I hope you have brains enough to appreciate that.’
‘Sergeant Whitcomb,’ the chaplain corrected, before he could control himself.
Colonel Cathcart Oared.
‘I said Sergeant Whitcomb,’ he replied.
‘I wish you’d try listening once in a while instead of always finding fault.
You don’t want to be a captain all your life, do you?’ ‘Sir?’
‘Well, I certainly don’t see how you’re ever going to amount to anything else if you keep on this way.
Corporal Whitcomb feels that you fellows haven’t had a fresh idea in nineteen hundred and forty-four years, and I’m inclined to agree with him.
A bright boy, that Corporal Whitcomb.
Well, it’s all going to change.’
Colonel Cathcart sat down at his desk with a determined air and cleared a large neat space in his blotter. When he had finished, he tapped his finger inside it.
‘Starting tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I want you and Corporal Whitcomb to write a letter of condolence for me to the next of kin of every man in the group who’s killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
I want those letters to be sincere letters.
I want them filled up with lots of personal details so there’ll be no doubt I mean every word you say.
Is that clear?’
The chaplain stepped forward impulsively to remonstrate.
‘But, sir, that’s impossible!’ he blurted out.
‘We don’t even know all the men that well.’
‘What difference does that make?’ Colonel Cathcart demanded, and then smiled amicably.
‘Corporal Whitcomb brought me this basic form letter that takes care of just about every situation.
Listen:
"Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs.: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action."
And so on.
I think that opening sentence sums up my sentiments exactly.
Listen, maybe you’d better let Corporal Whitcomb take charge of the whole thing if you don’t feel up to it.’
Colonel Cathcart whipped out his cigarette holder and flexed it between both hands like an onyx and ivory riding crop. ‘That’s one of the things that’s wrong with you, Chaplain.
Corporal Whitcomb tells me you don’t know how to delegate responsibility.
He says you’ve got no initiative either.
You’re not going to disagree with me, are you?’
‘No, sir.’ The chaplain shook his head, feeling despicably remiss because he did not know how to delegate responsibility and had no initiative, and because he really had been tempted to disagree with the colonel. His mind was a shambles.
They were shooting skeet outside, and every time a gun was fired his senses were jarred.
He could not adjust to the sound of the shots.
He was surrounded by bushels of plum tomatoes and was almost convinced that he had stood in Colonel Cathcart’s office on some similar occasion deep in the past and had been surrounded by those same bushels of those same plum tomatoes.
Déjà vu again. The setting seemed so familiar; yet it also seemed so distant.
His clothes felt grimy and old, and he was deathly afraid he smelled.
‘You take things too seriously, Chaplain,’ Colonel Cathcart told him bluntly with an air of adult objectivity.
‘That’s another one of the things that’s wrong with you.
That long face of yours gets everybody depressed.
Let me see you laugh once in a while.
Come on, Chaplain.
You give me a belly laugh now and I’ll give you a whole bushel of plum tomatoes.’
He waited a second or two, watching, and then chortled victoriously. ‘You see, Chaplain, I’m right.
You can’t give me a belly laugh, can you?’
‘No, sir,’ admitted the chaplain meekly, swallowing slowly with a visible effort.
‘Not right now.
I’m very thirsty.’
‘Then get yourself a drink.
Colonel Korn keeps some bourbon in his desk.
You ought to try dropping around the officers’ club with us some evening just to have yourself a little fun.
Try getting lit once in a while.