The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [49]
At that moment the driver stalled the jeep in a rut. Cummings turned toward him. He could have shot him, but instead he murmured, "Come on, son, we have no time for that." The jeep motor started again, and they continued on.
His bivouac had been destroyed. That was the most painful fact of all. The dangers to the division occupied his mind, caused him a good deal of anxiety, but that was abstract. What hurt directly, personally, was the shambles in which he had left the bivouac. He felt a sense of grief almost, remembering how the rivulets had washed away the gravel walks, the way his cot had turned over, become impaled in the mud, the filth and wreckage of his tent. What a waste! It angered him again.
"You better turn on your lights, son," he said to the driver. "This is going to take too long otherwise." If any snipers were near it would be like walking through a forest of thugs, carrying a candle. The General tensed pleasurably in his seat. Danger had a tang which made him appreciate the magnitude of his work. "You'd better cover the road on either side," he said to Hearn and Dalleson. They pointed their carbines out the open sides of the jeep, scanning the jungle. With the lights on, the foliage was silvery, more mysterious.
Lieutenant Hearn fingered the magazine on his carbine, removed it, clicked it into position again, holding the small rifle in his large hands, the muzzle pointed toward the jungle. He was in a complex mood with many elements of excitement and dejection. After all the order, all the well-timed advances, the front might now have exploded into anything, and in the meantime their jeep wandered around like a nerve seeking for a muscle or organ to function upon. The General had once said to him, "I like chaos, it's like the reagents foaming in the beaker before the precipitation of the crystals. It's a kind of savory to me."
Which was a crock of the well-known article, Hearn had decided at the time. The General didn't like chaos, or rather he didn't like it when he was in the beaker. The only ones who liked it were men like himself, Hearn, who really weren't involved.
Still, the General had reacted well. Hearn remembered the first apathy that had caught them all when the storm abated. The General had stared at his muddy cot for almost half a minute, and then had scraped off a small handful of muck, which he kneaded in his fingers. That storm had cut the legs from them all, and yet the General had responded, made his incredibly urbane speech to the men, while everything in all of them had demanded tucking up one's tail and slinking off for some cover. That was understandable, however; the General had had to recover the connotations of his command.
And now he was comprehensible too. Hearn knew from the tone of his politeness, the quality of his voice, that he was thinking of nothing at all but the campaign and the night ahead. It made the General another man, definitely the nerve end with no other desire than to find something to act upon.
It depressed Hearn even as it elicited his admiration. That type of concentration was inhuman, the process beyond his scope. He stared glumly at the jungle before him, hefting the carbine in his hands again. It was possible that a Jap machine gun could be set up at the next bend in the road, or much more likely there might be a few Jap snipers with an automatic weapon or two. Their jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused gropings and unimportant dissatisfactions. And with him quite as casually would be lost a man who might be a genius, and an overgrown oaf like Dalleson, and a young nervous driver who was probably a potential Fascist. Like that. Turning a curve in the road.
Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier. That was the thing, that was what caused this mood. Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and brave. And they were here on this road, a point moving along a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungle. And somewhere else a battle might be going on. The artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combat. None of it matched. The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were.