With more than thirty-two still to go. A vision of Mannix came swimming back; Culver stumbled along after the dauntless Colonel, thinking, Christ on a crutch. They hastened on. Night had fallen around them, tropic and sudden, lit now, as they descended across a thicket of swampy ground, only by the lights of the jeep. Culver had regained his wind but already his chest and back were awash in sweat, and he was thirsty. He took a vague comfort in the fact that others felt the same way, for behind him he heard canteens being unsnapped from their cases, rattling out of their cups, and the noise, in mid-march, of drinking--a choked, gurgling sound--then, faint to the rear, Mannix’s angry voice: “All right, goddammit, I told you people to hold onto your water! Put those goddam canteens back until the break!” Culver, craning his neck around, saw nothing--no Mannix, who had apparently dropped behind--nothing except a shadowy double line of men laboring through the sand, fading off far down the road into the general blackness. To the rear some marine made a joke, a remark; there was laughter and a snatch of song--_on top of old Smo-oky, all covered_.... Then Mannix’s voice again out of the dark: “O.K. you people can grabass all you want but I’m telling you you’d better save your wind. If you want to talk all the way it’s O.K. with me but you’re gonna crap out if you do, and remember what I said....” His tone had become terse and vicious; it could have been the sound of a satrap of Pharaoh, a galley master. It had the forbidding quality of a strand of barbed wire or a lash made of thorns, and the voices, the song, abruptly ceased, as if they had been strangled. Still his words continued to sting and flay them--already, in this first hour, with the merciless accents of a born bully--and Culver, suddenly angered, had an impulse to drop back and try to make him let up. “You people close it up now! Dammit, Shea, keep those men closed up there. They fall back they’re gonna have to run to catch up! Goddammit, close it up now, you hear me! I mean _you_, Thompson, goddammit you aren’t deaf! Close it up! _Close it up_, I said!” So it was that the voice, brutal and furious, continued the rest of the way.