From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [59]
Holmes looked the papers over with an air of profound well-being. “I suppose these are in good order?”
“Sir?” exploded Warden. “I make them out they’re always in good order.”
“Now, now, Sergeant,” Holmes said, raising his hand as if he were a bishop. “I know you’re a good first sergeant. I just want to be sure theres no slip on this transfer.”
“I made it out,” Warden told him.
“Yes,” Holmes smiled, “but your mind was too much on Leva and the supplyroom. If you’d quit worrying about Mess and Supply and trying to do their work in addition to your own, we’d have a lot more efficiency, and a much better outfit.”
“Somebody has to worry about it, Sir,” Warden said.
“Now, now,” Holmes laughed. “It cant be that bad, Sergeant. You look for things to worry about.
“Oh by the way, how is this new man Prewitt making out with straight duty now?”
“Doing fine. That boy is a good soldier.”
“I know he is,” Holmes said. “Thats what I’m counting on. I never saw a good soldier who liked to do straight duty as a private. I’m expecting to see him out for Company Smokers this summer. Theres an old saying that they tame lions in the Army.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Warden said bluntly. “I dont think you’ll ever see him out for boxing.”
“Wait until the rainy season’s over, Sergeant, before you be so sure. We’ve got a lot of field work coming up this summer.” He winked at Warden knowingly and picked up his rain-dark hat; at the moment he was sure, because Prewitt had been included in the plans of his campaign, and how could he not be on the squad if he was in the plans?
Warden watched him plowing his way back across the rain-swept deserted quad, realizing suddenly why he hated Holmes. It was because he had always feared him, not him personally, not his physique or mind, but what he stood for. Dynamite would make a good general someday, if he got the breaks. Good generals ran to a certain type, and Dynamite was it. Good generals had to have the type of mind that saw all men as masses, as numerical groups of Infantry, Artillery, and mortars that could be added and subtracted and understood on paper. They had to be able to see men as abstractions that they worked on paper with. They had to be like Blackjack Pershing who could be worried about the morality of his troops in France so much he tried to outlaw whorehouses to save their mothers heartache, but who was proud of them when they died in battle.
Through the obscuring mist of anger in him, the stark nakedness of the raindrenched earth and muddy grass and the lonely moving figure of Holmes huddled in his topcoat made a picture in his mind of a ghost town street and a strong wind rolling along a tattered scrap of paper in the gutter to some unforeseen and unimportant destination, moaning with the sadness of its duty. From upstairs he could hear the shouts and splashings of the Company washing up for chow, and the dullness that swept in through the open window made him shudder and put on his field jacket that hung on his chair.
He stared out the window, his rage disintegrated, replaced by an unutterable melancholy that had no reason he could find.
Leva’s bald head floated leisurely up the open window, heading for the kitchen where he and Warden ate, instead of with the Company in the messhall.
“Whats for chow?” Warden called.
“BS and C,” stated the wryfaced Leva laconically, and strolled on.
Roast beef hash and gravy! Again! Preem was getting worse and worse. It kept the Company Fund broke buying GI lemon extract for him.
Warden sat down at his desk and reached into a drawer and brought out the regulation .45 pistol he always kept there, hefting the heavy weighted balance in his hand. Just like the pistol his father had brought home from the War. Same weight, same shape, same heavy blueness. He and Frankie Lindsay up the street had swiped it from his father’s bureau, every now and then, and