That evening at twilight, just before the beginning of the march, Mannix found a nail in his shoe. “Look at it,” he said to Culver, “what lousy luck.” They were sitting on an embankment bordering the road. The blue dusk was already scattered with stars, but evening had brought no relief to the heat of the day. It clung to them still, damp and stifling, enveloping them like an overcoat. The battalion, over a thousand men, was ready for the march. It stretched out in two files on either side of the road below them for more than a mile. Culver turned and looked down into Mannix’s shoe: sure enough, a nailend had penetrated the lining at the base of the heel, a sharp pinpoint of torture. Mannix inspected the bottom of his big dirty foot. He pulled off a flake of skin which the nail had already worn away. “Of all the lousy luck,” he said, “gimme a band-aid.” “It’ll wear right through, Al,” Culver said, “you’d better get another pair of shoes. Try flattening it out with the end of your bayonet.” Mannix hammered for a moment at the nail and then looked up in exasperation. “It won’t go all the way. Gimme that band-aid.” A rusty spatter of blood he had picked up at noon was still on the sleeve of his dungarees. He had become nervous and touchy. All that afternoon, after they had come back, he had seemed, like Culver, still shaken by the slaughter, still awed, and rather despondent. Finally, he had alternated moments of remote abstraction with quick outbursts of temper. The shock of the explosion seemed to have set something off in him. His mood had become vague and unpredictable, and he was able to shift from sour, uncommunicative gloom to violent anger in an instant. Culver had never seen him quite so cranky before, nor had he ever seen him so testily at odds with his men, to whom he usually had shown the breeziest good will. All afternoon he’d been after them, nagging, bellowing orders--only to fall suddenly into a profound and brooding silence. As he squatted in the weeds eating his evening meal two hours before, he had hardly said a word, except to murmur--irrelevantly, Culver thought--that his company “had better goddam well shape up.” It puzzled Culver; the explosion seemed to have stripped off layers of skin from the Captain, leaving only raw nerves exposed.