From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [251]
And he could see then, at those times momentarily, how the deer and other game might also love the hunters who would kill them, just as he could see then that the hunters loved the game they tried so hard to kill, far more than any SPCA humane society would ever love it. And he would not, if he could, have had it any other way. Because he was a soldier, and because he could see it all then, in the easily shattered crystal clarity of the thin glass goblet of the silence that is guard duty in the field at night the last half hour before you are relieved.
Maybe the Re-enlistment Blues also came out of that.
He heard his relief, before he saw him, coming down the top of the embankment. Then Readall Treadwell hove into view, following his own footfalls into life, looking like a walking Woolworth’s under full equipment and slapping at mosquitoes. “Friday said to tell you he be down along the bob wire to the south,” Readall Treadwell said.
“What the hells he doin way down there?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m just tellin you what he tole me.”
“Okay,” he grinned. He cleared his throat. He always cleared his throat. After two hours on post he always felt his vocal cords might not work. “I must of woke him up when I came on,” he said.
“Yeah? Too goddam bad. Has the goddam lieutenant been around yet?”
“Nope, not yet.” He would get Friday and they would get the guitar and come up and wait for Andy.
“Then I’ll catch him sure,” Readall Treadwell said bitterly. “That son of a bitch never comes around after eleven. No sleep again tonight.”
“Yeah? Too goddam bad,” Prew grinned. “You can always go down and talk to one of the other posts and sneak a cigaret.”
“Piss on that noise,” Readall Treadwell said. “Sleep is what I need. And sleep is what I never get. You tell Big Chief to send a man around when he sees the truck,” Reedy called after him, “if he wants this post to be awake.”
Chief Choate was lying placidly on his back in his puptent among the messy blankets, his bulk seeming to bulge the sides, reading a comic book inside his mosquito bar by the light of a candle stuck to his helmet. The Chief bunked by himself, there was hardly room for Choate, let alone a partner, in a regulation shelter tent; and when he went in the field, which was seldom, he packed two shelterhalves instead of one, ever since the time when Leva the supply clerk had had to bunk with him once.
“Reedy said to tell you to send a man around if the lootenant comes.”
“This aint my relief,” the Chief protested. “I aint on duty.”
“I’m only tellin you what I was told to tell you.”
“That lazy son of a bitch,” the Chief said mildly, letting the book fall open like a postage stamp upon his chest. He stretched. “Build a fahr under him and he would holler for somebody to come put it out. Okay,” he said, “I’ll fix it,” and went back absorbedly into the adventures of Dick Tracy.
Friday was a full hundred and fifty yards down along the big loose curve of the double apron, through the stumbling root-tripping darkness. He was talking across the wire to the Air Corps night sentry from the Field junk yard across the road. Down here, where the wire cut back sharply from the gravel road to the flank that rested on one of the brackish ponds that became the swamp below where the mosquitoes bred, they were worse than fierce. They were fierce back at the bivouac.
“What the hell are you doing way off down here?” Prew said as he came up, slapping at the