Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [158]
Days dissolved into weeks and weeks into months. Time seemed not to be passing at all. Life was a wheel of watches, a procession of paper work, a fever dream of glaring sun, glaring stars, glaring blue water, hot nights, hot days, rain squalls; logs to write; monthly reports to submit, monthly statements to audit, repeating so often that it seemed the months were passing as swiftly as the days, And the days as slowly as the months, and all time was running melted and shapeless like the chocolate bars in the canteen and the butter in the butter dishes.
During this captivity Captain Queeg became more irascible, secluded, and strange. When he emerged from his cabin he usually performed some minor outrage that was written down in Maryk’s log. He incarcerated sailors and put officers under hack; he cut off water, he cut off coffee, and when the movie operator neglected to send him word that a performance was starting he cut off movies for the entire crew for six months. He made endless demands for written reports and investigations. Once he kept all the officers sitting in session for forty-eight hours, trying to find out which mess boy had burned out a Silex (they never found out, and he announced a twenty-point cut in everybody’s fitness rating). He developed a settled habit of summoning officers for conferences in the middle of the night. The equilibrium of declared hostility between himself and the wardroom, established by his speech after the Stilwell court-martial, came to seem the normal way of life for the officers. They averaged four or five broken hours of sleep each night. A gray mist of fatigue settled over their minds. They were jumpy, easily moved to quarrel, and more scared and sickened, with every passing week, by the everlasting buzz of the wardroom phone and the message, “Captain wants to see you in his cabin.” And all the time Maryk doggedly kept adding to his secret log.
Early in June they were rescued from the treadmill delirium of Seventh Fleet duty. The operation order for the invasion of Saipan arrived aboard, and the Caine was assigned to the screen of the main body of attack transports. There was genuine joy among the officers and crew when the old ship set out on a high-speed run by itself through dangerous waters to join up with the attack force at Eniwetok. As between gunfire and a prolongation of the tedium, they would probably have voted twenty to one for the gunfire. It was pleasanter to be shot at than to rot.
On the first day of the invasion Maryk made one of the briefest and most important entries in his medical log: an incident involving Willie Keith.
An hour before dawn of the invasion day, with the night fading to blue and Saipan beginning to show on the horizon, a humped black shape, Willie was surprised to find himself badly scared. It humiliated him to be afraid, approaching his second combat experience, when he had been so valorously carefree the first time. His innocence was gone. The flame and noise and ruin and falling figures of Kwajalein had penetrated to his bones and viscera even while he had hummed Begin the Beguine.
But when the sun came up, Willie momentarily forgot his fear in enchantment at the beauty of Saipan. Terraced and gardened, it was like Japanese scenes on lacquered screens and porcelain jars; a broad island of rolling green cultivated hills dotted with rustic homes, rising out of the gray waste of the sea. A flower-scented breeze blew from it across the water. Glancing down at the dirty forecastle, where the number-one gun crew stood in a blue phalanx of ragged dungarees, life jackets, and helmets, peering at the shore, Willie felt a tiny flash of sympathy for the Japanese. He sensed what it might be like to be short and yellow-skinned and devoted to a picture-book emperor, and to face extermination by hordes of big white men swarming from everywhere in flaming machines. Although the sea and air bombardment had enlivened the island’s bucolic prettiness