The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [31]
It would only be common sense for him to keep his mouth shut, and yet for the last ten minutes of the meal, the sweat had dripped steadily into his food, and his shirt had become progressively damper. More and more he had been resisting the impulse to mash the contents of his plate against the face of Lieutenant Colonel Conn. For the two weeks they had been eating in this tent, he had sat with seven other lieutenants and captains at a table adjacent to the one where Conn was talking now. And for two weeks he had heard Conn talk about the stupidity of Congress (with which Hearn would agree, but for different reasons), the inferiority of the Russian and British armies, the treachery and depravity of the Negro, and the terrible fact that Jew York was in the hands of foreigners. Once the first note had been sounded, Hearn had known with a suppressed desperation exactly how the rest of the symphony would follow. Until now he had contented himself with glaring at his food and muttering "stupid ass," or else staring up with a look of concentrated disgust at the ridgepole of the tent. But there was a limit to what Hearn could bear. With his big body jammed against the table, the scalding fabric of the tent side only a few inches away from his head, there was no way he could avoid looking at the expressions of the six field officers, majors and colonels, at the next table. And their appearance never changed. They were infuriating.
There was Lieutenant Colonel Webber, a short fat Dutchman, with a perpetual stupid good-natured grin which he interrupted only to ladle some food into his mouth. He was in command of the engineer section of the division, reputedly a capable officer, but Hearn had never heard him say anything, had never seen him do anything except eat with ferocious and maddening relish whatever slop had been delivered to them that day out of the endless cans.
Across the table from Webber were the "twins," Major Binner, the Adjutant General, and Colonel Newton, the Regimental Commander of the 460th. They were both tall thin mournful-looking men, with prematurely gray hair, long faces, and silver-rimmed eyeglasses. They looked like preachers, and they also rarely spoke. Major Binner had given evidence one night at supper of a religious disposition; for ten minutes he had conducted a monologue with appropriate references to chapter and verse in the Bible, but this was the only thing which distinguished him to Hearn. Colonel Newton was a painfully shy man with excellent manners, a West Pointer. Rumor claimed he had never had a woman in his life -- since this was in the jungle of the South Pacific, Hearn had never had an opportunity to observe the Colonel's defection at first hand. But the Colonel was beneath his manners an extremely fussy man who nagged his officers in a mild voice, and was reputed never to have had a thought which was not granted him first by the General.
These three should have been harmless; Hearn had never spoken to them, and they had done him no harm but he loathed them by now with the particular venom that a familiar and ugly piece of furniture assumes in time. They annoyed him because they were part of the same table which held Lieutenant Colonel Conn, Major Dalleson and Major Hobart.
"By God," Conn was saying now, "it's a damn shame that Congress hasn't slapped them down long ago. When it comes to them they pussyfoot around as if they were the Good Lord himself, but try and get an extra tank, try and get it." Conn was small, quite old, with a wrinkled face, and little eyes set a trifle vacantly under his forehead as though they did not function together. He was almost bald with a patina of gray hair above his neck and over his ears, and his nose was large, inflamed, and veined with blue filaments. He drank a great deal and held it well; the only sign was the hoarse thick authority of his voice.
Hearn sighed and poured some lukewarm water from a gray enamel pitcher into his cup. The sweat was lolling doubtfully under his chin, uncertain whether to run down his neck or drip off the edge of his jaw. Caustically, Hearn's chin smarted as he rubbed the perspiration onto the forearm of his sleeve. About him, through the tent, conversation flickered at the various tables.