gramist0206

@@@@@ Still, the General had reacted wellHearn remembered the first apathy that had caught them all when the storm abatedThe General had stared at his muddy cot for almost half a minute, and then had scraped off a small handful of muck, which he kneaded in his fingersThat storm had cut the legs from them all, and yet the General had responded, made his incredibly urbane speech to the men, while everything in all of them had demanded tucking up one's tail and slinking off for some coverThat was understandable, however; the General had had to recover the connotations of his command And now he was comprehensible tooHearn knew from the tone of his politeness, the quality of his voice, that he was thinking of nothing at all but the campaign and the night aheadIt made the General another man, definitely the nerve end with no other desire than to find something to act upon It depressed Hearn even as it elicited his admirationThat type of concentration was inhuman, the process beyond his scopeHe stared glumly at the jungle before him, hefting the carbine in his hands againIt was possible that a Jap machine gun could be set up at the next bend in the road, or much more likely there might be a few Jap snipers with an automatic weapon or twoTheir jeep would round the bend, be hit by a dozen bullets at once, and that would be the end of his petty history of unfocused gropings and unimportant dissatisfactionsAnd with him quite as casually would be lost a man who might be a genius, and an overgrown oaf like Dalleson, and a young nervous driver who was probably a potential FascistTurning a curve in the road Or, obversely, he might kill a man himselfIt would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite deadAll as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easierThat was the thing, that was what caused this moodEverything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fittedThe men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and braveAnd they were here on this road, a point moving along a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungleAnd somewhere else a battle might be going onThe artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combatThe night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they wer