From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [440]
“That wont do us no good if they’ve already laid one on the roof,” somebody yelled.
“All right,” Warden hollered, “can the chatter. Lets move. We’re wasting time. Squad leaders get these men upstairs. BAR men, platoon leaders and first-three-graders report to me here.”
With the corporals and buck sergeants haranguing them, the troops gradually began to sift out through the corridor to the porch stairs. Outside another plane went over. Then another, and another. Then what sounded like three planes together. The platoon leaders and guides and BAR men pushed their way down to the pingpong table that Warden jumped down off of.
“What you want me to do, First?” Stark said; his face still had the same expression of blank, flat refusal—like a stomach flatly refusing food—that he had had in the messhall; “what about the kitchen force? I’m pretty drunk, but I can still shoot a BAR.”
“I want you to get your ass in the kitchen with every man you got and start packing up,” Warden said, looking at him. He rubbed his hand hard over his own face. “We’ll be movin out for the beach as soon as this tapers off a little, and I want that kitchen all packed and ready to roll. Full field. Stoves and all. While you’re doin that, make a big pot of coffee on the big stove. Use the biggest #18 pot you got.”
“Right,” Stark said, and took off for the door into the messhall.
“Wait!” Warden hollered. “On second thought, make two pots. The two biggest you got. We’re going to need it.”
“Right,” Stark said, and went on. His voice was not blank, his voice was crisp. It was just his face, that was blank.
“The rest of you guys,” Warden said.
Seeing their faces, he broke off and rubbed his own face again. It didnt do any good. As soon as he stopped rubbing it settled right back into it, like a campaign hat that had been blocked a certain way.
“I want the BAR men to report to the supplyroom right now and get their weapons and all the loaded clips they can find and go up on the roof. When you see a Jap plane, shoot at it. Dont worry about wasting ammo. Remember to take a big lead. Thats all. Get moving.
“The rest of you guys,” Warden said, as the BAR men moved away at a run. “The rest of you guys. The first thing. The main thing. Every platoon leader is responsible to me personally to see that all of his men stay inside, except the BAR men up on the roof. A rifleman’s about as much good against a low flying pursuit ship as a boy scout with a slingshot. And we’re going to need every man we can muster when we get down to beach positions. I dont want none of them wasted here, by runnin outside to shoot rifles at airplanes. Or by goin souvenir huntin. The men stay inside. Got it?”
There was a chorus of hurried vacant nods. Most of the heads were on one side, listening to the planes going over in ones and twos and three. It looked peculiar to see them all nodding on one side like that. Warden found himself wanting to laugh excitedly.
“The BARs will be up on the roof,” he said. “They can do all the shooting that we can supply ammo for. Anybody else will just be getting in the way.”
“What about my MGs, Milt?” Peter Karelsen asked him.
The easy coolness in old Pete’s voice shocked Warden to a full stop. Drunk or not, Pete seemed to be the only one who sounded relaxed, and Warden remembered his two years in France.
“Whatever you think, Pete,” he said.
“I’ll take one. They couldnt load belts fast enough to handle more than one. I’ll take Mikeovitch and Grenelli up with me to handle it.”
“Can you get the muzzle up high enough on those ground tripods?”
“We’ll put the tripod over a chimney,” Pete said. “And then hold her down by the legs.”
“Whatever you think, Pete,” Warden said, thinking momentarily how wonderful it was to be able to say that.
“Come on, you two,” Pete said, almost boredly, to his two section leaders. “We’ll take Grenelli’s because we worked on it last.”
“Remember,” Warden said to the rest of them as Pete left with