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CATCH-22

15. Piltchard & Wren

Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, the inoffensive joint squadron
operations officers, were both mild, soft-spoken men of less than middle
height who enjoyed flying combat missions and begged nothing
more of life and Colonel Cathcart than the opportunity to continue flying
them. They had flown hundreds of combat missions and wanted to
fly hundreds more. They assigned themselves to every one. Nothing so
wonderful as war had ever happened to them before; and they were
afraid it might never happen to them again. They conducted their
duties humbly and reticently, with a minimum of fuss, and went to great
lengths not to antagonize anyone. They smiled quickly at everyone they
passed. When they spoke, they mumbled. They were shifty, cheerful,
subservient men who were comfortable only with each other and never
met anyone else's eye, not even Yossarian's eye at the open-air meeting
they called to reprimand him publicly for making Kid Sampson turn
back from the mission to Bologna.
"Fellas," said Captain Piltchard, who had thinning dark hair and
smiled awkwardly. "When you turn back from a mission, try to make
sure it's for something important, will you? Not for something unimportant
... like a defective intercom ... or something like that. Okay?
Captain Wren has more he wants to say to you on that subject."
"Captain Piltchard's right, fellas," said Captain Wren. "And that's all
I'm going to say to you on that subject. Well, we finally got to Bologna
today, and we found out it's a milk run. We were all a little nervous, I
guess, and didn't do too much damage. Well, listen to this. Colonel
Cathcart got permission for us to go back. And tomorrow we're really
going to paste those ammunition dumps. Now, what do you think
about that?"
And to prove to Yossarian that they bore him no animosity, they
even assigned him to fly lead bombardier with McWatt in the first formation
when they went back to Bologna the next day. He came in on
the target like a Havermeyer, confidently taking no evasive action at
all, and suddenly they were shooting the living shit out of him!
Heavy flak was everywhere! He had been lulled, lured and trapped,
and there was nothing he could do but sit there like an idiot and watch
the ugly black puffs smashing up to kill him. There was nothing he
could do until his bombs dropped but look back into the bombsight,
where the fine cross-hairs in the lens were glued magnetically over the
target exactly where he had placed them, intersecting perfectly deep
inside the yard of his block of camouflaged warehouses before the base
of the first building. He was trembling steadily as the plane crept
ahead. He could hear the hollow boom-boom-boom-boom of the flak
pounding all around him in overlapping measures of four, the sharp,
piercing crack! of a single shell exploding suddenly very close by. His
head was busting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for
the bombs to drop. He wanted to sob. The engines droned on monotonously
like a fat, lazy fly. At last the indices on the bombsight crossed,
tripping away the eight 500-pounders one after the other. The plane
lurched upward buoyantly with the lightened load. Yossarian bent
away from the bombsight crookedly to watch the indicator on his left.
When the pointer touched zero, he closed the bomb bay doors and,
over the intercom, at the very top of his voice, shrieked:
"Turn right hard!"
McWatt responded instantly. With a grinding howl of engines, he
flipped the plane over on one wing and wrung it around remorselessly
in a screaming turn away from the twin spires of flak Yossarian had
spied stabbing toward them. Then Yossarian had McWatt climb and
keep climbing higher and higher until they tore free finally into a calm,
diamond-blue sky that was sunny and pure everywhere and laced in the
distance with long white veils of tenuous fluff. The wind strummed
soothingly against the cylindrical panes of his windows, and he relaxed
exultantly only until they picked up speed again and then turned
McWatt left and plunged him right back down, noticing with a transitory
spasm of elation the mushrooming clusters of flak leaping open
high above him and back over his shoulder to the right, exactly where
he could have been if he had not turned left and dived. He leveled
McWatt out with another harsh cry and whipped him upward and
around again into a ragged blue patch of unpolluted air just as the
bombs he had dropped began to strike. The first one fell in the yard,
exactly where he had aimed, and then the rest of the bombs from his
own plane and from the other planes in his flight burst open on the
ground in a charge of rapid orange flashes across the tops of the buildings,
which collapsed instantly in a vast, churning wave of pink and
gray and coal-black smoke that went rolling out turbulently in all
directions and quaked convulsively in its bowels as though from great
blasts of red and white and golden sheet lightning.
"Well, will you look at that," Aarfy marveled sonorously right beside
Yossarian, his plump, orbicular face sparkling with a look of bright enchantment.
"There must have been an ammunition dump down there."
Yossarian had forgotten about Aarfy. "Get out!" he shouted at him.
"Get out of the nose!"
Aarfy smiled politely and pointed down toward the target in a generous
invitation for Yossarian to look. Yossarian began slapping at him
insistently and signaled wildly toward the entrance of the crawlway.
"Get back in the ship!" he cried frantically. "Get back in the ship!"
Aarfy shrugged amiably. "I can't hear you," he explained.
Yossarian seized him by the straps of his parachute harness and
pushed him backward toward the crawlway just as the plane was hit
with a jarring concussion that rattled his bones and made his heart
stop. He knew at once they were all dead.
"Climb!" he screamed into the intercom at McWatt when he saw he
was still alive. "Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb!"
The plane zoomed upward again in a climb that was swift and
straining, until he leveled it out with another harsh shout at McWatt
and wrenched it around once more in a roaring, merciless forty-five-degree
turn that sucked his insides out in one enervating sniff and left
him floating fleshless in mid-air until he leveled McWatt out again just
long enough to hurl him back around toward the right and then down
into a screeching dive. Through endless blobs of ghostly black smoke
he sped, the hanging smut wafting against the smooth Plexiglas nose of
the ship like an evil, damp, sooty vapor against his cheeks. His heart
was hammering again in aching terror as he hurtled upward and downward
through the blind gangs of flak charging murderously into the
sky at him, then sagging inertly. Sweat gushed from his neck in torrents
and poured down over his chest and waist with the feeling of
warm slime. He was vaguely aware for an instant that the planes in his
formation were no longer there, and then he was aware of only himself.
His throat hurt like a raw slash from the strangling intensity with
which he shrieked each command to McWatt. The engines rose to a
deafening, agonized, ululating bellow each time McWatt changed
direction. And far out in front the bursts of flak were still swarming
into the sky from new batteries of guns poking around for accurate
altitude as they waited sadistically for him to fly into range.
The plane was slammed again suddenly with another loud, jarring
explosion that almost rocked it over on its back, and the nose filled
immediately with sweet clouds of blue smoke. Something was on fire!
Yossarian whirled to escape and smacked into Aarfy, who had struck a
match and was placidly lighting his pipe. Yossarian gaped at his grinning,
moon-faced navigator "in utter shock and confusion. It occurred
to him that one of them was mad.
"Jesus Christ!" he screamed at Aarfy in tortured amazement. "Get
the hell out of the nose! Are you crazy? Get out!"
"What?" said Aarfy.
"Get out!" Yossarian yelled hysterically, and began clubbing Aarfy
backhanded with both fists to drive him away. "Get out!"
"I still can't hear you," Aarfy called back innocently with an expression
of mild and reproving perplexity. "You'll have to talk a little louder."
"Get out of the nose!" Yossarian shrieked in frustration. "They're
trying to kill us! Don't you understand? They're trying to kill us!"
"Which way should I go, goddammit?" McWatt shouted furiously
over the intercom in a suffering, high-pitched voice. "Which way
should I go?"
"Turn left! Left, you goddam dirty son of a bitch! Turn left hard!"
Aarfy crept up close behind Yossarian and jabbed him sharply in the
ribs with the stem of his pipe. Yossarian flew up toward the ceiling with
a whinnying cry, then jumped completely around on his knees, white
as a sheet and quivering with rage. Aarfy winked encouragingly and
jerked his thumb back toward McWatt with a humorous moue.
"What's eating him?" he asked with a laugh.
Yossarian was struck with a weird sense of distortion. "Will you get
out of here?" he yelped beseechingly, and shoved Aarfy over with all
his strength. "Are you deaf or something? Get back in the plane!" And
to McWatt he screamed, "Dive! Dive!"
Down they sank once more into the crunching, thudding, voluminous
barrage of bursting antiaircraft shells as Aarfy came creeping back
behind Yossarian arid jabbed him sharply in the ribs again. Yossarian
shied upward with another whinnying gasp.
"I still couldn't hear you," Aarfy said.
"I said get out of here!" Yossarian shouted, and broke into tears. He
began punching Aarfy in the body with both hands as hard as he could.
"Get away from me! Get away!"
Punching Aarfy was like sinking his fists into a limp sack of inflated
rubber. There was no resistance, no response at all from the soft,
insensitive mass, and after a while Yossarian's spirit died and his arms
dropped helplessly with exhaustion. He was overcome with a humiliating
feeling of impotence and was ready to weep in self-pity.
"What did you say?" Aarfy asked.
"Get away from me," Yossarian answered, pleading with him now.
"Go back in the plane."
"I still can't hear you.".
"Never mind," wailed Yossarian, "never mind. Just leave me alone."
"Never mind what?"
Yossarian began hitting himself in the forehead. He seized Aarfy by
the shirt front and, struggling to his feet for traction, dragged him to
the rear of the nose compartment and flung him down like a bloated
and unwieldy bag in the entrance of the crawlway. A shell banged open
with a stupendous clout right beside his ear as he was scrambling back
toward the front, and some undestroyed recess of his intelligence wondered
that it did not kill-them all. They were climbing again. The,
engines were howling again as though in pain, and the air inside the
plane was acrid with the smell of machinery and fetid with \:he stench
of gasoline. The next thing he knew, it was snowing!
Thousands of tiny bits of white paper were falling like snowflakes
inside the plane, milling around his head so thickly that they clung to
his eyelashes when he blinked in astonishment and fluttered against his
nostrils and lips each time he inhaled. When he spun around in bewilderment,
Aarfy was grinning proudly from ear to ear like something
inhuman as he held up a shattered paper map for Yossarian to see. A
large chunk of flak had ripped up from the floor through Aarfy's colossal
jumble of maps and had ripped out through the ceiling inches away
from their heads. Aarfy's joy was sublime.
"Will you look at this?" he murmured, waggling two of his stubby
fingers playfully into Yossarian's face through the hole in one of his
maps. "Will you look at this?"
Yossarian was dumbfounded by his state of rapturous contentment.
Aarfy was like an eerie ogre in a dream, incapable of being bruised or
evaded, and Yossarian dreaded him for a complex of reasons he was too
petrified to untangle. Wind whistling up through the jagged gash in
the floor kept the myriad bits of paper circulating like alabaster particles
in a paperweight and contributed to a sensation of lacquered,
waterlogged unreality. Everything seemed strange, so tawdry and
grotesque. His head was throbbing from a shrill clamor that drilled
relentlessly into both ears. It was McWatt, begging for directions in an
incoherent frenzy. Yossarian continued staring in tormented fascination
at Aarfy's spherical countenance beaming at him so serenely and
vacantly through the drifting whorls of white paper bits and concluded
that he was a raving lunatic just as eight bursts of flak broke open successively
at eye level off to the right, then eight more, and then eight
more, the last group pulled over toward the left so that they were
almost directly in front.
"Turn left hard!" he hollered to McWatt as Aarfy kept grinning, and
McWatt did turn left hard, but the flak turned left hard with them,
catching up fast, and Yossarian hollered, "I said hard, hard, hard, hard,
you bastard, hard!"
And McWatt bent the plane around even harder still, and suddenly,
miraculously, they were out of range. The flak ended. The guns
stopped booming at them. And they were alive.
Behind him, men were dying. Strung out for miles in a stricken, tortuous,
squirming line, the other flights of planes were making the same
hazardous journey over the target, threading their swift way through
the swollen masses of new and old bursts of flak like rats racing in a pack
through their own droppings. One was on fire, and flapped lamely off
by itself, billowing gigantically like a monstrous blood-red star. As
Yossarian watched, the burning plane floated over on its side and began
spiraling down slowly in wide, tremulous, narrowing circles, its huge
flaming burden blazing orange and flaring out in back like a long,
swirling cape of fire and smoke. There were parachutes, one, two,
three ... four, and then the plane gyrated into a spin and fell the rest of
the way to the ground, fluttering insensibly inside its vivid pyre like a
shred of colored tissue paper. One whole flight of planes from another
squadron had been blasted apart.
Yossarian sighed barrenly, his day's work done. He was listless and
sticky. The engines crooned mellifluously as McWatt throttled back to
loiter and allow the rest of the planes in his flight to catch up. The
abrupt stillness seemed alien and artificial, a little insidious. Yossarian
unsnapped his flak suit and took off his helmet. He sighed again, restlessly,
and closed his eyes and tried to relax.
"Where's Orr?" someone asked suddenly over his intercom.
Yossarian bounded up with a one-syllable cry that crackled with anxiety
and provided the only rational explanation for the whole mysterious
phenomenon of the flak at Bologna: Orr! He lunged forward over
the bombsight to search downward through the Plexiglas for some
reassuring sign of Orr, who drew flak like a magnet and who had
undoubtedly attracted the crack batteries of the whole Hermann
Goering Division to Bologna overnight from wherever the hell they
had been stationed the day before when Orr was still in Rome. Aarfy
launched himself forward an instant later and cracked Yossarian on the
bridge of the nose with the sharp rim of his flak helmet. Yossarian
cursed him as his eyes flooded with tears.
"There he is," Aarfy orated funereally, pointing down dramatically
at a hay wagon and two horses standing before the barn of a gray stone
farmhouse. "Smashed to bits. I guess their numbers were all up."
Yossarian swore at Aarfy again and continued searching intently,
cold with a compassionate kind of fear now for the little boupcy and
bizarre buck-toothed tent-mate who had smashed Appleby's forehead
open with a Ping-Pong racket and who was scaring the daylights out
of Yossarian once again. At last Yossarian spotted the two-engined,
twin-ruddered plane as it flew out of the green background of the
forests over afield of yellow farmland. One of the propellers was feathered
and perfectly still, but the plane was maintaining altitude and
holding a proper course. Yossarian muttered an unconscious prayer of
thankfulness and then flared up at Orr savagely in a ranting fusion of
resentment and relief.
"That bastard!" he began. "That goddam stunted, red-faced, big-cheeked,
curly-headed, buck-toothed rat bastard son of a bitch!"
"What?" said Aarfy.
"That dirty goddam midget-assed, apple-cheeked, goggle-eyed, undersized,
buck-toothed, grinning, crazy sonofabitchinbastard!" Yossarian
sputtered.
"What?"
"Never mind!"
"I still can't hear you," Aarfy answered.
Yossarian swung himself around methodically to face Aarfy. "You
prick," he began.
"Me?"
"You pompous, rotund, neighborly, vacuous, complacent ... "
Aarfy was unperturbed. Calmly he struck a wooden match and sucked
noisily at his pipe with an eloquent air of benign and magnanimous forgiveness.
He smiled sociably and opened his mouth to speak. Yossarian
put his hand over Aarfy's mouth and pushed him away wearily. He shut
his eyes and pretended to sleep' all the way back to the field so that he
would not have to listen to Aarfy or see him.
At the briefing room Yossarian made his intelligence report to
Captain Black and then waited in muttering suspense with all the others
until Orr chugged into sight overhead finally with his one good
engine still keeping him aloft gamely. Nobody breathed. Orr's landing
gear would not come down. Yossarian hung around only until Orr had
crash-landed safely, and then stole the first jeep he could find with a
key in the ignition and raced back to his tent to begin packing feverishly
for the emergency rest leave he had decided to take in Rome,
where he found Luciana and her invisible scar that same night.

16. Luciana

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night
club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had
been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some
singing comrades at the bar.
"All right, I'll dance with you," she said, before Yossarian could even
speak. "But I won't let you sleep with me."
"Who asked you?" Yossarian asked her.
"You don't want to sleep with me?" she exclaimed with surprise.
"I don't want to dance with you."
She seized Yossarian's hand and pulled him out on the dance floor.
She was a worse dancer than even he was, but she threw herself about
to the synthetic jitterbug music with more uninhibited pleasure than he
had ever observed until he felt his legs falling asleep with boredom and
yanked her off the dance floor toward the table at which the girl he
should have been screwing was still sitting tipsily with one hand around
Aarfy's neck, her orange satin blouse still hanging open slovenly below
her full white lacy brassiere as she made dirty sex talk ostentatiously
with Huple, Orr, Kid Sampson and Hungry Joe. Just as he reached
them, Luciana gave him a forceful, unexpected shove that carried them
both well beyond the table, so that they were still alone. She was a tall,
earthy, exuberant girl with long hair and a pretty face, a buxom, delightful,
flirtatious girl.
"All right," she said, "I will let you buy me dinner. But I won't let
you sleep with me."
"Who asked you?" Yossarian asked with surprise.
"You don't want to sleep with me?"
"I don't want to buy you dinner."
She pulled him out of the night club into the street and down a
flight of steps into a black-market restaurant filled with lively, chirping,
attractive girls who all seemed to know each other and with the self-conscious
military officers from different countries who had come
there with them. The food was elegant and expensive, and the aisles
were overflowing with great streams of flushed and merry proprietors,
all stout and balding. The bustling interior radiated with enormous,
engulfing waves of fun and warmth.
Yossarian got a tremendous kick out of the rude gusto with which
Luciana ignored him completely while she shoveled away her whole
meal with both hands. She ate like a horse until the last plate was
clean, and then she placed her silverware down with an air of conclusion
and settled back lazily in her chair with a dreamy and congested
look of sated gluttony. She drew a deep, smiling, contented breath and
regarded him amorously with a melting gaze.
"Okay, Joe," she putted, her glowing dark eyes drowsy and grateful.
"Now 1 will let you sleep with me."
"My name is Yossarian."
"Okay, Yossarian," she answered with a soft repentant laugh. "Now
1 will let you sleep with me."
""Who asked you?" said Yossarian.
Luciana was stunned. "You don't want to sleep with me?"
Yossarian nodded emphatically, laughing, and shot his hand up
under her dress. The girl came to life with a horrified start. She jerked
her legs away from him instantly, whipping her bottom around.
Blushing with alarm and embarrassment, she pushed her skirt back
down with a number of prim, sidelong glances about the restaurant.
"Now 1 will let you sleep with me," she explained cautiously in a
manner of apprehensive indulgence. "But not now."
"I know. "When we get back to my room."
The girl shook her head, eyeing him mistrustfully and keeping her
knees pressed together. "No, now 1 must go home to my mamma,
because my mamma does not like me to dance with soldiers or let them
take me to dinner, and she will be very angry with me if 1 do not come
home now. But 1 will let you write down for me where you live. And
tomorrow morning 1will come to your room for ficky-fick before 1 go
to my work at the French office. Capisci?"
"Bullshit!" Yossarian exclaimed with angry disappointment.
"Cosa vuol dire bullshit?" Luciana inquired with a blank look.
Yossarian broke into loud laughter. He answered her finally in a
tone of sympathetic good humor. "It means that 1 want to escort you
now to wherever the hell 1have to take you next so that 1can rush back
to that night club before Aarfy leaves with that wonderful tomato he's
got without giving me a chance to ask about an aunt or friend she must
have who's just like her."
"Come?"
"Subito, subito," he taunted her tenderly. "Mamma is waiting. Remember?"
"Si, Si, Mamma."
Yossarian let the girl drag him through the lovely Roman spring
night for almost a mile until they reached a chaotic bus depot honking
with horns, blazing with red and yellow lights and echoing with the
snarling vituperations of unshaven bus drivers pouring loathsome, hair-raising
curses out at each other, at their passengers and at the strolling,
unconcerned knots of pedestrians clogging their paths, who ignored
them until they were bumped by the buses and began shouting curses
back. Luciana vanished aboard one of the diminutive green vehicles, and
Yossarian hurried as fast as he could all the way back to the cabaret and
the bleary-eyed bleached blonde in the open orange satin blouse. She
seemed infatuated with Aarfy, but he prayed intensely for her luscious
aunt as he ran, or for a luscious girl friend, sister, cousin or mother
who was just as libidinous and depraved. She would have been perfect
for Yossarian, a debauched, coarse, vulgar, amoral, appetizing slattern
whom he had longed for and idolized for months. She was a real find.
She paid for her own drinks, and she had an automobile, an apartment
and a salmon-colored cameo ring that drove Hungry Joe clean out of his
senses with its exquisitely carved figures of a naked boy and girl on a
rock. Hungry Joe snorted and pranced and pawed at the floor in salivating
lust and groveling need, but the girl would not sell him the ring,
even though he offered her all the money in all their pockets and his
complicated black camera thrown in. She was not interested in money
or cameras. She was interested in fornication. '
She was gone when Yossarian got there. They were all gone, and he
walked right out and moved in wistful dejection through the dark,
emptying streets. Yossarian was not often lonely when he was by himself,
but he was lonely now in his keen envy of Aarfy, who he knew was
in bed that very moment with the girl who was just right for Yossarian,
and who could also make out any time he wanted to, if he ever wanted
to, with either or both of the two slender, stunning, aristocratic women
who lived in the apartment upstairs and fructified Yossarian's sex fantasies
whenever he had sex fantasies, the beautiful rich black-haired
countess with the red, wet, nervous lips and her beautiful rich black-haired
daughter-in-law. Yossarian was madly in love with all of them as
he made his way back to the officers' apartment, in love with Luciana,
with the prurient intoxicated girl in the unbuttoned satin blouse, and
with the beautiful rich countess and her beautiful rich daughter-in-law,
both of whom would never let him touch them or even flirt with them.
They doted kittenishly on Nately and deferred passively to Aarfy, but
they thought Yossarian was crazy and recoiled from him with distasteful
contempt each time he made an indecent proposal or tried to
fondle them when they passed on the stairs. They were both superb
creatures with pulpy, bright, pointed tongues and mouths like round
warm plums, a little sweet and sticky, a little rotten. They had class;
Yossarian was not sure what class was, but he knew that they had it and
he did not, and that they knew it, too. He could picture, as he walked,
the kind of underclothing they wore against their svelte feminine parts,
filmy, smooth, clinging garments of deepest black or of opalescent pastel
radiance with flowering lace borders, fragrant with the tantalizing
fumes of pampered flesh and scented bath salts rising in a germinating
cloud from their blue-white breasts. He wished again that he was
where Aarfy was, making obscene, brutal, cheerful love with a juicy
drunken tart who didn't give a tinker's dam about him and would never
think of him again.
But Aarfy was already back in the apartment when Yossarian arrived,
and Yossarian gaped at him with that same sense of persecuted astonishment
he had suffered that same morning over Bologna at his malign
and cabalistic and irremovable presence in the nose of the plane.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"That's right, ask him!" Hungry Joe exclaimed in a rage. "Make him
tell you what he's doing here!"
With a long, theatrical moan, Kid Sampson made a pistol of his
thumb and forefinger and blew his own brains out. Huple, chewing
away on a bulging wad of bubble gum, drank everything in with a callow,
vacant expression on his fifteen-year-old face. Aarfy was tapping
the bowl of his pipe against his palm leisurely as he paced back and
forth in corpulent self-approval, obviously delighted by the stir he was
causing.
"Didn't you go home with that girl?" Yossarian demanded.
"Oh, sure, I went home with her," Aarfy replied. "You didn't think
I was going to let her try to find her way home alone, did you?"
"Wouldn't she let you stay with her?"
"Oh, she wanted me to stay with her, all right." Aarfy chuckled.
"Don't you worry about good old Aarfy. But I wasn't going to take
advantage of a sweet kid like that just because she'd had a little too
much to drink. What kind of a guy do you think I am?"
"Who said anything about taking advantage of her?" Yossarian
railed at him in amazement. "All she wanted to do was get into bed
with someone. That's the only thing she kept talking about all night
long."
"That's because she was a little mixed up," Aarfy explained. "But 1
gave her a little talking to and really put some sense into her."
"You bastard!" Yossarian exclaimed, and sank down tiredly on the
divan beside Kid Sampson. "Why the hell didn't you give her to one of
us if you didn't want her?"
"You see?" Hungry Joe asked. "There's something wrong with
him."
Yossarian nodded and looked at Aarfy curiously. "Aarfy, tell me
something. Don't you ever screw any of them?"
Aarfy chuckled again with conceited amusement. "Oh, sure, 1 prod,
them. Don't you worry about me. But never any nice girls. 1know what
kind of girls to prod and what kind of girls not to prod, and 1 never
prod any nice girls. This one was a sweet kid. You could see her family
had money. Why, 1 even got her to throw that ring of hers away right
out the car window."
Hungry Joe flew into the air with a screech of intolerable pain. "You
did what?" he screamed. "You did what?" He began whaling away at
Aarfy's shoulders and arms with both fists, almost in tears. "1 ought to
kill you for what you did, you lousy bastard. He's sinful, that's what he
is. He's got a dirty mind, ain't he? Ain't he got a dirty mind?"
"The dirtiest," Yossarian agreed.
"What are you fellows talking about?" Aarfy asked with genuine
puzzlement, tucking his face away protectively inside the cushioning
insulation of his oval shoulders. "Aw, come on, Joe," he pleaded with a
smile of mild discomfort. "Quit punching me, will you?"
But Hungry Joe would not quit punching until Yossarian picked him
up and pushed him away toward his bedroom. Yossarian moved listlessly
into his own room, undressed and went to sleep. A second later
it was morning, and someone was shaking him.
"What are you waking me up for?" he whimpered.
It was Michaela, the skinny maid with the merry disposition and
homely sallow face, and she was waking him up because he had a visitor
waiting just outside the door. Luciana! He could hardly believe it.
And she was alone in the room with him after Michaela had departed,
lovely, hale and statuesque, steaming and rippling with an irrepressible
affectionate vitality even as she remained in one place and frowned at
him irately. She stood like a youthful female colossus with her magnificent
columnar legs apart on high white shoes with wedged heels,
wearing a pretty green dress and swinging a large, flat white leather
pocketbook, with which she cracked him hard across the face when he
leaped out of bed to grab her. Yossarian staggered backward out of
range in a daze, clutching his stinging cheek with bewilderment.
"Pig!" she spat out at him viciously, her nostrils flaring in a look of
savage disdain. "Vive com' un animale!"
With a fierce, guttural, scornful, disgusted oath, she strode across
the room and threw open the three tall casement windows, letting
inside an effulgent flood of sunlight and crisp fresh air that washed
through the stuffy room like an invigorating tonic. She placed her
pocketbook on a chair and began tidying the room, picking his things
up from the floor and off the tops of the furniture, throwing his socks,
handkerchief and underwear into an empty drawer of the dresser and
hanging his shirt and trousers up in the closet.
Yossarian ran out of the bedroom into the bathroom and brushed
his teeth. He washed his hands and face and combed his hair. When he
ran back, the room was in order and Luciana was almost undressed.
Her expression was relaxed. She left her earrings on the dresser and
padded barefoot to the bed wearing just a pink rayon chemise that
came down to her hips. She glanced about the room prudently to make
certain there was nothing she had overlooked in the way of neatness
and then drew back the coverlet and stretched herself out luxuriously
with an expression of feline expectation. She beckoned to him longingly,
with a husky laugh.
"Now," she announced in a whisper, holding both arms out to him
eagerly. "Now I will let you sleep with me."
She told him some lies about a single weekend in bed with a slaughtered
fiance in the Italian Army, and they all turned out to be true, for
she cried "finitoR" almost as soon as he started and wondered why he
didn't stop, until he had finitoed too and explained to her.
He lit cigarettes for both of them. She was enchanted by the deep
suntan covering his whole body. He wondered about the pink chemise
that she would not remove. It was cut like a man's undershirt, with narrow
shoulder straps, and concealed the invisible scar on her back that
she refused to let him see after he had made her tell him it was there.
She grew tense as fine steel when he traced the mutilated contours
with his finger tip from a pit in her shoulder blade almost to the base
of her spine. He winced at the many tortured nights she had spent in
the hospital, drugged or in pain, with the ubiquitous, ineradicable
odors of ether, fecal matter and disinfectant, of human flesh mortified
and decaying amid the white uniforms, the rubber-soled shoes,-and the
eerie night lights glowing dimly until dawn in the corridors. She had
been wounded in an air raid.
"Dove?" he asked, and he held his breath in suspense.
"Napoli."
"Germans?"
"Americani."
His heart cracked, and he fell in love. He wondered if she would
marry him.
"Tu sei pazzo," she told him with a pleasant laugh.
"Why am I crazy?" he asked.
"Perche non posso sposare."
"Why can't you get married?"
"Because I am not a virgin," she answered.
"What has that got to do with it?"
"Who will marry me? No one wants a girl who is not a virgin."
"I will. I'll marry you."
''Ma non posso sposarti."
"Why can't you marry me?"
"Perche sei pazzo."
"Why am I crazy?"
"Perche vuoi sposarmi."
Yossarian wrinkled his forehead with quizzical amusement. "You
won't marry me because I'm crazy, and you say I'm crazy because I
want to marry you? Is that right?"
"St."
"Tu sei pazz'!" he told her loudly.
"Perche?" she shouted back at him indignantly, her unavoidable
round breasts rising and falling in a saucy huff beneath the pink chemise
as she sat up in bed indignantly. "Why am I crazy?"
"Because you won't marry me."
"Stupido!" she shouted back at him, and smacked him loudly and
flamboyantly on the chest with the back of her hand. "Non posso sposarti! Non capisci? Non posso sposarti."
"Oh, sure, I understand. And why can't you marry me?"
"Perche sei pazzo!"
"And why am I crazy?"
"Perche vuoi sposarmi."
"Because I want to marry you. Carina, ti amo, " he explained, and he
drew her gently back down to the pillow. "Ti amo molto."
"Tu sei pazzo, " she murmured in reply, flattered.
"Perche?"
"Because you say you love me. How can you love a girl who is not a
virgin?"
"Because I can't marry you."
She bolted right up again in a threatening rage. "Why can't you
marry me?" she demanded, ready to clout him again if he gave an
uncomplimentary reply. "Just because I am not a virgin?"
"No, no, darling. Because you're crazy."
She stared at him in blank resentment for a moment and then tossed
her head back and roared appreciatively with hearty laughter. She
gazed at him with new approval when she stopped, the lush, responsive
tissues of her dark face turning darker still and blooming somnolently
with a swelling and beautifying infusion of blood. Her eyes grew dim.
He crushed out both their cigarettes, and they turned into each other
wordlessly in an engrossing kiss just as Hungry Joe came meandering
into the room without knocking to ask if Yossarian wanted to go out
with him to look for girls. Hungry Joe stopped on a dime when he saw
them and shot out of the room. Yossarian shot out of bed even faster
and began shouting at Luciana to get dressed. The girl was dumbfounded.
He pulled her roughly out of bed by her arm and flung her
away toward her clothing, then raced for the door in time to slam it
shut as Hungry Joe was running back in with his camera. Hungry Joe
had his leg wedged in the door and would not pull it out.
"Let me in!" he begged urgently, wriggling and squirming maniacally.
"Let me in!" He stopped struggling for a moment to gaze up into
Yossarian's face through the crack in the door with what he must have
supposed was a beguiling smile. "Me no Hungry Joe," he explained
earnestly. "Me heap big photographer from Life magazine. Heap big
picture on heap big cover. I make you big Hollywood star, Yossarian.
Multi dinero. Multi divorces. Multi ficky-fick all day long. Si, si, si!"
Yossarian slammed the door shut when Hungry Joe stepped back a
bit to try to shoot a picture of Luciana dressing. Hungry Joe attacked
the stout wooden barrier fanatically, fell back to reorganize his energies
and hurled himself forward fanatically again. Yossarian slithered into his
own clothes between assaults. Luciana had her green-and-white summer
dress on and was holding the skirt bunched up above her waist. A
wave of misery broke over him as he saw her about to vanish inside her
panties forever. He reached out to grasp her and drew her to him by
the raised calf of her leg. She hopped forward and molded herself
against him. Yossarian kissed her ears and her closed eyes romantically
and rubbed the backs of her thighs. She began to hum sensually a moment before
Hungry Joe hurled his frail body against the door in still
one more desperate attack and almost knocked them both down. Yossarian
pushed her away.
"Vite! Vite!" he scolded her. "Get your things on!"
"What the hell are you talking about?" she wanted to know.
"Fast! Fast! Can't you understand English? Get your clothes on fast!"
"Stupido!" she snarled back at him. "Vite is French, not Italian.
Subito, subito! That's what you mean. Subito!"
"Si, si. That's what I mean. Subito, subito!"
"Si, si," she responded cooperatively, and ran for her shoes and earrings.
Hungry Joe had paused in his attack to shoot pictures through the
closed door. Yossarian could hear the camera shutter clicking. When
both he and Luciana were ready, Yossarian waited for Hungry Joe's
next charge and yanked the door open on him unexpectedly. Hungry
Joe spilled forward into the room like a floundering frog. Yossarian
skipped nimbly around him, guiding Luciana along behind him
through the apartment and out into the hallway. They bounced down
the stairs with a great roistering clatter, laughing out loud breathlessly
and knocking their hilarious heads together each time they paused to
rest. Near the bottom they met Nately coming up and stopped laughing.
Nately was drawn, dirty and unhappy. His tie was twisted and his
shirt was rumpled, and he walked with his hands in his pockets. He
wore a hangdog, hopeless look.
"What's the matter, kid?" Yossarian inquired compassionately.
"I'm flat broke again," Nately replied with a lame and distracted
smile. "What am I going to do?"
Yossarian didn't know Nately had spent the last thirty-two hours at
twenty dollars an hour with the apathetic whore he adored, and he had
nothing left of his pay or of the lucrative allowance he received every
month from his wealthy and generous father. That meant he could not
spend time with her any more. She would not allow him to walk beside
her as she strolled the pavements soliciting other servicemen, and she
was infuriated when she spied him trailing her from a distance. He was
free to hang around her apartment if he cared to, but there was no certainty
that she would be there. And she would give him nothing unless
he could pay. She found sex uninteresting. Nately wanted the assurance
that she was not going to bed with anyone unsavory or with
someone he knew. Captain Black always made it a point to buy her
each time he came to Rome, just so he could torment Nately with the
news that he had thrown his sweetheart another hump and watch
Nately eat his liver as he related the atrocious indignities to which he
had forced her to submit.
Luciana was touched by Nately's forlorn air, but broke loudly into
robust laughter again the moment she stepped outside into the sunny
street with Yossarian and heard Hungry Joe beseeching them from the
window to come back and take their clothes off, because he really was
a photographer from Life magazine. Luciana fled mirthfully along the
sidewalk in her high white wedgies, pulling Yossarian along in tow with
the same lusty and ingenuous zeal she had displayed in the dance hall
the night before and at every moment since. Yossarian caught up and
walked with his arm around her waist until they came to the corner and
she stepped away from him. She straightened her hair in a mirror from
her pocketbook and put lipstick on.
"Why don't you ask me to let you write my name and address on a
piece of paper so that you will be able to find me again when you come
to Rome?'? she suggested.
"Why don't you let me write your name and address down on a
piece of paper?" he agreed.
"Why?" she demanded belligerently, her mouth curling suddenly
into a vehement sneer and her eyes flashing with anger. "So you can
tear it up into little pieces as soon as I leave?"
"Who's going to tear it up?" Yossarian protested in confusion.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"You will," she insisted. "You'll tear it up into little pieces the
minute I'm gone and go walking away like a big shot because a tall,
young, beautiful girl like me, Luciana, let you sleep with her and did
not ask you for money."
"How much money are you asking me for?" he asked her.
"Stupido!" she shouted with emotion. "I am not asking you for any
money!" She stamped her foot and raised her arm in a turbulent gesture
that made Yossarian fear she was going to crack him in the face
again with her great pocketbook. Instead, she scribbled her name and
address on a slip of paper and thrust it at him. "Here," she taunted him
sardonically, biting on her lip to still a delicate tremor. "Don't forget.
Don't forget to tear it into tiny pieces as soon as I am gone."
Then she smiled at him serenely, squeezed his hand and, with a
whispered regretful "Addio," pressed herself against him for a moment
and then straightened and walked away with unconscious dignity and
grace.
The minute she was gone, Yossarian tore the slip of paper up and
walked away in. the other direction, feeling very much like a big shot
because a beautiful young girl like Luciana had slept with him and did
not ask for money. He was pretty pleased with himself until he looked
up in the dining room of the Red Cross building and found himself
eating breakfast with dozens and dozens of other servicemen in all
kinds of fantastic uniforms, and then all at once he was surrounded by
images of Luciana getting out of her clothes and into her clothes and
caressing and haranguing him tempestuously in the pink rayon chemise
she wore in bed with him and would not take off. Yossarian
choked on his toast and eggs at the enormity of his error in tearing her
long, lithe, nude, young vibrant limbs into tiny pieces of- paper so
impudently and dumping her down so smugly into the gutter from the
curb. He missed her terribly already. There were so many strident
faceless people in uniform in the dining room with him. He felt an
urgent desire to be alone with her again soon and sprang up impetuously
from his table and went running outside and back down the
street toward the apartment in search of the tiny bits of paper in the
gutter, but they had all been flushed away by a street cleaner's hose.
He couldn't find her again in the Allied officers' night club that
evening or in the sweltering, burnished, hedonistic bedlam of the
black-market restaurant with its vast bobbing wooden trays of elegant
food and its chirping flock of bright and lovely girls. He couldn't even
find the restaurant. When he went to bed alone, he dodged flak over
Bologna again in a dream, with Aarfy hanging over his shoulder abominably
in the plane with a bloated sordid leer. In the morning he ran
looking for Luciana in all the French offices he could find, but nobody
knew what he was talking about, and then he ran in terror, so jumpy,
distraught and disorganized that he just had to keep running in terror
somewhere, to the enlisted men's apartment for the squat maid in the
lime-colored panties, whom he found dusting in Snowden's room
on the fifth floor in her drab brown sweater and heavy dark skirt.
Snowden was still alive then, and Yossarian could tell it was Snowden's
room from the name stenciled in white on the blue duffel bag he
tripped over as he plunged through the doorway at her in a frenzy of
creative desperation. The woman caught him by the wrists before he
could fall as he came stumbling toward her in need and pulled him
along down on top of her as she flopped over backward onto the bed
and enveloped him hospitably in her flaccid and consoling embrace,
her dust mop aloft in her hand like a banner as her broad, brutish, congenial
face gazed up at him fondly with a smile of unperjured friendship.
There was a sharp elastic snap as she rolled the lime-colored
panties off beneath them both without disturbing him.
He stuffed money into her hand when they were finished. She
hugged him in gratitude. He hugged her. She hugged him back and
then pulled him down on top of her on the bed again. He stuffed more
money into her hand when they were finished this time and ran out of
the room before she could begin hugging him in gratitude again. Back
at his own apartment, he threw his things together as fast as he could,
left for Nately what money he had, and ran back to Pianosa on a
supply plane to apologize to Hungry Joe for shutting him out of the
bedroom. The apology was unnecessary, for Hungry Joe was in high
spirits when Yossarian found him. Hungry Joe was grinning from ear
to ear, and Yossarian turned sick at the sight of him, for he understood
instantly what the high spirits meant.
"Forty missions," Hungry Joe announced readily in a voice lyrical
with relief and elation. "The colonel raised them again."
Yossarian was stunned. "But I've got thirty-two, goddammit! Three
more and I would have been through."
Hungry Joe shrugged indifferently. "The colonel wants forty missions,"
he repeated.
Yossarian shoved him out of the way and ran right into the hospital.

17. The Soldier in White

Yossarian ran right into the hospital, determined to remain there forever
rather than fly one mission more than the thirty-two missions he
had. Ten days after he changed his mind and came out, the colonel
raised the missions to forty-five and Yossarian ran right back in, determined
to remain in the hospital forever rather than fly one mission
more than the six missions more he had just flown.
Yossarian could run into the hospital whenever he wanted to because
of his liver and because of his eyes; the doctors couldn't fix his
liver condition and couldn't meet his eyes each time he told them he
had a liver condition. He could enjoy himself in the hospital, just as
long as there was no one really very sick in the same ward. His system
was sturdy enough to survive a case of someone else's malaria or
influenza with scarcely any discomfort at all. He could come through
other people's tonsillectomies without suffering any postoperative distress,
and even endure their hernias and hemorrhoids with only mild
nausea and revulsion. But that was just about as much as he could go
through without getting sick. After that he was ready to bolt. He could
relax in the hospital, since no one there expected him to do anything.
All he was expected to do in the hospital was die or get better, and since
he was perfectly all right to begin with, getting better was easy.
Being in the hospital was better than being over Bologna or flying
over Avignon with Huple and Dobbs at the controls and Snowden
dying in back.
There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital
as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer
people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much
lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a
much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew
a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater,
more orderly job of it. They couldn't dominate Death inside the hospital,
but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners.
They couldn't keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like
a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital.
There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that
was so common outside the hospital. They did not blow up in mid-air
like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian's tent, or freeze to death in the
blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling
his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane.
"I'm cold," Snowden had whimpered. "I'm cold."
"There, there," Yossarian had tried to comfort him. "There, there."
They didn't take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger
had done. They didn't explode ·into blood and clotted matter.
They didn't drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery
or crushed in landslides. They didn't get shot to death in hold-ups,
strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to
death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some
other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like
gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an
oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-
don't business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that
now-I-am-and-now-I-ain't. There were no famines or floods. Children
didn't suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No
one was beaten to death. People didn't stick their heads into ovens
with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting
like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at
the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on
the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full
of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.
All things considered, Yossarian often preferred the hospital, even
though it had its faults. The help tended to be officious, the rules, if
heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome. Since sick people
were apt to be present, he could not always depend on a lively
young crowd in the same ward with him, and the entertainment was
not always good. He was forced to admit that the hospitals had altered
steadily for the worse as the war continued and one moved closer to
the battlefront, the deterioration in the quality of the guests becoming
most marked within the combat zone itself where the effects of booming
wartime conditions were apt to make themselves conspicuous
immediately. The people got sicker and sicker the deeper he moved
into combat, until finally in the hospital that last time there had been
the soldier in white, who could not have been any sicker without being
dead, and he soon was.
The soldier in white was constructed entirely of gauze, plaster and
a thermometer, and the thermometer was merely an adornment left
balanced in the empty dark hole in the bandages over his mouth early
each morning and late each afternoon by Nurse Cramer and Nurse
Duckett right up to the afternoon Nurse Cramer read the thermometer
and discovered he was dead. Now that Yossarian looked back, it
seemed that Nurse Cramer, rather than the talkative Texan, had murdered
the soldier in white; if she had not read the thermometer and
reported what she had found, the soldier in white might still be lying
there alive exactly as he had been lying there all along, encased from
head to toe in plaster and gauze with both strange, rigid legs elevated
from the hips and both strange arms strung up perpendicularly, all four
bulky limbs in casts, all four strange, useless limbs hoisted up in the
air by taut wire cables and fantastically long lead weights suspended
darkly above him. Lying there that way might not have been much of
a life, but it was all the life he had, and the decision to terminate it,
Yossarian felt, should hardly have been Nurse Cramer's.
The soldier in white was like an unrolled bandage with a hole in it
or like a broken block of stone in a harbor with a crooked zinc pipe jutting
out. The other patients in the ward, all but the Texan, shrank from
him with a tenderhearted aversion from the moment they set eyes on
him the morning after the night he had been sneaked in. They gathered
soberly in the farthest recess of the ward and gossiped about him
in malicious, offended undertones, rebelling against his presence as a
ghastly imposition and resenting him malevolently for the nauseating
truth of which he was a bright reminder. They shared a common dread
that he would begin moaning.
"I don't know what I'll do if he does begin moaning," the dashing
young fighter pilot with the golden mustache had grieved forlornly. "It
means he'll moan during the night, too, because he won't be able to tell
time."
No sound at all came from the soldier in white all the time he was
there. The ragged round hole over his mouth was deep and jet black
and showed no sign of lip, teeth, palate or tongue. The only one who
ever came close enough to look was the affable Texan, who came close
enough several times a day to chat with him about more votes for the
decent folk, opening each conversation with the same unvarying greeting:
"What do you say, fella? How you coming along?" The rest of
the men avoided them both in their regulation maroon corduroy
bathrobes and unraveling flannel pajamas, wondering gloomily who
the soldier in white was, why he was there and what he was really like
inside.
"He's all right, I tell you," the Texan would report back to them
encouragingly after each of his social visits. "Deep down inside he's
really a regular guy. He's just feeling a little shy and insecure now
because he doesn't know anybody here and can't talk. Why don't you
all just step right up to him and introduce yourselves? He won't hurt
you."
"What the goddam hell are you. talking about?" Dunbar demanded.
"Does he even know what you're talking about?"
"Sure he knows what I'm talking about. He's not stupid. There ain't
nothing wrong with him."
"Can he hear you?"
"Well, I don't know if he can hear me or not, but I'm sure he knows
what I'm talking about."
"Does that hole over his mouth ever move?"
"Now, what kind of a crazy question is that?" the Texan asked
uneasily.
"How can you tell if he's breathing if it never moves?"
"How can you tell it's a he?"
"Does he have pads over his eyes underneath that bandage over his
face?"
"Does he ever wiggle his toes or move the tips of his fingers?"
The Texan backed away in mounting confusion. "Now, what kind of
a crazy question is that? You fellas must all be crazy or something. Why
don't you just walk right up to him and get acquainted? He's a real nice
guy, I tell you."
The soldier in white was more like a stuffed and sterilized mummy
than a real nice guy. Nurse Duckett and Nurse Cramer kept him spick-and-
span. They brushed his bandages often with a whiskbroom and
scrubbed the plaster casts on his arms, legs, shoulders, chest and pelvis
with soapy water. Working with a round tin of metal polish, they
waxed a dim gloss on the dull zinc pipe rising from the cement on his
groin. With damp dish towels they wiped the dust several times a day
from the slim black rubber tubes leading in and out of him to the two
large stoppered jars, one of them, hanging on a post beside his bed,
dripping fluid into his arm constantly through a slit in the bandages
while the other, almost out of sight on the floor, drained the fluid away
through the zinc pipe rising from his groin. Both young nurses polished
the glass jars unceasingly. They were proud of their housework.
The more solicitous of the two was Nurse Cramer, a shapely, pretty,
sexless girl with a wholesome unattractive face. Nurse Cramer had a
cute nose and a radiant, blooming complexion dotted with fetching
sprays of adorable freckles that Yossarian detested. She was touched
very deeply by the soldier in white. Her virtuous, pale-blue, saucer-like
eyes flooded with leviathan tears on unexpected occasions and made
Yossarian mad.
"How the hell do you know he's even in there?" he asked her.
"Don't you dare talk to me that way!" she replied indignantly.
"Well, how do you? You don't even know if it's really him."
"Who?"
"Whoever's supposed to be in all those bandages. You might really
be weeping for somebody else. How do you know he's even alive?"
"What a terrible thing to say!" Nurse Cramer exclaimed. "Now, you
get right into bed and stop making jokes about him."
"I'm not making jokes. Anybody might be in there. For all we know,
it might even be Mudd."
"What are you talking about?" Nurse Cramer pleaded with him in
a quavering voice.
"Maybe that's where the dead man is."
"What dead man?"
"I've got a dead man in my tent that nobody can throw out. His
name is Mudd."
Nurse Cramer's face blanched and she turned to Dunbar desperately
for aid. "Make him stop saying things like that," she begged.
"Maybe there's no one inside," Dunbar suggested helpfully. "Maybe
they just sent the bandages here for a joke."
She stepped away from Dunbar in alarm. "You're crazy," she cried,
glancing about imploring. "You're both crazy."
Nurse Duckett showed up then and chased them all back to their
own beds while Nurse Cramer changed the stoppered jars for the soldier
in white. Changing the jars for the soldier in white was no trouble
at all, since the same clear fluid was dripped back inside him over and
over again with no apparent loss. When the jar feeding the inside of his
elbow was just about empty, the jar on the floor was just about full,
and the two were simply uncoupled from their respective hoses and
reversed quickly so that the liquid could be dripped right back into
him. Changing the jars was no trouble to anyone but the men who
watched them changed every hour or so and were baffled by the procedure.
"Why can't they hook the two jars up to each other and eliminate
the middleman?" the artillery captain with whom Yossarian had
stopped playing chess inquired. "What the hell do they need him for?"
"I wonder what he did to deserve it," the warrant officer with malaria
and a mosquito bite on his ass lamented after Nurse Cramer had read
her thermometer and discovered that the soldier in white was dead.
"He went to war," the fighter pilot with the golden mustache surmised.
"We all went to war," Dunbar countered.
"That's what I mean," the warrant officer with malaria continued.
"Why him? There just doesn't seem to be any logic to this system of
rewards and punishment. Look what happened to me. If I had gotten
syphilis or a dose of clap for my five minutes of passion on the beach
instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see some justice. But
malaria? Malaria? Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?"
The warrant officer shook his head in numb astonishment.
"What about me?" Yossarian said. "I stepped out of my tent in
Marrakech one night to get a bar of candy and caught your dose of clap
when that Wac I never even saw before hissed me into the bushes. All
I really wanted was a bar of candy, but who could turn it down?"
"That sounds like my dose of clap, all right," the warrant officer
agreed. "But I've still got somebody else's malaria. Just for once I'd like
to see all these things sort of straightened out, with each person getting
exactly what he deserves. It might give me some confidence in this
universe."
"I've got somebody else's three hundred thousand dollars," the
dashing young fighter captain with the golden mustache admitted.
"I've been goofing off since the day I was born. I cheated my way
through prep school and college, and just about all I've been doing
ever since is shacking up with pretty girls who think I'd make a good
husband. I've got no ambition at all. The only thing I want to do after
the war is marry some girl who's got more money than I have and shack
up with lots more pretty girls. The three hundred thousand bucks was
left to me before I was born by a grandfather who made a fortune selling
hogwash on an international scale. I know I don't deserve it, but I'll
be damned if! give it back. I wonder who it really belongs to."
"Maybe it belongs to my father," Dunbar conjectured. "He spent a
lifetime at hard work and never could make enough money to even
send my sister and me through college. He's dead now, so you might
as well keep it."
"Now, if we can just find out who my malaria belongs to, we'd be all
set. It's not that I've got anything against malaria. I'd just as soon goldbrick
with malaria as with anything else. It's only that I feel an injustice
has been committed. Why should I have somebody else's malaria and
you have my dose of clap?"
"I've got more than your dose of clap," Yossarian told him. "I've got
to keep flying combat missions because of that dose of yours until they
kill me."
"That makes it even worse. What's the justice in that?"
"I had a friend named Clevinger two and a half weeks ago who used
to see plenty of justice in it."
"It's the highest kind of justice of all," Clevinger had gloated, clapping
his. hands with a merry laugh. "I can't help thinking of the
Hippolytus of Euripides, where the early licentiousness of Theseus is
probably responsible for the asceticism of the son that helps bring
about the tragedy that ruins them all. If nothing else, that episode with
the Wac should teach you the evil of sexual immorality."
"It teaches me the evil of candy."
"Can't you see that you're not exactly without blame for the predicament
you're in?" Clevinger had continued with undisguised relish. "If
you hadn't been laid up in the hospital with venereal disease for ten days
back there in Africa, you might have finished your twenty-five missions
in time to be sent home before Colonel Nevers was killed and Colonel
Cathcart came to replace him."
"And what about you?" Yossarian had replied: "You never got clap
in Marrakech and you're in the same predicament."
"I don't know," confessed Clevinger, with a trace of mock concern,
"I guess I must nave done something very bad in my time."
"Do you really believe that?"
Clevinger laughed. "No, of course not. I just like to kid you along a
little."
There were too many dangers for Yossarian to keep track of. There
was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, for example, and they were all out to
kill him. There was Lieutenant Scheisskopf with his fanaticism for
parades and there was the bloated colonel with his big fat mustache
and his fanaticism for retribution, and they wanted to kill him, too.
There was Appleby, Havermeyer, Black and Korn. There was Nurse
Cramer and Nurse Duckett, who he was almost certain wanted him
dead, 'and there was the Texan and the C.I.D. man, about whom he had
no doubt. There were bartenders, bricklayers and bus conductors all
over the world who wanted him dead, landlords and tenants, traitors
and patriots, lynchers, leeches and lackeys, and they were all out to
bump him off. That was the secret Snowden had spilled to him on the
mission to Avignon-they were out to get him; and Snowden had
spilled it all over the back of the plane.
There were lymph glands that might do him in. There were kidneys,
nerve sheaths and corpuscles. There were tumors of the brain.
There was Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle
a cancer cell. 'There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone,
diseases of the lung, diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart,
blood and arteries. There were diseases of the head, diseases of the
neck, diseases of the chest, diseases of the intestines, diseases of the
crotch. There even were diseases of the feet. There were billions of
conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals
at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and
every one was a potential traitor and foe. There were so many diseases
that it took a truly diseased mind to even think about them as often as
he and Hungry Joe did.
Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in
alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any
one he wanted to worry about. He grew very upset whenever he misplaced
some or when he could not add to his list, and he would go
rushing in a cold sweat to Doc Daneeka for help.
"Give him Ewing's tumor," Yossarian advised Doc Daneeka, who
would come to Yossarian for help in handling Hungry Joe, "and follow
it up with melanoma. Hungry Joe likes lingering diseases, but he likes
the fulminating ones even more."
Doc Daneeka had never heard of either. "How do you manage to
keep up on so many diseases like that?" he inquired with high professional
esteem.
"I learn about them at the hospital when 1study the Reader's Digest."
Yossarian had so many ailments to be afraid of that he was sometimes
tempted to turn himself in to the hospital for good and spend the
rest of his life stretched out there inside an oxygen tent with a battery
of specialists and nurses seated at one side of his bed twenty-four hours
a day waiting for something to go wrong and at least one surgeon with
a knife poised at the other, ready to jump forward and begin cutting
away the moment it became necessary. Aneurisms, for instance; how
else could they ever defend him in time against an aneurism of the
aorta? Yossarian felt much safer inside the hospital than outside the
hospital, even though he loathed the surgeon and his knife as much as
he had ever loathed anyone. He could start screaming inside a hospital
and people would at least come running to try to help; outside the hospital
they would throw him in prison if he ever started screaming about
all the things he felt everyone ought to start screaming about, or they
would put him in the hospital. One of the things he wanted to start
screaming about was the -surgeon's knife that was almost certain to be
waiting for him and everyone else who lived long enough to die. He
wondered often how he would ever recognize the first chill, flush,
twinge, ache, belch, sneeze, stain, lethargy, vocal slip, loss of balance or
lapse of memory that would signal the inevitable beginning of the
inevitable end.
He was afraid also that Doc Daneeka would still refuse to help him
when he went to him again after jumping out of Major Major's office,
and he was right.
"You think you've got something to be afraid about?" Doc Daneeka
demanded, lifting his delicate immaculate dark head up from his chest
to gaze at Yossarian irascibly for a moment with lachrymose eyes.
"What about me? My precious medical skills are rusting away here on
this lousy island while other doctors are cleaning up. Do you think 1
enjoy sitting here day after day refusing to help you? 1 wouldn't mind
it so much if 1 could refuse to help you back in the States or in some
place like Rome. But saying no to you here isn't easy for me, either."
"Then stop saying no. Ground me."
"I can't ground you," Doc Daneeka mumbled. "How many times do
you have to be told?"
"Yes you can. Major Major told me you're the only one in the
squadron who can ground me."
Doc Daneeka was stunned. "Major Major told you that? When?"
"When I tackled him in the ditch."
"Major Major told you that? In a ditch?"
"He told me in his office after we left the ditch and jumped inside.
He told me not to tell anyone he told me, so don't start shooting your
mouth off."
"Why that dirty, scheming liar!" Doc Daneeka cried. "He wasn't
supposed to tell anyone. Did he tell you how 1 could ground you?"
"Just by filling out a little slip of paper saying I'm on the verge of a
nervous collapse and sending it to Group. Dr. Stubbs grounds men in
his squadron all the time, so why can't you?"
"And what happens to the men after Stubbs does ground them?"
Doc Daneeka retorted with a sneer. "They go right back on combat
status, don't they? And he finds himself right up the creek. Sure, I can
ground you by filling out a slip saying you're unfit to fly. But there's a
catch."
"Catch-22?"
"Sure. If I take you off combat duty, Group has to approve my
action, and Group isn't going to. They'll put you right back on combat
status, and then where will I be? On my way to the Pacific Ocean,
probably. No, thank you. I'm not going to take any chances for you."
"Isn't it worth a try?" Yossarian argued. "What's so hot about Pianosa?"
"Pianosa is terrible. But it's better than the Pacific Ocean. I wouldn't
mind being shipped someplace civilized where I might pick up a buck
or two in abortion money every now and then. But all they've got in
the Pacific is jungles and monsoons. I'd rot there."
"You're rotting here."
Doc Daneeka flared up angrily. "Yeah? Well, at least I'm going to
come out of this war alive, which is a lot more than you're going to do."
"That's just what I'm trying to tell you, goddammit. I'm asking you
to save my life."
"It's not my business to save lives," Doc Daneeka retorted sullenly.
"What is your business?"
"I don't know what my business is. All they ever told me was to
uphold the ethics of my profession and never give testimony against
another physician. Listen. You think you're the only one whose life is
in danger? What about me? Those two quacks I've got working for me
in the medical tent still can't find out what's wrong with me."
"Maybe it's Ewing's tumor," Yossarian muttered sarcastically.
"Do you really think so?" Doc Daneeka exclaimed with fright.
"Oh, I don't know," Yossarian answered impatiently. "I just know
I'm not going to fly any more missions. They wouldn't really shoot me,
would they? I've got fifty-one."
"Why don't you at least finish the fifty-five before you take a stand?"
Doc Daneeka advised. "With all your bitching, you've never finished a
tour of duty even once."
"How the hell can I? The colonel keeps raising them every time I
get close."
"You never finish your missions because you keep running into the
hospital or going off to Rome. You'd be in a much stronger position if
you had your fifty-five finished and then refused to fly. Then maybe I'd
see what I could do."
"Do you promise?"
"I promise."
"What do you promise?"
"I promise that maybe I'll think about doing something to help if
you finish your fifty-five missions and if you get McWatt to put my
name on his flight log again so that I can draw my flight pay without
going up in a plane. I'm afraid of airplanes. Did you read about that
airplane crash in Idaho three weeks ago? Six people killed. It was terrible.
I don't know why they want me to put in four hours' flight time
every month in order to get my flight pay. Don't I have enough to
worry about without worrying about being killed in an airplane crash
too?"
"I worry about airplane crashes also," Yossarian told him. "You're
not the only one."
"Yeah, but I'm also pretty worried about that Ewing's tumor," Doc
Daneeka boasted. "Do you think that's why my nose is stuffed all the
time and why I always feel so chilly? Take my pulse."
Yossarian also worried about Ewing's tumor and melanoma. Catastrophes
were lurking everywhere, too numerous to count. When he
contemplated the many diseases and potential accidents threatening
him, he was positively astounded that he had managed to survive in
good health for as long as he had. It was miraculous. Each day he faced
was another dangerous mission against mortality. And he had been
surviving them for twenty-eight years.

18. The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice

Yossarian owed his good health to exercise, fresh air, teamwork and
good sportsmanship; it was to get away from them all that he had
first discovered the hospital. When the physical-education officer at
Lowery Field ordered everyone to fall out for calisthenics one afternoon,
Yossarian, the private, reported instead at the dispensary with
what he said was a pain in his right side.
"Beat it," said the doctor on duty there, who was doing a crossword
puzzle.
"We can't tell him to beat it," said a corporal. "There's a new directive
out about abdominal complaints. We have to keep them under
observation five days because so many of them have been dying after
we make them beat it."
"All right," grumbled the doctor. "Keep him under observation five
days and then make him beat it."
They took Yossarian's clothes away and put him in a ward, where he
was very happy when no one was snoring nearby. In the morning a
helpful young English intern popped in to ask him about his liver.
"I think it's my appendix that's bothering me," Yossarian told him.
"Your appendix is no good," the Englishman declared with jaunty
authority. "If your appendix goes wrong, we can take it out and have
you back on active duty in almost no time at all. But come to us with a
liver complaint and you can fool us for weeks. The liver, you see, is a
large, ugly mystery to us. If you've ever eaten liver you know what
I mean. We're pretty sure today that the liver exists, and we have a
fairly good idea of what it does whenever it's doing what it's supposed
to be doing. Beyond that, we're really in the dark After all, what is a
liver? My father, for example, died of cancer of the liver and was never
sick a day of his life right up till the moment it killed him. Never felt a
twinge of pain. In a way, that was too bad, since I hated my father. Lust
for my mother, you know."
"What's an English medical officer doing on duty here?" Yossarian
wanted to know.
The officer laughed. "I'll tell you all about that when I see you
tomorrow morning. And throw that silly ice bag away before you die
of pneumonia."
Yossarian never saw him again. That was one of the nice things '
about all the doctors at the hospital; he never saw any of them a second
time. They came and went and simply disappeared. In place of the
English intern the next day, there arrived a group of doctors he had
never seen before to ask him about his appendix.
"There's nothing wrong with my appendix," Yossarian informed
them. "The doctor yesterday said it was my liver."
"Maybe it is his liver," replied the white-haired officer in charge.
"What does his blood count show?"
"lie hasn't had a blood count."
"Have one taken right away. We can't afford to take chances with a
patient in his condition. We've got to keep ourselves covered in case he
dies." He made a notation on his clipboard and spoke to Yossarian. "In
the meantime, keep that ice bag on. It's very important."
"I don't have an ice bag on."
"Well, get one. There must be an ice bag around here somewhere.
And let someone know if the pain becomes unendurable."
At the end of ten days, a new group of doctors came to Yossarian with
bad news: he was in perfect health and had to get out. He was rescued
in the nick of time by a patient across the aisle who began to see everything
twice. Without warning, the patient sat up in bed and shouted,
"I see everything twice!"
A nurse screamed and an orderly fainted. Doctors came running
up from every direction with needles, lights, tubes, rubber mallets and
oscillating metal tines. They rolled up complicated instruments on
wheels. There was not enough of the patient to go around, and specialists
pushed forward in line with raw tempers and snapped at their
colleagues in front to hurry up and give somebody else a chance. A
colonel with a large forehead and horn-rimmed glasses soon arrived at
a diagnosis.
"It's meningitis," he called out emphatically, waving the others back.
"Although Lord knows there's not the slightest reason for thinking so."
"Then why pick meningitis?" inquired a major with a suave chuckle.
"Why not, let's say, acute nephritis?"
"Because I'm a meningitis man, that's why, and not an acute nephritis
man," retorted the colonel. "And I'm not going to give him
up to any of your kidney birds without a struggle. I was here first."
In the end, the doctors were all in accord. They agreed they had no
idea what was wrong with the soldier who saw everything twice, and
they rolled him away into a room in the corridor and quarantined
everyone else in the ward for fourteen days.
Thanksgiving Day came and went without any fuss while Yossarian
was still in the hospital. The only bad thing about it was the turkey for
dinner, and even that was pretty good. It was the most rational
Thanksgiving he had ever spent, and he took a sacred oath to spend
every future Thanksgiving Day in the cloistered shelter of a hospital.
He broke his sacred oath the very next year, when he spent the holiday
in a hotel room instead in intellectual conversation with Lieutenant
Scheisskopf's wife, who had Dori Duz's dog tags on for the occasion
and who henpecked Yossarian sententiously for being cynical and callous
about Thanksgiving, even though she didn't believe in God just as
much as he didn't.
"I'm probably just as good an atheist as you are," she speculated
boastfully. "But even I feel that we all have a great deal to be thankful
for and that we shouldn't be ashamed to show it."
"Name one thing I've got to be thankful for," Yossarian challenged
her without interest.
"Well ... " Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife mused and paused a moment
to ponder dubiously. "Me."
"Oh, come on," he scoffed.
She arched her eyebrows in surprise. "Aren't you thankful for me?"
she asked. She frowned peevishly, her pride wounded. "I don't have to
shack up with you, you know," she told him with cold dignity. "My
husband has a whole squadron full of aviation cadets who would be
only too happy to shack up with their commanding officer's wife just
for the added fillip it would give them."
Yossarian decided to change. the subject. "Now you're changing the
subject," he pointed out diplomatically. "I'll bet I can name two things
to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for."
"Be thankful you've got me," she insisted.
"I am, honey. But I'm also goddam good and miserable that I can't
have Dori Duz again, too. Or the hundreds of other girls and women
I'll see and want in my short lifetime and won't be able to go to bed
with even once."
"Be thankful you're healthy."
"Be bitter you're not going to stay that way."
"Be glad you're even alive."
"Be furious you're going to die."
"Things could be much worse," she cried.
"They could be one hell of a lot better," he answered heatedly.
"You're naming only one thing," she protested. "You said you could
name two."
"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways," Yossarian continued,
hurtling on over her objection. "There's nothing so mysterious
about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten
all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about-a country
bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.
Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being
who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth
decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running
through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed
old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in
the world did He ever create pain?"
"Pain?" Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously.
"Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily
dangers."
"And who created the dangers?" Yossarian demanded. He laughed
caustically. "Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us
pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or
one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes
right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer
worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He?"
"People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon
tubes in the middle of their foreheads."
"They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupefied
with morphine, don't they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer!
When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a
job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead,
His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It's obvious He never
met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler
like Him as even a shipping clerk!"
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife had turned ashen in disbelief and was
ogling him with alarm. "You'd better not talk that way about Him,
honey," she warned him reprovingly in a low and hostile voice. "He
might punish you."
"Isn't He punishing me enough?" Yossarian snorted resentfully.
"You know, we mustn't let Him get away with it. Oh no, we certainly
mustn't let Him get away scot-free for all the sorrow He's caused us.
Someday I'm going to make Him pay. I know when. On the Judgment
Day. Yes, that's the day I'll be close enough to reach out and grab that
little yokel by His neck and-"
"Stop it! Stop it!" Lieutenant Scheisskopfs wife screamed suddenly,
and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists.
"Stop it!"
Yossarian ducked behind his arm for protection while she slammed
away at him in feminine fury for a few seconds, and then he caught her
determinedly by the wrists and forced her 'gently back down on the
bed. "What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her
bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't
believe in God."
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I
don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the
mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. "Let's have a little
more religious freedom between us," he proposed obligingly. "You
don't believe in the God you want to, and I won't believe in the God I
want to. Is that a deal?" ,
That was the most illogical Thanksgiving he could ever remember
spending, and his thoughts returned wishfully to his halcyon fourteen-day
quarantine in the hospital the year before; but even that idyll had
ended on a tragic note: he was still in good health when the quarantine
period was over, and they told him again that he had to get out and go to
war. Yossarian sat up in bed when he heard the bad news and shouted,
"I see everything twice!"
Pandemonium broke loose in the ward again. The specialists came
running up from all directions and ringed him in a circle of scrutiny so
confining that he could feel the humid breath from their various noses
blowing uncomfortably upon the different sectors of his body. They
went snooping into his eyes and ears with tiny beams of light, assaulted
his legs and feet with rubber hammers and vibrating forks, drew blood
from his veins, held anything handy up for him to see on the periphery
of his vision.
The leader of this team of doctors was a dignified, solicitous gentleman
who held one finger up directly in front of Yossarian and
demanded, "How many fingers do you see?"
"Two," said Yossarian.
"How many fingers do you see now?" asked the doctor, holding up two.
"Two," said Yossarian.
"And how many now?" asked the doctor, holding up none.
"Two," said Yossarian.
The doctor's face wreathed with a smile. "By Jove, he's right," he
declared jubilantly. "He does see everything twice."
They rolled Yossarian away on a stretcher into the room with the
other soldier who saw everything twice and quarantined everyone else
in the ward for another fourteen days.
"I see everything twice!" the soldier who saw everything twice
shouted when they rolled Yossarian in.
"I see everything twice!" Yossarian shouted back at him just as
loudly, with a secret wink.
"The walls! The walls!" the other soldier cried. "Move back the
walls!"
"The walls! The walls!" Yossarian cried. "Move back the walls!"
One of the doctors pretended to shove the wall back. "Is that far
enough?" .
The soldier who saw everything twice nodded weakly and sank back
on his bed. Yossarian nodded weakly too, eyeing his talented roommate
with great humility and admiration. He knew he was in the presence of
a master. His talented roommate was obviously a person to be studied
and emulated. During the night, his talented roommate died, and
Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.
"I see everything once!" he cried quickly.
A new group of specialists came pounding up to his bedside with
their instruments to find out if it was true.
"How many fingers do you see?" asked the leader, holding up one.
"One."
The doctor held up two fingers. "How many fingers do you see
now?"
"One."
The doctor held up ten fingers. "And how many now?"
"One."
The doctor turned to the other doctors with amazement. "He does
see everything once!" he exclaimed. "We made him all better."
"And just in time, too," announced the doctor with whom Yossarian
next found himself alone, a tall, torpedo-shaped congenial man with an
unshaven growth of brown beard and a pack of cigarettes in his shirt
pocket that he chain-smoked insouciantly as he leaned against the wall.
"There are some relatives here to see you. Oh, don't worry," he added
with a laugh. "Not your relatives. It's the mother, father and brother of
that chap who died. They've traveled all the way from New York to see
a dying soldier, and you're the handiest one we've got."
"What are you talking about?" Yossarian asked suspiciously. "I'm
not dying."
"Of course you're dying. We're all dying. Where the devil else do
you think you're heading?"
"They didn't come to see me," Yossarian objected. "They came to
see their son."
"They'll have to take what they can get. As far as we're concerned,
one dying boy is just as good as any other, or just as bad. To a scientist,
all dying boys are equal. I have a proposition for you. You let them
come in and look you over for a few minutes and I won't tell anyone
you've been lying about your liver symptoms."
Yossarian drew back from him farther. "You know about that?"
"Of course I do. Give us some credit." The doctor chuckled amiably
and lit another cigarette. "How do you expect anyone to believe you
have a liver condition if you keep squeezing the nurses' tits every time
you get a chance? You're going to have to give up sex if you want to
convince people you've got an ailing liver."
"That's a hell of a price to pay just to keep alive. Why didn't you
turn me in if you knew I was faking?"
"Why the devil should I?" asked the doctor with a flicker of surprise.
"We're all in this business of illusion together. I'm always willing
to lend a helping hand to a fellow conspirator along the road to survival
if he's willing to do the same for me. These people have come a
long way, and I'd rather not disappoint them. I'm sentimental about
old people."
"But they came to see their son."
"They came too late. Maybe they won't even notice the difference."
"Suppose they start crying."
"They probably will start crying. That's one of the reasons they
came. I'll listen outside the door and break it up if it starts getting
tacky."
"It all sounds a bit crazy," Yossarian reflected. "What do they want
to watch their son die for, anyway?"
"I've never been able to figure that one out," the doctor admitted,
"but they always do. Well, what do you say? All you've got to do is lie
there a few minutes and die a little. Is that asking so much?"
"All right," Yossarian gave in. "If it's just for a few minutes and you
promise to wait right outside." He warmed to his role. "Say, why don't
you wrap a bandage around me for effect?"
"That sounds like a splendid idea," applauded the doctor.
They wrapped a batch of bandages around Yossarian. A team of
medical orderlies installed tan shades on each of the two windows and
lowered them to douse the room in depressing shadows. Yossarian suggested
flowers, and the doctor sent an orderly out to find two small
bunches of fading ones with a strong and sickening smell. When everything
was in place, they made Yossarian get back into bed and lie down.
Then they admitted the visitors.
The visitors entered uncertainly as though they felt they were intruding,
tiptoeing in with stares of meek apology, first the grieving mother
and father, then the brother, a glowering heavy-set sailor with a deep
chest. The man and woman stepped into the room stiffly side by side as
though right out of a familiar, though esoteric, anniversary daguerreotype
on a wall. They were both short, sere and proud. They seemed
made of iron and old, dark clothing. The woman had a long, brooding,
oval face of burnt umber, with coarse graying black hair parted severely
in the middle and combed back austerely behind her neck without curl,
wave or ornamentation. Her mouth was sullen and sad, her lined lips
compressed. The father stood very rigid and quaint in a double-breasted
suit with padded shoulders that were much too tight for him. He was
broad and muscular on a small scale and had a magnificently curled silver
mustache on his crinkled face. His eyes were creased and rheumy,
and he appeared tragically ill at ease as he stood awkwardly with the brim
of his black felt fedora held in his two brawny laborer's hands out in front
of his wide lapels. Poverty and hard work had inflicted iniquitous damage
on both. The brother was looking for a fight. His round white cap
was cocked at an insolent tilt, his hands were clenched, and he glared at
everything in the room with a scowl of injured truculence.
The three creaked forward timidly, holding themselves close to each
other in a stealthy, funereal group and inching forward almost in step,
until they arrived at the side of the bed and stood staring down at
Yossarian. There was a gruesome and excruciating silence that threatened
to endure forever. Finally Yossarian was unable to bear it any
longer and cleared his throat. The old man spoke at last.
"He looks terrible," he said.
"He's sick, Pa."
"Giuseppe," said the mother, who had seated herself in a chair with
her veiny fingers clasped in her lap.
"My name is Yossarian," Yossarian said.
"His name is Yossarian, Ma. Yossarian, don't you recognize me? I'm
your brother John. Don't you know who I am?"
"Sure I do. You're my brother John."
"He does recognize me! Pa, he knows who I am. Yossarian, here's
Papa. Say hello to Papa."
"Hello, Papa," said Yossarian.
"Hello, Giuseppe."
"His name is Yossarian, Pa."
"I can't get over how terrible he looks," the father said.
"He's very sick, Pa. The doctor says he's going to die."
"I didn't know whether to believe the doctor or not," the father said.
"You know how crooked those guys are."
"Giuseppe," the mother said again, in a soft, broken chord of muted
anguish.
"His name is Yossarian, Ma. She don't remember things too good
any more. How're they treating you in here, kid? They treating you
pretty good?"
"Pretty good," Yossarian told him ..
"That's good. Just don't let anybody in here push you around.
You're just as good as anybody else in here even though you are Italian.
You've got rights, too."
Yossarian winced and closed his eyes so that he would not have to
look at his brother John. He began to feel sick.
"Now see how terrible he looks," the father observed.
"Giuseppe," the mother said.
"Ma, his name is Yossarian," the brother interrupted her impatiently.
"Can't you remember?"
"It's all right," Yossarian interrupted him. "She can call me Giuseppe
if she wants to."
"Giuseppe," she said to him.
"Don't worry, Yossarian," the brother said. "Everything is going to
be all right."
"Don't worry, Ma," Yossarian said. "Everything is going to be all
right."
"Did you have a priest?" the brother wanted to know.
"Yes," Yossarian lied, wincing again.
"That's good," the brother decided. "Just as long as you're getting
everything you've got coming to you. We came all the way from New
York. We were afraid we wouldn't get here in time."
"In time for what?"
"In time to see you before you died."
"What difference would it make?"
"We didn't want you to die by yourself."
"What difference would it make?"
"He must be getting delirious," the brother said. "He keeps saying
the same thing over and over again."
"That's really very funny," the old man replied. "All the time I
thought his name was Giuseppe, and now I find out his name is Yossarian.
That's really very funny."
"Ma, make him feel good," the brother urged. "Say something to
cheer him up."
"Giuseppe."
"It's not Giuseppe, Ma. It's Yossarian."
"What difference does it make?" the mother answered in the same
mourning tone, without looking up. "He's dying."
Her tumid eyes filled with tears and she began to cry, rocking back and
forth slowly in her chair with her hands lying in her lap like fallen moths.
Yossarian was afraid she would start wailing. The father and brother
began crying also. Yossarian remembered suddenly why they were all crying,
and he began crying too. A doctor Yossarian had never seen before
stepped inside the room and told the visitors courteously that they had to
go. The father drew himself up formally to say goodbye.
"Giuseppe," he began.
"Yossarian," corrected the son.
"Yossarian," said the father.
"Giuseppe," corrected Yossarian.
"Soon you're going to die."
Yossarian began to cry again. The doctor threw him a dirty look
from the rear of the room, and Yossarian made himself stop.
The father continued solemnly with his head lowered. "When you
talk to the man upstairs," he said, "I want you to tell Him something
for me. Tell Him it ain't right for people to die when they're young. I
mean it. Tell Him if they got to die at all, they got to die when they're
old. I want you to tell Him that. I don't think He knows it ain't right,
because He's supposed to be good and it's been going on for a long,
long time. Okay?"
"And don't let anybody up there push you around," the brother
advised. "You'll be just as good as anybody else in heaven, even though
you are Italian."
"Dress warm," said the mother, who seemed to know.

19. Colonel Cathcart

Colonel Cathcart was a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of
thirty-six who lumbered when he walked and wanted to be a general.
He was dashing and dejected, poised and chagrined. He was complacent
and insecure, daring in the administrative stratagems he employed
to bring himself to the attention of his superiors and craven in his concern
that his schemes might all backfire. He was handsome and unattractive,
a swashbuckling, beefy, conceited man who was putting on fat
and was tormented chronically by prolonged seizures of apprehension.
Colonel Cathcart was conceited because he was a full colonel with a
combat command at the age of only thirty-six; and Colonel Cathcart
was dejected because although he was already thirty-six he was still
only a full colonel.
Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure
his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence
was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age
who were doing the same thing even better. The fact that there were
thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained the
rank of major enlivened him with foppish delight in his own remarkable
worth; on the other hand, the fact that there were men of his own
age and younger who were already generals contaminated him with an
agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his fingernails with an
unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than Hungry Joe's.
Colonel Cathcart was a very large, pouting, broad-shouldered man
with close-cropped curly dark hair that was graying at the tips and an
ornate cigarette holder that he purchased the day before he arrived in
Pianosa to take command of his group. He displayed the cigarette
holder grandly on every occasion and had learned to manipulate it
adroitly. Unwittingly, he had discovered deep within himself a fertile
aptitude for smoking with a cigarette holder. As far as he could tell, his
was the only cigarette holder in the whole Mediterranean theater of
operations, and the thought was both flattering and disquieting. He
had no doubts at all that someone as debonair and intellectual as
General Peckem approved of his smoking with a cigarette holder, even
though the two were in each other's presence rather seldom, which in
a way was very lucky, Colonel Cathcart recognized with relief, since
General Peckem might not have approved of his cigarette holder at all.
When such misgivings assailed Colonel Cathcart, he choked back a sob
and wanted to throw the damned thing away, but he was restrained by
his, unswerving conviction that the cigarette holder never failed to
embellish his masculine, martial physique with a high gloss of sophisticated
heroism that illuminated him to dazzling advantage among all
the other full colonels in the American Army with whom he was in
competition. Although how could he be sure?
Colonel Cathcart was indefatigable that way, an industrious, intense,
dedicated military tactician who calculated day and night in the service
of himself. He was his own sarcophagus, a bold and infallible diplomat
who was always berating himself disgustedly for all the chances he had
missed and kicking himself regretfully for all the errors he had made. He
was tense, irritable, bitter and smug. He was a valorous opportunist ~ho
pounced hoggishly upon every opportunity Colonel Korn discovered for
him and trembled in damp despair immediately afterward at the possible
consequences he might suffer. He collected rumors greedily and
treasured gossip. He believed all the news he heard and had faith in
none. He was on the alert constantly for every signal, shrewdly sensitive
to relationships and situations that did not exist. He was someone in the
know who was always striving pathetically to find out what was going on.
He was a blustering, intrepid bully who brooded inconsolably over the
terrible ineradicable impressions he knew he kept making on people of
prominence who were scarcely aware that he was even alive.
Everybody was persecuting him. Colonel Cathcart lived by his wits
in an unstable, arithmetical world of black eyes and feathers in his
cap, of overwhelming imaginary triumphs and catastrophic imaginary
defeats. He oscillated hourly between anguish and exhilaration, multiplying
fantastically the grandeur of his victories and exaggerating tragically
the seriousness of his defeats. Nobody ever caught him napping.
If word reached him that General Dreedle or General Peckem had been
seen smiling, frowning, or doing neither, he could not make himself rest
until he had found an acceptable interpretation and grumbled mulishly
until Colonel Korn persuaded him to relax and take things easy.
Lieutenant Colonel Korn was a loyal, indispensable ally who got on
Colonel Cathcart's nerves. Colonel Cathcart pledged eternal gratitude
to Colonel Korn for the ingenious moves he devised and was furious
with him afterward when he realized they might not work. Colonel
Cathcart was greatly indebted to Colonel Korn and did not like him at
all. The two were very close. Colonel Cathcart was jealous of Colonel
Korn's intelligence and had to remind himself often that Colonel Korn
was still only a lieutenant colonel, even though he was almost ten years
older than Colonel Cathcart, and that Colonel Korn had obtained his
education at a state university. Colonel Cathcart bewailed the miserable
fate that had given him for an invaluable assistant someone as
common as Colonel Korn. It was degrading to have to depend so thoroughly
on a person who had been educated at a state university. If
someone did have to become indispensable to him, Colonel Cathcart
lamented, it could just as easily have been someone wealthy and well
groomed, someone from a better family who was more mature than
Colonel Korn and who did not treat Colonel Cathcart's desire to
become a general as frivolously as Colonel Cathcart secretly suspected
Colonel Korn secretly did.
Colonel Cathcart wanted to be a general so desperately he was willing
to try anything, even religion, and he summoned the chaplain to
his office late one morning the week after he had raised the number of
missions to sixty and pointed abruptly down toward his desk to his
copy of The Saturday Evening Post. The colonel wore his khaki shirt
collar wide open, exposing a shadow of tough black bristles of beard on
his egg-white neck, and had a spongy hanging underlip. He was a person
who never tanned, and he kept out of the sun as much as possible
to avoid burning. The colonel was more than a head taller than the
chaplain and over twice as broad, and his swollen, overbearing authority
made the chaplain feel frail and sickly by contrast.
"Take a look, Chaplain," Colonel Cathcart directed, screwing a cigarette
into his holder and seating himself affluently in the swivel chair
behind his desk. "Let me know what you think."
The chaplain looked down at the open magazine compliantly and
saw an editorial spread dealing with an American bomber group in
England whose chaplain said prayers in the briefing room before each
mission. The chaplain almost wept with happiness when he realized
the colonel was not going to holler at him. The two had hardly spoken
since the tumultuous evening Colonel Cathcart had thrown him out of
the officers' club at General Dreedle's bidding after Chief White
Halfoat had punched Colonel Moodus in the nose. The chaplain's initial
fear had been that the colonel intended reprimanding him for having
gone back into the officers' club without permission the evening
before. He had gone there with Yossarian and Dunbar after the two
had come unexpectedly to his tent in the clearing in the woods to ask
him to join them. Intimidated as he was by Colonel Cathcart, he nevertheless
found it easier to brave his displeasure than to decline the
thoughtful invitation of his two new friends, whom he had met on one
of his hospital visits just a few weeks before and who had worked
so effectively to insulate him against the myriad social vicissitudes
involved in his official duty to live on closest terms of familiarity with
more than nine hundred unfamiliar officers and enlisted men who
thought him an odd duck.
The chaplain glued his eyes to the pages of the magazine. He studied
each photograph twice and read the captions intently as he organized
his response to the colonel's question into a grammatically
complete sentence that he rehearsed and reorganized in his mind a
considerable number of times before he was able finally to muster the
courage to reply.
"I think that saying prayers before each mission is a very moral and
highly laudatory procedure, sir," he offered timidly, and waited.
"Yeah," said the colonel. "But 1 want to know if you think they'll
work here."
"Yes, sir," answered the chaplain after a few moments. "I should
think they would."
"Then I'd like to give it a try." The colonel's ponderous, farinaceous
cheeks were tinted suddenly with glowing patches of enthusiasm. He rose
to his feet and began walking around excitedly. "Look how much good
they've done for these people in England. Here's a picture of a colonel in
The Saturday Evening Post whose chaplain conducts prayers before each
mission. If the prayers work for him, they should work for us. Maybe if
we say prayers, they'll put my picture in The Saturday Evening Post."
The colonel sat down again and smiled distantly in lavish contemplation.
The chaplain had no hint of what he was expected to say next.
With a pensive expression on his oblong, rather pale face, he allowed
his gaze to settle on several of the high bushels filled with red plum
tomatoes that stood in rows against each of the walls. He pretended to
concentrate on a reply. After a while he realized that he was staring at
rows and rows of bushels of red plum tomatoes and grew so intrigued
by the question of what bushels brimming with red plum tomatoes
were doing in a group commander's office that he forgot completely
about the discussion of prayer meetings until Colonel Cathcart, in a
genial digression, inquired:
"Would you like to buy some, Chaplain? They come right off the
farm Colonel Korn and I have up in the hills. I can let you have a
bushel wholesale."
"Oh, no, sir; I don't think so."
"That's quite all right," the colonel assured him liberally. "You don't
have to. Milo is glad to snap up all we can produce. These were picked
only yesterday. Notice how firm and ripe they are, like a young girl's
breasts."
The chaplain blushed, and the colonel understood at once that he
had made a mistake. He lowered his head in shame, his cumbersome
face burning. His fingers felt gross and unwieldy. He hated the chaplain
venomously for being a chaplain and making a coarse blunder out
of an observation that in any other circumstances, he knew, would have
been considered witty and urbane. He tried miserably to recall some
means of extricating them both from their devastating embarrassment.
He recalled instead that the chaplain was only a captain, and he
straightened at once with a shocked and outraged gasp. His cheeks
grew tight with fury at the thought that he had just been duped into
humiliation by a man who was almost the same age as he was and still
only a captain, and he swung upon the chaplain avengingly with a look
of such murderous antagonism that the chaplain began to tremble.
The colonel punished him sadistically with a long, glowering, malignant,
hateful, silent stare.
"We were speaking about something else," he reminded the chaplain
cuttingly at last. "We were not speaking about the firm, ripe
breasts of young girls but about something else entirely. We were
speaking about conducting religious services in the briefing room
before each mission. Is there any reason why we can't?"
"No, sir," the chaplain mumbled.
"Then we'll begin with this afternoon's mission." The colonel's
hostility softened gradually as he applied himself to details. "Now, I
want you to give a lot of thought to the kind of prayers we're going to
say. I don't want anything heavy or sad. I'd like you to keep it light and
snappy, something that will send the boys out feeling pretty good. Do
you know what I mean? I don't want any of this Kingdom of God or
Valley of Death stuff. That's all too negative. What are you making
such a sour face for?"
"I'm sorry, sir," the chaplain stammered. "I happened to be thinking
of the Twenty-third Psalm just as you said that."
"How does that one go?"
"That's the one you were just referring to, sir. 'The Lord is my
shepherd; 1-'"
"That's the one I was just referring to. It's out. What else have you
got?"
"'Save me, 0 God; for the waters are come in unto-'"
"No waters," the colonel decided, blowing ruggedly into his cigarette
holder after flipping the butt down into his combed-brass ash
tray. "Why don't we try something musical? How about the harps on
the willows?"
"That has the rivers of Babylon in it, sir," the chaplain replied.
"' ... there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.'''
"Zion? Let's forget about that one right now. I'd like to know how
that one even got in there. Haven't you got anything humorous that
stays away from waters and valleys and God? I'd like to keep away from
the subject of religion altogether if we can."
The chaplain was apologetic. "I'm sorry, sir, but just about all the
prayers I know are rather somber in tone and make at least some passing
reference to God."
"Then let's get some new ones. The men are already doing enough
bitching about the missions I send them on without our rubbing it in
with any sermons about God or death or Paradise. Why can't we take
a more positive approach? Why can't we all pray for something good,
like a tighter bomb pattern, for example? Couldn't we pray for a
tighter bomb pattern?"
"Well, yes, sir, I suppose so," the chaplain answered hesitantly. "You
wouldn't even need me if that's all you wanted to do. You could do that
yourself."
"I know I could," the colonel responded tartly. "But what do you
think you're here for? I could shop for my own food, too, but that's
Milo's job, and that's why he's doing it for every group in the area. Your
job is to lead us in prayer, and from now on you're going to lead us in
a prayer for a tighter bomb pattern before every mission. Is that clear?
I think a tighter bomb pattern is something really worth praying for. It
will be a feather in all our caps with General Peckem. General Peckem
feels it makes a much nicer aerial photograph when the bombs explode
close together."
"General Peckem, sir?"
"That's right, Chaplain," the colonel replied, chuckling paternally at
the chaplain's look of puzzlement. "I wouldn't want this to get around,
but it looks like General Dreedle is finally on the way out and that
General Peckem is slated to replace him. Frankly, I'm not going to be
sorry to see that happen. General Peckem is a very good man, and I
think we'll be all much better off under him. On the other hand, it
might never take place, and we'd still remain under General Dreedle.
Frankly, I wouldn't be sorry to see that happen either, because General
Dreedle is another very good man, and I think we'll all be much better
off under him too. I hope you're going to keep all this under your
hat, Chaplain. I wouldn't want either one to get the idea I was throwing
my support on the side of the other."
"Yes, sir."
"That's good," the colonel exclaimed, ,and stood up jovially. "But
all this gossip isn't getting us into The Saturday Evening Post, eh,
Chaplain? Let's see what kind of procedure we can evolve. Incidentally,
Chaplain, not a word about this beforehand to Colonel Korn. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
Colonel Cathcart began tramping back and forth reflectively in the
narrow corridors left between his bushels of plum tomatoes and the
desk and wooden chairs in the center of the room. "I suppose we'll
have to keep you waiting outside until the briefing is over, because all
that information is classified. We can slip you in while Major Danby is
synchronizing the watches. I don't think there's anything secret about
the right time. We'll allocate about a minute and a half for you in the
schedule. Will a minute and a half be enough?"
"Yes, sir. If it doesn't include the time necessary to excuse the atheists
from the room and admit the enlisted men."
Colonel Cathcart stopped in his tracks. "What atheists?" he bellowed
defensively, his whole manner changing in a flash to one of virtuous
and belligerent denial. "There are no atheists in my outfit!
Atheism is against the law, isn't it?"
"No, sir."
"It isn't?" The colonel was surprised. "Then it's un-American, isn't
it?"
"I'm not sure, sir," answered the chaplain.
"Well, I am!" the colonel declared. "I'm not going to disrupt our
religious services just to accommodate a bunch of lousy atheists.
They're getting no special privileges from me. They can stay right
where they are and pray with the rest of us. And what's all this about
enlisted men? Just how the hell do they get into this act?"
The chaplain felt his face flush. "I'm sorry, sir. I just assumed you
would want the enlisted men to be present, since they would be going
along on the same mission."
"Well, 1 don't. They've got a God and a chaplain of their own,
haven't they?"
"No, sir."
"What are you talking about? You mean they pray to the same God
we do?"
"Yes, sir."
"And He listens?"
"I think so, sir."
"Well, I'll be damned," remarked the colonel, and he snorted to
himself in quizzical amusement. His spirits drooped suddenly a
moment later, and he ran his hand nervously over his short, black,
graying curls. "Do you really think it's a good idea to let the enlisted
men in?" he asked with concern.
"I should think it only proper, sir."
"I'd like to keep them out," confided the colonel, and began cracking
his knuckles savagely as he wandered back and forth. "Oh, don't get
me wrong, Chaplain. It isn't that 1 think the enlisted men are dirty,
common and inferior. It's that we just don't have enough room.
Frankly, though, I'd just as soon the officers and enlisted men didn't
fraternize in the briefing room. They see enough of each other during
the mission, it seems to me. Some of my very best friends are enlisted
men, you understand, but that's about as close as 1 care to let them
come. Honestly now, Chaplain, you wouldn't want your sister to marry
an enlisted man, would you?"
"My sister is an enlisted man, sir," the chaplain replied.
The colonel stopped in his tracks again and eyed the chaplain
sharply to make certain he was not being ridiculed. "Just what do you
mean by that remark, Chaplain? Are you trying to be funny?"
"Oh, no, sir," the' chaplain hastened to explain with a look of excruciating
discomfort. "She's a master sergeant in the Marines."
The colonel had never liked the chaplain and now he loathed and
distrusted him. He experienced a keen premonition of danger and
wondered if the chaplain too was plotting against him, if the chaplain's
reticent, unimpressive manner was really just a sinister disguise masking
a fiery ambition that, way down deep, was crafty and unscrupulous.
There was something funny about the chaplain, and the colonel soon
detected what it was. The chaplain was standing stiffly at attention, for
the colonel had forgotten to put him at ease. Let him stay that way, the
colonel decided vindictively, just to show him who was boss and to
safeguard himself against any loss of dignity that might devolve from
his acknowledging the omission.
Colonel Cathcart was drawn hypnotically toward the window with a
massive, dull stare of moody introspection. The enlisted men were
. always treacherous, he decided. He looked downward in mournful
gloom at the skeet-shooting range he had ordered built for the officers
on his headquarters staff, and he recalled the mortifying afternoon
General Dreedle had tongue-lashed him ruthlessly in front of Colonel
Korn and Major Danby and ordered him to throw open the range to all
the enlisted men and officers on combat duty. The skeet-shooting range
had been a real black eye for him, Colonel Cathcart was forced to conclude.
He was positive that General Dreedle had never forgotten it,
even though he was positive that General Dreedle didn't even remember
it, which was really very unjust, Colonel Cathcart lamented, since
the idea of a skeet-shooting range itself should have been a real feather
in his cap, even though it had been such a real black eye. Colonel
Cathcart was helpless to assess exactly how much ground he had gained
or lost with his goddam skeet-shooting range and wished that Colonel
Korn were in his office right then to evaluate the entire episode for him
still one more time and assuage his fears.
It was all very perplexing, all very discouraging. Colonel Cathcart
took the cigarette holder out of his mouth, stood it on end inside the
pocket of his shirt, and began gnawing on the fingernails of both hands
grievously. Everybody was against him, and he was sick to his soul that
Colonel Korn was not with him in this moment of crisis to help him
decide what to do about the prayer meetings. He had almost no faith
at all in the chaplain, who was still only a captain. "Do you think," he
asked, "that keeping the enlisted men out might interfere with our
chances of getting results?"
The chaplain hesitated, feeling himself on unfamiliar ground again.
"Yes, sir," he replied finally. "I think it's conceivable that such an action
could interfere with your chances of having the prayers for a tighter
bomb pattern answered."
"I wasn't even thinking about that!" cried the colonel, with his eyes
blinking and splashing like puddles. "You mean that God might even
decide to punish me by giving us a looser bomb pattern?"
"Yes, sir," said the chaplain. "It's conceivable He might."
"The hell with it, then," the colonel asserted in a huff of independence.
"I'm not going to set these damned prayer meetings up just to
make things worse than they are." With a scornful snicker, he settled
himself behind his desk, replaced the empty cigarette holder in his
mouth and lapsed into parturient silence for a few moments. "Now that
I think about it," he confessed, as much to himself as to the chaplain,
"having the men pray to God probably wasn't such a hot idea anyway.
The editors of The Saturday Evening Post might not have cooperated."
The colonel abandoned his project with remorse, for he had conceived
it entirely on his own and had hoped to unveil it as a striking
demonstration to everyone that he had no real need for Colonel Korn.
Once it was gone, he was glad to be rid of it, for he had been troubled
from the start by the danger of instituting the plan without first checking
it out with Colonel Korn. He heaved an immense sigh of contentment.
He had a much higher opinion of himself now that his idea was
abandoned, for he had made a very wise decision, he felt, and, most
important, he had made this wise decision 'Without consulting Colonel
Korn.
"Will that be all, sir?" asked the chaplain.
"Yeah," said Colonel Cathcart. "Unless you've got something else to
suggest."
"No, sir. Only ... "
The colonel lifted his eyes as though affronted and studied the
chaplain with aloof distrust. "Only what, Chaplain?"
"Sir," said the chaplain, "some of the men are very upset since you
raised the number of missions to sixty. They've asked me to speak to
you about it."
The colonel was silent. The chaplain's face reddened to the roots of
his sandy hair as he waited. The colonel kept him squirming a long
time with a fixed, uninterested look devoid of all emotion.
"Tell them there's a war going on," he advised finally in a flat voice.
"Thank you, sir, I will," the chaplain replied in a flood of gratitude
because the colonel had finally said something. "They were wondering
why you couldn't requisition some of the replacement crews that are
waiting in Africa to take their places and then let them go home."
"That's an administrative matter," the colonel said. "It's none of
their business." He pointed languidly toward the wall. "Help yourself
to a plum tomato, Chaplain. Go ahead, it's on me."
"Thank you, sir. Sir-"
"Don't mention it. How do you like living out there in the woods,
Chaplain? Is everything hunky-dory?"
"Yes, sir."
"That's good. You get in touch with us if you need anything."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Sir-"
"Thanks for dropping around, Chaplain. I've got some work to do
now. You'll let me know if you can think of anything for getting our
names into The Saturday Evening Post, won't you?"
"Yes, sir, I will." The chaplain braced himself with a prodigious
effort of the will and plunged ahead brazenly. "I'm particularly concerned
about the condition of one of the bombardiers, sir. Yossarian."
The colonel glanced up quickly with a start of vague recognition.
"Who?" he asked in alarm.
"Yossarian, sir."
"Yossarian?"
"Yes, sir. Yossarian. He's in a very bad way, sir. I'm afraid he won't
be able to suffer much longer without doing something desperate."
"Is that a fact, Chaplain?"
"Yes, sir. I'm afraid it is."
The colonel thought about it in heavy silence for a few moments.
"Tell him to trust in God," he advised finally.
"Thank you, sir," said the chaplain. "I will."

20. Corporal Whitcomb

The late-August morning sun was hot and steamy, and there was no
breeze on the balcony. The chaplain moved slowly. He was downcast
and burdened with self-reproach when he stepped without noise from
the colonel's office on his rubber-soled and rubber-heeled brown
shoes. He hated himself for what he construed to be his own cowardice.
He had intended to take a much stronger stand with Colonel
Cathcart on the matter of the sixty missions, to speak out with courage,
logic and eloquence on a subject about which he had begun to feel very
deeply. Instead he had failed miserably, had choked up once again in
the face of opposition from a stronger personality. It was a familiar,
ignominious experience, and his opinion of himself was low.
He choked up even more a second later when he spied Colonel
Korn's tubby monochrome figure trotting up the curved, wide, yellow
stone staircase toward him in lackadaisical haste from the great dilapidated
lobby below with its lofty walls of cracked dark marble and circular
floor of cracked grimy tile. The chaplain was even more frightened
of Colonel Korn than he was of Colonel Cathcart. The swarthy,
middle-aged lieutenant colonel with the rimless, icy glasses and faceted,
bald, domelike pate that he was always touching sensitively with the tips
of his splayed fingers disliked the chaplain and was impolite to him frequently.
He kept the chaplain in a constant state of terror with his curt,
derisive tongue and his knowing, cynical eyes that the chaplain was
never brave enough to meet for more than an accidental second.
Inevitably, the chaplain's attention, as he cowered meekly before him,
focused on Colonel Korn's midriff, where the shirttails bunching up
from inside his sagging belt and ballooning down over his waist gave
him an appearance of slovenly girth and made him seem inches shorter
than his middle height. Colonel Korn was an untidy disdainful man
with an oily skin and deep, hard lines running almost straight down
from his nose between his crepuscular jowls and his square, clefted chin.
His face was dour, and he glanced at the chaplain without recognition
as the two drew close on the staircase and prepared to pass.
"Hiya, Father," he said tonelessly without looking at the chaplain.
"How's it going?"
"Good morning, sir," the chaplain replied, discerning wisely that
Colonel Korn expected nothing more in the way of a response.
Colonel Korn was proceeding up the stairs without slackening his
pace, and the chaplain resisted the temptation to remind him again
that he was not a Catholic but an Anabaptist, and that it was therefore
neither necessary nor correct to address him as Father. He was almost
certain now that Colonel Korn remembered and that calling him
Father with a look of such bland innocence was just another one
of Colonel Korn's methods of taunting him because he was only an
Anabaptist.
Colonel Korn halted without warning when he was almost by and
came whirling back down upon the chaplain with a glare of infuriated
suspicion. The chaplain was petrified.
"What are you doing with that plum tomato, Chaplain?" Colonel
Korn demanded roughly.
The chaplain looked down his arm with surprise at the plum tomato
Colonel Cathcart had invited him to take. "I got it in Colonel
Cathcart's office, sir," he managed to reply.
"Does the colonel know you took it?"
"Yes, sir. He gave it to me."
"Oh, in that case I guess it's okay," Colonel Korn said, mollified. He
smiled without warmth, jabbing the crumpled folds of his shirt back
down inside his trousers with his thumbs. His eyes glinted keenly with
a private and satisfying mischief. "What did Colonel Cathcart want to
see you about, Father?" he asked suddenly.
The chaplain was tongue-tied with indecision for a moment. "I
don't think I ought-"
"Saying prayers to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post?"
The chaplain almost smiled. "Yes, sir."
Colonel Korn was enchanted with his own intuition. He laughed
disparagingly. "You know, I was afraid he'd begin thinking about something
so ridiculous as soon as he saw this week's Saturday Evening Post.
I hope you succeeded in showing him what an atrocious idea it is."
"He has decided against it, sir."
"That's good. I'm glad you convinced him that the editors of The
Saturday Evening Post were not likely to run that same story twice just
to give some publicity to some obscure colonel. How are things in the
wilderness, Father? Are you able to manage out there?"
"Yes, sir. Everything is working out."
"That's good. I'm happy to hear you have nothing to complain
about. Let us know if you need anything to make you comfortable. We
all want you to have a good time out there."
"Thank you, sir. I will."
Noise of a growing stir rose from the lobby below. It was almost
lunchtime, and the earliest arrivals were drifting into the headquarters
mess halls, the enlisted men and officers separating into different dining
halls on facing sides of the archaic rotunda. Colonel Korn stopped
smiling.
"You had lunch with us here just a day or so ago, didn't you, Father?"
he asked meaningfully.
"Yes, sir. The day before yesterday."
"That's what I thought," Colonel Korn said, and paused to let his
point sink in. "Well, take it easy, Father. I'll see you around when it's
time for you to eat here again."
"Thank you, sir."
The chaplain was not certain at which of the five officers' and five
enlisted men's mess hall~ he was scheduled to have lunch that day, for
the system of rotation worked out for him by Colonel Korn was complicated,
and he had forgotten his records back in his tent. The chaplain
was the only officer attached to Group Headquarters who did not
reside in the moldering red stone Group Headquarters building itself
or in any of the smaller satellite structures that rose about the grounds
in disjuncted relationship. The chaplain lived in a clearing in the
woods about four miles away between the officers' club and the first of
the four squadron areas that stretched away from Group Headquarters
in a distant line. The chaplain lived alone in a spacious, square tent that
was also his office. Sounds of revelry traveled to him at night from the
officers' club and kept him awake often as he turned and tossed on his
cot in passive, half-voluntary exile. He was not able to gauge the effect
of the mild pills he took occasionally to help him sleep and felt guilty
about for days afterward.
The only one who lived with the chaplain in his clearing in the
woods was Corporal Whitcomb, his assistant. Corporal Whitcomb, an
atheist, was a disgruntled subordinate who felt he could do the chaplain's
job much better than the chaplain was doing it and viewed himself,
therefore, as an underprivileged victim of social inequity. He lived
in a tent of his own as spacious and square as the chaplain's. He was
openly rude and contemptuous to the chaplain once he discovered that
the chaplain would let him get away with it. The borders of the two
tents in the clearing stood no more than four or five feet apart.
It was Colonel Korn who had mapped out this way of life for the
chaplain. One good reason for making the chaplain live outside the
Group Headquarters building was Colonel Korn's theory that dwelling
in a tent as most of his parishioners did would bring him into closer
communication with them. Another good reason was the fact that having
the chaplain around Headquarters all the time made the other officers
uncomfortable. It was one thing to maintain liaison with the Lord,
and they were all in favor of that; it was something else, though,
to have Him hanging around twenty-four hours a day. All in all, as
Colonel Korn described it to Major Danby, the jittery and goggle-eyed
group operations officer, the chaplain had it pretty soft; he had little
more to do than listen to the troubles of others, bury the dead, visit the
bedridden and conduct religious services. And there were not so many
dead for him to bury any more, Colonel Korn pointed out, since opposition
from German fighter planes had virtually ceased and since close
to ninety per cent of what fatalities there still were, he estimated, perished
behind the enemy lines or disappeared inside clouds, where the
chaplain had nothing to do with disposing of the remains. The religious
services were certainly no great strain, either, since they were
conducted only once a week at the Group Headquarters building and
were attended by very few of the men.
Actually, the chaplain was learning to love it in his clearing in the
woods. Both he and Corporal Whitcomb had been provided with
every convenience so that neither might ever plead discomfort as a
basis for seeking permission to return to the Headquarters building.
The chaplain rotated his breakfasts, lunches and dinners in separate
sets among the eight squadron mess halls and ate every fifth meal in
the enlisted men's mess at Group Headquarters and every tenth meal
at the officers' mess there. Back home in Wisconsin the chaplain had
been very fond of gardening, and his heart welled with a glorious
impression of fertility and fruition each time he contemplated the low,
prickly boughs of the stunted trees and the waist-high weeds and thickets
by which he was almost walled in. In the spring he had longed to
plant begonias and zinnias in a narrow bed around his tent but he had
been deterred by his fear of Corporal Whitcomb's rancor. The chaplain
relished the privacy and isolation of his verdant surroundings and
the reveries and meditation that living there fostered. Fewer people
came to him with their troubles than formerly, and he allowed himself
a measure of gratitude for that too. The chaplain did not mix freely and
was not comfortable in conversation. He missed his wife and his three
small children, and she missed him.
What displeased Corporal Whitcomb most about the chaplain,
apart from the fact that the chaplain believed in God, was his lack of
initiative and aggressiveness. Corporal Whitcomb regarded the low
attendance at religious services as a sad reflection of his own status. His
mind germinated feverishly with challenging new ideas for sparking
the great spiritual revival of which he dreamed himself the architect box
lunches, church socials, form letters to the families of men killed
and injured in combat, censorship, Bingo. But the chaplain blocked
him. Corporal Whitcomb bridled with vexation beneath the chaplain's
restraint, for he spied room for improvement everywhere. It was people
like the chaplain, he concluded, who were responsible for giving
religion such a bad name and making pariahs out of them both. Unlike
the chaplain, Corporal Whitcomb detested the seclusion of the clearing
in the woods. One of the first things he intended to do after he
deposed the chaplain was move back into the Group Headquarters
,building, where he could be right in the thick of things.
When the chaplain drove back into the clearing after leaving Colonel
Korn, Corporal Whitcomb was outside in the muggy haze talking
in conspiratorial tones to a strange chubby man in a maroon corduroy
bathrobe and gray flannel pajamas. The chaplain recognized the bathrobe
and pajamas as official hospital attire. Neither of the two men gave
him any sign of recognition. The stranger's gums had been painted
purple; his corduroy bathrobe was decorated in back with a picture of
a B-25 nosing 'through orange bursts of flak and in front with six neat
rows of tiny bombs signifying sixty combat missions flown. The chaplain
was so struck by the sight that he stopped to stare. Both men broke
off their conversation and waited in stony silence for him to go. The
chaplain hurried inside his tent. He heard, or imagined he heard, them
tittering.
Corporal Whitcomb walked in a moment later and demanded,
"What's doing?"
"There isn't anything new," the chaplain replied with averted eyes.
"Was anyone here to see me?"
"Just that crackpot Yossarian again. He's a real troublemaker, isn't
he?"
"I'm not so sure he's a crackpot," the chaplain observed.
"That's right, take his part," said Corporal Whitcomb in an injured
tone, and stamped out.
The chaplain could not believe that Corporal Whitcomb was offended
again and had really walked out. As soon as he did realize it,
Corporal Whitcomb walked back in.
"You always side with other people," Corporal Whitcomb accused.
"You don't back up your men. That's one of the things that's wrong
with you."
"I didn't intend to side with him," the chaplain apologized. "I was
just making a statement."
"What did Colonel Cathcart want?"
"It wasn't anything important. He just wanted to discuss the possibility
of saying prayers in the briefing room before each mission."
"All right, don't tell me," Corporal Whitcomb snapped and walked
out again.
The chaplain felt terrible. No matter how considerate he tried to be,
it seemed he always managed to hurt Corporal Whitcomb's feelings.
He gazed down remorsefully and saw that the orderly forced upon him
by Colonel Korn to keep his tent clean and attend to his belongings
had neglected to shine his shoes again.
Corporal Whitcomb came back in. "You never trust me with information,"
he whined truculently. "You don't have confidence in your
men. That's another one of the things that's wrong with you."
"Yes, I do," the chaplain assured him guiltily. "I have lots of confidence
in you."
"Then how about those letters?"
"No, not now," the chaplain pleaded, cringing. "Not the letters.
Please don't bring that up again. I'll let you know if I have a change of
mind."
Corporal Whitcomb looked furious. "Is that so? Well, it's all right
for you to just sit there and shake your head while I do all the work.
Didn't you see that guy outside with all those pictures painted on his
bathrobe?"
"Is he here to see me?"
"No," Corporal Whitcomb said, and walked out.
It was hot and humid inside the tent, and the chaplain felt himself
turning damp. He listened like an unwilling eavesdropper to the muffled,
indistinguishable drone of the lowered voices outside. As he sat
inertly at the rickety bridge table that served as a desk, his lips were
closed, his eyes were blank, and his face, with its pale ochre hue and
ancient, confined clusters of minute acne pits, had the color and texture
of an uncracked almond shell. He racked his memory far same
clue to the origin of Corporal Whitcomb's bitterness toward him. In
same way he was unable to fathom, he was convinced he had done him
same unforgivable wrong. It seemed incredible that such lasting ire as
Corporal Whitcomb's could have stemmed from his rejection of Bingo
or the farm letters home to the families of the men killed in combat.
The chaplain was despondent with an acceptance of his own ineptitude.
He had intended for some weeks to have a heart-to-heart talk
with Corporal Whitcomb in order to find out what was bothering him,
but was already ashamed of what he might find out.
Outside the tent, Corporal Whitcomb snickered. The other man
chuckled. For a few precarious seconds, the chaplain tingled with a weird,
occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in
same prior time or existence. He endeavored to trap and nourish the
impression in order to predict, and perhaps even control, what incident
would occur next, but the afflatus melted away unproductively, as he had
known beforehand it would. Deja vu. The subtle, recurring confusion
between illusion and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated
the chaplain, and he knew a number of things about it. He knew,
far example, that it was called paramnesia, and he was interested as well
in such corollary optical phenomena as jamais vu, never seen, and presque
vu, almost seen. There were terrifying, sudden moments when objects,
concepts and even people that the chaplain had lived with almost all his
life inexplicably took an an unfamiliar and irregular aspect that he had
never seen before and which made them seem totally strange: jamais vu.
And there were other moments when he almost saw absolute truth in
brilliant flashes of clarity that almost came to him: presque vu. The episode
of the naked man in the tree at Snowden's funeral mystified him thoroughly.
It was not deja vu, for at the time he had experienced no sensation
of ever having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden's funeral before. It
was not jamais vu, since the apparition was not of someone, or something,
familiar appearing to him in an unfamiliar guise. And it was certainly oat
presque vu, far the chaplain did see him.

A jeep started up with a backfire directly outside and roared away.
Had the naked man in the tree at Snowden's funeral been merely a hallucination?
Or had it been a true revelation? The chaplain trembled at
the mere idea. He wanted desperately to confide in Yossarian, but each
time he thought about the occurrence he decided not to think about it
any further, although now that he did think about it he could not be
sure that he ever really had thought about it.
Corporal Whitcomb sauntered back in wearing a shiny new smirk
and leaned his elbow impertinently against the center pole of the chaplain's
tent.
"Do you know who that guy in the red bathrobe was?" he asked
boastfully. "That was a C.I.D. man with a fractured nose. He came
down here from the hospital on official business. He's conducting an
investigation. "
The chaplain raised his eyes quickly in obsequious commiseration.
"I hope you're not in any trouble. Is there anything I can do?"
"No, I'm not in any trouble," Corporal Whitcomb replied with a
grin. "You are. They're going to crack down on you for signing Washington
Irving's name to all those letters you've been signing Washington
Irving's name to. How do you like that?"
"I haven't been signing Washington Irving's name to any letters,"
said the chaplain.
"You don't have to lie to me," Corporal Whitcomb answered. "I'm
not the one you have to convince."
"But I'm not lying."
"I don't care whether you're lying or not. They're going to get you
for intercepting Major Major's correspondence, too. A lot of that stuff
is classified information."
"What correspondence?" asked the chaplain plaintively in rising
exasperation. "I've never seen any of Major Major's correspondence."
"You don't have to lie to me," Corporal Whitcomb replied. "I'm not
the one you have to convince."
"But I'm not lying!" protested the chaplain.
"I don't see why you have to shout at me," Corporal Whitcomb
retorted with an injured look. He came away from the center pole and
shook his finger at the chaplain for emphasis. "I just did you the
biggest favor anybody ever did you in your whole life, and you don't
even realize it. Every time he tries to report you to his superiors, somebody
up at the hospital censors out the details. He's been going batty
for weeks trying to turn you in. I just put a censor's okay on his letter
without even reading it. That will make a very good impression for you
up at C.I.D. headquarters. It will let them know that we're not the least
bit afraid to have the whole truth about you come out."
The chaplain was reeling with confusion. "But you aren't authorized
to censor letters, are you?"
"Of course not," Corporal Whitcomb answered. "Only officers are
ever authorized to do that. I censored it in your name."
"But I'm not authorized to censor letters either. Am I?"
"I took care of that for you, too," Corporal Whitcomb assured him.
"I signed somebody else's name for you."
"Isn't that forgery?"
"Oh, don't worry about that either. The only one who might complain
in a case of forgery is the person whose name you forged, and
I looked out for your interests by picking a dead man. I used
Washington Irving's name." Corporal Whitcomb scrutinized the chaplain's
face closely for some sign of rebellion and then breezed ahead
confidently with concealed irony. "That was pretty quick thinking on
my part, wasn't it?"
"I don't know," the chaplain wailed softly in a quavering voice,
squinting with grotesque contortions of anguish and incomprehension.
"I don't think I understand all you've been telling me. How will it
make a good impression for me if you signed Washington Irving's
name instead of my own?"
"Because they're convinced that you are Washington Irving. Don't
you see? They'll know it was you."
"But isn't that the very belief we want to dispel? Won't this help
them prove it?"
"If I thought you were going to be so stuffy about it, I wouldn't even
have tried to help," Corporal Whitcomb declared indignantly, and
walked out. A second later 1;lewalked back in. "I just did you the
biggest favor anybody ever did you in your whole life and you don't
even know it. You don't know how to show your appreciation. That's
another one of the things that's wrong with you."
"I'm sorry," the chaplain apologized contritely. "I really am sorry.
It's just that I'm so completely stunned by all you're telling me that I
don't even realize what I'm saying. I'm really very grateful to you."
"Then how about letting me send out those form letters?" Corporal
Whitcomb demanded immediately. "Can I begin working on the first
drafts?"
The chaplain's jaw dropped in astonishment. "No, no," he groaned.
"Not now."
Corporal Whitcomb was incensed. "I'm the best friend you've got
and you don't even know it," he asserted belligerently, and walked out
of the chaplain's tent. He walked back in. "I'm on your side and you
don't even realize it. Don't you know what serious trouble you're in?
That C.I.D. man has gone rushing back to the hospital to write a
brand-new report on you about that tomato."
"What tomato?" the chaplain asked, blinking.
"The plum tomato you were hiding in your hand when you first
showed up here. There it is. The tomato you're still holding in your
hand right this very minute!"
The chaplain unclenched his fingers with surprise and saw that
he was still holding the plum tomato he had obtained in Colonel
Cathcart's office. He set it down quickly on the bridge table. "I got this
tomato from Colonel Cathcart," he said, and was struck by how ludicrous
his explanation sounded. "He insisted 1 take it."
"You don't have to lie to me," Corporal Whitcomb answered. "I
don't care whether you stole it from him or not."
"Stole it?" the chaplain exclaimed with amazement. "Why should 1
want to steal a plum tomato?"
"That's exactly what had us both stumped," said Corporal Whitcomb.
"And then the C.I.D. man figured out you might have some
important secret papers hidden away inside it."
The chaplain sagged limply beneath the mountainous weight of his
despair. "I don't have any important secret papers hidden away inside
it," he stated simply. "I didn't even want it to begin with. Here, you can
have it. Take it and see for yourself."
"I don't want it."
"Please take it away," the chaplain pleaded in a voice that was barely
audible. "I want to be rid of it."
"I don't want it," Corporal Whitcomb snapped again, and stalked
out with an angry face, suppressing a smile of great jubilation at having
forged a powerful new ,alliance with the C.I.D. man and at having
succeeded again in convincing the chaplain that he was really displeased.
Poor Whitcomb, sighed the chaplain, and blamed himself for his
assistant's malaise. He sat mutely in a ponderous, stultifying melancholy,
waiting expectantly for Corporal Whitcomb to walk back in. He
was disappointed as he heard the peremptory crunch of Corporal
Whitcomb's footsteps recede into silence. There was nothing he
wanted to do next. He decided to pass up lunch for a Milky Way and a
Baby Ruth from his foot locker and a few swallows of lukewarm water
from his canteen. He felt himself surrounded by dense, overwhelming
fogs of possibilities in which he could perceive no glimmer of light. He
dreaded what Colonel Cathcart would think when the news that he
was suspected of being Washington Irving was brought to him, then
fell to fretting over what Colonel Cathcart was already thinking about
him for even having broached the subject of the sixty missions. There
was so much unhappiness in the world, he reflected, bowing his head
dismally beneath the tragic thought, and there was nothing he could
do about anybody's, least of all his own.

21. General Dreedle

Colonel Cathcart was not thinking anything at all about the chaplain,
but was tangled up in a brand-new, menacing problem of his own:
Yossarian!
Yossarian! The mere sound of that execrable, ugly name made his
blood run cold and his breath come in labored gasps. The chaplain's
first mention of the name Yossarian! had tolled deep in his memory like
a portentous gong. As soon as the latch of the door had clicked shut,
the whole humiliating recollection of the naked man in formation
came cascading down upon him in a mortifying, choking flood of
stinging details. He began to perspire and tremble. There was a sinister
and unlikely coincidence exposed that was too diabolical in implication
to be anything less than the most hideous of omens. The name
of the man who had stood naked in ranks that day to receive his
Distinguished Flying Cross from General Dreedle had also been --
Yossarian! And now it was a man named Yossarian who was threatening
to make trouble over the sixty missions he had just ordered the men in
his group to fly. Colonel Cathcart wondered gloomily if it was the
same Yossarian.
He climbed to his feet with an air of intolerable woe and began
moving about his office. He felt himself in the presence of the mysterious.
The naked man in formation, he conceded cheerlessly, had been
a real black eye for him. So had the tampering with the bomb line
before the mission to Bologna and the seven-day delay in destroying
the bridge at Ferrara, even though destroying the bridge at Ferrara
finally, he remembered with glee, had been a real feather in his cap,
although losing a plane there the second time around, he recalled in
dejection, had been another black eye, even though he had won another
real feather in his cap by getting a medal approved for the
bombardier who had gotten him the real black eye in the first place
by going around over the target twice. That bombardier's name, he
remembered suddenly with another stupefying shock, had also been
Yossarian! Now there were three! His viscous eyes bulged with astonishment and he whipped himself around in alarm to see what was taking
place behind him. A moment ago there had been no Yossarians in
his life; now they were multiplying like hobgoblins. He tried to make
himself grow calm. Yossarian was not a common name; perhaps there
were not really three Yossarians but only two Yossarians, or maybe
even only one Yossarian -- but that really made no difference! The colonel
was still in grave peril. Intuition warned him that he was drawing close
to some immense and inscrutable cosmic climax, and his broad, meaty,
towering frame tingled from head to toe at the thought that Yossarian,
whoever he would eventually turn out to be, was destined to serve as
his nemesis.
Colonel Cathcart was not superstitious, but he did believe in omens
and he sat right back down behind his desk and made a cryptic notation
on his memorandum pad to look into the whole suspicious business of
the Yossarians right away. He wrote his reminder to himself in a heavy
and decisive hand, amplifying it sharply with a series of coded punctuation
marks and underlining the whole message twice, so that it read:

Yossarian!!!(?)!

The colonel sat back when he had finished and was extremely
pleased with himself for the prompt action he had just taken to meet
this sinister crisis. Yossarian -- the very sight of the name made him
shudder. There were so many esses in it. It just had to be subversive. It
was like the word subversive itself. It was like seditious and insidious too,
and like socialist, suspicious, fascist and Communist. It was an odious, alien,
distasteful name, a name that just did not inspire confidence. It was not
at all like such clean, crisp, honest, American names as Cathcart,
Peckem and Dreedle.
Colonel Cathcart rose slowly and began drifting about his office
again. Almost unconsciously, he picked up a plum tomato from the top ,
of one of the bushels and took a voracious bite. He made a wry face at
once and threw the rest of the plum tomato into his wastebasket. The
colonel did not like plum tomatoes, not even when they were his own,
and these were not even his own. These had been purchased in different
market places all over Pianosa by Colonel Korn under various
identities, moved up to the colonel's farmhouse in the hills in the dead
of night, and transported down to Group Headquarters the next morning
for sale to Milo, who paid Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn premium
prices for them. Colonel Cathcart often wondered if what they
were doing with the plum tomatoes was legal, but Colonel Korn said
it was, and he tried not to brood about it too often. He had no way of
knowing whether or not the house in the hills was legal, either, since
Colonel Korn had made all the arrangements. Colonel Cathcart did
not know if he owned the house or rented it, from whom he had
acquired it or how much, if anything, it was costing. Colonel Korn was
the lawyer, and if Colonel Korn assured him that fraud, extortion, currency
manipulation, embezzlement, income tax evasion and black-market
speculations were legal, Colonel Cathcart was in no position to
disagree with him.
All Colonel Cathcart knew about his house in the hills was that he
had such a house and hated it. He was never so bored as when spending
there the two or three days every other week necessary to sustain
the illusion that his damp and drafty stone farmhouse in the hills was a
golden palace of carnal delights. Officers' clubs everywhere pulsated
with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking and
sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most
beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily
satisfied Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses.
o such private nights of ecstasy or hushed-up drinking and sex orgies
ever occurred. They might have occurred if either General Dreedle or
General Peckem had once evinced an interest in taking part in orgies
with him, but neither ever did, and the colonel was certainly not going
to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless
there was something in it for him.
The coloI1eldreaded his dank lonely nights at his farmhouse and the
dull, uneventful days. He had much more fun back at Group, browbeating
everyone he wasn't afraid of. However, as Colonel Korn kept reminding
him, there was not much glamour in having a farmhouse in the hills
if he never used it. He drove off to his farmhouse each time in a mood of
self-pity. He carried a shotgun in his jeep and spent the monotonous
hours there shooting it at birds and at the plum tomatoes that did grow
there in untended rows and were too much trouble to harvest.
Among those officers of inferior rank toward whom Colonel Cathcart
still deemed it prudent to show respect, he included Major -- de
Coverley, even though he did not want to and was not sure he even had
to. Major -- de Coverley was as great a mystery to him as he was to
Major Major and to everyone else who ever took notice of him.
Colonel Cathcart had no idea whether to look up or look down in his
attitude toward Major -- de Coverley. Major -- de Coverley was
only a major, even though he was ages older than Colonel Cathcart; at
the same time, so many other people treated Major -- de Coverley
with such profound and fearful veneration that Colonel Cathcart had a
hunch they might all know something. Major -- de Coverley was an
ominous, incomprehensible presence who kept him constantly on edge
and of whom even Colonel Korn tended to be wary. Everyone was
afraid of him, and no one knew why. No one even knew Major -- de
Coverley's first name, because no one had ever had the temerity to ask
him. Colonel Cathcart knew that Major -- de Coverley was away
and he rejoiced in his absence until it occurred to him that Major --
de Coverley might be away somewhere conspiring against him, and
then he wished that Major -- de Coverley were back in his squadron
where he belonged so that he could be watched.
In a little while Colonel Cathcart's arches began to ache from pacing
back and forth so much. He sat down behind his desk again and
resolved to embark upon a mature and systematic evaluation of the
entire military situation. With the businesslike air of a man who knows
how to get things done, he found a large white pad, drew a straight line
down the middle and crossed it near the top, dividing the page into two
blank columns of equal width. He rested a moment in critical rumination.
Then he huddled over his desk, and at the head of the left column,
in a cramped and finicky hand, he wrote,. "Black Eyes!!!" At the
top of the right column he wrote, "Feathers in My Cap!!!!!" He leaned
back once more to inspect his chart admiringly from an objective
perspective. After a few seconds of solemn deliberation, he licked the
tip of his pencil carefully and wrote under "Black Eyes!!!," after intent
intervals:
Ferrara
Bologna (bomb line moved on map during)
Skeet range
Naked man in formation (after Avignon)
Then he added:
Food poisoning (during Bologna)
and
Moaning (epidemic of during Avignon briefing)
Then he added:
Chaplain (banging around officers' club every night)
He decided to be charitable about the chaplain, even though he did
not like him, and under "Feathers in My Cap!!!!!" he wrote:
Chaplain (hanging around officers' club every night)
The two chaplain entries, therefore, neutralized each other. Alongside
"Ferrara" and "Naked man in formation (after Avignon)" he then
wrote:
Yossarian!
Alongside "Bologna (bomb line moved on map during)" "Food poisoning
(during Bologna)" and "Moaning (epidemic of during Avignon briefing)" he
wrote in a bold, decisive hand:

?

Those entries labeled "?" were the ones he wanted to investigate
immediately to determine if Yossarian had played any part in them.
Suddenly his arm began to shake, and he was unable to write any
more. He rose to his feet in terror, feeling sticky and fat, and rushed to
the open window to gulp in fresh air. His gaze fell on the skeet range,
and he reeled away with a sharp cry of distress, his wild and feverish
eyes scanning the walls of his office frantically as though they ~ere
swarming with Yossarians.
Nobody loved him. General Dreedle hated him, although General
Peckem liked him, although he couldn't be sure, since Colonel Cargill,
General Peckem's aide, undoubtedly had ambitions of his own and was
probably sabotaging him with General Peckem at every opportunity.
The only good colonel, he decided, was a dead colonel, except for himself.
The only colonel he trusted was Colonel Moodus, and even he had
an in with his father-in-law. Milo, of course, had been the big feather
in his cap, although having his group bombed by Milo's planes had
probably been a terrible black eye for him, even though Milo had ultimately
stilled all protest in disclosing the huge net profit the syndicate
had realized on the deal with the enemy and convincing everyone that
bombing his own men and planes had therefore really been a commendable
and very lucrative blow on the side of private enterprise.
The colonel was insecure about Milo because other colonels were trying
to lure him away, and Colonel Cathcart still had that lousy Big
Chief White Halfoat in his group who that lousy, lazy Captain Black
claimed was the one really responsible for the bomb line's being moved
during the Big Siege of Bologna. Colonel Cathcart liked Big Chief
White Halfoat because Big Chief White Halfoat kept punching that
lousy Colonel Moodus in the nose every time he got drunk and
Colonel Moodus was around. He wished that Big Chief White Halfoat
would begin punching Colonel Korn in his fat face, too. Colonel Korn
was a lousy smart aleck. Someone at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters
had it in for him and sent back every report he wrote with a
blistering rebuke, and Colonel Korn had bribed a clever mail clerk
there named Wintergreen to try to find out who it was. Losing that
plane over Ferrara the second time around had not done him any good,
he had to admit, and neither had having that other plane disappear
inside that cloud-that was one he hadn't even written down! He tried to
recall, longingly, if Yossarian had been lost in that plane in the cloud
and realized that Yossarian could not possibly have been lost in that
plane in the cloud if he was still around now raising such a big stink
about having to fly a lousy five missions more.
Maybe sixty missions were too many for the men to fly, Colonel
Cathcart reasoned, if Yossarian objected to flying them, but he then
remembered that forcing his men to fly more missions than everyone
else was the most tangible achievement he had going for him. As
Colonel Korn often remarked, the war was crawling with group commanders
who were merely doing their duty, and it required just some
sort of dramatic gesture like making his group fly more combat missions
than any other bomber group to spotlight his unique qualities of
leadership. Certainly none of the generals seemed to object to what he
was doing, although as far as he could detect they weren't particularly
impressed either, which made him suspect that perhaps sixty combat
missions were not nearly enough and that he ought to increase the
number at once to seventy, eighty, a hundred, or even two hundred,
three hundred, or six thousand!
Certainly he would be much better off under somebody suave like
General Peckem than he was under somebody boorish and insensitive
like General Dreedle, because General Peckem had the discernment,
the intelligence and the Ivy League background to appreciate and
enjoy him at his full value, although General Peckem had never given
the slightest indication that he appreciated or enjoyed him at all.
Colonel Cathcart felt perceptive enough to realize that visible signals
of recognition were never necessary between sophisticated, self-assured
people like himself and General Peckem who could warm Ito
each other from a distance with innate mutual understanding. It was
enough that they were of like kind, and he knew it was only a matter
of waiting discreetly for preferment until the right time, although it
rotted Colonel Cathcart's self-esteem to observe that General Peckem
never deliberately sought him out and that he labored no harder to
impress Colonel Cathcart with his epigrams and erudition than he did
to impress anyone else in earshot, even enlisted men. Either Colonel
Cathcart wasn't getting through to General Peckem or General
Peckem was not the scintillating, discriminating, intellectual, forward-looking
personality he pretended to be and it was really General
Dreedle who was sensitive, charming, brilliant and sophisticated and
under whom he would certainly be much better off, and suddenly
Colonel Cathcart had absolutely no conception of how strongly he
stood with anyone and began banging on his buzzer with his fist for
Colonel Korn to come running into his office and assure him that
everybody loved him, that Yossarian was a figment of his imagination,
and that he was making wonderful progress in the splendid and valiant
campaign he was waging to become a general.
Actually, Colonel Cathcart did not have a chance in hell of becoming
a general. For one thing, there was ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, who
also wanted to be a general and who always distorted, destroyed,
rejected or misdirected any correspondence by, for or about Colonel
Cathcart that might do him credit. For another, there already was a
general, General Dreedle, who knew that General Peckem was after
his job but did not know how to stop him.
General Dreedle, the wing commander, was a blunt, chunky, barrel-chested
man in his early fifties. His nose was squat and red, and he had
lumpy white, bunched-up eyelids circling his small gray eyes like haloes
of bacon fat. He had a nurse and a son-in-law, and he was prone to long,
ponderous silences when he had not been drinking too much. General
Dreedle had wasted too much of his time in the Army doing his job well,
and now it was too late. New power alignments had coalesced without
him and he was at a loss to cope with them. At unguarded moments his
hard and sullen face slipped into a somber, preoccupied look of defeat
and frustration. General Dreedle drank a great deal. His moods were
arbitrary and unpredictable. "War is hell," he declared frequently, drunk
or sober, and he really meant it, although that did not prevent him from
making a good living out of it or from taking his son-in-law into the
business with him, even though the two bickered constantly.
"That bastard," General Dreedle would complain about his son-in-law
with a contemptuous grunt to anyone who happened to be standing
beside him at the curve of the bar of me officers' club. "Everything
he's got he owes to me. I made him, that lousy son of a bitch! He hasn't
got brains enough to get ahead on his own."
"He thinks he knows everything," Colonel Moodus would retort in
a sulking tone to his own audience at the other end of the bar. "He
can't take criticism and he won't listen to advice."
"All he can do is give advice," General Dreedle would observe with
a rasping snort. "If it wasn't for me, he'd still be a corporal."
General Dreedle was always accompanied by both Colonel Moodus
and his nurse, who was as delectable a piece of ass as anyone who saw
her had ever laid eyes on. General Dreedle's nurse was chubby, short
and blond. She had plump dimpled checks, happy blue eyes, and neat
curly turned-up hair. She smiled at everyone and never spoke at all
unless she was spoken to. Her bosom was lush and her complexion
clear. She was irresistible, and men edged away from her carefully. She
was succulent, sweet, docile and dumb, and she drove everyone crazy
but General Dreedle.
"You should see her naked," General Dreedle chortled with croupy
relish, while his nurse stood smiling proudly right at his shoulder.
"Back at Wing she's got a uniform in my room made of purple silk
that's so tight her nipples stand out like bing cherries. Milo got me the
fabric. There isn't even room enough for panties or a brassiere underneath.
I make her wear it some nights when Moodus is around just to
drive him crazy." General Dreedle laughed hoarsely. "You should see
what goes on inside that blouse of hers every time she shifts her
weight. She drives him out of his mind. The first time I catch him putting
a hand on her or any other woman I'll bust the horny bastard right
down to private and put him on K.P. for a year."
"He keeps her around just to drive me crazy," Colonel Moodus
accused aggrievedly at the other end of the bar. "Back at Wing she's got
a uniform made out of purple silk that's so tight her nipples stand out
like bing cherries. There isn't even room for panties or a brassiere
underneath. You should hear that silk rustle every time she shifts her
weight. The first time I make a pass at her or any other girl he'll bust
me right down to private and put me on K.P. for a year. She drives me
out of my mind."
"He hasn't gotten laid since we shipped overseas," confided General
Dreedle, and his square grizzled head bobbed with sadistic laughter at
the fiendish idea. "That's one of the reasons I never let him out of my
sight, just so he can't get to a woman. Can you imagine what that poor
son of a bitch is going through?"
"I haven't been to bed with a woman since we shipped overseas,"
Colonel Moodus whimpered tearfully. "Can you imagine what I'm
going through?"
General Dreedle could be as intransigent with anyone else when displeased
as he was with Colonel Moodus. He had no taste for sham, tact
or pretension, and his credo as a professional soldier was unified and
concise: he believed that the young men who took orders from him
should be willing to give up their lives for the ideals, aspirations and idiosyncrasies
of the old men he took orders from. The officers and enlisted
men in his command had identity for him only as military quantities. All
he asked was that they do their work; beyond that, they were free to do
whatever they pleased. They were free, as Colonel Cathcart was free, to
force their men to fly sixty missions if they chose, and they were free, as
Yossarian had been free, to stand in formation naked if they wanted to,
although General Dreedle's granite jaw swung open at the sight and he
went striding dictatorially right down the line to make certain that there
really was a man wearing nothing but moccasins waiting at attention in
ranks to receive a medal from him. General Dreedle was speechless.
Colonel Cathcart began to faint ,when he spied Yossarian, and Colonel
Korn stepped up behind him and squeezed his arm in a strong grip. The
silence was grotesque. A steady warm wind flowed in from the beach, an
old cart filled with dirty straw rumbled into view on the main road,
drawn by a black donkey and driven by a farmer in a flopping hat and
faded brown work clothes who paid no attention to the formal military
ceremony taking place in the small field on his right.
At last General Dreedle spoke. "Get back in the car," he snapped
over his shoulder to his nurse, who had followed him down the line.
The nurse toddled away with a smile toward his brown staff car, parked
about twenty yards away at the edge of the rectangular clearing.
General Dreedle waited in austere silence until the car door slammed
and then demanded, "Which one is this?"
Colonel Moodus checked his roster. "This one is Yossarian, Dad.
He gets a Distinguished Flying Cross."
"Well, I'll be damned," mumbled General Dreedle, and his ruddy
monolithic face softened with amusement. "Why aren't you wearing
clothes, Yossarian?"
"I don't want to."
"What do you mean you don't want to? Why the hell don't you
want to?"
"I just don't want to, sir."
"Why isn't he wearing clothes?" General Dreedle demanded over
his shoulder of Colonel Cathcart.
"He's talking to you," Colonel Korn whispered over Colonel Cathcart's
shoulder from behind, jabbing his elbow sharply into Colonel
Cathcart's back.
"Why isn't he wearing clothes?" Colonel Cathcart demanded of
Colonel Korn with a look of acute pain, tenderly nursing the spot
where Colonel Korn had just jabbed him.
"Why isn't he wearing clothes?" Colonel Korn demanded of Captain
Piltchard and Captain Wren.
"A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all
over him," Captain Wren replied. "He swears he's never going to wear
a uniform again."
"A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all
over him," Captain Korn reported directly to General Dreedle. "His
uniform hasn't come back from the laundry yet."
"Where are his other uniforms?"
"They're in the laundry, too."
"What about his underwear?" General Dreedle demanded.
"All his underwear's in the laundry, too," answered Colonel Korn.
"That sounds like a lot of crap to me," General Dreedle declared.
"It is a lot of crap, sir," Yossarian said.
"Don't you worry, sir," Colonel Cathcart promised General Dreedle
with a threatening look at Yossarian. "You have my personal word, for
it that this man will be severely punished."
"What the hell do I care if he's punished or not?" General Dreedle
replied with surprise and irritation. "He's just won a medal. If he wants
to receive it without any clothes on, what the hell business is it of
yours?"
"Those are my sentiments exactly, sir!" Colonel Cathcart echoed
with resounding enthusiasm and mopped his brow with a damp white
handkerchief. "But would you say that, sir, even in the light of General
Peckem's recent memorandum on the subject of appropriate military
attire in combat areas?"
"Peckem?" General Dreedle's face clouded.
"Yes, sir, sir," said Colonel Cathcart obsequiously. "General Peckem
even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform
so they'll make a good impression on the enemy when they're
shot down."
"Peckem?" repeated General Dreedle, still squinting with bewilderment.
"Just what the hell does Peckem have to do with it?"
Colonel Korn jabbed Colonel Cathcart sharply again in the back
with his elbow.
"Absolutely nothing, sir!" Colonel Cathcart responded sprucely,
wincing in extreme pain and gingerly rubbing the spot where Colonel
Korn had just jabbed him again. "And that's exactly why 1 decided to
take absolutely no action at all until 1 first had an opportunity to discuss
it with you. Shall we ignore it completely, sir?"
General Dreedle ignored him completely, turning away from him in
baleful scorn to hand Yossarian his medal in its case.
"Get my girl back from the car," he commanded Colonel Moodus
crabbily, and waited in one spot with his scowling face down until his
nurse had rejoined him.
"Get word to the office right away to kill that directive 1just issued
ordering the men to wear neckties on the combat missions," Colonel
Cathcart whispered to Colonel Korn urgently out of the corner of his
mouth.
"I told you not to do it," Colonel Korn snickered. "But you just
wouldn't listen to me."
"Shhhh!" Colonel Cathcart cautioned. "Goddammit, Korn, what
did you do to my back?"
Colonel Korn snickered again.
General Dreedle's nurse always followed General Dreedle everywhere
he went, even into the briefing room just before the mission to
Avignon, where she stood with her asinine smile at the side of the platform
and bloomed like a fertile oasis at General Dreedle's shoulder in
her pink-and-green uniform. Yossarian looked at her and fell in love,
desperately. His spirits sank, leaving him empty inside and numb. He
sat gazing in clammy want at her full red lips and dimpled cheeks as he
listened to Major Danby describe in a monotonous, didactic male
drone the heavy concentrations of flak awaiting them at Avignon, and
he moaned in deep despair suddenly at the thought that he might
never see again this lovely woman to whom he had never spoken a
word and whom he now loved so pathetically. He throbbed and ached
with sorrow, fear and desire as he stared at her; she was so beautiful.
He worshipped the ground she stood on. He licked his parched, thirsting
lips with a sticky tongue and moaned in misery again, loudly
enough this time to attract the startled, searching glances of the men
sitting around him on the rows of crude wooden benches in their
chocolate-colored coveralls and stitched white parachute harnesses.
Nately turned to him quickly with alarm. "What is it?" he whispered.
"What's the matter?"
Yossarian did not hear him. He was sick with lust and mesmerized
with regret. General Dreedle's nurse was only a little chubby, and his
senses were stuffed to congestion with the yellow radiance of her hair
and the unfelt pressure of her soft short fingers, with the rounded,
untasted wealth of her nubile breasts in her Army-pink shirt that was
opened wide at the throat and with the rolling, ripened, triangular confluences
of her belly and thighs in her tight, slick forest-green gabardine
officer's pants. He drank her in insatiably from head to painted toenail.
He never wanted to lose her. "Oooooooooooooh," he moaned again,
and this time the whole room rippled at his quavering, drawn-out cry.
A wave of startled uneasiness broke over the officers on the dais, and
even Major Danby, who had begun synchronizing the watches, was distracted
momentarily as he counted out the seconds and almost had
to begin again. Nately followed Yossarian's transfixed gaze down the
long frame auditorium until he came to General Dreedle's nurse.
He blanched with trepidation when he guessed what was troubling
Yossarian.
"Cut it out, will you?" Nately warned in a fierce whisper.
"Oooooooooooooooooooooh," Yossarian moaned a fourth time,
this time loudly enough for everyone to hear him distinctly.
"Are you crazy?" Nately hissed vehemently. "You'll get into trouble."
"Oooooooooooooooooooooh," Dunbar answered Yossarian from
the opposite end of the room.
Nately recognized Dunbar's voice. The situation was now out of
control, and he turned away with a small moan. "Ooh."
"Oooooooooooooooooooh," Dunbar moaned back at him.
"Oooooooooooooooooooh," Nately moaned out loud in exasperation
when he realized that he had just moaned.
"Oooooooooooooooooooooh," Dunbar moaned back at him again.
"Oooooooooooooooooooooh," someone entirely new chimed III
from another section of the room, and Nately's hair stood on end.
Yossarian and Dunbar both replied while Nately cringed and
hunted about futilely for some hole in which to hide and take
Yossarian with him. A sprinkling of people were smothering laughter.
An elfin impulse possessed Nately and he moaned intentionally the
next time there was a lull. Another new voice answered. The flavor of
disobedience was titillating, and Nately moaned deliberately again, the
next time he could squeeze one in edgewise. Still another new voice
echoed him. The room was boiling irrepressibly into bedlam. An eerie
hubbub of voices was rising. Feet were scuffled, and things began to
drop from people's fingers-pencils, computers, map cases, clattering
steel flak helmets. A number of men who were not moaning were now
giggling openly, and there was no telling how far the unorganized
insurrection of moaning might have gone if General Dreedle himself
had not come forward to quell it, stepping out determinedly in the
center of the platform directly in front of Major Danby, who, with his
earnest, persevering head down, was still concentrating on his wrist
watch and saying "... twenty-five seconds ... twenty ... fifteen ... "
General Dreedle's great, red domineering face was gnarled with perplexity
and oaken with awesome resolution.
"That will be all, men," he ordered tersely, his eyes glaring with disapproval
and his square jaw firm, and that's all there was. "I run a fighting
outfit," he told them sternly, when the room had grown absolutely
quiet and the men on the benches were all cowering sheepishly, "and
there'll be no more moaning in this group as long as I'm in command.
Is that clear?"
It was clear to everybody but Major Danby, who was still concentrating
on his wrist watch and counting down the seconds aloud.
"... four ... three ... two ... one ... time!" called out Major Danby,
and raised his eyes triumphantly to discover that no one had been listening
to him and that he would have to begin all over again. "Ooooh,"
he moaned in frustration.
"What was that?" roared General Dreedle incredulously, and
whirled around in a murderous rage upon Major Danby, who staggered
back in terrified confusion and began to quail and perspire.
"Who is this man?"
"M-major Danby, sir," Colonel Cathcart stammered. "My group
operations officer."
"Take him out and shoot him," ordered General Dreedle.
"S-sir?"
"I said take him out and shoot him. Can't you hear?"
"Yes, sir!" Colonel Cathcart responded smartly, swallowing hard,
and turned in a brisk manner to his chauffeur and his meteorologist.
"Take Major Danby out and shoot him."
"S-sir?" his chauffeur and his meteorologist stammered.
"I said take Major Danby out and shoot him," Colonel Cathcart
snapped. "Can't you hear?"
The two young lieutenants nodded lumpishly and gaped at each
other in stunned and flaccid reluctance, each waiting for the other to
initiate the procedure of taking Major Danby outside and shooting
him. Neither had ever taken Major Danby outside and shot him
before. They inched their way dubiously toward Major Danby from
opposite sides. Major Danby was white with fear. His legs collapsed
suddenly and he began to fall, and the two young lieutenants sprang
forward and seized him under both arms to save him from slumping to
the floor. Now that they had Major Danby, the rest seemed easy, but
there were no guns. Major Danby began to cry. Colonel Cathcart
wanted to rush to his side and comfort him, but did not want to look
like a sissy in front of General Dreedle. He remembered that Appleby
and Havermeyer always brought their .45 automatics on the missions,
and he began to scan the rows of men in search of them.
As soon as Major Danby began to cry, Colonel Moodus, who had
been vacillating wretchedly on the sidelines, could restrain himself no
longer and stepped out diffidently toward General Dreedle with a
sickly air of self-sacrifice. "I think you'd better wait a minute, Dad," he
suggested hesitantly. "I don't think you can shoot him."
General Dreedle was infuriated by his intervention. "Who the hell
says I can't?" he thundered pugnaciously in a voice loud enough to rattle
the whole building. Colonel Moodus, his face flushing with embarrassment,
bent dose to whisper into his ear. "Why the hell can't I?"
General Dreedle bellowed. Colonel Moodus whispered some more.
"You mean I can't shoot anyone I want to?" General Dreedle demanded
with uncompromising indignation. He pricked up his ears with interest
as Colonel Moodus continued whispering. "Is that a fact?" he inquired,
his rage tamed by curiosity.
"Yes, Dad. I'm afraid it is."
"I guess you think you're pretty goddam smart, don't you?" General
Dreedle lashed out at Colonel Moodus suddenly.
Colonel Moodus turned crimson again. "No, Dad, it isn't-"
"All right, let the insubordinate son of a bitch go," General Dreedle
snarled, turning bitterly away from his son-in-law and barking peevishly
at Colonel Cathcart's chauffeur and Colonel Cathcart's meteorologist.
"But get him out of this building and keep him out. And let's
continue this goddam briefing before the war ends. I've never seen so
much incompetence."
Colonel Cathcart nodded lamely at General Dreedle and signaled
his men hurriedly to push Major Danby outside the building. As soon
as Major Danby had been pushed outside, though, there was no one to
continue the briefing. Everyone gawked at everyone else in oafish surprise.
General Dreedle turned purple with rage as nothing happened.
Colonel Cathcart had no idea what to do. He was about to begin
moaning aloud when Colonel Korn came to the rescue by stepping
forward and taking control. Colonel Cathcart sighed with enormous,
tearful relief, almost overwhelmed with gratitude.
"Now, men, we're going to synchronize our watches," Colonel
Korn began promptly in a sharp, commanding manner, rolling his eyes
flirtatiously in General Dreedle's direction. "We're going to synchronize
our watches one time and one time only, and if it doesn't come off
in that one time, General Dreedle and I are going to want to know
why. Is that clear?" He fluttered his eyes toward General Dreedle again
to make sure his plug had registered. "Now set your watches for nine-eighteen."
Colonel Korn synchronized their watches without a single hitch and
moved ahead with confidence. He gave the men the colors of the day
and reviewed the weather conditions with an agile, flashy versatility,
casting sidelong, simpering looks at General Dreedle every few seconds
to draw increased encouragement from the excellent impression
he saw he was making. Preening and pruning himself effulgently and
strutting vaingloriously about the platform as he picked up momentum,
he gave the men the colors of the day again and shifted nimbly
into a rousing pep talk on the importance of the bridge at Avignon to
the war effort and the obligation of each man on the mission to place
love of country above love of life. When his inspiring dissertation was
finished, he gave the men the colors of the day still one more time,
stressed the angle of approach and reviewed the weather conditions
again. Colonel Korn felt himself at the full height of his powers. He
belonged in the spotlight.
Comprehension dawned slowly on Colonel Cathcart; when it came,
he was struck dumb. His face grew longer and longer as he enviously
watched Colonel Korn's treachery continue, and he was almost afraid
to listen when General Dreedle moved up beside him and, in a whisper
blustery enough to be heard throughout the room, demanded,
"Who is that man?"
Colonel Cathcart answered with wan foreboding, and General
Dreedle then cupped his hand over his mouth and whispered something
that made Colonel Cathcart's face glow with immense joy.
Colonel Korn saw and quivered with uncontainable rapture. Had he
just been promoted in the field by General Dreedle to full colonel? He
could not endure the suspense. With a masterful flourish, he brought
the briefing to a close and turned expectantly to receive ardent congratulations
from General Dreedle-who was already striding out of
the building without a glance backward, trailing his nurse and Colonel
Moodus behind him. Colonel Korn was stunned by this disappointing
sight, but only for an instant. His eyes found Colonel Cathcart, who
was still standing erect in a grinning trance, and he rushed over jubilantly
and began pulling on his arm.
"What'd he say about me?" he demanded excitedly in a fervor of
proud and blissful anticipation. "What did General Dreedle say?"
"He wanted to know who you were."
"I know that. I know that. But what'd he say about me? What'd he
say?"
"You make him sick."

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