The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [153]
He had known it was dangerous to rest the troops for a week, but it was a gamble he had had to take while he finished the road, and it had boomeranged. The shock cut deeply into the General's confidence. The process at most times was unbelievable to him, and he was suffering the amazement and terror of a driver who finds his machine directing itself, starting and halting when it desires. He had heard of this, military lore was filled with such horror tales, but he had never imagined it would happen to him. It was incredible. For five weeks the troops had functioned like an extension of his own body. And now, apparently without cause, or at least through causes too intangible for him to discover, he had lost his sensitive control. No matter how he molded them now the men always collapsed into a sodden resistant mass like dishrags, too soft, too wet to hold any shape which might be given them. At night he would lie sleepless on his cot, suffering an almost unbearable frustration; there were times when he was burning with the impotence of his rage. One night he had lain for hours like an epileptic emerging from a coma, his hands clasping and unclasping endlessly, his eyes staring fixedly at the dim outlines of the ridgepole of his tent. The power, the intensity of the urges within himself, inexpressible, balked, seemed to course through his limbs, beating in senseless fury against the confines of his body. There was everything he wanted to control, everything, and he could not direct even six thousand men. Even a single man had been able to balk him.
He had made furious efforts for a time, launched that attack, had kept the troops patrolling constantly, but deep inside himself, unadmitted, he was becoming frightened. A new attack on which he had had Major Dalleson and the G-3 staff working for days had been called off several times already. Always there had been good superficial reasons -- a large shipment of supplies was due from a few Liberty ships in a day or two, or else he felt it tnore advisable to capture first some minor features of land which might seriously impede the attack. But actually he was afraid; failure now would be fatal. He had expended too much on that first attack, and if this one foundered, weeks and possibly months would accrue before a third major drive could be initiated. By that time he would be replaced.
His mind had become dangerously lassitudinous, and his body had been troubled for some time by a painful diarrhea. In an effort to scour his ailment he had had officers' mess suffer the most rigid inspections, but despite the new standards of cleanliness his diarrhea continued. It was acutely difficult now to conceal his annoyance with the most insignificant details, and it was affecting everything about him. Hot wet days sloughed past, and the officers in headquarters snapped at each other, had petty quarrels and cursed the unremitting heat and rain. Nothing seemed to move in all the cramped choked spaces of the jungle, and it developed an attitude in which no one expected anything to move. The division was going subtly and inevitably to pot, and he felt powerless to alter it.
Hearn suffered the results in all their immediacy. Without the disturbing and fascinating intimacy the General had granted him in his first weeks as an aide, the job had become reduced quickly to its onerous humiliating routine. A change had come about in their relationship, quietly achieved, but its end product left him in a formal and obviously subordinate status. The General no longer confided in him, no longer lectured him, and the duties of his job, which had been treated between them until now as a tacit joke,