The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [48]
Red grunted. "It won't do you any good. We're gonna be up on the line tonight." With nightfall, the air was becoming sultry again.
The General was worried. After the jeep pulled out of the motor pool he said to his driver, "Take us to headquarters battery of the one-five-one." He turned around to Major Dalleson and Lieutenant Hearn, who were squeezed together uncomfortably in the back seat. "If their line isn't in to Second Battalion we'll be doing some walking before the night is over." The jeep passed through an opening in the barbed wire and turned right onto the road that led toward the front. The General scrutinized it morosely. The mud was very bad and it would become worse. Now it was slimy and the jeep skidded and weaved from one side of the road to the other, but in a few hours it would become hard and gummy like clay, and the vehicles might bog down to their hubs. He gazed dully at the jungle on either side of the road. They passed a few Jap corpses decomposing in a ditch and the General held his breath. No matter how familiar that smell had become, he could never bear it casually. He made a mental note to have a burial detail police the road once this trouble was over.
The night had come and with it a potential disaster. In the jeep motoring forward slowly through the darkness, Cummings had a sensation of being suspended in air. The steady drone of the motor, the silence of everyone in the vehicle, and the heavy wet rustling of the jungle seemed to strip him of everything but the quick absorbed functioning of his mind. Alone, settled by himself somewhere in space, he had to work this out. The storm had come with amazing rapidity, following in the wake of a Japanese attack. Ten minutes before the rain had begun, he had had a message from 2nd Battalion headquarters that a heavy fire fight had started before their lines. And then the telephone lines had been cut to pieces in the storm, his headquarters had been laid flat, and the radio would not function. He had no idea of what was happening at the front. By now Hutchins might have pulled back 2nd Battalion. The Japs, driven on with a kind of frenzy generated by the gale, could conceivably have penetrated his front line in any number of places. With no orders coming through to them, Lord knew what might happen. If only headquarters battery had its line open to the front.
At least he had moved a dozen tanks up two days ago to 2nd Battalion. They would never have been able to make it on the road tonight, nor, for that matter, could they advance now, but if necessary, a defense position could be organized around them tonight. What chaos there could be. The entire line might be a series of isolated hedgehogs by tomorrow. And there was nothing he could do until he got to a telephone line. Anything could develop. In two days he might be back where he was when he started the pivoting operation.
When he reached that telephone line, the decisions would have to be almost immediate. He reviewed the personalities of his line officers, remembered the distinguishing characteristics, if there were any, of different companies, even individual platoons. His acute memory reissued a spate of incidents and strength figures; he knew effectively where every gun and every man on Anopopei was placed, and all this knowledge passed in an undigested flow through his head. At the moment he was an extremely simple man. Everything in him was functioning for one purpose, and from experience, with a confident unstated certainty, he knew that when demanded of him all this information would crystallize into the proper reactions. If he built up enough tension his instincts would not fail him.
And with all this there was an intense and primitive rage. The storm had thwarted him, and his anger took childish forms. From time to time a spasm of irritation washed over his concentration and muddied it. "Not a word about that storm," he would mutter to himself every now and then. "A meteorological corps which doesn't function. Army knew about it, but did they tell me? No report of the storm, none at all. What bungling or perhaps not bungling at all. They're trying to cross me."