by Herman Wouk
“I think we have a pretty good wardroom, sir-”
“Why, I said so. For a lot of wartime recruits, they’re fine. But you and I have to run this ship. Now, I’m well aware that I’m not the easiest man in the world to get along with, and not the smartest either. I probably have done a lot of things that strike you as damned queer, and I’ll probably go right on doing them. I can only see one way to run this ship, Steve, and come hell or high water that’s how it’s going to be run. And you’re my exec, and so you’re in the middle. I know all about that. I was exec for the unholiest son of a bitch in the Navy for three months, and during that time I did my duty, and was the second unholiest son of a bitch. That’s how it goes.”
“Yes, sir.”
With a friendly smile, Queeg said, “Well, I’m off.”
“I’ll walk you down, sir.”
“Why, thank you, Steve. That’ll be very pleasant.”
In the days that followed the Caine was hastily put back together by the yard workmen, none of its parts much the better for the disassembly; and the general hope, as in the case of a clock taken apart by a child, was not that it would perform in an improved manner, but rather that it might begin ticking again as well as before. Some of the worst decay in the engineering plant was patched and the ship had new radars. Otherwise it was the same mangy old Caine. Nobody knew why the overhaul time had been cut in half, but Keefer was vocal on the point, as usual. “Someone finally figured out that the bucket won’t hold together for more than one invasion, anyway,” he theorized. “So they just souped her up enough for one last gasp.”
On the thirtieth of December, the Caine steamed out through the Golden Gate at sunset, minus some twenty-five of her crew, who had elected court-martial for missing ship rather than another cruise with Queeg. Willie Keith was on the bridge, and his spirits were low as the last hills slipped past the bow, and the ship issued forth on the purple sea. He knew this meant a long, long parting from May. There would be hundreds of thousands of miles of steaming, and probably many battles, before the ship would come into these waters again with its bow pointed the other way. The sun, dead ahead, sinking beneath ragged banks of dark clouds, shot out great spokes of red light which fanned across the western sky. It was an uncomfortable similitude of the flag of Japan.
But he had a good steak dinner in the wardroom, and he wasn’t posted for a night watch. And what cheered him most of all was that he went to sleep in a room, not the clipping shack. He had inherited Carmody’s bunk, and Paynter was his new roommate.
With a sense of great luxury and well-being, Willie crawled to the narrow upper bunk and slid between the fresh, rough Navy sheets. He lay only a few inches beneath the plates of the main deck. He had not much more room than he would have had under the lid of a coffin. A knotty valve of the fire main projected downward into his stomach. The stateroom was not as large as the dressing closet in his Manhasset home. But what did all that matter? From the clipping shack to this bunk was a great rise in the world. Willie closed his eyes, listened with pleasure to the hum of the ventilators, and felt in his bones the vibration of the main engines, transmitted through the springs of his bunk. The ship was alive again. He felt warm, and safe, and at home. Drowsiness came over him almost at once, and he slept deliciously.
PART FIVE
THE MUTINY
CHAPTER 19
The Circle of Compliance
Any recent book of military history is likely to contain the remark that by the beginning of 1944 World War II was really won. Quite rightly, too. The great turning points, Guadalcanal, El Alamein, Midway, and Stalingrad, were in the past. Italy had surrendered. The murdering Germans were at last recoiling. The Japanese, their meager power spread thin over a swollen empire, had begun to crack. The industrial power of the Allies was coming to flood; that of their enemies was waning. It was a bright picture.
But Ensign Keith had a worm’s-eye view of the war remarkably different from that of the post-war historians. Standing in the black cold wheelhouse of the Caine at midnight on New Year’s Eve, as the ship plowed its old snout through the murky sea toward the west, he took a very gloomy view of the world situation.
In the first place, he decided, he had been an idiot to go into the Navy instead of the Army. Russia was doing the real dirty work in Europe. The smart man’s place in this war-unlike the last-was in the infantry, wallowing in idleness in England while the asses who had taken refuge in the Navy tossed on sickening seas, on the way to assault the terrible barrier of the Japanese mid-Pacific islands. His destiny now was coral and blasted palms and spitting shore batteries and roaring Zeros-and mines, hundreds of them, no doubt-and the bottom of the sea, perhaps, in the end. Meantime his opposite numbers in the Army would be visiting Canterbury Cathedral or the birthplace of Shakespeare arm in arm with pretty English girls, whose good will toward Americans was already a global legend.
It seemed to Willie that the war against Japan would be the largest and deadliest in human history, and that it would probably end only in 1955 or 1960, upon the intervention of Russia, a decade after the collapse of Germany. How could the Japanese ever be dislodged from their famed “unsinkable carriers,” the chain of islands, swarming with planes which could massacre any approaching fleet? There would be, perhaps, one costly Tarawa a year. He was sure he was headed for the forthcoming one. And the war would drag on at that rate until he was bald and middle-aged.
Willie didn’t have a historian’s respect for the victories at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Midway. The stream of news as it burbled by his mind left only a confused impression that our side was a bit ahead in the game, but making painful slow work of it. He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn’t know that he knew. This war seemed to him different from all the others: diffuse, slogging, and empty of drama.
He was on his way to fight in battles as great as any in the histories. But these would appear to him mere welters of nasty, complicated, tiresome activity. Only in after years, reading books describing the scenes in which he had been engaged, would he begin to think of his battles as Battles. Only then, when the heat of youth was gone, would he come to warm himself with the fanned-up glow of the memory that he, too, Willie Keith, had fought on Saint Crispin’s Day.
For two days the Caine wallowed through gray cold rainy weather. There was the usual eating of damp sandwiches while clinging to stanchions, and sleeping in fits between pitches and rolls. Contrasted to the golden days of shore leave, this spell of misery seemed worse to the officers and crew than any they had ever undergone. There was a general feeling that they were all damned forever to a floating wet hell.
On the third day they broke into the sunny blue of the South Seas. Dank pea jackets, sweaters, and windbreakers vanished. Officers in creased khakis and crew in dungarees began to look familiar to each other. Furniture was unroped. Hot meals were resumed at breakfast time. The pervading gloom and taciturnity gave way to a freshet of laughing reminiscence and boasts about the leave period. In a way, the short-handedness of the crew helped the recovery process. Those who had preferred court-martial to further adventures with Captain Queeg were the crafty, the discontented, the easily discouraged. The sailors who had returned to man the Caine were jolly boys, ready to take the bad with the good, and fond of the old ship, however heartily and horribly they cursed it.
On this day Willie took a mighty leap upward in life. He stood the noon-to-four watch as officer of the deck. Keefer was present to correct any disastrous mistake, and Captain Queeg himself perched in his chair throughout the watch, alternately dozing or blinking placidly in the sunshine. Willie conducted a faultless watch. It was a simple matter of staying on station in the screen while the convoy zigzagged. Whatever his inner shakiness, he kept a bold front, and maneuvered the ship firmly. When the watch was over he penciled in the log:
12 to 4-Steaming as before.
Willis
Seward Keith
Ensign, USNR
He had signed many logs for port watches, but this was different. He put an extra flourish to his signature, and thrilled as though he were entering his name in a historic document.
In a state of quiet exaltation, he went down the ladders to the wardroom, and ripped merrily into a stack of decoded messages. He kept at it until the new steward’s mate, Rasselas, a sweet-faced, pudgy colored boy with huge brown eyes, touched his arm and begged permission to lay the table for dinner. Willie folded away his codes, poured a cup of coffee from the Silex, and lay on the wardroom couch with his legs up, sipping. The radio was purring a Haydn quartet; the boys in the radio shack had not yet noticed and strangled it. Rasselas spread a fresh white cloth, and clinked the silver into place. From the pantry, where Whittaker in his new khaki uniform of a chief steward lorded it over the mess boys, there floated an aroma of roast beef. Willie sighed with contentment, and snuggled in the corner of the gently rocking couch. He looked around at the wardroom, freshly sprayed with a light green paint, its brown leather fittings renewed, the brass polished, the chairs gleaming. After all, he said to himself, there were worse places in the world than the wardroom of the Caine.
The other officers came straggling in, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, good-humored, and hungry. All the old jokes were brought out. They seemed funny and gay to Willie: Harding’s procreative fertility, Keefer’s novel, the foulness of the ship’s fresh water (“Paynter’s Poison”), Maryk’s New Zealand girl of the seven warts, and, latest of all, Willie Keith’s stature as a Don Juan. The officers and sailors of the ship had caught glimpses of May Wynn during the overhaul, and her voluptuousness had become a matter of fable. Linked with the remembrance of the pretty nurses who had visited Willie in Pearl Harbor, the appearance of May had established for the ensign a reputation for mystic power over women.
It was a fine new topic for wardroom banter. Sex was the subject, therefore anybody could be a comedian. A properly timed grunt was a great witticism. Willie for his part was delighted. He protested, and denied, and pretended to be vexed, and kept on prolonging the joke long after the others were ready to drop it; and sat down to dinner in very high spirits indeed. He felt a warm bond with the other officers, made stronger by the presence of the two bashful newcomers, Jorgensen and Ducely. He realized now how green, how intrusive, he and Harding must have seemed five months ago to the vanished Gorton, Adams, and Carmody. He put a spoonful of pea soup to his lips, and at that instant the ship passed over a high swell and pitched violently. He noticed the practiced motion of his arm with which he neutralized the pitching and kept the spoon from spilling even a drop; and he uttered a low happy laugh, and drank it off.
After dinner he said to Ducely, as the fragile-looking ensign was about to leave the wardroom, “Let’s have a walk on the forecastle, shall we? Have to start talking about communications sometime.”
“Yes, sir,” said his new assistant meekly.
They stepped through the door of the forecastle into a cool purple twilight. The only brightness was a patch of fading gold in the west. “Well, Ducely.” Willie rested one leg on the starboard bitts, and leaned on the life lines with both hands, enjoying the flow of the salt wind. “Getting used to the Caine?”
“As much as I ever will, I guess. Horrible fate, isn’t it?”
Willie turned an annoyed glance at the ensign. “I suppose so. Every ship has good points and bad-”
“Oh, of course. I guess there isn’t much to do on one of these old rattletraps, which is something. And then I suppose we’ll spend most of our time in Navy yards getting patched up, which suits me, too. If it only weren’t so cramped and filthy! The wardroom is like a chicken coop.”
“Well, you get more or less used to it, Ducely. I guess you don’t like the clip shack too much, eh?”
“It’s revolting. I almost died in there the first night. Why, that stack gas!”
“Awful, isn’t it?” said Willie, with huge enjoyment.
“Abominable.”
“Well, after a while you won’t mind it so much.”
“No fear. I don’t sleep there any more.”
The grin faded from Willie’s face. “Oh? Where do you sleep?”
“In the ship’s office, on the half deck. Nobody uses it at night. I have a folding cot. It’s swell in there. Real airy.”
This information irritated Willie extremely. “I don’t think the captain will approve of that. He’s very particular about-”
“I asked him, sir. He said I could sleep anywhere that I could find six vacant feet.”
Willie said to himself that he would be damned. He had suffered five months without thinking of this simple escape. “Hm. Well, now, you’re supposed to assist me in communications, and-”
“I’ll be glad to try, sir, but I don’t know beans about communications-”
“What do you know about?”
“Practically nothing, sir. You see, my-that is, I got a direct commission into the Navy. My mother owns most of a shipyard in Boston, and so-the whole thing is just a mess. Just one letter of the alphabet fouled me up-one letter. When they were making out my commission they asked me whether I wanted to be an S or a G. I didn’t know. They said S meant Specialist and G meant General. So I asked which was better and they said that a G was regarded as much superior. So naturally, I asked for G. That was my mistake. My God, it was all arranged. I was supposed to go into Public Relations. I did, too. But I got ordered to some hole down in Virginia. And suddenly one day this directive came through saying that all ensigns designated G were to be sent out to sea. It all happened so fast there just wasn’t a thing my mother could do about it. So, here I am.”
“Tough.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. Public Relations is worse than the Caine, I think. The paper work! If there’s one thing I’m no good for, it’s paper work.”
“Too bad. Communications is all paper work, Ducely. You’ll just have to get good at it-”
“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you, sir,” said Ducely with a resigned sigh. “Naturally, I’ll do my best. But I’m just not going to be worth a damn to you-”
“Can you type?”
“No. And what’s worse, I’m absent-minded. I can’t remember where I’ve put a paper two seconds after I’ve laid it down.”
“Beginning tomorrow you’ll get yourself a typing course from Jellybelly and learn to type-”
“I’ll try, but I don’t think I’ll ever learn. I’m all thumbs-”
“And I think you’d better get started on decoding right away: Do you have a watch tomorrow morning?”
“No, sir.”
“Fine. Meet me in the wardroom after breakfast and I’ll show you the codes-”
“I’m afraid that’ll have to wait, sir. Tomorrow morning I have to finish my officers’ qualification assignment for Mr. Keefer.”
It had grown dark now, and the sky was crowded with stars. Willie peered at the dim face of his assistant and wondered whether he himself had ever seemed such a mixture of effrontery and stupidity. “Well, stay up a little late tonight and finish your assignment.”
“I will if you insist, Mr. Keith, but I’m really horribly fagged out.”
“The hell with it. Get a good night’s sleep by all means,” said Willie. He started to walk away. “We’ll start decoding in the afternoon. Unless, of course, you have something more important to do.”
“No, sir,” said Ducely, with bland sincerity, tagging after him, “I don’t believe I have.”
“Great,” said Willie. He twisted the dogs on the forecastle door viciously, motioned his assistant through, and slammed the door with a clang that was heard in the after crew’s quarters.
This force will assault and capture Kwajalein Atoll and other objectives in the Marshall Islands, with the purpose of establishing bases for further attacks to the westward-
Willie stared at the blotchy mimeographed words. He tossed aside the thick operation orde
r and snatched a war atlas from the bookshelf. Turning to a map of the Central Pacific, he saw that Kwajalein was the largest of the atolls, in the very heart of the Marshalls, surrounded by Jap strongholds. He whistled.
Official mail was heaped two feet high on his bunk. He had dumped the tumbled mass of envelopes stamped with crimson secrecy warnings out of three gray mail sacks which lay crumpled on the deck. The stuff had accumulated in Pearl Harbor for a month. It was all his now, to log, file, and be responsible for; his first batch of secret mail since inheriting Keefer’s job.
Willie threw a blanket over the rest of the mail and brought the operation order up to the captain. Queeg was in the cabin on the main deck which had formerly housed two officers. It had been altered at the Navy Yard under his careful direction so that it contained one bed, a wide desk, an armchair, a lounge seat, a large safe, and numerous speaking tubes and squawk boxes. The captain paused in his shaving to riffle through the sheets, dripping soap on them. “Kwajalein, hey?” he said casually. “Kay. Leave this stuff here. You’ll discuss this with nobody, of course, not even Maryk.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
When Willie began to log and file the mail he made unpleasant discoveries. Keefer had turned over to him a set of dog-eared ledgers and the keys to the filing cabinet, and had offhandedly added several handfuls of secret mail which lay on the deck of his closet under shoes and dirty laundry. He assured Willie that the correspondence was “meaningless garbage.”
“I’ve been figuring on logging it in when the next batch came. You may as well do it,” he said, yawning. He climbed back on his bunk and resumed reading Finnegan’s Wake.
Willie found the file cabinet in a hopeless jumble. Letters in it would have been easier to locate had they been stuffed in a gunnysack. The ledgers contained an idiotically complicated system for entering the arrival of mail, using four different notations for each letter. Willie calculated that it would take him five or six solid working days to log the mail. He went to the ship’s office and watched Jellybelly logging tremendous sackfuls of non-secret correspondence. The yeoman typed entries on green form sheets, and in less than an hour disposed of as much mail as Willie had in his room. “Where’d you get that system?” he asked the sailor.
