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 uncon-tained; 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. Man-nix’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