"I'm not going to dinner; I'm going to sit right here and sweat out this quarterly report... which the Regimental Commander is graciously pleased to see right after his dinner... and which somebody whose name I won't mention has put me two hours behind on. So I may be a few minutes late for our waltz. Go ‘way now, Charlie, and don't bother me. See you later."
Sergeant Zim left so abruptly that I barely had time to lean over and tie my shoe and thereby be out of sight behind the file cases as he passed through the outer office. Captain Frankel was already shouting, "Orderly! Orderly! ORDERLY! -- do I have to call you three times? What's your name? Put yourself down for an hour's extra duty, full kit. Find the company commanders of E, F, and G, my compliments and I'll be pleased to see them before parade. Then bounce over to my tent and fetch me a clean dress uniform, cap, side arms, shoes, ribbons—no medals. Lay it out for me here. Then make afternoon sick call—if you can scratch with that arm, as I've seen you doing, your shoulder can't be too sore. You've got thirteen minutes until sick call on the bounce, soldier!"
I made it... by catching two of them in the senior instructors— showers (an orderly can go anywhere) and the third at his desk; the orders you get aren't impossible, they merely seem so because they nearly are. I was laying out Captain Frankel's uniform for parade as sick call sounded. Without looking up he growled, "Belay that extra duty. Dismissed." So I got home just in time to catch extra duty for "Uniform, Untidy in, Two Particulars" and see the sickening end of Ted Hendrick's time in the M. I.
So I had plenty to think about as I lay awake that night. I had known that Sergeant Zim worked hard, but it had never occurred to me that he could possibly be other than completely and smugly self-satisfied with what he did. He looked so smug, so self-assured, so at peace with the world and with himself.
The idea that this invincible robot could feel that he had failed, could feel so deeply and personally disgraced that he wanted to run away, hide his face among strangers, and offer the excuse that his leaving would be "best for the outfit," shook me up as much, and in a way even more, than seeing Ted flogged.
To have Captain Frankel agree with him—as to the seriousness of the failure, I mean—and then rub his nose in it, chew him out. Well! I mean really. Sergeants don't get chewed out; sergeants do the chewing. A law of nature.
But I had to admit that what Sergeant Zim had taken, and swallowed, was so completely humiliating and withering as to make the worst I had ever heard or overhead from a sergeant sound like a love song. And yet the Captain hadn't even raised his voice.
The whole incident was so preposterously unlikely that I was never even tempted to mention it to anyone else.
And Captain Frankel himself—Officers we didn't see very often. They showed up for evening parade, sauntering over at the last moment and doing nothing that would work up a sweat; they inspected once a week, making private comments to sergeants, comments that invariably meant grief for somebody else, not them; and they decided each week what company had won the honor of guarding the regimental colors. Aside from that, they popped up occasionally on surprise inspections, creased, immaculate, remote, and smelling faintly of cologne—and went away again.
Oh, one or more of them did always accompany us on route marches and twice Captain Frankel had demonstrated his virtuosity at la savate. But officers didn't work, not real work, and they had no worries because sergeants were under them, not over them.
But it appeared that Captain Frankel worked so hard that he skipped meals, was kept so busy with something or other that he complained of lack of exercise and would waste his own free time just to work up a sweat.
As for worries, he had honestly seemed to be even more upset at what had happened to Hendrick than Zim had been. And yet he hadn't even known Hendrick by sight; he had been forced to ask his name.
I had an unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part of it was something wildly different from what it appeared to be—like discovering that your own mother isn't anyone you've ever seen before, but a stranger in a rubber mask.
