by James Jones
“Gentlemen!” Jake Delbert said again. He charged up to his feet. “Ah—” he said. “Your glasses are empty, gentlemen. Dont you think its about time for another drink. Jeff isnt back yet. I’ll—ah—do the honors. Eh?”
Nobody laughed.
“This is a party, gentlemen,” Jake joked insistently, “not a convention, you know. Eh? Dont you think we ought to perhaps possibly maybe ah . . .” Both of them were looking at him blankly, and gradually he ran down like a phonograph and tapered off into a nervous silence.
“I’m thirsty,” Jake said desperately, finally.
Sam Slater smiled at him, openly contemptuously, and Jake felt a spasm of nameless fear.
“Of course, Jake,” Sam Slater said soothingly. “Let us have another. Let us all have another.”
“But what I dont see,” Holmes said suddenly. “What do you suppose makes them all afraid like that? I’m not afraid, not of the truth.” And he meant it truly. He looked deep inside himself, there was no fear there.
Sam Slater shrugged. “Environmental training, I suppose. Psychologically, its a sort of subjective association of oneself with the external object. Some boys cant shoot birds because they put themselves into the place of the injured bird. Same thing.”
Holmes was irritated. “But thats stupid.”
“Gentlemen,” Jake Delbert said urgently. “Your drinks, gentlemen.”
“Thanks, Jake,” Sam Slater said soothingly. Somehow, Jake thought, Sam’s solace is always ominous. “Of course its stupid,” Sam said to Holmes. “Nobody claimed it wasnt stupid. Still, it happens to them.”
“Ha,” Jake Delbert said aloud, and to hell with them, what are they anyway? “Tell me, Dynamite,” Jake said. “How are you makin’ out with that new man, whats his name, Prewitt. Have you convinced him he should go out yet?”
“Who?” Holmes said. He looked up startled, jerked from the clarity of the abstract back into the turbid concrete, where the application always has to take place. “Oh,” he said. “Prewitt. No, not yet. But my boys are working on him.”
“Giving him The Treatment?” Sam Slater interjected.
“Yes,” Holmes said reluctantly.
“Thats a good example of my theory. How long do you think we could run an army without noncoms who fear our class so much they will tyrannize their own?”
“Not very long, I guess,” Holmes said.
“The secret,” Sam Slater said, “is to cause every caste to fear its superiors and be contemptuous of its inferiors. You are wise to have your noncoms do it instead of doing it yourself. That makes even the noncoms more aware of the gulf between EM and officers.”
“But has it done any good yet?” Jake insisted, swinging it back again to the concrete, away from that infernal theory of young Slater’s. “Your Smoker season is in June this year, instead of August. You haven’t as much time to pull him into line as you would have had last year, and he hasnt given in yet, has he?”
“I told you no,” Holmes said violently, finding he was suddenly just a Captain again. “But I’ve taken all that other into account. I know what I’m doing. Truly, Sir.”
“I ’m sure you do, m’ boy,” Jake said sympathetically. He was back on familiar ground now. He could risk a pointed glance at Slater. “But dont forget, son, that this man is apparently a bolshevik, a true fuckup. They’re diff’r’nt from the average run, you know. I firmly believe in leading men, myself, but with bolsheviks you have to drive them. Its the only way to handle them. And you cant ever let them best you or you lose prestige with the men and they ’ll all be tryin’ to take advantage of you.”
“That’s true,” Sam Slater interjected. “If you’ve made an open issue of the thing, you must follow it through. Not that the issue itself is important, but because of the overall effect it has on the men.”
“I haven’t made an open issue of it yet,” Holmes said, feeling badgered. “The men are doing it practically by themselves, without my help.” Immediately he realized he had trapped himself. “What I mean,” he said.
“Oh,” Jake grinned. He was not missing any tricks now. These young flibertygibets who were always sucking in with the rank; it was all very well to talk theory, but it was the application of it that counted. “But dont you think that’ll look to the men as if you’re tryin’ to evade the responsibility?”
“No,” Holmes said, seeing what he was doing. “Not at all. I was trying to accomplish it with the noncoms, without coming into it myself, as the General said.” He nodded at Sam Slater.
“I wouldnt depend on that completely,” Jake said. “If he doesnt come around soon, so that he gets full benefit of the trainin’ season, he wont be any good to you anyway, will he?”
“Oh, yes,” Holmes said. “What I want him for is the Bowl season next winter, not the Company Smokers.” He smiled a little condescendingly, feeling he had won that round.
“Yes,” Jake pressed him, “but if he gets out of going out for Smokers, he’s still made you back down and lose face. And thats no good. Eh?” he said to Slater. “Am I right?”
Sam Slater looked at him some time before he answered. He had been sitting back, watching both of them, knowing they were playing for his approbation now. It warmed him. Jake of course had all the rank, but Jake was a coward and a member of the old Paternalism school that inevitably someday he and his generation would have to fight. And he liked young Holmes.
“Yes,” he said, finally. “Thats right. The important thing,” he said to Holmes, “is that you as an officer must not allow even a suspicion that an EM has made you back down. The boxing thing itself is unimportant,” he added, looking at Jake.
Jake preferred to ignore that one. He had gained a temporary advantage, and he had changed the subject; that was enough for now. But it was outrageous that he should even have to struggle with Holmes, he a Lieutenant Colonel. “If he doesnt come around soon,” he told Holmes coldly, “you have to break him. Have no choice. Throw the book at him, so that at least by winter and the Bowl Season he will be ready to talk turkey.”
“Yes,” Holmes said doubtfully. He had sensed the Brigadier’s favor in that last crack about the boxing, but he did not know whether he had enough collateral to plunge. “But I don’t think it will work that way,” he said, deciding to risk it. “I don’t think you can break this man.”
“Ha!” Jake said. He looked at the General. “Of course you can break him.”
“You can break any man,” Sam Slater said coldly. “You are an officer.”
“Thats right,” Jake said stoutly. “I remember when I served here at Schofield as a Captain and John Dillinger was a private. If there ever was an honest to God maverick that couldnt be broken, there was one. But by God they broke him. They broke him right here in the Post Stockade. I bet you he served most of his enlistment in the Post Stockade, by God,” Jake said indignantly. “Thats when he swore he’d get even with the United States if it was the last thing he ever did.”
“That doesnt sound like they broke him,” Holmes said, unable to back out now. “From the way he went after he got out of here, I would say they never broke him.”
“Oh yes they did,” Jake said. “J E Hoover and his boys broke him. They broke him right in two, that night in Chicago. Just like they broke Prettyboy Floyd and the rest of them.”
“They killed him,” Holmes said. “Not broke him.”
“Its the same thing,” Jake said indignantly. “What the hell ’s the difference?”
“I dont know,” Holmes said, deciding to give up. “None, I guess.” But he knew he did not believe that. It was in his voice.
“No,” Sam Slater said. “Jake’s wrong. There is a great deal of difference. They never broke Dillinger. You might as well be honest, Jake, and give him his due.”
Jake Delbert’s face thickened redly.
“You cant understand that,” Sam Slater said deliberately. “But I can understand him. And I think Dynamite here can.”
Jake sat down in h
is chair and raised his drink up to his reddened face and sipped it, and Sam Slater stared back at him unmoved. “But the important thing is they did kill him, like they always kill them. The only thing wrong with Dillinger was he was an individualist, and you cant understand that, Jake. But thats why they had to kill him. Crime never pays, see?” he grinned.
Holmes felt vastly relieved, but then as Slater spoke he had a vivid mental picture, suddenly, of how a little difference of opinion in thought, just like this one, say between a private and a noncom, could inextricably lead a man to the Stockade, and from there—unless the opinion in him changed, unless they broke him—lead him on step by irrevocable step to where he sat in a Chevrolet sedan on a sideroad at night holding a snub nosed .38 in an angry frightened hand and waited for the shots to pour out of the darkness into him at any moment, all this occurring in a peaceful nation not at war. It was an overpoweringly weird idea that made him shiver. He just managed to catch himself from thinking that it might even have been himself and then remembered what Slater had said about some boys could not shoot birds. He felt a curiously unreal quality about everything around him. The power of thought, he told himself, all from such an innocent beginning.
“Captain,” Jake said to him chokingly, “I’m positively instructing you to give this man Prewitt the goddam book, if he doesnt come around before its too late for him to train for Smokers.”
“I’ve meant to do that all along, Sir,” Holmes said, “except that perhaps I’ve thought it might not be necessary.” He felt a little sorry for the poor old bugger.
“It’ll be necessary,” Jake said brutally. “You can take my word for that. And that is a direct order, Captain.” He sat back in his chair.
Holmes, however, did not feel the least bit anxious. His majority in Regiment that he had had his eye on was nothing compared to a job on the Brigade staff perhaps. And even if the job did not pan out, Delbert could do nothing to him as long as Sam Slater kept an eye on him.
“The important thing,” Sam Slater said, moving in like a fencing master who takes advantage of a pause in his pupils’ bout to give a little more instruction, “the important thing is to remember the logic behind the thing. You wouldnt let a single cantankerous mule hold up the whole pack train from carrying supplies up the Waianae Range, would you? If you couldnt get him to move, you’d push him off, wouldnt you?”
“No,” Holmes said. “Yes.”
“Thats all it amounts to.”
“That is it, isnt it?” Holmes asked nervously. “You have to think of the majority and the end in view, dont you? You have to be cruel, perhaps, for the good of the whole? That is it, isnt it?”
“Thats it exactly,” Sam Slater said, with a curiously feminine satisfaction. “Anyone who governs must be cruel.”
“Yes,” Holmes said, feeling suddenly for no reason like he had been seduced, the way a woman must feel, he thought, after she has let some guy get into her pants.
“You’re learning swiftly,” Sam Slater said to him.
After that Jake did not try to change the subject any more. Sam Slater went right back into his theory, talking almost hurriedly now. The two of them were still talking it when the two Majors from Regiment came in and were duly startled by the presence of a general officer and slunk around to get a reinforcing drink and, finding they were still ignored, slunk off to drink it.
The two of them were still talking when S/Sgt Jefferson came back with the women. And they went on talking, Holmes listening intently because he knew now he was forced by Prewitt into a position where he could no longer evade this thing and so must go on or else go back, Sam Slater elaborating the comforting creed that had evolved from being in a similar position once, his eyes lighting up a little now as he talked.
The two hefty specimens who had attached themselves to their laps drank and listened puzzledly. Jake and the two Majors had already given it up and adjourned to the back rooms to take up the business they had come here for.
But Holmes had almost forgotten that. The talk, for Holmes, was momentarily opening up whole series of new vistas. Things he had not even guessed at before now. And he strained hard concentrating, catching only glimpses before the cloud bank rolled back covering them up, but always opening new ones beyond that he thought he could maybe see completely.
“Reason,” Sam Slater said, “is the greatest discovery ever made by man. Yet it is the most disregarded and least used. No wonder reasonable, sensitive men become bitter and disillusioned.”
“I’ve always seen it,” Holmes said excitedly. “All my life I’ve seen it. Always at a distance.”
“Its all based on apprehension,” Sam Slater smiled. “Apprehension is the key. After you learn to judge the degree of apprehension that is there in each man, you can predict infallibly how far you can trust him, how far you can make him go. The next step, of course, is to induce the apprehension artificially. Its already there, all you got to do is call it forth. The greater the apprehension, the greater the control.”
“Whats appre-hension, kiddo?” the Japanese one on Sam Slater’s chair arm said.
“Fear,” Sam Slater grinned.
“Oh,” she said, and frowned puzzledly, over at the other one.
“Lissen,” the Chinese one on Holmes’s knee said. “What wrong with you guys, any-ways?”
“Not a thing,” Sam Slater said.
“You no like us, maybe no?” the Japanese one said.
“Why of course,” Sam Slater said. “You’re lovely ladies.”
“You aint mad at me? are you?” the Chinese one said to Holmes.
“Why should I be mad at you?”
“I no no. Maybe I do something you not like?”
“Come on, Iris,” the Japanese one said. “To hell with them. We go find that white-haired old fatty. He with Beulah. Liven it up someways maybe.”
Iris got up. “I not do something hurt your feelings?” she coaxed at Holmes.
“Hell, no,” Holmes said.
“You see?” Sam Slater grinned, when they had gone. “You see what I mean by apprehension?”
Holmes laughed.
“You know,” Sam Slater said. “I’ve tried to explain this to old Jake a hundred times. I’ve been explaining it to him ever since I hit this Rock. Jake has a great deal of ability, if he would only learn how to use it.”
“He’s pretty old,” Holmes said cautiously.
“Too old,” Sam Slater said. “If I’ve ever seen a man who’s lost and groping in the dark its old Jake Delbert. And you’d think that if anybody had the background and the training to see the trend of our time, Jake Delbert would be one. But no, he’s still afraid. Afraid, and so much of a moralist that he would rather spend his life believing the sentimental memos he writes his troops, instead of trying to help humanity. And relieving himself (as with a bowel movement when the moral guts become too full) by throwing these stags.
“Not that I dislike them, mind you. I think they’re fine and I enjoy them. In their place. But a man cannot make them his life work. Not without going rotten. A man must have something bigger than himself to believe in.”
“Thats it,” Holmes said excitedly. “Something bigger than himself. And where in this world today can he find it?”
“Nowhere,” Sam Slater said. “Except in reason. You know, you’re pretty old for a Captain, Dynamite, but you would still be young for a Major. At your age I was only a Major myself, see? And I hadnt even begun to learn the new logic. If a smart man had not picked me out as a protege I’d still be a Major, and a Jake Delbert, today.”
“The thing with you, though,” Holmes pointed out. “You were willing to listen to reason, when it was shown you.”
“Exactly,” Sam Slater said. “And we have great need of proteges who can learn that lesson in our profession, today. And we’re going to need them a lot worse, a little later on. There is absolutely no limit to the possibilities open to them.”
“I dont care about the rank,” Holmes said. H
e had, he knew, said that before. But this time it was true, this time he really meant it. “All I care about,” he said, “is to find a truly firm ground, a foundation a thinking man can stand on, a sound logic that will not let you down. Give me that and the rank can go to hell.”
“Thats exactly the way I felt myself,” Sam Slater said. He smiled thinly. “You know, I can use a man like you. God knows I’ve got enough stupid dolts on my staff. I need at least one good man. How would you like to transfer to Brigade and work for me?”
“If you really think I could really do it,” Holmes said modestly. He was thinking what would Karen say to this? Ha, if she had her way he would never have gone to any of these stags, at all. And then where would he be? He could just see Jake Delbert’s face!
“Do it, hell,” Sam Slater said. “Listen, if you want it its yours, see? I’ll look into it for you tomorrow.
“You know,” he said, “actually the thing with this man Prewitt is important only insofar as it affects you personally. Not for the boxing squad, not even for your prestige. In reality its only a springboard for testing and developing your character.”
“I never thought of it that way before.”
“I dont think it would be good for you to transfer out until after you handle that thing, just for your own good, see? Then after you handled that and transferred, you could drop the whole damned boxing squad altogether. We’ll have better uses for your energy.”
“Yes, I could do that,” Holmes said, wondering if he wanted to quit coaching.
“Well,” Sam Slater grinned, getting up. “I need another drink and I think we’ve talked damn near enough, dont you? We’re wasting valuable time, hey? I’m going to find those goddamned women.” He stepped over to the syphon bottle and was very suddenly no longer the philosopher, it was as if part of his mind had been turned off like a spigot.
Capt Holmes was startled, then almost frightened. Because he could not forget it all so easily. He had seen a picture of a new power that would make a brand new world, a world with real meaning based on logic, not just the meaning of the moralists. This was a meaning that would work out in practice, based on a realistic power. A power of great kindness with potentialities to do great good, to raise humanity to new heights despite humanity’s own mulishness and inertia. A power that was tragic in its kindness because it would always be misunderstood by the masses who wanted only to fornicate and fill their bellies. A power that only history would vindicate, because the lives of great men and great ideas were always tragic. It had made his belly muscles tighten spasmodically with a sheer desire to just plain yell that he had not felt since he was a boy. How could Slater just shut it off like a faucet?