The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [263]
Exactly. You'd think we have some sense, but the damn truth of it is we just go around screwing and drinking and. . .
And having a hell of a good time.
Having a hell of a good time, Brown finishes. That's exactly what I was gonna say, Jennings, but you beat me to it. He stumbles, sits down on the pavement.
Helluva note.
He wakes up in his bed with Beverly undressing him. I know what you're gonna say, honey, he mumbles, but I got my troubles, you just keep pushing something through, trying to make ends meet, trying to produce 'cause that's what you gotta pay off on, and it takes a long time, it's, it's a hard life, as the preacher says.
And in the morning, massaging his headache, examining an estimate, he wonders what Beverly did last night.
(The sly winks, the droll expressions of anguish among the men who had gone out the night before. At ten in the lavatory, Freeman joins him.)
Oh, what a bag I got on.
I feel rocky today, Brown says. What the hell we do it for?
Got to get out of the rut, I guess.
Yeah. Oh, man!
6
This same night, on the other side of the mountain range, Cummings was making a tour of his positions. The attack had been progressing favorably for a day and a half, and his line companies had advanced from a quarter to a half mile. The division was moving again, more successfully than he had expected, and the long wet month of inactivity and stagnation seemed to have ended. F Company had made contact with the Toyaku Line, and according to the last report Cummings had received that afternoon, a reinforced platoon from E Company had captured a Japanese bivouac on F Company's flank. For the next few days the attack would teeter from enemy counterattacks, but if they held, and he was going to see that they held, the Toyaku Line might be breached within two weeks.
Secretly, he was a little surprised at the advance. He had prepared the attack for over a month, hoarded his supplies, revised his battle plans from day to day through all the eventless weeks that had followed the aborted Japanese attack across the river. He had done everything a commander could do, and yet he had been gloomy. The memory of the bivouacs at the front with their covered foxholes and duckwalks through the mud had depressed him more than once; it spoke with such finality of the men sitting down to rest permanently, implacably.
He knew now he was wrong. The lessons learned from every campaign were different, and he had absorbed an obscure but basic axiom. If the men settled down long enough they became restless, ennuied to the point of courage again by the drab repetition of their days. It's a mistake to relieve a company which has not been advancing, he told himself. Just let them sit in the mud long enough, and they'll attack through their own volition. It was fortuitous that his battle orders had been launched at a time when the men were eager to move ahead again, but deep in his mind he knew he had been lucky. He had misjudged their morale completely.
If I had a few company commanders who were perceptive, the whole process would be simpler, more responsive, and yet it's too much to ask sensitivity of a CO besides all the other things he has to have. No, it's my fault, I should have seen it in spite of them. Perhaps for this reason the early success of the attack gave him little elation. He was pleased, naturally enough, because his greatest burden had been removed. The pressure from Corps had relaxed, and the fear that for a time had colored everything -- that he would be relieved of his command in the middle of the campaign -- had retreated now, and would expire if the advance continued favorably. Still he had substituted one dissatisfaction for another. Cummings was bothered by a suspicion, very faint, not quite stated, that he had no more to do with the success of the attack than a man who presses a button and waits for the elevator. It muddied the edges of his satisfaction, angered him subtly. The odds were that the attack would bog down sooner or later in any case, and when he left tomorrow for Army, this present success was going to hurt his chances of getting naval support for the Botoi Bay operation. In effect he would have to commit himself, claim that the campaign could be won only by that side invasion, and there would be the ticklish business of having to undercut, disparage the advances he had made already.