The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [209]
He is always learning things, understanding already that his mind must work on many levels. There is the thing he thinks of as the truth, the objective situation which his mind must unravel; there is the "deep layer," as he calls it, the mattress resting on the cloud, and he does not care to plumb for the legs; there is, and it is very important, the level where he must do and say things for their effect upon the men with whom he lives and works.
He learns the last dramatically in the hour on Military History and Tactics. (The brown scrubbed room, the blackboards at the front, the benches where the cadets sit in the unquestioned symmetry of ancient patterns, the squares of a chessboard.)
Sir (he gets permission to speak), is it fair to say that Lee was the better general than Grant? I know that their tactics don't compare, but Grant had the knowledge of strategy. What good are tactics, sir, if the. . . the larger mechanics of men and supplies are not developed properly, because the tactics are just the part of the whole? In this conception wasn't Grant the greater man because he tried to take into account the intangibles. He wasn't much good at the buck-and-wing but he could think up the rest of the show. (The classroom roars.)
It has been a triple error. He has been contradictory, rebellious and facetious.
Cummings, you'll make your points in the future more concisely.
Yes, sir.
You happen to be wrong. You men will find out that experience is worth a great deal more than theory. It is impossible to account for all your strategy, those things have a way of balancing out as happened at Richmond, as is happening now in the trench warfare in Europe. Tactics is always the determinant. (He writes it on the blackboard.)
And, Cummings. . .
Sir?
Since you will be fortunate if you command a battalion by the end of twenty years, you'll do a sight better to concern yourself with the strategic problems of a platoon (there is muffled laughter at his sarcasm) than with those of an Army. (Seeing the approval in his eyes, the class releases its laughter, singeing Cummings's flesh.)
He hears about it for weeks. Hey, Cummings, how many hours will you need to take Richmond?
They're sending you over, Ed, I hear, as adviser to the French. With the proper concepts the Hindenburg Line may be breached.
He learns so many things from this, understands, besides all else, that he is not liked, will not be liked, and he can't make mistakes, cannot expose himself to the pack. He will have to wait. But he is hurt, cannot restrain himself from writing about it to Margaret. And his contempt thrives in recompense; there is a world of manners about which these men know nothing.
In The Howitzer, when he graduates, they have printed "The Strategist" under his record, and then to soften it, for it jars with the mellow sentimental glow of yearbooks, they have added a little ambiguously, "Handsome Is as Handsome Does."
He goes out to an abridged furlough with Margaret, the announcement of their engagement, and the rapid shuttle on the transport to the war in Europe.
In the planning section of GHQ he lives in the remaining wing of a château, occupies the bare whitewashed room that had once belonged to a chambermaid, but he does not know this. The war has caught him up agreeably, altered the deadening routine of forms, the detail work of outlining troop movements. The sound of the artillery is always an enrichment to his work, the bare gnashed ground outside speaks of the importance of his figures.
There is even one night when the entire war stands out for him on the edge of a knife blade, a time when everything balances in his mind.
He goes out with his colonel, an enlisted chauffeur, and two other officers on an inspection of the front. It is picnic style with