From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [87]
There was a Pall Mall ad in it that he liked. It was painted in bright color and showed some happy soldiers on the range. (There were lots of things about the Army now, in all the magazines, since the peace-time draft.) Three of these were in the prone position firing, and the other two were back on the ready line sitting on green grass, and one of these was holding up two cigarets, a Pall Mall and a short one. He was a very happy looking soldier.
He studied this one quite a while, too, professionally admiring the artist’s observation. The board stiff campaign hats that were definitely Regular Army, pre-draft, were there. The Infantry’s robin’s-egg-blue cord and acorns were on the hats. The old style chrome bayonet and white web sheath with its brown leather tip, the shooting jackets made out of the obsolete CKC blouses and ripped up the back for shoulder room, the sheepskin elbow and shoulder pads with the fleece turned in, the new M1 rifle that had not got to Wahoo yet and that he had only seen in diagrams—they all were there; and the range season with the deep smell of burnt powder and the clinking brassy tubes of cartridges heavy in the hand came back to him as he looked at it. The only thing he could professionally find wrong with it was that none of them had leggins on. Well, maybe they didnt issue leggins now, back in the States. He tore it out, thinking it would look good tacked to the inside of his footlocker top.
The gleaming white tubes of the tailormade cigarets in the picture made him thirsty for a smoke, and he had his hand in his shirt pocket before he remembered he and Angelo had smoked his last two tailormades in the latrine. He folded the picture up and put it in the empty pocket and took the sack of Duke’s Mixture out of the other pocket and rolled one, before he went on reading.
But it was the back cover of that same issue of the Post that really caught him, really took him outside of now. It was a Chesterfield Merry Christmas ad of a young woman holding up a carton of them as she zoomed up over a snowy hill, her skis clear off the ground and shot snow in the air about her feet. She had on red pants with white stripes down the sides that fit her hips and long lined thighs very closely and wrinkled cunningly across the crotch. A red and white striped long sleeved sweater with a white pullover vest over that, as she bent forward slightly, suggested loosely the pendulous breasts underneath. He looked at the photograph quite a while, his eyes working along the shadowed wrinkles, trying vainly to get underneath, before he rolled the old Post up and stuck it back behind the seat, happy with a new idea.
For Christ’s sake, Prewitt, he told himself, here you been looking at these magazines a half an hour without ever going through the cunt-pictures; and he got up to go and get the Ladies’ Home Journals.
There were lots of them, old ones of the Company’s subscription around the Dayroom, because no matter what the Dayroom orderly thew out he always saved the Journals, until they had been worn completely out.
He went through several magazines from front to back, not bothering with the idiotic stories, looking for the ads. Most of them had women in them and these were what he looked for. The colored photographs were the best for reality in picturing the women, but on the other hand they usually put a few more clothes on these than they did the drawings. The small drawn ads in the back, down the outsides of the pages, the ones with the slightly oversized breasts and the collection of fanning wrinkles around the crotch, with the moulded, deep, fleshly look; these were the best.
There was a Mum ad that said “A girl can be too trusting at times!” with the big firm legs and flat belly that no woman ever had, the girl in underwear and a filmy negligee sitting on a stool, shoving a big powder