The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [255]
The sunlight, the heat, was everywhere, dazzling.
For an hour they marched uphill almost constantly, and then halted at a stream to fill their canteens. They rested for fifteen minutes and went on again. Their clothing had been wet at least a dozen times, from the ocean spray, from the river, their sweat, from sleeping on the ground, and each time it dried it left its stains. Their shirts were streaked with white lines of salt, and under their armpits, beneath their belts, the cloth was beginning to rot. They were chafed and blistered and sunburned; already some of them were limping on sore feet, but all these discomforts were minor, almost unnoticed in the leaden stupor of marching, the fever they suffered from the sun. Their fatigue had racked them, exploited all the fragile vaults of their bodies, the leaden apathy of their muscles. They had tasted so many times the sour acrid bile of labor, had strained their overworked legs over so many hills, that at last they were feeling the anesthesia of exhaustion. They kept moving without any thought of where they went, dully, stupidly, waving and floundering from side to side. The weight of their packs was crushing, but they considered them as a part of their bodies, a boulder lodged in their backs.
The bushes and thickets grew higher, reached almost to their chests. The brambles kept catching in their rifles, and hooking onto their clothing. They thrashed forward, plunging through the brush until halted by the barbs clinging to their clothing, and then stopped, picked the barbs loose, and swooped forward again. The men thought of nothing but the hundred feet of ground in front of them; they almost never looked upward to the crest of the hill they were climbing. In the early afternoon, they took a long break in the shadow of some rocks. The time passed sluggishly in the chirping of the crickets, the languid flights of the insects. The men, wretchedly tired, began to sleep. Hearn had no desire to move, but the break was too prolonged. He stood up slowly, hitched on his pack, and called out, "Come on, men. On your feet." There was no response, which furnished him with a sharp irritation. They would have obeyed Croft quickly. "Come on, let's get going, men. We can't sit around on our butts all day." His voice was taut and impersonal, and the soldiers rose out of the grass slowly and sullenly. He could hear them muttering, was aware of a glum crabbed resistance.
His nerves were more keyed than he had realized. "Quit the bitching and let's go," he heard himself piping. He was damn tired of them, he realized suddenly.
"That sonofabitch," one of them muttered.
It shocked him, and generated resentment. He repressed it, however. What they were doing was understandable enough. In the fatigue of the march, they had to have someone to blame, and no matter what he did they would hate him sooner or later. His approach would end by confusing and annoying them. Croft they would obey, for Croft satisfied their desire for hatred, encouraged it, was superior to it, and in turn exacted obedience. The realization depressed him. "We've still got a long way to go," he told them more quietly.
They continued to plod on. They were much closer to Mount Anaka now. Every time they crossed a ridge-line they could see the towering cliff walls bordering the pass, could distinguish even the individual trees in the forests on its middle slopes. The country, even the air, had changed. It was cooler here, but the air was perceptibly thinner, and burned faintly in their lungs.
They reached the approach to the pass by three o'clock. Croft climbed the crest of the last hill, crouched behind a bush, and examined the land before them. Beneath the hill, a valley extended for perhaps a quarter of a mile, an island of tall grass surrounded