The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [324]
Croft stared uneasily at them. It was too obviously an expression of the way they all felt. He was tired himself, almost as tired as he had been, and he knew he would have to drive them every yard upward. "We're gonna eat a ration here, and then we're gonna go on. You men understand that?"
There was a subdued muttering again. He sat down on a boulder and stared in the direction from which they had come. Miles away he could see the yellow hills where they had been ambushed, and where someplace now Brown and his litter detail must be traveling. Far off he could see the fringe of jungle that bordered the island and beyond it the sea from which they had come. It was all wilderness; there seemed no one, nothing alive in any of it. The war on the other side of the mountain was remote at this moment.
Behind him Mount Anaka bored into his back as if it were a human thing. He turned around and stared at it soberly, feeling again the crude inarticulate thrill it always gave him. He was going to climb it; he swore it to himself.
But all around him he could feel the pressure of the men. He knew that none of them liked him, and he hardly cared, but now they hated him and he could feel it as almost a leaden oppression in the air.
And they had to get up. If they failed, then the thing he had done with Hearn was wrong, and he had been bucking the Army, simply disobeying an order. Croft was troubled. He would have to carry the platoon virtually on his back and it was going to be very difficult. He spat, and slit the end off a cardboard K ration. As with everything else, he did this neatly, expertly.
Late into the afternoon Ridges and Goldstein struggled along with Wilson. They moved at a torturously slow pace, toting him forward for ten yards or at most fifteen before they set him down. An ant traveling in a straight line would have gone literally as fast. They did not think of quitting or continuing, they hardly ever listened to Wilson's ramblings, there was nothing in all the heat and effort but the dumb imperative to carry him on. They did not talk, they were exhausted beyond speech, they only shambled forward like blind men crossing a strange and terrifying street. Their fatigue had cut through so many levels, had blunted finally so many of their senses that they were reduced to the lowest common denominator of their existence. Carrying him was the only reality they knew.
And so for hours they labored forward, ready to collapse at any moment, but somehow never quite falling unconscious. Toward the end they had only a dumb wonder that they could abuse their bodies so mightily and have them still function.
Wilson fell into a fever and drifted along in a heavy swell of fog. The jolting of the litter became dull and leaden, almost pleasant. The few words he heard, the hoarse panting communications between Ridges and Goldstein, the sound of his own voice, indeed all sensations entered his head quite separately like doors opening into individual closets. His senses were exceptionally vivid, he felt every spasm of their muscles in the tremors of the litter, and obversely the pains of his wound seemed remote, something that came to him outside the envelope of his body. But one thing had deserted him. He had no will. He was completely passive, blissfully tired, and it took him minutes to decide to ask for anything, or to bring his hand up to his forehead to chase an insect. And when he did, his fingers remained motionless on his face for almost as long before he dropped his arm again. He was almost happy.
He rambled on about anything that came into his mind, talking for minutes at a time, his voice rasping weakly or rising to a shout without any control. And the men carrying him listened without understanding the meaning of his words or even caring.
"They was woman in Kansas when Ah was out at Riley, she used to take me up and live wi' me jus' as if Ah was her husband. Ah never even stayed in the goddam barracks, Ah jus' use' to tell 'em mah wife was in town. That woman use' to cook for me and mend mah uniforms and starch 'em nice as