The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [89]
"So what you've got to do is break them down," Hearn said.
"Exactly. Break them down. Every time an enlisted man sees an officer get an extra privilege, it breaks him down a little more."
"I don't see that. It seems to me they'd hate you more."
"They do. But they also fear us more. I don't care what kind of man you give me, if I have him long enough I'll make him afraid. Every time there's what you call an Army injustice, the enlisted man involved is confirmed a little more in the idea of his own inferiority." He smoothed the hair over his temple. "I happen to know of an American prison camp in England which'll be a terror once we invade Europe. The methods used will be brutal, and it's going to cause a stink eventually, but it happens to be necessary. In our own back yard we have a particular replacement depot where an attempt was actually made to kill the Colonel in command. You aren't capable of understanding it, but I can tell you, Robert, that to make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder. Men in prison camps, deserters, or men in replacement camps are in the backwaters of the Army and the discipline has to be proportionately more powerful. The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates."
"Where do I fit into this?" Hearn asked.
"You don't yet. There are such things as papal dispensations." The General grinned at him, lit another cigarette. Almost entirely muted, a burst of laughter from the recreation tent filtered through the bivouac to them.
Hearn sat forward. "You take the man who's out on guard right now, and listens to that laughter. It seems to me there'd come a time when he'd want to turn his machine gun around."
"Oh, eventually. The time soldiers start doing that is when an army is about defeated. Until then, the hate just banks in them, makes them fight a little better. They can't turn it on us, so they turn it outward."
"But you've a big gamble there," Hearn said. "If we lose the war, you've produced a revolution. It seems to me in terms of your interest it would be better to lose the war by being overgood to the men, and avoid the revolution afterward."
Cummings laughed. "That would be one of your liberal weeklies, wouldn't it? You're an ass, Robert. We're not going to lose the war, and if we did, you don't think Hitler would grant a revolution, do you?"
"Then what you're saying is that you people can't lose the war either way."
"You people, you people," the General parroted. "That's a bit of Marxism, isn't it, the great big capitalist conspiracy. Just how do you know so much about Marxism?"
"I've played around with it."
"I doubt it. I doubt if you really have." The General pinched the butt of his cigarette reflectively. "You're misreading history if you see this war as a grand revolution. It's power concentration."
Hearn shrugged. "I'm a poor history student, I'm no thinker, I just think it's bad sense to have men hating you."
"Again I say it's not important if they're afraid of you. Robert, stop and think, with all the hate there's been in the world, there have been surprisingly few revolutions." He ticked his chin softly with his fingernail, a little sensuously, as if he were absorbed in the scraping sound of his beard. "You can even see the Russian revolution as a space-organization progress. The machine techniques of this century demand consolidation, and with that you've got to have fear, because the majority of men must be subservient to the machine, and it's not a business they instinctively enjoy."
Hearn shrugged again. This discussion had taken the form it invariably assumed. The more intangible and inchoate