From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [338]
He came out at 1840 hours, right after evening chow, shaky from loss of food and blinded by the dazzling brilliance of the bare 40-watt bulbs, just seven and one half hours more than three days from the moment he had sat down at the mess table and taken the first bite of food for appearances’ sake and banged on his plate with his fork in one hand and his heart squeezed up into his ears. He was a different man than when he had gone in, and he was very surprised to find the world basically unchanged.
It had not turned out to be nearly as bad as he had thought it would be. He came out of it feeling he had been tested and not found wanting, he was almost as proud of it as he was of the Taps he had once played at Arlington; but it was not any of it nearly as bad as he had thought it would be. That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.
They served dinner chow, just like breakfast chow, and supper chow, to one barrack at a time in the Stockade. This was because the messhall was small. Because the daily schedule in the Stockade was large, it only allowed half an hour per meal (plenty of time plenty of time, a half hour, Maj Thompson said, for any man to eat in). There being three barracks, each barrack had to eat in ten minutes. Actually, in practice, it did not quite amount to ten minutes. It amounted to five minutes. After you subtracted the time spent forming, and coming and going, and getting seated and served. Many prisoners felt this was not enough time. But then nobody had ever tried to accuse the Stockade of being a pleasure resort. They ran things on a hard, fast schedule in the Stockade.
Prew, according to The Malloy’s instructions via Angelo Maggio, had had two choices: He could either eat real fast and ask for seconds, in which case he would be forced to eat two more platefuls and then dosed with castor oil; or, he could eat just a little and then gripe about the poor food, in which case he would be forced to eat two more platefuls and then dosed with castor oil. He had, beforehand, objectively, chosen the second alternative on the theory that it would mean one less plateful of food in his stomach for the castor oil to work on.
He was still working on the second plateful when Barrack Number Two filed in (they always served Barrack #1, the trustees, first and Barrack #2, the recalcitrants, last in the Stockade) and sat down to eat ignoring him and he picked out Angelo Maggio and Blue Berry and the big man with the soft vague eyes of an unabashed dreamer whom he had never seen before but who could only be Jack Malloy, but he clamped down on the feeling of happiness and relief and did not look at them because he had been warned of that, too.
S/Sgt Judson administered the castor oil to him personally, after he had seen to it that he ate the two platefuls. Fatso’s method of administering castor oil was to grab the seated man by the hair and pull his head back and put the bottle between his lips against the clenched teeth while two other guards held him and then have a third guard hold his nose. With Prew, they did not have to hold the nose; he kept The Malloy’s instructions firmly in the front of his mind all the time and swallowed dutifully all the castor oil Fatso offered him, which was all the castor oil in the pint bottle. Even later, when they took him down to the “gym,” he kept The Malloy’s instructions firmly in the front of his mind. While all this was going on, Barrack Number Two ate on indifferently stolidly.
In the “gym,” a small bare room down at the other end of the T corridor from the barrack wings, where the guards took the boys to give them their workouts, Fatso asked him how his gut felt. He answered truthfully that he felt a little sick to the stomach, whereupon Fatso hit him in the sick stomach with his fist, and Prew gratefully vomited a large part of the commingled castor oil and food onto the floor. While he was cleaning it up with the bucket and