The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [305]
Croft joined the others behind the hill. "All right, men, let's haul ass. We're gonna head right along next to the cliffs, and we ain't gonna hang around for no one." He took the lead in the column and they moved out rapidly, jogging for several hundred yards at a time before slowing to a walk, and then after a few paces beginning to trot again. In an hour they moved five miles over the hills and through the tall grass, never pausing, never slowing down for the stragglers.
Roth forgot quickly about the Lieutenant, as did the others. The shock of the second ambush was blunted in the rigors of their retreat. They thought of nothing but the breathless clamor in their chests, the trembling of their overworked legs. When Croft finally called a halt they flopped on the ground numbly, not even caring if the Japs were pursuing them. At that moment if they had been attacked they would probably have lain there dumb.
Croft alone was standing. He spoke slowly, his chest heaving, but his speech distinct. "We're gonna take a little break." He stared disdainfully at them, noting the stupor with which they listened to him. "Since you men are all so goddam pooped, I'll stand guard." Most of them had hardly heard him, and those who did gathered no sense from his words. They just lay there passive.
Slowly they recuperated, their breath becoming normal, their legs regaining some strength. But still the ambush and the march had drained them. The morning sun was high enough by now to be unpleasantly hot and they sweltered, lying on their bellies and watching the perspiration drip from their faces onto their forearms. Minetta retched up the dry sour lumps of his breakfast ration.
As they recovered, the Lieutenant's death bothered them only slightly. It had been too abrupt, too disconnected for them to feel very much, and now that he was gone they found it difficult to believe he had ever been with the platoon. Wyman crawled over to Red and lay down beside him, plucking idly at a few tufts of grass. Occasionally he would bite on one and then spit it out.
"That was funny," he said at last. It was pleasant to be lying there, knowing that in an hour they would turn back. A small filtrate of the terror he had felt in the ambush worked through him for a moment.
"Yeah," Red muttered. And now the Lieutenant. He could see Hearn scowling when he had refused the offer to be a noncom. His mind skated on the brittlest ice, and he had a vague sense of oppression as if there was something he could not afford to face, something that was going to come up again.
"The Lootenant was a good guy," Wyman blurted suddenly. The words shocked him deeply. For the first time he bridged the distance between his few contacts with Hearn and the last glimpse he had had of him, the bloody meaningless corpse. "A good guy," he repeated doubtfully, feeling his way around the edge of the terror this caused.
"They ain't a fuggin one of those officers is worth a goddam," Red swore. His exhausted limbs twitched nervously from his anger.
"Oh, I don't know, there's all kinds of guys. . ." Wyman protested gently. He was still trying to bridge the sound of the Lieutenant's voice with the color of his blood.
"I wouldn't spit on the best one of them," Minetta said furiously. A mild superstition about not saying anything bad about the dead troubled him, but he repressed it defiantly. "I ain't afraid of saying what I think. They're all bastards." Under his high forehead, Minetta's eyes looked large, excited. "If it took him being knocked off for us to go back, then I'll settle for that." They had sent him out, they didn't give a goddam, but who could he fight against? "Aaaah." He lit a cigarette, puffed cautiously at it, for the smoke roiled