The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [295]
But the history wasn't. All right, all the great dreams had blunted and turned practical and corrupt, and the good things had often been done through bad motives, but still it had not all been bad, there had also been victories where there should have been defeats. The world, by all the logics, should have turned Fascist and it hadn't yet.
For a moment there were a few sounds in the valley beneath him, and he picked up his rifle and stared into the shadows of the grass. It became quiet again. For some reason he was left depressed.
It was a skinny enough hope, and all the pressures, all the machines, were squeezing men a little more; with every weapon the odds became a little more out of whack. Morality against bombs. Even the techniques of revolution were changed, were accomplished with armies against armies now, or not at all.
If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.
A plan for concerted action, comrades. He grinned sourly. There would always be another fifty, that wasn't the idea. It had no use. It was just something to keep you occupied, keep you happy. Tonight we strike at Generalissimo Cummings.
Aaah, horseshit.
There were no answers you could find, but perhaps there were epochs in history which had no answers. Rely on the blunder factor. Sit back and wait for the Fascists to louse it up.
Only that wasn't enough, you couldn't do that. For whatever reason, you had to keep resisting. You had to do things like giving up a commission.
Hearn and Quixote. Bourgeois liberals.
Still, when he got back he would do that little thing. If he looked for the reasons they were probably lousy, but it was even lousier to lead men for obviously bad motives. It meant leaving the platoon to Croft, but if he stayed he would become another Croft.
When things got really bad, maybe the political differences on the Left would be shelved.
Drought season for anarchists.
Martinez moved along for a few hundred yards through the tall grass, keeping well within the shadow of the cliffs. As he advanced, he awakened slowly, flexing his arms and pinching the back of his neck. He had been partially asleep while he had talked to Croft, or at least nothing that was said had any significance to him. He had understood the directions, the mission, he had known that Croft was telling him to do something and instinctively he obeyed, but he had not thought about the connotations. It had not seemed particularly dangerous or odd to be going out by himself at night into country he had never seen before.
Now of course as his mind cleared it was becoming apparent to him. Damn fool thing? he wondered, and then dismissed it. If Croft had told him it was necessary, then obviously it was. His senses became alerted, his nerve ends poised. He moved forward with an effortless silent motion, placing his heel first on the ground, and then bringing his toes down gently, his body weaving through the grass to diminish the rustling. A man twenty yards away could not have been certain that anyone was approaching. And yet with this he did not go slowly; through experience, his feet seemed to paw the ground, avoiding stones or twigs, settling confidently, noiselessly. He was functioning more like an animal now than a man.
He was frightened, but effectively so; he had no panic, and it left him intensely aware of everything he could see or feel. On the ship, in the assault boat that landed on Anopopei, a dozen times since, he had been close to hysteria, worth nothing at all, but that variety