The long march

By William Styron

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The long march
    
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The long march

Author: William Styron

Release date: August 1, 2025 [eBook #76604]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Random House, 1952

Credits: Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG MARCH ***





                                                                    The
                                                                   Long
                                                                  March




BOOKS BY WILLIAM STYRON

LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS
THE LONG MARCH
SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE
THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER

                                                                    The
                                                                   Long
                                                                  March

                                                         [Illustration]

                                                         WILLIAM STYRON
                                                RANDOM HOUSE · NEW YORK


                 © Copyright, 1952, by William Styron

              All rights reserved under International and
             Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published
                  in New York by Random House, Inc.,
               and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by
                    Random House of Canada Limited.

                            Manufactured in
                     the United States of America

                        Designed by Carl Weiss


                                  to

                             _Hiram Haydn_




                                   The
                                  Long
                                 March




[Illustration]


One noon, in the blaze of a cloudless Carolina summer, what was left of
eight dead boys lay strewn about the landscape, among the poison ivy and
the pine needles and loblolly saplings. It was not so much as if they
had departed this life but as if, sprayed from a hose, they were only
shreds of bone, gut, and dangling tissue to which it would have been
impossible ever to impute the quality of life, far less the capacity to
relinquish it. Of course, though, these had really died quickly, no
doubt before the faintest flicker of recognition, of wonder,
apprehension, or terror had had time to register in their minds. But the
shock, it occurred to Lieutenant Culver, who stood in the shady lee of
an ambulance and watched the scene, must have been fantastic to those on
the periphery of the explosion, those fifteen or so surviving marines
who now lay on the ground beneath blankets, moaning with pain and
fright, and who, not more than half an hour before, had been waiting
patiently in line for their lunch before the two mortar shells,
misfired--how? why? the question already hung with a buzzing, palpable
fury in the noontime heat--had plummeted down upon the chow-line and had
deadened their ears and senses and had hurled them earthward where they
lay now, alive but stricken in a welter of blood and brain, scattered
messkits and mashed potatoes, and puddles of melting ice cream. Moments
ago in the confusion--just before he had stolen off from the Colonel’s
side to go behind a tree and get sick--Lieutenant Culver had had a
glimpse of a young sweaty face grimed with dust, had heard the boy’s
voice, astonishing even in that moment of nausea because of its clear,
unhysterical tone of explanation: “Major, I tell you I was on the field
phone and I tell you as soon as they come out the tube I knew they were
short rounds and so I hollered....” Of course it had been an accident.
But why? He heard the Major shout something, then Culver had heard no
more, retching on the leaves with a sound that, for the moment, drowned
out the cries and whines of the wounded and the noise of trucks and
ambulances crashing up through the underbrush.

It was not that he had a weak stomach or that he was unacquainted with
carnage that allowed him to lose control. If anything, he prided himself
on his stomach, and as for blood he had seen a lot spilled on Okinawa
and had himself (although through no act of valor whatever) received a
shrapnel wound--in the buttocks, a matter which even in retrospect, as
he had often been forced to remind his wife, possessed no elements of
comedy at all. In this case it was simply that on the one hand he
himself had been shocked. The sight of death was the sort of thing which
in wartime is expected, which one protects oneself against, and which
is finally excused or at least ignored, in the same way that a beggar is
ignored, or a head cold, or a social problem. But in training here in
the States in peacetime (or what, this sweltering summer in the early
1950s, passed as peacetime) one had felt no particular need for that
type of self-defense, and the slick nude litter of intestine and
shattered blue bones, among which forks and spoons peeked out like so
many pathetic metal flowers, made a crazy, insulting impact at Culver’s
belly, like the blow of a fist. And on the other hand (and the pulsing
ache at his brow now as he vomited helplessly onto his shoes lent
confirmation to what he’d been trying to deny to himself for months): he
was too old, he was no longer an eager kid just out of Quantico with a
knife between his teeth. He was almost thirty, he was old, and he was
afraid.

Lieutenant Culver had been called back to the marines early that spring.
When, one Saturday morning, his wife had thrown the brown envelope
containing his orders onto the bed where he lay sleeping, he experienced
an odd distress which kept him wandering about, baffled and mumbling to
himself, for days. Like most of his fellow reserves he had retained his
commission after the last war. It was an insouciant gesture which he had
assumed would in some way benefit him in case of an all-out conflict,
say, thirty years hence, but one which made no provisions for such an
eventuality as a police action in Korea. It had all come much too soon
and Culver had felt weirdly as if he had fallen asleep in some barracks
in 1945 and had awakened in a half-dozen years or so to find that the
intervening freedom, growth, and serenity had been only a glorious if
somewhat prolonged dream. A flood of protest had welled up in him, for
he had put the idea of war out of his mind entirely, and the brief years
since Okinawa had been the richest of his life. They had produced, among
lesser things, a loving, tenderly passionate wife who had passed on to
their little girl both some of her gentle nature and her wealth of
butter-colored hair; a law degree, the fruits of which he had just begun
to realize, even though still somewhat impecuniously, as one of the
brightest juniors in a good New York law firm; a friendly beagle named
Howard whom he took for hikes in Washington Square; a cat, whom he did
not deign to call by name, and despised; and a record-player that played
Haydn, Mozart and Bach.

Up until the day that his orders came--the day that he tried to forget
and the one that Betsy, his wife, soon bitterly referred to as “the day
the roof fell in”--they had been living in a roomy walk-up in the
Village and experiencing the prosaic contentment that comes from eating
properly, indulging themselves with fair moderation in the pleasures of
the city, and watching the growth of a child. This is not to say that
they were either smug or dull. They had a bright circle of friends,
mostly young lawyers and newspapermen and doctors and their wives. There
were parties and occasional week ends in the country, where everyone
became frankly drunk. There were the usual household skirmishes, too,
but these were infrequent and petered out quickly. Both of them were too
sensible to allow some domestic misdemeanor to develop into anything
horrible; they were well adjusted and each of them found it easy to
admit, long after the honeymoon, that they were deeply in love. Months
later at camp, ensnared futilely in the coils of some administrative
flypaper, Culver would find himself gazing up from his work and out
across the smoky hot barrens of pine and sand, relieving his vast
boredom in a daydream of that vanished simplicity and charm. His mind
seemed to drift toward one recurrent vision. This was of the afternoons
in winter when--bundled to the ears, the baby-carriage joggling bravely
in the van and the melancholy beagle scampering at their heels--they
took their Sunday stroll. On such days the city, its frantic heartbeat
quieted and clothed in the sooty white tatters of a recent snow, seemed
to have an Old World calm, and the people that passed them in the
twilight appeared to be, like themselves, pink-cheeked and contented, no
matter what crimson alarms flowered at the newsstands or what evil
rumors sounded from distant radios. For Culver the waning Sunday light
had not spelled out the promise of Monday morning’s gloom but of
Monday’s challenge--and this was not because he was a go-getter but
because he was happy. He was happy to walk through the chill and
leafless dusk with his wife and his child and his dog. And he was happy
to return home to warmth and peanut butter and liverwurst, to the
familiar delight of the baby’s good-night embrace, to the droll combat
between beagle and cat, to music before sleep. Sometimes in these
reveries Culver thought that it was the music, more than anything, which
provided the key, and he recalled himself at a time which already seemed
dark ages ago, surrounded by beer cans and attuned, in the nostalgic air
of a winter evening, to some passage from some forgotten Haydn. It was
one happy and ascending bar that he remembered, a dozen bright notes
through which he passed in memory to an earlier, untroubled day at the
end of childhood. There, like tumbling flowers against the sunny grass,
their motions as nimble as the music itself, two lovely little girls
played tennis, called to him voicelessly, as in a dream, and waved their
arms.

The sordid little town outside the camp possessed the horror of
recognition, for Culver had been there before. They left the baby with
a sister and headed South where, on the outskirts of the town, they
found a cramped room in a tourist cabin. They were there for two weeks.
They searched vainly for a place to live, there was no more room at the
camp. They turned away from bleak cell-like rooms offered at five times
their value, were shown huts and chicken-coops by characters whose bland
country faces could not hide the sparkle, in their calculating eyes, of
venal lust. The aging proprietress of the tourist camp was a scold and a
cheat. And so they finally gave up. Betsy went home. He kissed her
good-by late one rainy afternoon in the bus station, surrounded by a
horde of marines and by cheap suitcases and fallen candy wrappers and
the sound of fretful children--all of the unlovely mementoes, so
nightmarishly familiar, of leave-taking and of anxiety. Of war. He felt
her tears against his cheek. It had been an evil day, and the rain that
streamed against the windows, blurring a distant frieze of gaunt gray
pines, had seemed to nag with both remembrance and foreboding--of tropic
seas, storm-swept distances and strange coasts.




II


He had heard the explosion himself. They had been eating at their own
chow-line in a command post set up in a grove of trees, when the noise
came from off to the right, distant enough but still too close: a twin
quick earth-shaking sound--_crump crump_. Then seconds later in the
still of noon when even the birds had become quiet and only a few
murmured voices disturbed the concentration of eating, a shudder had
passed through the surrounding underbrush, like a faint hot wind. It was
premonitory, perhaps, but still no one knew. The leaves rustled, ceased,
and Culver had looked up from where he squatted against a tree to see
fifty scattered faces peering toward the noise, their knives and forks
suspended. Then from the galley among the trees a clatter broke the
silence, a falling pan or kettle, and someone laughed, and the Colonel,
sitting nearby, had said to the Major--what had he said? Culver couldn’t
remember, yet there had been something uneasy in his tone, even then,
before anyone had known, and at least ten minutes before the radio
corporal, a tobacco-chewing clown from Oklahoma named Hobbs, came
trotting up brushing crumbs from his mouth, a message book clutched in
one fat paw. He was popular in battalion headquarters, one of those
favored men who, through some simplicity or artlessness of nature, can
manage a profane familiarity which in another would be insubordinate;
the look of concern on his clown’s face, usually so whimsical,
communicated an added dread.

“I gotta flash red from Plumbob, Colonel, and it ain’t no problem
emergency. All hell’s broke loose over in Third Battalion. They dropped
in some short rounds on a chow-line and they want corpsmen and a doctor
and the chaplain. Jesus, you should hear ’em down there.”

The Colonel had said nothing at first. The brief flicker of uneasiness
in his eyes had fled, and when he put down his messkit and looked up at
Hobbs it was only to wipe his hands on his handkerchief and squint
casually into the sun, as if he were receiving the most routine of
messages. It was absolutely typical of the man, Culver reflected. Too
habitual to be an act yet still somehow too faintly self-conscious to be
entirely natural, how many years and what strange interior struggle had
gone into the perfection of such a gesture? It was good, Grade-A
Templeton, perhaps not a distinctly top-notch performance but certainly,
from where the critic Culver sat, deserving of applause: the frail,
little-boned, almost pretty face peering upward with a look of
attitudinized contemplation; the pensive bulge of tongue sliding inside
the rim of one tanned cheek to gouge out some particle of food; small
hands working calmly in the folds of the handkerchief--surely all this
was more final, more commanding than the arrogant loud mastery of a
Booth, more like the skill of Bernhardt, who could cow men by the
mystery of her smallest twitch. Perhaps fifteen seconds passed before he
spoke. Culver became irritated--at his own suspense, throbbing inside
him like a heartbeat, and at the awesome silence which, as if upon
order, had fallen over the group of five, detached from the bustle of
the rest of the command post: the Colonel; Hobbs; Major Lawrence, the
executive officer, now gazing at the Colonel with moist underlip and
deferential anxiety; Captain Mannix; himself. Back off in the bushes a
mockingbird commenced a shrill rippling chant and far away, amidst the
depth of the silence, there seemed to be a single faint and terrible
scream. Hobbs spat an auburn gob of tobacco-juice into the sand, and the
Colonel spoke: “Let me have that radio, Hobbs, and get me Plumbob One,”
he said evenly, and then with no change of tone to the Major: “Billy,
send a runner over for Doc Patterson and you two get down there with the
chaplain. Take my jeep. Tell the Doc to detach all his corpsmen. And
you’d better chop-chop.”

The Major scrambled to his feet. He was youthful and handsome, a fine
marine in his polished boots, his immaculate dungarees--donned freshly
clean, Culver had observed, that morning. He was of the handsomeness
preferred by other military men--regular features, clean-cut, rather
athletic--but there was a trace of peacetime fleshiness in his cheeks
which often lent to the corners of his mouth a sort of petulance, so
that every now and again, his young uncomplicated face in deep
concentration over some operations map or training schedule or order, he
looked like a spoiled and arrogant baby of five. “Aye-aye, sir,” he said
and bent over the Colonel, bestowing upon him that third-person flattery
which to Culver seemed perilously close to bootlicking and was thought
to be considerably out of date, especially among the reserves. “Does the
Colonel want us to run our own problem as ordered, sir?” He was a
regular.

Templeton took the headset from Hobbs, who lowered the radio down beside
him in the sand. “Yeah, Billy,” he said, without looking up, “yeah,
that’ll be all right. We’ll run her on time. Tell O’Leary to tell all
companies to push off at thirteen-hundred.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” And the Major, boots sparkling, was off in a puff of
pine needles and dust.

“Jesus,” Mannix said. He put down his messkit and nudged Culver in the
ribs. Captain Mannix, the commanding officer of headquarters company,
was Culver’s friend and, for five months, his closest one. He was a
dark heavy-set Jew from Brooklyn, Culver’s age and a reserve, too, who
had had to sell his radio store and leave his wife and two children at
home. He had a disgruntled sense of humor which often seemed to bring a
spark of relief not just to his own, but to Culver’s, feeling of
futility and isolation. Mannix was a bitter man and, in his bitterness,
sometimes recklessly vocal. He had long ago given up genteel accents,
and spoke like a marine. It was easier, he maintained. “Je-_sus_,” he
whispered again, too loud, “what’ll Congress do about this? Look at
Billy chop-chop.”

Culver said nothing. His tension eased off a bit, and he looked around
him. The news had not seemed yet to have spread around the command post;
the men began to get up and walk to the chow-line to clean their
mess-gear, strolled back beneath the trees and flopped down, heads
against their packs, for a moment’s nap. The Colonel spoke in an easy,
confidential voice with the other battalion commander: the casualties
were confined, Culver gathered, to that outfit. It was a battalion made
up mostly of young reserves and it was one in which, he suddenly
thanked God, he knew no one. Then he heard the Colonel go on calmly--to
promise more aid, to promise to come down himself, shortly. “Does it
look rough, Luke?” Culver heard him say, “Hold on tight, Luke boy”--all
in the cool and leisurely, almost bored, tones of a man to whom the
greatest embarrassment would be a show of emotion, and to whom, because
of this quality, had been given, in the midst of some strained and
violent combat situation long ago, the name “Old Rocky.” He was not yet
forty-five, yet the adjective “old” applied, for there was a gray sheen
in his hair and a bemused, unshakable look in his tranquil eyes that
made him seem, like certain young ecclesiastics, prematurely aged and
perhaps even wise. Culver saw him put the headset down and get up,
walking off toward the operations tent with a springy, slim-hipped,
boyish stride, calling out over his shoulder as he went: “Mannix.”
Simply that: Mannix. A voice neither harsh nor peremptory nor, on the
other hand, particularly gentle. It was merely a voice which expected to
be obeyed, and Culver felt Mannix’s big weight against him as the
Captain put a hand on his shoulder and pried himself up from the
ground, muttering, “Jesus, lemme digest a bit, Jack.”

Mannix despised the Colonel. Yet, Culver thought, as the Captain hulked
stiff-kneed behind the Colonel and disappeared after him into the
operations tent, Mannix despised everything about the Marine Corps. In
this attitude he was like nearly all the reserves, it was true, but
Mannix was more noisily frank in regard to his position. He detested
Templeton not because of any slight or injustice, but because Templeton
was a lieutenant colonel, because he was a regular, and because he
possessed over Mannix--after six years of freedom--an absolute and
unquestioned authority. Mannix would have hated any battalion commander,
had he the benignity of Santa Claus, and Culver, listening to Mannix’s
frequently comical but often too audible complaints, as just now, was
kept in a constant state of mild suspense--half amusement, half horror.
Culver settled himself against the tree. Apparently there was nothing,
for the moment at least, that he could do. Above him an airplane droned
through the stillness. A truck grumbled across the clearing, carrying a
group of languid hospital corpsmen, was gone; around him the men lay
against their packs in crumpled attitudes of sleep. A heavy drowsiness
came over him, and he let his eyes slide closed. Suddenly he yearned,
with all of the hunger of a schoolboy in a classroom on a May afternoon,
to be able to collapse into slumber. For the three days they had been on
the problem he had averaged only four hours of sleep a night--almost
none last night--and gratefully he knew he’d be able to sleep this
evening. He began to doze, dreaming fitfully of home, of white cottages,
of a summer by the sea. _Long walk tonight._ And his eyes snapped open
then--on what seemed to be the repeated echo, from afar, of that faint
anguished shriek he had heard before--in the horrid remembrance that
there would be no sleep tonight. For anyone at all. Only a few seconds
had passed.

“Long walk tonight,” the voice repeated. Culver stared upward through a
dazzling patchwork of leaves and light to see the broad pink face of
Sergeant O’Leary, smiling down.

“Christ, O’Leary,” he said, “don’t remind me.”

The Sergeant, still grinning, gestured with his shoulder in the
direction of the operations tent. “The Colonel’s really got a wild hair,
ain’t he?” He chuckled and reached down and clutched one of his feet,
with an elaborate groan.

Culver abruptly felt cloaked in a gloom that was almost tangible, and he
was in no mood to laugh. “You’ll be really holding that foot tomorrow
morning,” he said, “and that’s no joke.”

The grin persisted. “Ah, Mister Culver,” O’Leary said, “don’t take it so
hard. It’s just a little walk through the night. It’ll be over before
you know it.” He paused, prodding with his toe at the pine needles.
“Say,” he went on, “what’s this I heard about some short rounds down in
Third Batt?”

“I don’t know from nothing, O’Leary. I just read the papers.” Another
truck came by, loaded with corpsmen, followed by a jeep in which sat
the helmeted Major Lawrence, a look of sulky arrogance on his face, his
arms folded at his chest like a legionnaire riding through a conquered
city. “But from what I understand,” Culver went on, turning back, “quite
a few guys got hurt.”

“That’s tough,” O’Leary said. “I’ll bet you they were using that old
stuff they’ve had stored on Guam ever since ’45. Jesus, you’d think
they’d have better sense. Why, I seen those shells stacked up high as a
man out there just last year, getting rained on every day and getting
the jungle rot and Jesus, they put tarps over ’em but five years is one
hell of a long time to let 81-shells lay around. I remember once....”
Culver let him talk, without hearing the words, and drowsed. O’Leary was
an old-timer (though only a few years older than Culver), a regular who
had just signed over for four more years, and it was impossible to
dislike him. On Guadalcanal he had been only a youngster, but in the
intervening years the Marine Corps had molded him--perhaps by his own
unconscious choice--in its image, and he had become as inextricably
grafted to the system as any piece of flesh surgically laid on to arm
or thigh. There was great heartiness and warmth in him but at the same
time he performed all infantry jobs with a devoted, methodical
competence. He could say sarcastically, “The Colonel’s really got a wild
hair, ain’t he?” but shrug his shoulders and grin, and by that
ambivalent gesture sum up an attitude which only a professional soldier
could logically retain: I doubt the Colonel’s judgment a little, but I
will willingly do what he says. He also shared with Hobbs, the radioman,
some sort of immunity. And thus it had been last night, Culver recalled,
that upon the Colonel’s announcement about this evening’s forced
march--which was to take thirteen hours and extend the nearly thirty-six
miles back to the main base--O’Leary had been able to give a long,
audible, incredulous whistle, right in the Colonel’s face, and elicit
from the Colonel an indulgent smile; whereas in the same blackout tent
and at virtually the same instant Mannix had murmured, “Thirty-six
miles, Jesus Christ,” in a tone, however, laden with no more disbelief
or no more pain than O’Leary’s whistle, and Culver had seen the
Colonel’s smile vanish, replaced on the fragile little face by a subtle,
delicate shadow of irritation.

“You think that’s too long?” the Colonel had said to Mannix then,
turning slightly. There had been no hostility in his voice, or even
reproof; it had, in fact, seemed merely a question candidly
stated--although this might have been because two enlisted men had been
in the tent, O’Leary, and some wizened, anonymous little private
shivering over the radio. It was midsummer, but nights out in the swamps
were fiercely, illogically cold, and from where they had set up the
operations tent that evening--on a tiny patch of squashy marshland--the
dampness seemed to ooze up and around them, clutching their bones in a
chill which extra sweaters and field jackets and sweatshirts could not
dislodge. A single kerosene pressure-lamp dangled from overhead--roaring
like a pint-sized, encapsuled hurricane; it furnished the only light in
the tent, and the negligible solace of a candlelike heat. It had the
stark, desperate, manufactured quality of the light one imagines in an
execution chamber; under it the Colonel’s face, in absolute repose as
he stared down for a brief, silent instant and awaited Mannix’s reply,
looked like that of a mannequin, chalky, exquisite, solitary beneath a
store-window glare.

“No, sir,” Mannix said. He had recovered quickly. He peered up at the
Colonel from his camp stool, expressionless. “No, sir,” he repeated, “I
don’t think it’s too long, but it’s certainly going to be some hike.”

The Colonel did something with his lips. It seemed to be a smile. He
said nothing--bemused and mystifying--wearing the enigma of the moment
like a cape. In the silence the tempestuous little lamp boiled and
raged; far off in the swamp somewhere a mortar flare flew up with a
short, sharp crack. O’Leary broke the quietness in the tent with a loud
sneeze, followed, almost like a prolongation of the sneeze, by a
chuckle, and said: “Oh boy, Colonel, there’re gonna be some sore feet
Saturday morning.”

The Colonel didn’t answer. He hooked his thumbs in his belt. He turned
to the Major, who was brooding upward from the field desk, cheeks
propped against his hands. “I was sitting in my tent a while ago,
Billy,” the Colonel said, “and I got to thinking. I got to thinking
about a lot of things. I got to thinking about the Battalion. I said to
myself, ‘How’s the Battalion doing?’ I mean, ‘What kind of an outfit do
I have here? Is it in good combat shape? If we were to meet an Aggressor
enemy tomorrow would we come out all right?’ Those were the queries I
posed to myself. Then I tried to formulate an answer.” He paused, his
eyes luminous and his lips twisted in a wry, contemplative smile as if
he were indeed, again, struggling with the weight of the questions to
which he had addressed himself. The Major was absorbed; he looked up at
Templeton with an intent baby-blue gaze and parted mouth, upon which,
against a pink cleft of the lower lip, there glittered a bead of saliva.
“Reluctantly,” the Colonel went on slowly, “reluctantly, I came to this
conclusion: the Battalion’s been doping off.” He paused again. “Doping
off. Especially,” he said, turning briefly toward Mannix with a thin
smile, “a certain component unit known as Headquarters and Service
Company.” He leaned back on the camp stool and slowly caressed the
pewter-colored surface of his hair. “I decided a little walk might be in
order for tomorrow night, after we secure the problem. Instead of going
back to the base on the trucks. What do you think, Billy?”

“I think that’s an excellent idea, sir. An excellent idea. In fact I’ve
been meaning to suggest something like that to the Colonel for quite
some time. As a means of inculcating a sort of group _esprit_.”

“It’s what they need, Billy.”

“Full marching order, sir?” O’Leary put in seriously.

“No, that’d be a little rough.”

“Aaa-h,” O’Leary said, relieved.

Suddenly Culver heard Mannix’s voice: “Even so--”

“Even so, what?” the Colonel interrupted. Again, the voice was not
hostile, only anticipatory, as if it already held the answer to whatever
Mannix might ask or suggest.

“Well, even so, Colonel,” Mannix went on mildly, while Culver, suddenly
taut and concerned, held his breath, “even without packs thirty-six
miles is a long way for anybody, much less for guys who’ve gone soft
for the past five or six years. I’ll admit my company isn’t the hottest
outfit in the world, but most of them are reserves--”

“Wait a minute, Captain, wait a minute,” the Colonel said. Once more the
voice--as cool and as level as the marshy ground upon which they were
sitting--carefully skirted any tone of reproach and was merely explicit:
“I don’t want you to think I’m taking it out on the Battalion merely
because of you, or rather H & S Company. But they aren’t reserves.
They’re _marines_. _Comprend?_” He arose from the chair. “I think,” he
went on flatly, almost gently, “that there’s one thing that we are all
tending to overlook these days. We’ve been trying to differentiate too
closely between two particular bodies of men that make up the Marine
Corps. Technically it’s true that a lot of these new men are
reserves--that is, they have an ‘R’ affixed at the end of the ‘USMC.’
But it’s only a technical difference, you see. Because first and
foremost they’re _marines_. I don’t want my marines doping off. They’re
going to _act_ like marines. They’re going to be _fit_. If they meet an
Aggressor enemy next week they might have to march a long, long way. And
that’s what I want this hike to teach them. _Comprend?_” He made what
could pass for the token of a smile and laid his hand easily and for a
lingering second on Mannix’s shoulder, in a sort of half-gesture of
conciliation, understanding--something--it was hard to tell. It was an
odd picture because from where he sat Culver was the only one in the
tent who could see, at the same instant, both of their expressions. In
the morbid, comfortless light they were like classical Greek masks, made
of chrome or tin, reflecting an almost theatrical disharmony: the
Colonel’s fleeting grin sculpted cleanly and prettily in the unshadowed
air above the Captain’s darkened, downcast face where, for a flicker of
a second, something outraged and agonized was swiftly graven and swiftly
scratched out. The Colonel’s smile was not complacent or unfriendly. It
was not so much as if he had achieved a triumph but merely equilibrium,
had returned once more to that devout, ordered state of communion which
the Captain’s words had ever so briefly disturbed. At that moment
Culver almost liked the Colonel, in some negative way which had nothing
to do with affection, but to which “respect,” though he hated the word,
was the nearest approach. At least it was an honest smile, no matter how
faint. It was the expression of a man who might be fatuous and a ham of
sorts, but was not himself evil or unjust--a man who would like to
overhear some sergeant say, “He keeps a tight outfit, but he’s
straight.” In men like Templeton all emotions--all smiles, all
anger--emanated from a priestlike, religious fervor, throbbing inwardly
with the cadence of parades and booted footfalls. By that passion rebels
are ordered into quick damnation but simple doubters sometimes find
indulgence--depending upon the priest, who may be one inclined toward
mercy, or who is one ever rapt in some litany of punishment and
court-martial. The Colonel was devout but inclined toward mercy. He was
not a tyrant, and his smile was a sign that the Captain’s doubts were
forgiven, probably even forgotten. But only Culver had seen the
Captain’s face: a quick look of both fury and suffering, like the
tragic Greek mask, or a shackled slave. Then Mannix flushed. “Yes, sir,”
he said.

The Colonel walked toward the door. He seemed already to have put the
incident out of his mind. “Culver,” he said, “if you can ever make radio
contact with Able Company tell them to push off at 0600. If you can’t,
send a runner down before dawn to see if they’ve got the word.” He gave
the side of his thigh a rather self-conscious, gratuitous slap. “Well,
good night.”

There was a chorus of “Good night, sirs,” and then the Major went out,
too, trailed by O’Leary. Culver looked at his watch: it was nearly three
o’clock.

Mannix looked up. “You going to try and get some sleep, Tom?”

“I’ve tried. It’s too cold. Anyway, I’ve got to take over the radio
watch from Junior here. What’s your name, fellow?”

The boy at the radio looked up with a start, trembling with the cold.
“McDonald, sir.” He was very young, with pimples and a sweet earnest
expression; he had obviously just come from boot camp, for he had
practically no hair.

“Well, you can shove off and get some sleep, if you can find a nice warm
pile of pine needles somewhere.” The boy sleepily put down his earphones
and went out, fastening the blackout flap behind him.

“I’ve tried,” Culver repeated, “but I just can’t get used to sleeping on
the ground any more. I’m getting old and rheumatic. Anyway, the Old Rock
was in here for about two hours before you came, using up my sack time
while he told the Major and O’Leary and me all about his Shanghai days.”

“He’s a son of a bitch.” Mannix morosely cupped his chin in his hands,
blinking into space, at the bare canvas wall. He was chewing on the butt
of a cigar. The glare seemed to accentuate a flat Mongoloid cast in his
face; he looked surly and tough and utterly exhausted. Shivering, he
pulled his field jacket closer around his neck, and then, as Culver
watched, his face broke out into the comical, exasperated smile which
always heralded his bitterest moments of outrage--at the Marine Corps,
at the system, at their helpless plight, the state of the world--tirades
which, in their unqualified cynicism, would have been intolerable were
they not always delivered with such gusto and humor and a kind of grisly
delight. “Thirty ... six ... _miles_,” he said slowly, his eyes alive
and glistening, “_thirty ... six ... miles_! Christ on a crutch! Do you
realize how far that is? Why that’s as far as it is from Grand Central
to Stamford, Connecticut! Why, man, I haven’t walked a hundred
consecutive yards since 1945. I couldn’t go thirty-six miles if I were
sliding downhill the whole way on a sled. And a _forced_ march, mind
you. You just don’t stroll along, you know. That’s like running. That’s
a regulation two-and-a-half miles per hour with only a ten-minute break
each hour. So H & S Company is fouled up. So maybe it is. He can’t take
green troops like these and do that. After a couple of seven-or ten-or
fifteen-mile conditioning hikes, maybe so. If they were young. And
rested. Barracks-fresh. But this silly son of a bitch is going to have
all these tired, flabby old men flapping around on the ground like a
bunch of fish after the first two miles. Christ on a frigging crutch!”

“He’s not a bad guy, Al,” Culver said, “he’s just a regular. Shot in
the ass with the Corps. A bit off his nut, like all of them.”

But Mannix had made the march seem menacing, there was no doubt about
that, and Culver--who for the moment had been regarding the hike as a
sort of careless abstraction, a prolonged evening’s stroll--felt a solid
dread creep into his bones, along with the chill of the night.
Involuntarily, he shuddered. He felt suddenly unreal and disoriented, as
if through some curious second sight or seventh sense his surroundings
had shifted, ever so imperceptibly, into another dimension of space and
time. Perhaps he was just so tired. Freezing marsh and grass instead of
wood beneath his feet, the preposterous cold in the midst of summer,
Mannix’s huge distorted shadow cast brutishly against the impermeable
walls by a lantern so sinister that its raging noise had the sound of a
typhoon at sea--all these, just for an instant, did indeed contrive to
make him feel as if they were adrift at sea in a dazzling, windowless
box, ignorant of direction or of any points of the globe, and with no
way of telling. What he had had for the last years--wife and child and
home--seemed to have existed in the infinite past or, dreamlike again,
never at all, and what he had done yesterday and the day before, moving
wearily with this tent from one strange thicket to a stranger swamp and
on to the green depths of some even stranger ravine, had no sequence,
like the dream of a man delirious with fever. All time and space seemed
for a moment to be enclosed within the tent, itself unmoored and
unhelmed upon a dark and compassless ocean.

And although Mannix was close by, he felt profoundly alone. Something
that had happened that evening--something Mannix had said, or suggested,
perhaps not even that, but only a fleeting look in the Captain’s face,
the old compressed look of torment mingled with seething
outrage--something that evening, without a doubt, had added to the great
load of his loneliness an almost intolerable burden. And that burden was
simply an anxiety, nameless for the moment and therefore the more
menacing. It was not merely the prospect of the hike. Exhaustion had
just made him vulnerable to a million shaky, anonymous fears--fears
which he might have resisted had he felt strong and refreshed, or
younger. His age was showing badly. All this would have been easy at
twenty-three. But he was thirty, and seventy-two virtually sleepless
hours had left him feeling bushed and defeated. And there was another
subtle difference he felt about his advanced age--a new awakening, an
awareness--and therein lay the reason for his fears.

It was simply that after six years of an ordered and sympathetic
life--made the more placid by the fact that he had assumed he had put
war forever behind him--it was a shock almost mystically horrifying, in
its unreality, to find himself in this new world of frigid nights and
blazing noons, of disorder and movement and fanciful pursuit. He was
insecure and uprooted and the prey of many fears. Not for days but for
weeks, it seemed, the battalion had been on the trail of an invisible
enemy who always eluded them and kept them pressing on--across swamps
and blasted fields and past indolent, alien streams. This enemy was
labeled Aggressor, on maps brightly spattered with arrows and symbolic
tanks and guns, but although there was no sign of his aggression he fled
them nonetheless and they pushed the sinister chase, sending up shells
and flares as they went. Five hours’ pause, five hours in a tent
somewhere, lent to the surrounding grove of trees a warm, homelike
familiarity that was almost like permanence, and he left each command
post feeling lonely and uprooted, as they pushed on after the spectral
foe into the infinite strangeness of another swamp or grove. Fatigue
pressed down on his shoulders like strong hands, and he awoke in the
morning feeling weary, if he ever slept at all. Since their
constant movement made the sunlight come from ever-shifting points
of the compass, he was often never quite sure--in his steady
exhaustion--whether it was morning or afternoon. The displacement and
the confusion filled him with an anxiety which would not have been
possible six years before, and increased his fatigue. The tent itself,
in its tiny, momentary permanence, might have had all of the appeal of
the home which he so desperately hungered for, had it not been so cold,
and had it not seemed, as he sat there suddenly shivering with fear, so
much more like a coffin instead.

Then it occurred to him that he was actually terrified of the march, of
the thirty-six miles: not because of the length--which was beyond
comprehension--but because he was sure he’d not be able to make it. The
contagion of Mannix’s fear had touched him. And he wondered then if
Mannix’s fear had been like his own: that no matter what his hatred of
the system, of the Marine Corps, might be, some instilled, twisted pride
would make him walk until he dropped, and his fear was not of the hike
itself, but of dropping. He looked up at Mannix and said, “Do you think
you can make it, Al?”

Mannix heavily slapped his knee. He seemed not to have heard the
question. The giddy sensation passed, and Culver got up to warm his
hands at the lamp.

“I’ll bet if Regiment or Division got wind of this they’d lower the boom
on the bastard,” Mannix said.

“They have already. They said fine.”

“What do you mean? How do you know?”

“He said so, before you came in. He radioed to the base for permission,
or so he said.”

“The bastard.”

“He wouldn’t dare without it,” Culver said. “What I can’t figure out is
why Regiment gave him the O.K. on it.”

“The swine. The little swine. It’s not on account of H & S Company. You
know that. It’s because it’s an exploit. He wants to be known as a tough
guy, a boondocker.”

“There’s one consolation, though,” said Culver, after a pause, “if it’ll
help you any.”

“What, for God’s sake?”

“Old Rocky, or whatever they call him, is going to hike along, too.”

“You think so?” Mannix said doubtfully.

“I know so. So do you. He wouldn’t dare not push along with his men.”

Mannix was silent for a moment. Then he said viciously, as if obsessed
with the idea that no act of Templeton’s could remain untainted by a
prime and calculated evil: “But the son of a bitch! He’s made for that
sort of thing. He’s been running around the boondocks for six years
getting in shape while sane people like you and me were home living like
humans and taking it easy. Billy Lawrence, too. They’re both gung ho.
These fat civilians can’t take that sort of thing. My God! Hobbs! Look
at that radioman, Hobbs. That guy’s going to keel over two minutes
out--” He rose suddenly to his feet and stretched, his voice stifled by
the long, indrawn breath of a yawn. “Aaa-h, fuck it. I’m going to hit
the sack.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Fine bed. A poncho in a pile of poison ivy. My ass looks like a
chessboard from chigger bites. Jesus, if Mimi could see me now.” He
paused and pawed at his red-rimmed eyes. “Yeah,” he said, blinking at
his watch, “I think I will.” He slapped Culver on the back, without much
heartiness. “I’ll see you tomorrow, sport. Stay loose.” Then he lumbered
from the tent, mumbling something: _be in for fifty years_.

Culver turned away from the lamp. He sat down at the field desk,
strapping a black garland of wires and earphones around his skull. The
wild, lost wail of the radio signal struck his ears, mingling with the
roar, much closer now, of the lamp; alone as he was, the chill and
cramped universe of the tent seemed made for no one more competent than
a blind midget, and was on the verge of bursting with a swollen
obbligato of demented sounds. He felt almost sick with the need for
sleep and, with the earphones still around his head, he thrust his face
into his arms on the field desk. There was nothing on the radio except
the signal; far off in the swamp the companies were sleeping wretchedly
in scattered squads and platoons, tumbled about in the cold and the
dark, and dreaming fitful dreams. The radios were dead everywhere,
except for their signals: a crazy, tortured multitude of wails on which
his imagination played in exhaustion. They seemed like the cries of
souls in the anguish of hell, if he concentrated closely enough, shrill
cracklings, whines, barks and shrieks--a whole jungle full of noise an
inch from his eardrum and across which, like a thread of insanity, was
strung the single faint fluting of a dance-band clarinet--blown in from
Florida or New York, someplace beyond reckoning. His universe now seemed
even more contained: not merely by the tiny space of the tent, but by
the almost tangible fact of sound. And it was impossible to sleep.
Besides, something weighed heavily on his mind; there was something he
had forgotten, something he was supposed to do....

Then suddenly he remembered the Colonel’s instructions. He cleared his
throat and spoke drowsily into the mouthpiece, his head still resting
against his arms. “This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able. This is
Bundle Three calling Bundle Able. This is Bundle Three calling Bundle
Able. Do you hear me? Over....” He paused for a moment, waiting. There
was no answer. He repeated: “This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able,
this is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able, this is....” And he snapped
abruptly erect, thinking of Mannix, thinking: to hell with it: simply
because the words made him feel juvenile and absurd, as if he were
reciting Mother Goose.

He _would_ stay awake. And he thought of Mannix. Because Mannix would
laugh. Mannix appreciated the idiocy of those radio words, just as in
his own crazy way he managed to put his finger on anything which might
represent a symbol of their predicament. Like the radio code. He had a
violent contempt for the gibberish, the boy-scout passwords which
replaced ordinary conversation in the military world. To Mannix they
were all part of the secret language of a group of morons, morons who
had been made irresponsibly and dangerously clever. He had despised the
other side, also--the sweat, the exertion, and the final danger. It had
been he, too, who had said, “None of this Hemingway crap for me, Jack”;
he was nobody’s lousy hero, and he’d get out of this outfit some way.
Yet, Culver speculated, who really was a hero anyway, any more? Mannix’s
disavowal of faith put him automatically out of the hero category, in
the classical sense, yet if suffering was part of the hero’s role,
wasn’t Mannix as heroic as any? On his shoulder there was a raw, deeply
dented, livid scar, made the more conspicuous and, for that matter, more
ugly, by the fact that its evil slick surface only emphasized the burly
growth of hair around it. There were smaller scars all over his body.
About them Mannix was neither proud nor modest, but just frank, and once
while they were showering down after a day in the field, Mannix told him
how he had gotten the scars, one day on Peleliu. “I was a buck sergeant
then. I got pinned down in a shell hole out in front of my platoon.
Christ knows how I got there but I remember there was a telephone in the
hole and--whammo!--the Nips began laying in mortar fire on the area and
I got a piece right here.” He pointed to a shiny, triangular groove just
above his knee. “I remember grabbing that phone and hollering for them
to for Christ’s sake get the 81s up and knock out that position, but
they were slow, Jesus they were slow! The Nips were firing for effect, I
guess, because they were coming down like rain and every time one of the
goddam things went off I seemed to catch it. All I can remember is
hollering into that phone and the rounds going off and the zinging noise
that shrapnel made. I hollered for 81s and I caught a piece in my hand.
Then I hollered for at least a goddam rifle grenade and I caught a piece
in the ass, right here. I hollered for 60s and guns and airplanes. Every
time I hollered for something I seemed to catch some steel. Christ, I
was scared. And hurting! Jesus Christ, I never hurt so much in my life.
Then I caught this one right here”--he made a comical, contorted
gesture, with a bar of soap, over his shoulder--“man, it was lights out
then. I remember thinking, ‘Al, you’ve had it,’ and just before I passed
out I looked down at that telephone. You know, that frigging wire had
been blasted right out of sight all that time.”

No, perhaps Mannix wasn’t a hero, any more than the rest of them, caught
up by wars in which, decade by half-decade, the combatant served peonage
to the telephone and the radar and the thunderjet--a horde of cunningly
designed, and therefore often treacherous, machines. But Mannix had
suffered once, that “once” being, in his own words, “once too goddam
many, Jack.” And his own particular suffering had made him angry, had
given him an acute, if cynical, perception about their renewed bondage,
and a keen nose for the winds that threatened to blow up out of the
oppressive weather of their surroundings and sweep them all into
violence. And he made Culver uneasy. His discontent was not merely
peevish; it was rocklike and rebellious, and thus this discontent
seemed to Culver to be at once brave and somehow full of peril.

He had first seen Mannix the revolutionary five months ago, soon after
they had been called back to duty. He hadn’t known him then. There were
compulsory lectures arranged at first, to acquaint the junior officers
with recent developments in what had been called “the new amphibious
doctrine.” The outlines of these lectures were appallingly familiar: the
stuffy auditorium asprawl with bored lieutenants and captains, the
brightly lit stage with its magnified charts and graphs, the lantern
slides (at which point, when the lights went out, it was possible to
sneak a moment’s nap, just as in officers’ school seven years ago), the
parade of majors and colonels with their maps and pointers, and their
cruelly tedious, doggedly memorized lectures: the whole scene, with its
grave, professorial air, seemed seedily portentous, especially since no
one cared, save the majors and colonels, and no one listened. When
Culver sat down, during the darkness of a lantern slide, next to the big
relaxed mass which he dimly identified as a captain, he noticed that it
was snoring. When the lights went up, Mannix still slept on, filling
the air around him with a loud, tranquil blubber. Culver aroused him
with a nudge. Mannix grumbled something, but then said, “Thanks, Jack.”
A young colonel had come onto the stage then. He had made many of the
lectures that week. He had a curiously thick, throaty voice which would
have made him sound like a yokel, except that his words were coolly,
almost passionately put, and he bent forward over the lectern with a
bleak and solemn attitude--a lean, natty figure with hair cut so close
to his head that he appeared to be, from that distance, nearly bald. “An
SS man,” Mannix whispered, “he’s gonna come down here and cut your balls
off. You Jewish?” He grinned and collapsed back, forehead against his
hand, into quiet slumber. Culver couldn’t recall what the colonel talked
about: the movement of supplies, logistics, ship-to-shore movement,
long-range planning, all abstract and vast, and an ardent glint came to
his eyes when he spoke of the “grandiose doctrine” which had been
formulated since they, the reserves, had been away. “You bet your life,
Jack,” Mannix had whispered out of the shadows then. He seemed to have
snapped fully awake and, following the lecture intently, he appeared to
address his whispers not to Culver, or the colonel, but to the air. “You
bet your life they’re grandiose,” he said, “even if you don’t know what
grandiose means. I’ll bet you’d sell your soul to be able to drop a bomb
on somebody.” And then, aping the colonel’s instructions to the
corporal--one of the enlisted flunkies who, after each lecture, passed
out the reams of printed and mimeographed tables and charts and résumés,
which everyone promptly, when out of sight, threw away--he whispered in
high, throaty, lilting mockery: “Corporal, kindly pass out the atom
bombs for inspection.” He smacked the arm of his seat, too hard; it
could be heard across the auditorium, and heads turned then, but the
colonel had not seemed to have noticed. “Jesus,” Mannix rumbled
furiously, “Jesus Christ almighty,” while the colonel droned on, in his
countrified voice: “Our group destiny,” he said, “amphibiously
integrated, from any force thrown against us by Aggressor enemy.”

Later--toward the end of that week of lectures, after Mannix had spoken
the calm, public manifesto which at least among the reserves had made
him famous, and from then on the object of a certain awe, though with a
few doubts about his balance, too--Culver had tried to calculate how he
had gotten by with it. Perhaps it had to do with his size, his bearing.
There was at times a great massive absoluteness in the way he spoke. He
was huge, and the complete honesty and candor of his approach seemed to
rumble forth, like notes from a sounding board, in direct proportion to
his size. He had suffered, too, and this suffering had left a
persistent, unwhipped, scornful look in his eyes, almost like a stain,
or rather a wound, which spells out its own warning and cautions the
unwary to handle this tortured parcel of flesh with care. And he was an
enormous man, his carriage was formidable. That skinny, bristle-haired
colonel, Culver finally realized, had been taken aback past the point of
punishment, or even reprimand, merely because of the towering,
unavoidable, physical fact that he was facing not a student or a captain
or a subordinate, but a stubborn and passionate man. So it was that,
after a lecture on transport of supplies, when the colonel had called
Mannix’s name at random from a list to answer some generalized,
hypothetical question, Mannix had stood up and said merely, “I don’t
know, sir.” A murmur of surprise passed over the auditorium then, for
the colonel, early in the hour, had made it plain that he had wanted at
least an attempt at an answer--a guess--even though they might be
unacquainted with the subject. But Mannix merely said, “I don’t know,
sir,” while the colonel, as if he hadn’t heard correctly, rephrased the
question with a little tremor of annoyance. There was a moment’s silence
and men turned around in their seats to look at the author of this
defiance. “I don’t know, sir,” he said again, in a loud but calm voice.
“I don’t know what my first consideration would be in making a space
table like that. I’m an infantry officer. I got an 0302.” The colonel’s
forehead went pink under the glare of the lights. “I stated earlier,
Captain, that I wanted some sort of answer. None of you gentlemen is
expected to know this subject pat, but you can essay _some kind of an
answer_.” Mannix just stood there, solid and huge, blinking at the
colonel. “I just have to repeat, sir,” he said finally, “that I don’t
have the faintest idea what my first consideration would be. I never
went to cargo-loading school. I’m an 0302. And I’d like to respectfully
add, sir, if I might, that there’s hardly anybody in this room who knows
that answer, either. They’ve forgotten everything they ever learned
seven years ago. Most of them don’t even know how to take an M-1 apart.
They’re too old. They should be home with their family.” There was
passion in his tone but it was controlled and straightforward--he had
managed to keep out of his voice either anger or insolence--and then he
fell silent. His words had the quality, the sternness, of an absolute
and unequivocal fact, as if they had been some intercession for grace
spoken across the heads of a courtroom by a lawyer so quietly convinced
of his man’s innocence that there was no need for gesticulations or
frenzy. The colonel’s eyes bulged incredulously at Mannix from across
the rows of seats, but in the complete, astounded hush that had
followed he was apparently at a loss for words. A bit unsteadily, he
called out another name and Mannix sat down, staring stonily ahead.

It had been perhaps a court-martial offense, at least worthy of some
reprimand, but that was all there was to it. Nothing happened, no
repercussions, nothing. The thing had been forgotten; either that, or it
had been stored away in the universal memory of colonels, where all such
incidents are sorted out for retribution, or are forgotten. Whatever
effect it had on the colonel, or whatever higher, even more important
sources got wind of it, it had its effect on Mannix. And the result was
odd. Far from giving the impression that he had been purged, that he had
blown off excess pressure, he seemed instead more tense, more
embittered, more in need to scourge something--his own boiling spirit,
authority, anything.

Culver’s vision of him at this time was always projected against
Heaven’s Gate, which was the name--no doubt ironically supplied at first
by the enlisted men--of the pleasure-dome ingeniously erected amid a
tangle of alluvial swampland, and for officers only. He and Mannix
lived in rooms next to each other, in the bachelor quarters upstairs.
The entire area was a playground which had all the casual opulence of a
Riviera resort and found its focus in the sparkling waters of a swimming
pool, set like an oblong sapphire amid flowered walks and a fanciful
growth of beach umbrellas. There, at ten minutes past four each day,
Mannix could be found, his uniform shed in an instant and a gin fizz in
his hand--a sullen, mountainous figure in a lurid sportshirt, across
which a squadron of monstrous butterflies floated in luminous,
unmilitary files. Both Mannix and Culver hated the place--its factitious
luxury, its wanton atmosphere of alcohol and torpid ease and dances, the
vacant professional talk of the regular officers and the constant
teasing presence of their wives, who were beautiful and spoke in tender
drawls and boldly flaunted at the wifeless reserves--in a proprietary,
Atlanta-debutante fashion--their lecherous sort of chastity. The place
seemed to offer up, like a cornucopia, the fruits of boredom, of
footlessness and dissolution. It was, in Mannix’s words, like a prison
where you could have anything you wanted except happiness, and once, in
a rare midnight moment when he allowed himself to get drunk, he got
paper and wood together from his room and announced to Culver in an
unsteady but determined voice that he was going to burn the place down.
Culver held him off, but it was true: they were bound to the pleasures
of the place by necessity--for there was no place to go for a hundred
miles, even if they had wanted to go--and therefore out of futility.
“Goddam, it’s degrading,” Mannix had said, making use of an adjective
which indeed seemed to sum it all up. “It’s like sex now. Or the lack of
it. Now maybe it’s all right for a kid to go without sex, but it’s
degrading for someone like me almost thirty to go without making love
for so long. It’s simply degrading, that’s all. I’d go for one of these
regulars’ pigs if it wasn’t for Mimi.... This whole mess is degrading. I
know it’s my own fault I stayed in the reserves, Jack, you don’t have to
tell me that. I was a nut I didn’t know I was going to get called out
for every frigging international incident that came along. But, goddam,
it’s degrading”--and with a glum, subdued gesture he’d down the dregs
of his drink--“it’s degrading for a man my age to go sniffing around on
my belly in the boondocks like a dog. And furthermore--” He looked
scornfully about him, at the glitter and chrome, at the terrace by the
pool where Japanese lanterns hung like a grove of pastel moons, and a
girl’s shrill and empty laugh uncoiled as bright as tinsel through the
sluggish coastal dusk. It was a silent moment in a night sprinkled with
a dusty multitude of Southern stars, and the distant bleating saxophone
seemed indecisive and sad, like the nation and the suffocating summer,
neither at peace nor at war. “Furthermore, it’s degrading to come out of
the field each day and then be _forced_ to go to a night club like this,
when all you want to do is go home to your wife and family. Goddam, man,
I’ve _gotta_ get out!”

But underneath his rebellion, Culver finally knew, Mannix--like all of
them--was really resigned. Born into a generation of conformists, even
Mannix (so Culver sensed) was aware that his gestures were not symbolic,
but individual, therefore hopeless, maybe even absurd, and that he was
trapped like all of them in a predicament which one personal
insurrection could, if anything, only make worse. “You know,” he said
once, “I think I was really afraid just one time last war.” The phrase
“last war” had had, itself, a numb, resigned quality, in its lack of any
particular inflection, like “last week end,” or “last movie I went to
see.” They had been lying on the beach to which they fled each hot week
end. In that setting of coast and sea and lugubrious solitude they felt
nearly peaceful, in touch with a tranquil force more important, and more
lasting (or so it seemed on those sunlit afternoons), than war. Mannix
had been, almost for the first time since Culver had known him, rested
and subdued, and the sound of his voice had been a surprise after long,
sun-laden hours of sleep and silence. “That’s the goddam truth,” he said
thoughtfully, “I was only afraid once. Really afraid, I mean. It was at
a hotel in San Francisco. I think I really came closer to dying that
night than I ever have in my life. We were drunk, you see, polluted, all
of us. I think there were five of us, all of us boots just out of Dago.
Kids. We were on the tenth floor of this hotel and in this room and I
believe we were about as drunk as anyone could get. I remember going in
to take a shower in the bathroom. It was late at night, past midnight,
and after I took this shower, you see, I came out into the room buck
naked. Two of those drunk guys were waiting for me. They grabbed me and
pushed me toward the window. I was so loaded I couldn’t battle. Then
they pushed me out the window and held me by the heels while I dangled
upside-down buck naked in space, ten floors above the street.” He paused
and sucked at a beer can. “Can you imagine that?” he went on slowly.
“How I felt? I got stone-sober in a second. Imagine being that high
upside-down in space with two drunks holding onto your heels. I was
heavy, man, just like now, you see. All I can remember is those
teeny-weeny lights below and the tiny little people like ants down there
and those two crazy drunk guys holding onto my wet slippery ankles,
laughing like hell and trying to decide whether to let go or not. I just
remember the cold wind blowing on my body and that dark, man, infinite
darkness all around me, and my ankles beginning to slip out of their
hands. I really saw Death then, and I think that all I could think of
was that I was going to fall and smash myself on that hard, hard street
below. That those crazy bastards were going to let me fall. I was
praying, I guess. I remember the blood rushing to my brain and my ankles
slipping, and that awful strange noise. And I was reaching out, man,
clutching at thin air. Then I wondered what that noise was, that high
loud noise, and then I realized it was me, screaming at the top of my
voice, all over San Francisco.” He stopped talking then and scuffed at
the sand with one calloused heel. “They hauled me up somehow. It was
those sober guys--I guess they were sober--the other two. They got me
up. But every time I remember that moment a great big cold shudder runs
up and down my spine.” He chuckled and chewed on his cigar but the laugh
was half-hearted and listless, and he dug his elbows into the sand and
resumed his quiet, placid gaze toward the horizon. Culver watched him:
his bitterness dissolved in the hot salty air, slumped in the sand
gazing wistfully out to sea, sun-glassed, hairy-chested, a cigar
protruding from his face and a beer can warming in his hand, he seemed
no longer the man who could sicken himself with resentment, but relaxed,
pliable even, like a huge hairy baby soothed by the wash of elemental
tides, ready to receive anything, all, into that great void in his soul
which bitterness and rebellion had briefly left vacant--all--the
finality of more suffering, or even death. War was in the offing. A
promenade of waves, snow-crowned like lovely garlands in the dark hair
of girls, swelled eastward toward Africa: past those smoky heights, more
eastward still, the horizon seemed to give back repeated echoes of the
sea, like far-off thunder, or guns. Culver remembered making a quick,
contorted motion in the sand with his body, and being swept by a hot
wave of anguish. It was loneliness and homesickness, but it was also
fright. Across the rim of his memory two little girls playing on the
sunny grass waved to him, were gone, pursued by a shower of uncapturable
musical sounds. Mannix’s resigned silence fed his loneliness. Suddenly
he felt, like Mannix, upturned drunkenly above the abyss, blood rushing
to his head, in terror clutching at the substanceless night....

       *       *       *       *       *

In the noonday light Sergeant O’Leary, his face brightly pink, was still
talking. Culver snapped awake with a start. O’Leary grinned down at
him--“Damn, Lieutenant, you’re gonna crap out tonight if you’re that
tired now”--and Culver struggled for speech; time seemed to have
unspooled past him in a great spiral, and for an instant--his mind still
grappling with the memory of a hurried, chaotic nightmare--he was unable
to tell where he was. He had the feeling that it should be the night
before, and that he was still in the tent. “Did I go to sleep, O’Leary?”
he said, blinking upward.

“Yes, sir,” O’Leary said, and chuckled, “you sure did.”

“How long?”

“Oh, just a second.”

“Christ, I _am_ tired. I dreamt it was last night,” Culver said. He got
to his feet. A truck moved through the clearing in a cloud of dust.
There seemed to be new activity in the command post, and new confusion.
Culver and O’Leary turned together then toward the operations tent; the
Colonel had come out and was striding toward them, followed by Mannix.

“Culver, get your jeep and driver,” he said, walking toward the road,
not looking up. His voice was briskly matter-of-fact; he strode past
them with short, choppy steps and the swagger stick in his hand made a
quick tattoo, _slap-slap_-slapping against his dungaree pants. “I want
you and Captain Mannix to go with me down to Third Batt. See if we can
help.” His voice faded; Mannix trailed behind him, saying nothing, but
his face seemed to Culver even more exhausted, and even more grimly
taut, than it had been an hour before.

The road was a dusty cart-path that rambled footlessly across scrubby,
fallow farmland. Shacks and cabins, long ago abandoned, lay along its
way. They piled into the jeep, Mannix and Culver in the back, the
Colonel in front next to the driver. They hadn’t far to go--less than a
mile--but the trip felt endless to Culver because the day, by now a
fitful carrousel of sleepy sounds, motions without meaning, seemed
wildly, almost dangerously abstracted, as if viewed through drug-glazed
eyes or eyes, like those of a mole, unacquainted with light. Dust
billowed past them as they went. Above them a blue cloudless sky in
which the sun, pitched now at its summit, beat fearfully down, augured
no rain for the day, or for the evening. Mannix said nothing; his
silence prompted Culver to turn and look at him. He was gazing straight
ahead with eyes that seemed to bore through the Colonel’s neck.
Tormented beast in the cul-de-sac, baffled fury, grief at the edge of
defeat--his eyes made Culver suddenly aware of what they were about to
see, and he turned dizzily away and watched the wreck of a Negro cabin
float past through the swirling dust: shell-shattered doors and sagging
walls, blasted façade--a target across which for one split second in the
fantastic noon there seemed to crawl the ghosts of the bereaved and the
departed, mourning wraiths come back to reclaim from the ruins some hot
scent of honeysuckle, smell of cooking, murmurous noise of bees. Culver
closed his eyes and drowsed, slack-jawed, limp, his stomach faintly
heaving.

       *       *       *       *       *

One boy’s eyes lay gently closed, and his long dark lashes were washed
in tears, as though he had cried himself to sleep. As they bent over him
they saw that he was very young, and a breeze came up from the edges of
the swamp, bearing with it a scorched odor of smoke and powder, and
touched the edges of his hair. A lock fell across his brow with a sort
of gawky, tousled grace, as if preserving even in that blank and
mindless repose some gesture proper to his years, a callow charm. Around
his curly head grasshoppers darted among the weeds. Below, beneath the
slumbering eyes, his face had been blasted out of sight. Culver looked
up and met Mannix’s gaze. The Captain was sobbing helplessly. He cast an
agonized look toward the Colonel, standing across the field, then down
again at the boy, then at Culver. “Won’t they ever let us alone, the
sons of bitches,” he murmured, weeping. “Won’t they ever let us alone?”




III


That evening at twilight, just before the beginning of the march, Mannix
found a nail in his shoe. “Look at it,” he said to Culver, “what lousy
luck.” They were sitting on an embankment bordering the road. The blue
dusk was already scattered with stars, but evening had brought no relief
to the heat of the day. It clung to them still, damp and stifling,
enveloping them like an overcoat. The battalion, over a thousand men,
was ready for the march. It stretched out in two files on either side of
the road below them for more than a mile. Culver turned and looked down
into Mannix’s shoe: sure enough, a nailend had penetrated the lining at
the base of the heel, a sharp pinpoint of torture. Mannix inspected the
bottom of his big dirty foot. He pulled off a flake of skin which the
nail had already worn away. “Of all the lousy luck,” he said, “gimme a
band-aid.”

“It’ll wear right through, Al,” Culver said, “you’d better get another
pair of shoes. Try flattening it out with the end of your bayonet.”

Mannix hammered for a moment at the nail and then looked up in
exasperation. “It won’t go all the way. Gimme that band-aid.” A rusty
spatter of blood he had picked up at noon was still on the sleeve of his
dungarees. He had become nervous and touchy. All that afternoon, after
they had come back, he had seemed, like Culver, still shaken by the
slaughter, still awed, and rather despondent. Finally, he had alternated
moments of remote abstraction with quick outbursts of temper. The shock
of the explosion seemed to have set something off in him. His mood had
become vague and unpredictable, and he was able to shift from sour,
uncommunicative gloom to violent anger in an instant. Culver had never
seen him quite so cranky before, nor had he ever seen him so testily at
odds with his men, to whom he usually had shown the breeziest good will.
All afternoon he’d been after them, nagging, bellowing orders--only to
fall suddenly into a profound and brooding silence. As he squatted in
the weeds eating his evening meal two hours before, he had hardly said a
word, except to murmur--irrelevantly, Culver thought--that his company
“had better goddam well shape up.” It puzzled Culver; the explosion
seemed to have stripped off layers of skin from the Captain, leaving
only raw nerves exposed.

Now he had become fretful again, touchily alert, and his voice was heavy
with impatience. He mumbled as he plastered the band-aid on his foot. “I
wish they’d get this show on the road. That’s the trouble with the
Marine Corps, you always stand frigging around for half the night while
they think up some grandiose doctrine. I wish to Christ I’d joined the
Army. Man, if I’d have known what I was getting in for when I went down
to that recruiting office in 1941, I’d have run off at the door.” He
looked up from his foot and down toward the command group nearly at the
head of the column. Three or four officers were clustered together on
the road. The Colonel was among them, neat, almost jaunty, in new
dungarees and boots. On his head there was a freshly clean utility cap
with a spruce uptilted bill and a shiny little silver leaf. At his side
he wore a pearl-handled .38 revolver, glistening with silver inlay. It
was, as usual, loaded, though no one knew why, for he was never known to
shoot it; the general feeling seemed to be that it was his emblematic
prerogative, no more an affectation, certainly, than a visored hat
encrusted with gilt, or grenades worn at the shoulder. The pistol--like
the swagger stick; the nickname; the quizzical, almost tenderly
contemplative air of authority--was part of the act, and to be sure,
Culver reflected, the act was less offensive, less imperious than it
might be. One simply learned soon to believe that the pistol “belonged,”
just as the name “Old Rocky” belonged; if such an act finally did no
harm, if it only flattered his vanity, was the Colonel to be blamed,
Culver asked himself, if he did nothing to mitigate the total
impression?

Mannix watched him, too, watched the Colonel toe at the sand, thumbs
hooked rakishly in his belt, a thin gentle smile on his face, adumbrated
by the fading light: he looked youthful and fresh, nonchalant,
displaying the studied casualness of an athlete before the stadium
throng, confident of his own victory long before the race begins.
Mannix gnawed at the end of a cigar, spat it out viciously. “Look at
the little jerk. He thinks he’s gonna have us pooped out at the halfway
mark--”

Culver put in, “Look Al, why don’t you do something about that nail? If
you told the Colonel he’d let you ride in--”

Mannix went fiercely on, in a husky whisper: “Well he’s not. He’s a
little sadist, but he’s not gonna have Al Mannix crapped out. I’ll walk
anywhere that son of a bitch goes and a mile further. He thinks H & S
Company’s been doping off. Well, I’ll show him. I wouldn’t ask him to
ride in if I’d been walking over broken glass. I’ll--”

He paused. Culver turned and looked at him. They were both silent,
staring at each other, embarrassed by the common understanding of their
gaze. Each turned away; Mannix murmured something and began to tie his
shoe. “You’re right Al,” Culver heard himself saying. It seemed it was
almost more than he could bear. Night was coming on. As in a stupor, he
looked down the road at the battalion, the men lounging along the
embankments with their rifles, smoking and talking in tired, subdued
voices, smoke rising in giant blue clouds through the dusk, where swarms
of gnats rose and fell in vivacious, panicky flight. In the swamp, frogs
had begun a brainless chorale; their noise seemed perfectly suited to
his sense of complete and final frustration. It was almost more than he
could bear. So Mannix had felt it, too: not simply fear of suffering,
nor exhaustion, nor the lingering horror, which gripped both of them, of
that bloody wasteland in the noonday heat. But the other: the old
atavism that clutched them, the voice that commanded, once again, _you
will_. How stupid to think they had ever made their own philosophy; it
was as puny as a house of straw, and at this moment--by the noise in
their brains of those words, _you will_--it was being blasted to the
winds like dust. They were as helpless as children. Another war, and
years beyond reckoning, had violated their minds irrevocably. For six
years they had slept a cataleptic sleep, dreaming blissfully of peace,
awakened in horror to find that, after all, they were only marines,
responding anew to the old commands. They were marines. Even if they
were old. Bank clerks and salesmen and lawyers. Even if, right now,
they were unutterably tired. They could no more _not_ be determined to
walk the thirty-six miles than they could, in the blink of an eye, turn
themselves into beautiful nymphs. Culver was afraid he wasn’t going to
make it, and now he knew Mannix was afraid, and he didn’t know what to
feel--resentment or disgust--over the fact that his fear was mingled
with a faint, fugitive pride.

Mannix looked up from his shoe and at the Colonel. “You’re goddam right,
Jack, we’re going to make it,” he said. “My company’s going to make it
if I have to _drag in their bodies_.” There was a tone in his voice that
Culver had never heard before.

Suddenly the Colonel’s flat voice broke through the stillness: “All
right, Billy, let’s saddle up.”

“‘Tallion saddle up!” The Major’s words were eager and shrill, became
multiplied down the long mile. “Smoking lamp’s out!” The blue cloud
dissolved on the air, the gnats descended in a swarm and the voices
passed on--_Saddle up, saddle up_--while the battalion rose to its
feet, not all at once but in a steady gradual surge, like rows of corn
snapping back erect after the passing of a wind. Mannix got to his feet,
began to sideslip in a cloud of dust down the embankment toward his
company directly below. It was at the head of the column, right behind
the command group. Culver, moving himself now down the hill, heard
Mannix’s shout. It rang out in the dusk with deliberate authority,
hoarse blunt command: “All right, H & S Company, saddle up, saddle up!
You people get off your asses and straighten up!” Culver passed by him
on his way to the command group: he stood surrounded by a cloud of
gnats, hulking enormously above the company, hands balanced lightly on
his hips, poised forward badgering the men like some obsessed, rakehell
Civil War general before a battle: “All right, you people, we’re gonna
walk thirty-six miles tonight and I mean walk! First man I see drop
out’s gonna get police duty for two weeks, and that goes for everybody.
You think I’m kidding you wait and see. There’s gonna be trucks going in
for those that can’t make it but I don’t want to see anyone from H & S
Company climbing on! If an old man with as much flab as I’ve got can
make it you people can too....” There was a note, almost, of desperation
in his voice. Culver, passing along the line of bedraggled,
mournful-looking men, so few of whom looked like fabled marines, heard
the voice rise to a taut pitch close to frenzy; it was too loud, it
worried Culver, and he wished to caution him: no longer just admonishing
the men to a simple duty, it was the voice of a man wildly fanatic with
one idea: to last. “I want to hear no bitching out of you people! Take
it easy on the water. You get shinsplints or blisters you see the
corpsman, don’t come crying to me. When we get in I want to see all of
you people....” Not because the hike was good or even sensible, Culver
thought, but out of hope of triumph, like a chain-gang convict who
endures a flogging without the slightest whimper, only to spite the
flogger. Culver joined the command group, heard the Colonel say to the
Major: “Looks like H & S Company’s going to make it _en masse_, Billy.”
It was just as Culver feared, for although his words were pleasant
enough, his face, regarding Mannix for a brief moment, had a look of
narrow scrutiny, as if he, too, had detected in the Captain’s tone that
note of proud and willful submission, rebellion in reverse. But there
was no emotion in his voice as he turned quickly, with a glance at his
watch, and said, “Let’s move out, Billy.”

They started out without delay. A jeep, its headlamps lit, preceded
them. The Colonel, in the lead, abreast of the Major and just ahead of
Culver, plunged off into the deep dust of the road. He walked with a
slinky-hipped, athletic stride, head down between his shoulders and
slightly forward, arms bent and moving methodically; nothing broke the
rhythm of his steps--ruts in the road or the deeply grooved tire
tracks--and Culver became quickly amazed, and rather appalled, at the
pace he was setting. It was the pace of a trained hiker--determined,
unhesitant, much closer to a trot now than a walk--and only a few
minutes passed before Culver was gasping for breath. Sand lay thick in
the road, hindering a natural step. They had not gone more than a couple
of hundred yards; already he felt sweat trickling down his forehead and
beneath his arms. For a moment fear surged up in him unnaturally, and a
crazy panic. He had been afraid of the march before, but his fear had
been abstract and hazy; now so quickly fatigued, in what seemed a matter
of seconds, he felt surely (as Mannix had predicted) that he’d be unable
to last the first hour. A panicky wash of blood came to his face and he
struggled for breath, wanting to cry out--it passed. His mind groped for
reason and the terror receded: once he adjusted to the shock of this
pace, he realized, he’d be all right. Then the panic went away; as it
did so, he found himself breathing easier, freed of that irrational
fright. The Colonel pushed ahead in front of him with the absolute
mechanical confidence of a wound-up, strutting tin soldier on a table
top. Culver, panting a bit, heard his voice, as calm and unwinded as if
he were sitting at a desk somewhere, addressed to the Major: “We shoved
off at nine on the dot, Billy. We should make the main road at ten and
have a break.” “Yes, sir,” he heard the Major say, “we’ll be ahead of
the game.” Culver made a calculation then; by the operations map, which
he knew so well, that was three and a half miles--a mile farther than
the regulation distance for an hour’s march. It was, indeed, like
running. Pushing on through the sand, he felt a wave of hopelessness so
giddy and so incomprehensible that it was almost like exhilaration--and
he heard a noise--half-chuckle, half-groan--escape between his labored
breaths. Three and a half miles: the distance from Greenwich Village
almost to Harlem. In his mind he measured that giddy parade of city
blocks, an exhausting voyage even on wheels. It was like twisting a
knife in his side but he went on with the mental yardstick--to imagine
himself plodding that stretch up the sandless, comfortably receptive
pavements of Fifth Avenue, past Fourteenth Street and the bleak vistas
of the Twenties and the Thirties, hurrying onward north by the Library,
twenty blocks more to the Plaza, and pressing still onward along the
green acres of the Park ... his thoughts recoiled. Three and a half
miles. In an hour. With more than thirty-two still to go. A vision of
Mannix came swimming back; Culver stumbled along after the dauntless
Colonel, thinking, Christ on a crutch.

They hastened on. Night had fallen around them, tropic and sudden, lit
now, as they descended across a thicket of swampy ground, only by the
lights of the jeep. Culver had regained his wind but already his chest
and back were awash in sweat, and he was thirsty. He took a vague
comfort in the fact that others felt the same way, for behind him he
heard canteens being unsnapped from their cases, rattling out of their
cups, and the noise, in mid-march, of drinking--a choked, gurgling
sound--then, faint to the rear, Mannix’s angry voice: “All right,
goddammit, I told you people to hold onto your water! Put those goddam
canteens back until the break!” Culver, craning his neck around, saw
nothing--no Mannix, who had apparently dropped behind--nothing except a
shadowy double line of men laboring through the sand, fading off far
down the road into the general blackness. To the rear some marine made a
joke, a remark; there was laughter and a snatch of song--_on top of old
Smo-oky, all covered_.... Then Mannix’s voice again out of the dark:
“O.K. you people can grabass all you want but I’m telling you you’d
better save your wind. If you want to talk all the way it’s O.K. with me
but you’re gonna crap out if you do, and remember what I said....” His
tone had become terse and vicious; it could have been the sound of a
satrap of Pharaoh, a galley master. It had the forbidding quality of a
strand of barbed wire or a lash made of thorns, and the voices, the
song, abruptly ceased, as if they had been strangled. Still his words
continued to sting and flay them--already, in this first hour, with the
merciless accents of a born bully--and Culver, suddenly angered, had an
impulse to drop back and try to make him let up.

“You people close it up now! Dammit, Shea, keep those men closed up
there. They fall back they’re gonna have to run to catch up! Goddammit,
close it up now, you hear me! I mean _you_, Thompson, goddammit you
aren’t deaf! Close it up! _Close it up_, I said!” So it was that the
voice, brutal and furious, continued the rest of the way.

And so it was that those first hours Culver recollected as being the
most harrowing of all, even though the later hours brought more subtle
refinements of pain. He reasoned that this was because during the first
few miles or so he was at least in rough possession of his intellect,
his mind lashing his spirit as pitilessly as his body. Later, he seemed
to be involved in something routine, an act in which his brain, long
past cooperation, played hardly any part at all. But during these early
hours there was also the fact of Mannix. Superimposed upon Culver’s own
fantasies, his anger, his despair (and his own calm moments of
rationalization, too) was his growing awareness of what was happening to
the Captain. Later, Mannix’s actions seemed to become mixed up and a
part of the general scheme, the nightmare. But here at first Culver’s
mind was enough in focus for Mannix’s transformation to emerge clearly,
even if with the chill, unreal outlines of coming doom--like a man
conversing, who might turn around briefly to a mirror and see behind him
in the room no longer his familiar friend, but something else--a shape,
a ghost, a horror--a wild and threatful face reflected from the glass.

They made the highway at ten o’clock, almost to the minute. When the
Colonel looked at his watch and stopped and the Major raised his arm,
shouting, “Breather! Ten minutes!” Culver went over to the side of the
road and sat down in the weeds. Blood was knocking angrily at his
temples, behind his eyes, and he was thirsty enough to drink, with a
greedy recklessness, nearly a third of his canteen. He lit a cigarette;
it tasted foul and metallic and he flipped it away. His knees and
thighs, unaccustomed to so much pounding, were stiff and fatigued; he
stretched them out slowly into the dewy underbrush, looking upward at a
placid cloud of stars. He turned. Up the road, threading its way through
a barrier of outstretched legs and rifles, came a figure. It was Mannix.
He was still muttering as he lumbered up and sank down beside him.
“Those goddam people, they won’t keep it closed up. I have to dog them
every minute. They’re going to find themselves running the whole way if
they don’t keep closed up. Gimme a butt.” He was breathing heavily, and
he passed the back of his hand over his brow to wipe the sweat away.

“Why don’t you leave them alone?” Culver said. He gave the Captain a
cigarette, which he lit, blowing the smoke out in a violent sort of
choked puff.

“Dammit,” he replied, coughing, “you _can’t_ leave them alone! They
don’t want to make this lousy hike. They’d just as soon crap out on the
side and let the trucks haul them in. They’d just as soon take police
duty. Man, they’re reserves. They don’t care who sees them crap out--me,
anybody.” He fell back with a sigh into the weeds, arms over his eyes.
“Fuck it,” he said. Culver looked down at him. From the jeep’s headlamps
an oblong of yellow slanted across the lower part of his face. One
corner of his mouth jerked nervously--a distasteful grimace, as if he
had been chewing something sour. Exhausted, completely bushed, there was
something in his manner--even in repose--which refused to admit his own
exhaustion. He clenched his teeth convulsively together. It was as if
his own fury, his own obsession now, held up, Atlas-like, the burden of
his great weariness. “Jesus,” he murmured, almost irrelevantly, “I can’t
help thinking about those kids today, lying out there in the weeds.”

Culver rested easily for a moment, thinking too. He looked at his watch,
with a sinking sensation: six of their ten minutes had already
passed--so swiftly that they seemed not to have existed at all. Then he
said, “Well, for Christ’s sake, Al, why don’t you let them crap out? If
you were getting screwed like these enlisted men are you’d crap out too,
you wouldn’t care. You don’t have to chew them out like you’ve been
doing. Let’s face it, you don’t really care if they make it. You. Me,
maybe. But these guys ... anybody else. What the hell.” He paused,
fumbling for words, went on feebly, “_Do_ you?”

Mannix rose up on his elbows then. “You’re damn right I do,” he said
evenly. They turned toward the Colonel standing not far away; he and the
Major, pointing a flashlight, were bent together over a map. Mannix
hawked something up and spat. His voice became more controlled. “You see
that little jerk standing there?” he said. “He thinks he’s pulling
something on us. Thirty-six miles. _No_body walks that far, stateside.
_No_body. We never walked that far even with Edson, last war. See, that
little jerk wants to make a name for himself--Old Rocky Templeton. Led
the longest forced march in the history of the Corps--”

“But--” Culver started.

“He’d just love to see H & S Company crap out,” he went on tensely,
“he’d _love_ it. It’d do something to his ego. Man, I can see him
now”--and his voice lifted itself in a tone of sour mockery--“‘Well,
Cap’n Mannix, see where you had a little trouble last night getting your
men in. Need a little bit more _esprit_, huh?’” His voice lowered,
filled with venom. “Well, screw _him_, Jack. I’ll get my company in if I
have to carry them on my back--”

It was useless to reason with him. Culver let him go on until he had
exhausted his bitter spurt of hatred, of poison, and until finally he
lay back again with a groan in the weeds--only a moment before the cry
came again: “Saddle up! Saddle up!”

They pushed off once more. It was just a bit easier now, for they were
to walk for two miles on the highway, where there was no sand to hinder
their steps, before turning back onto the side roads. Yet there was a
comfortless feeling at the outset, too: legs cramped and aching from the
moment’s rest, he walked stooped and bent over, at the start, like an
arthritic old man, and he was sweating again, dry with thirst, after
only a hundred yards. How on earth, he wondered, gazing up for a second
at the dim placid landscape of stars, would they last until the next
morning, until nearly noon? A car passed them--a slick convertible bound
for the North, New York perhaps--wherever, inevitably, for some civilian
pleasure--and its fleet, almost soundless passage brought, along with
the red pinpoint of its vanishing taillights, a new sensation of
unreality to the night, the march: dozing, shrouded by the dark, its
people seemed unaware of the shadowy walkers, had sped unceasingly on,
like ocean voyagers oblivious of all those fishy struggles below them in
the night, submarine and fathomless.

They plodded on, the Colonel pacing the march, but slower now, and
Culver played desperately with the idea that the man would, somehow,
tire, become exhausted himself. A wild fantasia of hopes and imaginings
swept through his mind: that Templeton _would_ become fatigued, having
overestimated his own strength, _would_ stop the march after an hour or
so and load them on the trucks--like a stern father who begins a
beating, only to become touched with if not remorse then leniency, and
stays his hand. But Culver knew it was a hollow desire. They pushed
relentlessly ahead, past shadowy pine groves, fields dense with the
fragrance of alfalfa and wild strawberries, shuttered farmhouses,
deserted rickety stores. Then this brief civilized vista they abandoned
again, and for good, when without pause they plunged off again onto
another road, into the sand. Culver had become bathed in sweat once
more; they all had, even the Colonel, whose neat dungarees had a black
triangular wet spot plastered at their back. Culver heard his own breath
coming hoarsely again, and felt the old panic: he’d never be able to
make it, he knew, he’d fall out on the side like the old man he
was--but far back to the rear then he heard Mannix’s huge voice,
dominating the night: “All right, goddammit, move out! We got sand here
now. Move out and close it up! Close it up, I say, goddammit!
Leadbetter, get that barn out of your ass and close it up! _Close it
up_, I say!” They spurred Culver on, after a fashion, but following upon
those shouts, there was a faint, subdued chorus, almost inaudible, of
moans and protests. They came only from Mannix’s company, a muffled,
sullen groan. To them Culver heard his own fitful breath add a
groan--expressing something he could hardly put a name to: fury,
despair, approaching doom--he scarcely knew. He stumbled on behind the
Colonel, like a ewe who follows the slaughterhouse ram, dumb and
undoubting, too panicked by the general chaos to hate its leader, or
care.

At the end of the second hour, and three more miles, Culver was sobbing
with exhaustion. He flopped down in the weeds, conscious now of a
blister beginning at the bottom of his foot, as if it had been scraped
by a razor.

Mannix was having trouble, too. This time when he came up, he was
limping. He sat down silently and took off his shoe; Culver, gulping
avidly at his canteen, watched him. Both of them were too winded to
smoke, or to speak. They were sprawled beside some waterway--canal or
stream; phosphorescent globes made a spooky glow among shaggy Spanish
moss, and a rank and fetid odor bloomed in the darkness--not the swamp’s
decay, Culver realized, but Mannix’s feet. “Look,” the Captain muttered
suddenly, “that nail’s caught me right in the heel.” Culver peered down
by the glare of Mannix’s flashlight to see on his heel a tiny hole,
bleeding slightly, bruised about its perimeter and surrounded by a pasty
white where the band-aid had been pulled away. “How’m I going to do it
with that?” Mannix said.

“Try beating that nail down again.”

“I tried, but the point keeps coming out I’d have to take the whole
frigging shoe apart.”

“Can’t you put a piece of cloth over it or something?”

“I tried that, too, but it puts my foot off balance. It’s worse than the
nail.” He paused. “Jesus Christ.”

“Look,” Culver said, “try taking this strip of belt and putting it over
it.” They debated, operated, talked hurriedly, and neither of them was
aware of the Colonel, who had walked over through the shadows and was
standing beside them. “What’s the matter, Captain?” he said.

They looked up, startled. Hands hooked as usual--Culver wanted to say
“characteristically”--in his belt, he stood serenely above them. In the
yellow flashlight glow his face was red from exertion, still damp with
sweat, but he appeared no more fatigued than a man who had sprinted a
few yards to catch a bus. The faint smile hovered at the corners of his
lips. Once more it was neither complacent nor superior but, if anything,
almost benevolent, so that by the unnatural light, in which his delicate
features became fiery red and again now, along the borders of his slim
tapering fingers, nearly transparent, he looked still not so much the
soldier but the priest in whom passion and faith had made an alloy, at
last, of only the purest good intentions; above meanness or petty spite,
he was leading a march to some humorless salvation, and his smile--his
solicitous words, too--had at least a bleak sincerity.

“I got a nail in my shoe,” Mannix said.

The Colonel squatted down and inspected Mannix’s foot, cupping it almost
tenderly in his hand. Mannix appeared to squirm at the Colonel’s touch.
“That looks bad,” he said after a moment, “did you see the corpsman?”

“No, sir,” Mannix replied tensely, “I don’t think there’s anything can
be done. Unless I had a new pair of boondockers.”

The Colonel ruminated, rubbing his chin, his other hand still holding
the Captain’s foot. His eyes searched the dark reaches of the
surrounding swamp, where now the rising moon had laid a tranquil silver
dust. Frogs piped shrilly in the night, among the cypress and the
shallows and closer now, by the road and the stagnant canal, along which
danced shifting pinpoints of fire--cigarettes that rose and fell in the
hidden fingers of exhausted men. “Well,” the Colonel finally said,
“well--” and paused. Again the act: indecision before decision, the
waiting. “Well,” he said, and paused again. The waiting. At that
moment--in a wave that came up through his thirst, his throbbing lips,
his numb sense of futility--Culver felt that he knew of no one on earth
he had ever loathed so much before. And his fury was heightened by the
knowledge that he did not hate the man--the Templeton with his shrewd
friendly eyes and harmless swagger, that fatuous man whose attempt to
convey some impression of a deep and subtle wisdom was almost
endearing--not this man, but the Colonel, the marine: that was the one
he despised. He didn’t hate him for himself, nor even for his brutal
march. Bad as it was, there were no doubt worse ordeals; it was at least
a peaceful landscape they had to cross. But he did hate him for his
perverse and brainless gesture: squatting in the sand, gently, almost
indecently now, stroking Mannix’s foot, he had too long been conditioned
by the system to perform with grace a human act. Too ignorant to know
that with this gesture--so nakedly human in the midst of a crazy,
capricious punishment which he himself had imposed--he lacerated the
Captain by his very touch. Then he spoke. Culver knew what he was going
to say. Nothing could have been worse.

“Well,” he said, “maybe you’d better ride in on one of the trucks.”

If there had been ever the faintest possibility that Mannix would ride
in, those words shattered it. Mannix drew his foot away abruptly, as if
the Colonel’s hand were acid, or fire. “No, sir!” he said fiercely--too
fiercely, the note of antagonism, now, was unmistakable--“No, sir! I’ll
make this frigging march.” Furiously, he began to put on his shoe. The
Colonel rose to his feet, hooked his thumbs in his belt and gazed
carelessly down.

“I think you’re going to regret it,” he said, “with that foot of yours.”

The Captain got up, limping off toward his company, over his retreating
shoulder shot back a short, clipped burst of words at the Colonel--whose
eyeballs rolled white with astonishment when he heard them--and thereby
joined the battle.

“Who cares what you think,” he said.




IV


Had the Colonel entertained any immediate notions of retribution, he
held them off, for at a quarter past four that morning--halfway through
the march, when the first green light of dawn streaked the sky--Culver
still heard Mannix’s hoarse, ill-tempered voice, lashing his troops from
the rear. For hours he had lost track of Mannix. As for the Colonel, the
word had spread that he was no longer pacing the march but had gone
somewhere to the rear and was walking there. In his misery, a wave of
hope swelled up in Culver: if the Colonel had become fagged, and was
walking no longer but sitting in his jeep somewhere, at least they’d all
have the consolation of having succeeded while their leader failed. But
it was a hope, Culver knew, that was ill-founded. He’d be back there
slogging away. The bastard could outmarch twenty men, twenty raging
Mannixes.

The hike had become disorganized, no slower but simply more spread out.
Culver--held back by fatigue and thirst and the burning, enlarging pain
in his feet--found himself straggling behind. From time to time he
managed to catch up; at one point he discovered himself at the tail end
of Mannix’s company, but he no longer really cared. The night had simply
become a great solitude of pain and thirst, and an exhaustion so
profound that it enveloped his whole spirit, and precluded thought.

A truck rumbled past, loaded with supine marines, so still they appeared
unconscious. Another passed, and another--they came all night. But far
to the front, long after each truck’s passage, he could hear Mannix’s
cry: “Keep on, Jack! This company’s walking in.” They pushed on through
the night, a shambling horde of zombies in drenched dungarees, eyes
transfixed on the earth in a sort of glazed, avid concentration. After
midnight it seemed to Culver that his mind only registered impressions,
and these impressions had no sequence but were projected upon his brain
in a scattered, disordered riot, like a movie film pieced together by an
idiot. His memory went back no further than the day before; he no longer
thought of anything so unattainable as home. Even the end of the march
seemed a fanciful thing, beyond all possibility, and what small
aspirations he now had were only to endure this one hour, if just to
attain the microscopic bliss of ten minutes’ rest and a mouthful of warm
water. And bordering his memory was ever the violent and haunting
picture of the mangled bodies he had seen--when? where? it seemed weeks,
years ago, beneath the light of an almost prehistoric sun; try as he
could, to dwell upon consoling scenes--home, music, sleep--his mind was
balked beyond that vision: the shattered youth with slumbering eyes, the
blood, the swarming noon.

Then at the next halt, their sixth--or seventh, eighth, Culver had long
ago lost count--he saw Mannix lying beside a jeep-towed water-cart at
the rear of his company. O’Leary was sprawled out next to him, breath
coming in long asthmatic groans. Culver eased himself painfully down
beside them and touched Mannix’s arm. The light of dawn, a feverish pale
green, had begun to appear, outlining on Mannix’s face a twisted look of
suffering. His eyes were closed.

“How you doing, Al?” Culver said, reaching up to refill his canteen.

“Hotsy-totsy,” he breathed, “except for my frigging foot. How you making
it, boy?” His voice was listless. Culver looked down at Mannix’s shoe;
he had taken it off, to expose heel and sock, where, soaked up like the
wick of a lantern, rose a dark streak of blood.

“Jesus,” Culver said, “Al, for Christ sake now, you’d better ride in on
a truck.”

“Nail’s out, sport. I finally stole me a pair of pliers, some radioman.
Had to run like hell to catch up.”

“Even so--” Culver began. But Mannix had fallen into an impervious
silence. Up the road stretched a line of squatting men, Mannix’s
company. Most were sprawled in the weeds or the dust of the road in
attitudes as stiff as death, yet some nearby sat slumped over their
rifles, drinking water, smoking; there was a thin resentful muttering in
the air. And the men close at hand--the faces he could see in the
indecisive light--wore looks of agonized and silent protest. They seemed
to be mutely seeking for the Captain, author of their misery, and they
were like faces of men in bondage who had jettisoned all hope, and were
close to defeat. In the weeds Mannix breathed heavily, mingling his with
the tortured wheezes of O’Leary, who had fallen sound asleep. It was
getting hot again. No one spoke. Then a fitful rumbling filled the dawn,
grew louder, and along the line bodies stirred, heads turned, gazing
eastward down the road at an oncoming, roaring cloud of dust. Out of the
dust came a machine. It was a truck, and it passed them, and it rattled
to a stop up in the midst of the company.

“Anyone crapped out here?” a voice called. “I got room for ten more.”

There was a movement toward the truck; nearby, half a dozen men got to
their feet, slung their rifles, and began to hobble up the road. Culver
watched them tensely, hearing Mannix stir beside him, putting his shoe
back on. O’Leary had awakened and sat up. Together the three of them
watched the procession toward the truck: a straggle of limping men
plodding as wretchedly as dog-pound animals toward that yawning vehicle
in the smoky dawn, huge, green, and possessed of wheels--which would
deliver them to freedom, to sleep, oblivion. Mannix watched them without
expression, through inflamed eyes; he seemed so drugged, so dumb with
exhaustion, that he was unaware of what was taking place. “What happened
to the Colonel?” he said absently.

“He went off in a jeep a couple of hours ago,” O’Leary said, “said
something about checking on the column of march.”

“What?” Mannix said. Again, he seemed unaware of the words, as if
they--like the sight of this slow streaming exodus toward the
truck--were making no sudden imprint on his mind, but were filtering
into his consciousness through piles and layers of wool. A dozen more
men arose and began a lame procession toward the truck. Mannix watched
them, blinking. “What?” he repeated.

“To check the column, sir,” O’Leary repeated. “That’s what he said.”

“He _did_?” Mannix turned with an angry, questioning look. “Who’s pacing
the march, then?”

“Major Lawrence is.”

“He _is_?” Mannix rose to his feet, precariously, stiffly and in pain
balancing himself not on the heel, but the toe only, of his wounded
foot. He blinked in the dawn, gazing at the rear of the truck and the
cluster of marines there, feebly lifting themselves into the interior.
He said nothing and Culver, watching him from below, could only think of
the baffled fury of some great bear cornered, bloody and torn by a foe
whose tactics were no braver than his own, but simply more cunning. He
bit his lips--out of pain perhaps, but as likely out of impotent rage
and frustration, and he seemed close to tears when he said, in a tone
almost like grief: “_He_ crapped out! _He_ crapped out!”

He came alive like a somnambulist abruptly shocked out of sleep, and he
lunged forward onto the road with a wild and tormented bellow. “Hey, you
people, get off that goddam truck!” He sprang into the dust with a skip
and a jump, toiling down the road with hobbled leg and furious flailing
arms. By his deep swinging gait, his terrible limp, he looked no more
capable of locomotion than a wheel-chair invalid, and it would have
been funny had it not seemed at the same time so full of threat and
disaster. He pressed on. “Off that truck, goddammit, I say! Off that
truck. Saddle up. Saddle up now, I say! On your feet!” he yelled. “Get
off that goddam truck before I start kicking you people in the ass!” His
words flayed and cowed them; a long concerted groan arose in the air,
seemed to take possession of the very dawn; yet they debarked from the
truck in terrified flight, scuttling down like mice from a sinking raft.
“Move the hell out of here!” he shouted at the truck driver, a skinny
corporal, eyes bulging, who popped back into the cab in fright. “Get
that heap out of here!” The truck leaped off with a roar, enveloping the
scene in blue smoke and a tornado of dust. Mannix, with windmilling
arms, stood propped on his toe in the center of the road, urged the men
wildly on. “Saddle up now! Let somebody else crap out O.K., but not you
people, hear me! Do you hear me! Goddammit, I mean it! Shea, get those
people moving out up there! You people better face it, you got eighteen
more miles to go....” Culver tried to stop him, but they had already
begun to run.

Panic-stricken, limping with blisters and with exhaustion, and in
mutinous despair, the men fled westward, whipped on by Mannix’s cries.
They pressed into the humid, sweltering light of the new day. Culver
followed; O’Leary, without a murmur, puffed along beside him, while to
the rear, with steady slogging footsteps, trailed the remnants of the
battalion. Dust billowed up and preceded them, like Egypt’s pillar of
cloud, filling the air with its dry oppressive menace. It coated their
lips and moist brows with white powdery grit, like a spray of plaster,
and gave to the surrounding trees, the underbrush and vacant fields, a
blighted pallor, as if touched by unseasonable frost. The sun rose
higher, burning down at their backs so that each felt he bore on his
shoulders not the burden of a pack but, almost worse, a portable oven
growing hotter and hotter as the sun came up from behind the sheltering
pines. They walked automatically, no longer with that light and
tentative step in order to ease the pain in their feet, but with the
firm, dogged tread of robots; and if they were all like Culver they had
long since parted with a sensation of motion below the hips, and felt
there only a constant throbbing pain--of blisters and battered muscles
and the protest of exhausted bones.

Then one time Culver saw the Colonel go by in a jeep, boiling along in a
cloud of dust toward the head of the column. He caught a glimpse of him
as he passed: he looked sweaty and tired, far from rested, and Culver
wondered how justified Mannix’s outrage had been, assigning to the
Colonel that act of cowardice. So he hadn’t been pacing the march, but
God knows he must have been hiking along to the rear; and his doubts
were bolstered by O’Leary’s voice, coming painfully beside him: “Old
Captain Mannix’s mighty pissed off at the Colonel.” He paused, wheezing
steadily. “Don’t know if he’s got a right to be that way. Old Colonel
ain’t gonna crap out without a reason. Colonel’s kind of rough sometimes
but he’ll go with the troops.” Culver said nothing. They plodded ahead
silently. Culver felt like cursing the Sergeant. How could he be so
stupid? How could he, in the midst of this pain, yield up still only
words of accord and respect and even admiration for the creator of such
a wild and lunatic punishment? Only a man so firmly cemented to the
system that all doubts were beyond countenance could say what O’Leary
did--and yet--and yet God knows, Culver thought wearily, he could be
right and himself and Mannix, and the rest of them, inescapably wrong.
His mind was confused. A swarm of dust came up and filled his lungs.
Mannix was screwing everything up horribly, and Culver wanted suddenly
to sprint forward--in spite of the effort it took--reach the Captain,
take him aside and tell him: _Al, Al, let up, you’ve already lost the
battle_. Defiance, pride, endurance--none of these would help. He only
mutilated himself by this perverse and violent rebellion; no matter what
the Colonel was--coward and despot or staunch bold leader--he had him
beaten, going and coming. Nothing could be worse than what Mannix was
doing--adding to a disaster already ordained (Culver somehow sensed) the
burden of his vicious fury. At least let up, the men had had enough.
But his mind was confused. His kidneys were aching as if they had been
pounded with a mallet, and he walked along now with his hands on his
waist, like a professor lecturing in a classroom, coattails over his
arms.

And for the first time he felt intolerably hot--with a heat that
contributed to his mounting fury. At night they had sweated more from
exertion; the coolness of the evening had been at least some solace, but
the morning’s sun began to flagellate him anew, adding curious sharp
blades of pain to the furious frustration boiling inside him.
Frustration at the fact that he was not independent enough, nor
possessed of enough free will, was not _man_ enough to say, to hell with
it and crap out himself; that he was not man enough to disavow all his
determination and endurance and suffering, cash in his chips, and by
that act flaunt his contempt of the march, the Colonel, the whole bloody
Marine Corps. But he was _not_ man enough, he knew, far less simply a
free man; he was just a marine--as was Mannix, and so many of the
others--and they had been marines, it seemed, all their lives, would go
on being marines forever; and the frustration implicit in this thought
brought him suddenly close to tears. Mannix. A cold horror came over
him. Far down, profoundly, Mannix was so much a marine that it could
make him casually demented. The corruption begun years ago in his
drill-field feet had climbed up, overtaken him, and had begun to rot his
brain. Culver heard himself sobbing with frustration and outrage. The
sun beat down against his back. His mind slipped off into fevered
blankness, registering once more, on that crazy cinematic tape, chaos,
vagrant jigsaw images: Mannix’s voice far ahead, hoarse and breaking
now, then long spells of silence; halts beside stifling, windless
fields, then a shady ditch into which he plunged, feverish and comatose,
dreaming of a carnival tent where one bought, from a dozen barrels, all
sorts of ice, chipped, crushed, and cubed, in various shapes and sizes.
He was awakened by that terrible cry--_Saddle up, saddle up!_--and he
set out again. The sun rose higher and higher. O’Leary, with a groan,
dropped behind and vanished. Two trucks passed loaded with stiff,
green-clad bodies motionless as corpses. The canteen fell off Culver’s
belt, somewhere, sometime; now he found though, to his surprise, that he
was no longer thirsty and no longer sweating. This was dangerous, he
recalled from some lecture, but at that moment the young marine vomiting
at the roadside seemed more important, even more interesting. He stopped
to help, thought better of it, passed on--through a strange crowd of
pale and tiny butterflies, borne like bleached petals in shimmering
slow-motion across the dusty road. At one point Hobbs, the radioman,
cruised by in a jeep with a fishpole antenna; he was laughing, taunting
the marchers with a song--_I got romance in my pants_--and he waved a
jolly fat hand. A tanager rose, scarlet and beautiful, from a steaming
thicket and pinwheeled upward, down again, and into the meadow beyond:
there Culver thought, for a brief terrified moment, that he saw eight
butchered corpses lying in a row, blood streaming out against the weeds.
But it passed. Of course, he remembered, that was yesterday--or was
it?--and then for minutes he tried to recall Hobbs’s name, gave up the
effort; it was along about this time, too, that he gazed at his watch,
neither pleased nor saddened to find that it was not quite nine o’clock,
began to wind it with careful absorption as he trudged along, and looked
up to see Mannix looming enormously at the roadside.

“Get up,” the Captain was saying. He had hardly any voice left at all;
whatever he spoke with gave up only a rasp, a whisper. “Get your ass off
the deck,” he was saying, “get up, I say.”

Culver stopped and watched. The marine lay back in the weeds. He was fat
and he had a three-day growth of beard. He held up one bare foot, where
there was a blister big as a silver dollar and a dead, livid white, the
color of a toadstool; as the Captain spoke, the marine blandly peeled
the skin away, revealing a huge patch of tender, pink, virgin flesh. He
had a patient hillbilly voice and he was explaining softly, “Ah just
cain’t go on, Captain, with a foot like this. Ah just cain’t do it, and
that’s all there is to it.”

“You _can_, goddammit,” he rasped. “I walked ten miles with a nail in
my foot. If I can do it you can, too. Get up, I said. You’re a
marine....”

“Captain,” he went on patiently, “Ah cain’t help it about your nail. Ah
may be a marine and all that but Ah ain’t no goddam fool....”

The Captain, poised on his crippled foot, made a swift, awkward gesture
toward the man, as if to drag him to his feet; Culver grabbed him by the
arm, shouting furiously: “Stop it, Al! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
Enough!” He paused, looking into Mannix’s dull hot eyes. “Enough!” he
said, more quietly. “Enough.” Then gently, “That’s enough, Al. They’ve
just had enough.” The end was at hand, Culver knew, there was no doubt
of that. The march had come to a halt again, the men lay sprawled out on
the sweltering roadside. He looked at the Captain, who shook his head
dumbly and suddenly ran trembling fingers over his eyes. “O.K.,” he
murmured, “yeah ... yes”--something incoherent and touched with
grief--and Culver felt tears running down his cheeks. He was too tired
to think--except: old Al. Mannix. Goddam. “They’ve had enough,” he
repeated.

Mannix jerked his hand away from his face. “O.K.,” he croaked, “Christ
sake, I hear you. O.K. They’ve had enough, they’ve had enough. O.K. I
heard you the first time. Let ’em crap out! I’ve did--done--” He paused,
wheeled around. “To hell with them all.”

He watched Mannix limp away. The Colonel was standing nearby up the
road, thumbs hooked in his belt, regarding the Captain soberly. Culver’s
spirit sank like a rock. Old Al, he thought. You just couldn’t win.
Goddam. Old great soft scarred bear of a man.

       *       *       *       *       *

If in defeat he appeared despondent, he retained one violent shred of
life which sustained him to the end--his fury. It would get him through.
He was like a man running a gauntlet of whips, who shouts outrage and
defiance at his tormentors until he falls at the finish. Yet--as Culver
could have long ago foretold--it was a fury that was uncontained; the
old smoking bonfire had blazed up in his spirit. And if it had been out
of control hours ago when he had first defied the Colonel, there was no
doubt at all that now it could not fail to consume both of them. At
least one of them. Culver, prone on his belly in the weeds, was hot with
tension, and he felt blood pounding at his head when he heard the
Colonel call, in a frosty voice: “Captain Mannix, will you come here a
minute?”

Culver was the closest at hand. There were six more miles to go. The
break had extended this time to fifteen minutes--an added rest because,
as Culver had heard the Colonel explain to the Major, they’d walk the
last six miles without a halt. Another break, he’d said, with a wry
weary grin, and they’d never be able to get the troops off the ground.
Culver had groaned--another senseless piece of sadism--then reasoned
wearily that it _was_ a good idea. Probably. Maybe. Who knew? He was too
tired to care. He watched Mannix walk with an awful hobbling motion up
the road, face screwed up in pain and eyes asquint like a man trying to
gaze at the sun. He moved at a good rate of speed but his gait was
terrible to behold--jerks and spasms which warded off, reacted to, or
vainly tried to control great zones and areas of pain. Behind him most
of his men lay in stupefied rows at the edge of the road and waited for
the trucks to come. They knew Mannix had finished, and they had crumpled
completely. For the last ten minutes, in a listless fashion, he had
assembled less than a third of the company who were willing to continue
the march--diehards, athletes, and just those who, like Mannix himself,
would make the last six miles out of pride and spite. Out of fury. It
was a seedy, bedraggled column of people: of hollow, staring eyes and
faces green with slack-jawed exhaustion; and behind them the remnants of
the battalion made hardly more than two hundred men. Mannix struggled on
up the road, approached the Colonel, and stood there propped on his toe,
hands on his hips for balance.

The Colonel looked at him steadily for a moment, coldly. Mannix was no
longer a simple doubter but the heretic, and was about to receive
judgment. Yet there was still an almost paternal reluctance in
Templeton’s voice as he spoke, slowly and very softly, out of the
troops’ hearing: “Captain Mannix, I want you to go in on the trucks.”

“No, sir,” Mannix said hoarsely, “I’m going to make this march.”

The Colonel looked utterly whipped; gray bags of fatigue hung beneath
his eyes. He seemed no longer to have strength enough to display his odd
theatrical smile; his posture was taut and vaguely stooped, the
unmistakable bent-kneed stance of a man with blisters, and Culver was
forced to concede--with a sense of mountainous despair--that he _had_
made the march after all, somewhere toward the rear and for legitimate
reasons of his own, even if Mannix now was too blind, too outraged, to
tell. _Goddam_, Culver heard himself moaning aloud, _if just he only
hadn’t made it_, but he heard the Colonel go on coolly: “Not with that
foot you aren’t.” He glanced down. The Captain’s ankle had swollen to a
fat milky purple above the top of his shoe; he was unable to touch his
heel to the ground even if he had wanted to. “Not with that foot,” he
repeated.

Mannix was silent, panting deeply--not as if taken aback at all, but
only as if gathering wind for an outburst. He and the Colonel gazed at
each other, twin profiles embattled against an escarpment of pines, the
chaste blue sky of morning. “Listen, Colonel,” he rasped, “you ordered
this goddam hike and I’m going to walk it even if I haven’t got one
goddam man left. You can crap out yourself for half the march--” Culver
wanted desperately, somehow, by any means to stop him--not just because
he was pulling catastrophe down on his head but because it was simply no
longer worth the effort. Couldn’t he see? That the Colonel didn’t care
and that was that? That with him the hike had had nothing to do with
courage or sacrifice or suffering, but was only a task to be performed,
that whatever he was he was no coward, he had marched the whole way--or
most of it, any idiot could see that--and that he was as far removed
from the vulgar battle, the competition, which Mannix had tried to
promote as the frozen, remotest stars. He just didn’t care. Culver
strove, in a sick, heaving effort, to rise, to go and somehow separate
them, but Mannix was charging on: “You run your troops. Fine. O.K. But
what’s all this about crapping out--”

“Wait a minute, Captain, now--” the Colonel blurted ominously. “For your
information--”

“_Fuck_ you and your information,” said Mannix in a hoarse, choked
voice. He was almost sobbing. “If you think--”

But he went no further, for the Colonel had made a curious, quick
gesture--stage-gesture, fantastic and subtle, and it was like watching
an old cowboy film to see the Colonel’s hand go swiftly back to the
handle of his pistol and rest there, his eyes cool and passionate and
forbidding. It was a gesture of force which balked even the Captain.
Mannix’s face went pale--as if he had only just then realized the words
which had erupted so heedlessly from his mouth--and he said nothing,
only stood there sullen and beaten and blinking at the glossy white
handle of the pistol as the Colonel went on: “For your information,
Captain, you aren’t the only one who made this march. But I’m not
_interested_ in your observations. You quiet down now, hear? You march
in, see? I order you confined to your quarters, and I’m going to see
that you get a court-martial. Do you understand? I’m going to have you
tried for gross insubordination. I’ll have you sent to Korea. _Keep your
mouth shut._ Now get back to your company!” He was shaking with wrath;
the hot morning light beat with piety and with vengeance from his gray,
outraged eyes. “Get back to your men,” he whispered, “_get back to your
men_!”

Then he turned his back to the Captain and called down the road to the
Major: “All right, Billy, let’s saddle up!”

So it was over, but not quite all. The last six miles took until past
noon. Mannix’s perpetual tread on his toe alone gave to his gait a
ponderous, bobbing motion which resembled that of a man wretchedly
spastic and paralyzed. It lent to his face too--whenever Culver became
detached from his own misery long enough to glance at him--an aspect of
deep, almost prayerfully passionate concentration--eyes thrown skyward
and lips fluttering feverishly in pain--so that if one did not know he
was in agony one might imagine that he was a communicant in rapture,
offering up breaths of hot desire to the heavens. It was impossible to
imagine such a distorted face; it was the painted, suffering face of a
clown, and the heaving gait was a grotesque and indecent parody of a
hopeless cripple, with shoulders gyrating like a seesaw and with
flapping, stricken arms. The Colonel and the Major had long since
outdistanced them, and Culver and Mannix walked alone. When the base
came into sight, he was certain they were not going to make it. They
trudged into the camp. Along the barren, treeless streets marines in
neat khaki were going to lunch, and they turned to watch the mammoth
gyrating Captain, so tattered and soiled--who addressed convulsive
fluttering prayers to the sky, and had obviously parted with his senses.
Then Mannix stopped suddenly and grasped Culver’s arm. “What the hell,”
he whispered, “we’ve made it.”




V


For a long while Culver was unable to sleep. He had lain naked on his
bed for what seemed hours, but unconsciousness would not come; his
closed eyes offered up only vistas of endless roads, steaming thickets,
fields, tents--sunshine and darkness illogically commingled--and the
picture, which returned to his mind with the unshakable regularity of a
scrap of music, of the boys who lay dead beneath the light of another
noon. Try as he could, sleep would not come. So he dragged himself erect
and edged toward the window, laboriously, because of his battered feet;
it took him a full minute to do so, and his legs, like those of an
amputee which possess the ghost of sensation, felt as if they were still
in motion, pacing endless distances. He lowered himself into a chair and
lighted a cigarette. Below, the swimming pool was grotto-blue, a
miniature of the cloudless sky above, lit with shapes of dancing light
as shiny as silver dimes. A squad of sunsuited maidens, officers’ wives,
splashed at its brink or ate ice-cream sundaes on the lawn, and filled
the noontime with their decorous sunny laughter. It was hot and still.
Far off above the pines, in the hot sunlight and over distant peace and
civilization, brewed the smoky and threatful beginnings of a storm.

Culver let his head fall on his arm. Yes, they had had it--those eight
boys--he thought, there was no doubt of that. In mindless slumber now,
they were past caring, though diadems might drop or Doges surrender.
They were ignorant of all. And that they had never grown old enough to
know anything, even the tender miracle of pity, was perhaps a better
ending--it was hard to tell. Faint warm winds came up from the river,
bearing with them a fragrance of swamp and pine, and a last whisper of
air passed through the trees, shuddered, died, became still; suddenly
Culver felt a deep vast hunger for something he could not explain, nor
ever could remember having known quite so achingly before. He only felt
that all of his life he had yearned for something that was as fleeting
and as incommunicable, in its beauty, as that one bar of music he
remembered, or those lovely little girls with their ever joyful, ever
sprightly dance on some far and fantastic lawn--serenity, a quality of
repose--he could not call it by name, but only knew that, somehow, it
had always escaped him. As he sat there, with the hunger growing and
blossoming within him, he felt that he had hardly ever known a time in
his life when he was not marching or sick with loneliness or afraid.

And so, he thought, they had all had it, in their various fashions. The
Colonel had had his march and his victory, and Culver could not say
still why he was unable to hate him. Perhaps it was only because he was
a different kind of man, different enough that he was hardly a man at
all, but just a quantity of attitudes so remote from Culver’s world that
to hate him would be like hating a cannibal, merely because he gobbled
human flesh. At any rate, he had had it. And as for Mannix--well, _he’d_
certainly had it, there was no doubt of _that_. Old Al, he thought
tenderly. The man with the back unbreakable, the soul of pity--where was
he now, great unshatterable vessel of longing, lost in the night, astray
at mid-century in the never-endingness of war?

His hunger faded and died. He raised his head and gazed out the window.
Over the pool a figure swan-dived against the sky, in crucified,
graceless descent broke the water with a lumpy splash. A cloud passed
over the day, darkening the lawn with a moment’s somber light. The
conversation of the girls became subdued, civilized, general. Far off
above the trees, on the remotest horizon, thunderheads bloomed, a
squall. Later, toward sundown, they would roll landward over a shadowing
reach of waves, borne nearer, ever more darkly across the coast, the
green wild desolation of palmetto and cypress and pine--and here, where
the girls pink and scanty in sunsuits would slant their tar-black eyes
skyward in the gathering night, abandon pool and games and chatter and
with shrill cries of warning flee homeward like gaudy scraps of paper on
the blast, voices young and lovely and lost in the darkness, the
onrushing winds. One thing, Culver thought, was certain--they were in
for a blow. Already there would be signals up and down the coast.

Abruptly he was conscious of a dry, parched thirst. He rose to his
feet, put on a robe, and hobbled out into the hallway toward the water
cooler. As he rounded the corner he saw Mannix, naked except for a towel
around his waist, making his slow and agonized way down the hall. He was
hairy and enormous and as he inched his way toward the shower room,
clawing at the wall for support, his face with its clenched eyes and
taut, drawn-down mouth was one of tortured and gigantic suffering. The
swelling at his ankle was the size of a grapefruit, an ugly blue, and
this leg he dragged behind him, a dead weight no longer capable of
motion.

Culver started to limp toward him, said, “Al--” in an effort to help him
along, but just then one of the Negro maids employed in the place came
swinging along with a mop, stopped, seeing Mannix, ceased the singsong
little tune she was humming, too, and said, “Oh my, you poor man. What
you been doin’? Do it hurt?” Culver halted.

“Do it hurt?” she repeated. “Oh, I bet it does. Deed it does.” Mannix
looked up at her across the short yards that separated them, silent,
blinking. Culver would remember this: the two of them communicating
across that chasm one unspoken moment of sympathy and understanding
before the woman, spectacled, bandannaed, said again, “Deed it does,”
and before, almost at precisely the same instant, the towel slipped away
slowly from Mannix’s waist and fell with a soft plop to the floor;
Mannix then, standing there, weaving dizzily and clutching for support
at the wall, a mass of scars and naked as the day he emerged from his
mother’s womb, save for the soap which he held feebly in one hand. He
seemed to have neither the strength nor the ability to lean down and
retrieve the towel and so he merely stood there huge and naked in the
slanting dusty light and blinked and sent toward the woman, finally, a
sour, apologetic smile, his words uttered, it seemed to Culver, not with
self-pity but only with the tone of a man who, having endured and
lasted, was too weary to tell her anything but what was true.

“Deed it does,” he said.




[Illustration]




ABOUT THE AUTHOR


William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia. He served three years
in the United States Marine Corps, and after the war, returned to
complete his studies at Duke University.

_Lie Down in Darkness_, William Styron’s first novel, appeared in 1951.
For that initial work, he was awarded the Prix de Rome of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later his short novel, _The Long
March_, was published, followed by Set _This House on Fire_ (1960) and
_The Confessions of Nat Turner_ (1967).

Mr. Styron, his wife and four children live in Roxbury, Connecticut.





*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG MARCH ***


    

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.


START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
    other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
    whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
    of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
    at www.gutenberg.org. If you
    are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
    of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
  
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:

    • You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
        the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
        you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
        to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
        agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
        within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
        legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
        payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
        Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
        Literary Archive Foundation.”
    
    • You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
        you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
        does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
        License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
        copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
        all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
        works.
    
    • You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
        any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
        electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
        receipt of the work.
    
    • You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
        distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
    

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™

Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.