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By Root 9072 0

the mechanisms of Army planning, the forms he had to fill out, but he was always uneasy. He feared the slowness of his mind, the unconscionable time it took him to make a decision when he had no paper before him and time was pressing. Nights like the one he had spent with the General when the Japanese attacked tormented him if he allowed himself to think of it. He knew that he could not have disposed his troops with even a fraction of the ease and dispatch with which the General had managed it over the field telephone, and he wondered how he would have managed if the General had left it to him. He was always afraid that a situation would develop in which he would have to call upon the more dazzling aptitudes that his position demanded, and which he did not have. He would have preferred any other job but that of G-3.

Yet the Major never thought of asking for a transfer; nothing could have been more repugnant to him. He had always possessed an intense loyalty to his commander if he felt the man was a good officer, and no one had ever impressed him more than the General. It was inconceivable to Major Dalleson that he should desert the General unless he was ordered to; he would, if the bivouac had been overrun by Japanese troops, probably have died defending the General in his tent. It was the only romantic attitude in his heavy mind and body. And besides this, the Major had his ambition to sustain him. It was, of course, a very backward ambition; the Major had no more hope of becoming a general than a rich merchant in the Middle Ages might have dreamed of becoming king. The Major wanted to make lieutenant-colonel, or even conceivably colonel before the war ended, and in his position as G-3 he was entitled to that. His reasoning was simple; he had every intention of remaining in the Army after the war and he judged that if he rose as high as lieutenant-colonel the chances were very good that in the postwar Army he would be demoted no lower than captain. Out of all the ranks it was the one he preferred the most next to top sergeant, and he felt a little wistfully that it would not be very correct for him to become an enlisted man again. So, unhappily, he continued to wrestle with his job as the chief of operations.

Now as he completed the timetables he turned with reluctance to the march orders that would be necessary to remove a battalion from the line and divert them to the beach. In itself it was not too complicated a process, but since he didn't know which battalion would be removed, he had to draw up four sets of withdrawal orders and work out the subsidiary movements of the troops who would have to fill the gap in each case. It kept him busy through most of the afternoon, for, although he assigned part of it to Leach and his other assistant, it was necessary to check their work, and the Major was very thorough, very slow.

He finished that at last, and sketched a tentative march order for the invasion battalion once it had landed at Botoi. Here there was no precedent for him to follow -- the General had sketched the outline of the attack, but he had been a little vague. From experience, Dalleson knew he would have to submit something and the General would proceed to rip it apart and give him the movement in detail. He hoped to avoid this but he knew there was little likelihood of it, and so, sweating profusely in the heat of the tent, he indicated a route of combat march along one of the main trails, and estimated the time it should take for each portion of it. This was unplotted terrain of his mind as well, and he halted many times, wiped his forehead, and tried unsuccessfully to conceal his anxiety from himself. The steady murmur of voices in the tent, the steady bustle of men moving from desk to desk, or the draftsmen humming over their work, irritated him. Once or twice he looked up, glared balefully at whoever was talking, and then returned to his work with an audible grunt.

The telephone rang frequently and despite himself Dalleson began to listen to the conversations. Once for several minutes, Hearn chatted with