knew he would have to submit something and the General would proceed to rip it apart and give him the movement in detail. He hoped to avoid this but he knew there was little likelihood of it, and so, sweating profusely in the heat of the tent, he indicated a route of combat march along one of the main trails, and estimated the time it should take for each portion of it. This was unplotted terrain of his mind as well, and he halted many times, wiped his forehead, and tried unsuccessfully to conceal his anxiety from himself. The steady murmur of voices in the tent, the steady bustle of men moving from desk to desk, or the draftsmen humming over their work, irritated him. Once or twice he looked up, glared balefully at whoever was talking, and then returned to his work with an audible grunt.

            The telephone rang frequently and despite himself Dalleson began to listen to the conversations. Once for several minutes, Hearn chatted with some other officer over the phone, and Dalleson finally threw down his pencil and shouted, "Goddammit, why don't you men all shut up and get to work?" It was obviously directed toward Hearn, who murmured something into the receiver and hung up after staring thoughtfully at Dalleson.

            "Did you give those papers to Hobart?" he asked Hearn.

            "Yes."

            "What the hell you been doing since then?"

            Hearn grinned and lit a cigarette. "Nothing in particular, Major." There was a subdued titter from a few of the clerks in the tent.

            Dalleson stood up, surprised to find himself suddenly in a rage, "I don't want any of your goddam lip, Hearn." This made it worse. It was bad to reprimand an officer in front of enlisted men. "Go over and help Leach."

            For several seconds Hearn stood motionless, and then he nodded, sauntered carelessly over to Leach's desk, and sat down beside him. Dalleson had trouble in getting back to work. In the weeks that had elapsed since the division had stalled on the line, Dalleson had expressed his concern by driving his men. He would worry frequently that his subordinates were slacking off and the work was becoming sloppy. To correct that, he was after his clerks all the time to make them retype papers in which there was one error or even one erasure, and he consistently bullied his junior officers to produce more work. It was basically a superstition. Dalleson believed that if he could make his own small unit function perfectly the rest of the division would follow his example. Part of the discomfort Hearn had caused him until now had come from Dalleson's conviction that Hearn cared very little about the work. It was a dangerous business. "One man can louse up an outfit," was one of Dalleson's axioms, and Hearn was a threat. It was the first time he could ever remember a subordinate telling him that he had been doing nothing. When that started happening. . . Dalleson fretted through the rest of the afternoon, outlined the march order very uncertainly, and an hour before evening chow had finished enough of the battle plan to present it to the General.

            He went over to Cummings's tent, gave it to him, and stood by uncomfortably, waiting for comments. Cummings studied it carefully, looking up from time to time to voice a criticism. "I see you've got four different withdrawal orders, and four assembly areas."

            "Yes, sir."

            "I don't think that'll be necessary, Major. We'll pick one assembly point back of Second Battalion, and whichever outfit we use for the invasion will go there. It won't be more than a five-mile march at the very most, no matter which one we take."

            "Yes, sir." Dalleson busied himself scribbling notes on a little pad.

            "I think you'd better allow 108 minutes instead of 104 for the trip with the LCMs."

            "Yes, sir."

            And so on. Cummings gave his objections, and Dalleson continued to mark them in his note-pad. Cummings watched him with a little contempt. Dalleson's got a mind like a switchboard, he told himself. If your plug will fit one of his mental holes, he can furnish the necessary answer, but otherwise he's lost.

            Cummings sighed, lit a cigarette. "We've got to co-ordinate the staff work on this more thoroughly. Will you tell Hobart and Conn I'll want them with you in the morning first thing?"

            "Yes, sir," Dalleson rumbled.

            The General scratched his upper lip. That would have been Hearn's job if he were still orderly. Cummings had been doing without an aide. He exhaled his cigarette. "By the way, Major," Cummings asked. "How's Hearn getting along with you?" Cummings yawned casually, but he was tense. With Hearn out of his daily view, certain regrets, certain urges, were tempting him once more. But he repressed them. What a touchy business that thing with Hearn could have been, Cummings thought. Hearn couldn't come back. That was out.

            Dalleson knitted his heavy forehead. "Hearn's all right, sir. He's got too goddam much lip, but I can knock that out of him."