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.