Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [127]
In the first place, he decided, he had been an idiot to go into the Navy instead of the Army. Russia was doing the real dirty work in Europe. The smart man’s place in this war-unlike the last-was in the infantry, wallowing in idleness in England while the asses who had taken refuge in the Navy tossed on sickening seas, on the way to assault the terrible barrier of the Japanese mid-Pacific islands. His destiny now was coral and blasted palms and spitting shore batteries and roaring Zeros-and mines, hundreds of them, no doubt-and the bottom of the sea, perhaps, in the end. Meantime his opposite numbers in the Army would be visiting Canterbury Cathedral or the birthplace of Shakespeare arm in arm with pretty English girls, whose good will toward Americans was already a global legend.
It seemed to Willie that the war against Japan would be the largest and deadliest in human history, and that it would probably end only in 1955 or 1960, upon the intervention of Russia, a decade after the collapse of Germany. How could the Japanese ever be dislodged from their famed “unsinkable carriers,” the chain of islands, swarming with planes which could massacre any approaching fleet? There would be, perhaps, one costly Tarawa a year. He was sure he was headed for the forthcoming one. And the war would drag on at that rate until he was bald and middle-aged.
Willie didn’t have a historian’s respect for the victories at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Midway. The stream of news as it burbled by his mind left only a confused impression that our side was a bit ahead in the game, but making painful slow work of it. He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn’t know that he knew. This war seemed to him different from all the others: diffuse, slogging, and empty of drama.
He was on his way to fight in battles as great as any in the histories. But these would appear to him mere welters of nasty, complicated, tiresome activity. Only in after years, reading books describing the scenes in which he had been engaged, would he begin to think of his battles as Battles. Only then, when the heat of youth was gone, would he come to warm himself with the fanned-up glow of the memory that he, too, Willie Keith, had fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.
For two days the Caine wallowed through gray cold rainy weather. There was the usual eating of damp sandwiches while clinging to stanchions, and sleeping in fits between pitches and rolls. Contrasted to the golden days of shore leave, this spell of misery seemed worse to the officers and crew than any they had ever undergone. There was a general feeling that they were all damned forever to a floating wet hell.
On the third day they broke into the sunny blue of the South Seas. Dank pea jackets, sweaters, and windbreakers vanished. Officers in creased khakis and crew in dungarees began to look familiar to each other. Furniture was unroped. Hot meals were resumed at breakfast time. The pervading gloom and taciturnity gave way to a freshet of laughing reminiscence and boasts about the leave period. In a way, the short-handedness of the crew helped the recovery process. Those who had preferred court-martial to further adventures with Captain Queeg were the crafty, the discontented, the easily discouraged. The sailors who had returned to man the Caine were jolly boys, ready to take the bad with the good, and fond of the old ship, however heartily and horribly they cursed it.
On this day Willie took a mighty leap upward in life. He stood the noon-to-four watch as officer of the deck. Keefer was present to correct any disastrous mistake, and Captain Queeg himself perched in his chair throughout the watch, alternately dozing or blinking placidly in the sunshine. Willie conducted a faultless watch. It was a simple matter of staying