The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [282]
Secretly, he was a little surprised at the advance. He had prepared the attack for over a month, hoarded his supplies, revised his battle plans from day to day through all the eventless weeks that had followed the aborted Japanese attack across the river. He had done everything a commander could do, and yet he had been gloomy. The memory of the bivouacs at the front with their covered foxholes and duckwalks through the mud had depressed him more than once; it spoke with such finality of the men sitting down to rest permanently, implacably.
He knew now he was wrong. The lessons learned from every campaign were different, and he had absorbed an obscure but basic axiom. If the men settled down long enough they became restless, ennuied to the point of courage again by the drab repetition of their days. It's a mistake to relieve a company which has not been advancing, he told himself. Just let them sit in the mud long enough, and they'll attack through their own volition. It was fortuitous that his battle orders had been launched at a time when the men were eager to move ahead again, but deep in his mind he knew he had been lucky. He had misjudged their morale completely.
If I had a few company commanders who were perceptive, the whole process would be simpler, more responsive, and yet it's too much to ask sensitivity of a CO besides all the other things he has to have. No, it's my fault, I should have seen it in spite of them. Perhaps for this reason the early success of the attack gave him little elation. He was pleased, naturally enough, because his greatest burden had been removed. The pressure from Corps had relaxed, and the fear that for a time had colored everything -- that he would be relieved of his command in the middle of the campaign -- had retreated now, and would expire if the advance continued favorably. Still he had substituted one dissatisfaction for another. Cummings was bothered by a suspicion, very faint, not quite stated, that he had no more to do with the success of the attack than a man who presses a button and waits for the elevator. It muddied the edges of his satisfaction, angered him subtly. The odds were that the attack would bog down sooner or later in any case, and when he left tomorrow for Army, this present success was going to hurt his chances of getting naval support for the Botoi Bay operation. In effect he would have to commit himself, claim that the campaign could be won only by that side invasion, and there would be the ticklish business of having to undercut, disparage the advances he had made already.
Nevertheless, things had changed. Reynolds had sent him a confidential memo that Army might not frown completely on the Botoi idea now, and when he saw them he could maneuver it. That type of favor was manageable.
In the meantime he had been playing the fraud with himself, he knew. All day as he had sat in the operations tent, reading the reports that had come in, he had been a little annoyed. He had felt like a politician on election night, he thought, who was watching the party candidate win and feeling chagrined because he had tried to nominate another man. The damn thing was unimaginative, stale, any commander could have mounted it as successfully, and it would be galling to admit that Army was right.
But of course they weren't. There was going to be trouble ahead, and they refused to accept it. For a moment Cummings thought of the reconnaissance patrol he had sent to the other side of the mountain, and he shrugged. If that came off, if they brought back a report of some value, if indeed