The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [33]
At midday, the annoyance was greater. The mess tent had been erected in the least prepossessing area of the bivouac, several hundred yards from the beach, without any decent shade from the coconut trees. The sun beat down and heated the inside until even the flies ambled sluggishly through the air. The officers ate in a swelter, sweat dripping from their hands and faces onto the plates before them. At Motome in the division's permanent bivouac the officers' mess had been set up in a little dell with a brook trickling over some rocks nearby, and the contrast was galling. As a result there was little conversation, and it was not exceptional for a quarrel to start. But at least in the past it had not cut across too many ranks. A captain might argue with a major, or a major with a lieutenant colonel, but no lieutenants had been correcting colonels.
Lieutenant Hearn was aware of that. He was aware of a great many things, but even a stupid man would have known that a second lieutenant, indeed the only second lieutenant in Combined Headquarters, did not go around picking fights. Besides, he knew he was resented. The other officers considered it a piece of unwarranted good fortune that he should have been assigned to the General as his aide when he had joined the outfit only toward the end of the Motome campaign.
Beyond all this, Hearn had done little to make friends. He was a big man with a shock of black hair, a heavy immobile face. His brown eyes, imperturbable, stared out coldly above the short blunted and slightly hooked arc of his nose. His wide thin mouth was unexpressive, a top ledge to the solid mass of his chin, and his voice was sharp with a thin contemptuous quality, rather surprising in so big a man. He would have denied it at times but he liked very few people, and most men sensed it uneasily after talking to him for a few minutes. He was above all the kind of man other men love to see humiliated.
It would only be common sense for him to keep his mouth shut, and yet for the last ten minutes of the meal, the sweat had dripped steadily into his food, and his shirt had become progressively damper. More and more he had been resisting the impulse to mash the contents of his plate against the face of Lieutenant Colonel Conn. For the two weeks they had been eating in this tent, he had sat with seven other lieutenants and captains at a table adjacent to the one where Conn was talking now. And for two weeks he had heard Conn talk about the stupidity of Congress (with which Hearn would agree, but for different reasons), the inferiority of the Russian and British armies, the treachery and depravity of the Negro, and the terrible fact that Jew York was in the hands of foreigners. Once the first note had been sounded, Hearn had known with a suppressed desperation exactly how the rest of the symphony would follow. Until now he had contented himself with glaring at his food and muttering "stupid ass," or else staring up with a look of concentrated disgust at the ridgepole of the tent. But there was a limit to what Hearn could bear. With his big body jammed against the table, the scalding fabric of the tent side only a few inches away from his head, there was no way he could avoid looking at the expressions of the six field officers, majors and colonels, at the next table. And their appearance never changed. They were infuriating.
There was Lieutenant Colonel Webber, a short fat Dutchman, with a perpetual stupid good-natured grin which he interrupted only to