Colonel, like a ewe who follows the slaughterhouse ram, dumb and undoubting, too panicked by the general chaos to hate its leader, or care. At the end of the second hour, and three more miles, Culver was sobbing with exhaustion. He flopped down in the weeds, conscious now of a blister beginning at the bottom of his foot, as if it had been scraped by a razor. Mannix was having trouble, too. This time when he came up, he was limping. He sat down silently and took off his shoe; Culver, gulping avidly at his canteen, watched him. Both of them were too winded to smoke, or to speak. They were sprawled beside some waterway--canal or stream; phosphorescent globes made a spooky glow among shaggy Spanish moss, and a rank and fetid odor bloomed in the darkness--not the swamp’s decay, Culver realized, but Mannix’s feet. “Look,” the Captain muttered suddenly, “that nail’s caught me right in the heel.” Culver peered down by the glare of Mannix’s flashlight to see on his heel a tiny hole, bleeding slightly, bruised about its perimeter and surrounded by a pasty white where the band-aid had been pulled away. “How’m I going to do it with that?” Mannix said. “Try beating that nail down again.” “I tried, but the point keeps coming out I’d have to take the whole frigging shoe apart.” “Can’t you put a piece of cloth over it or something?” “I tried that, too, but it puts my foot off balance. It’s worse than the nail.” He paused. “Jesus Christ.” “Look,” Culver said, “try taking this strip of belt and putting it over it.” They debated, operated, talked hurriedly, and neither of them was aware of the Colonel, who had walked over through the shadows and was standing beside them. “What’s the matter, Captain?” he said. They looked up, startled. Hands hooked as usual--Culver wanted to say “characteristically”--in his belt, he stood serenely above them. In the yellow flashlight glow his face was red from exertion, still damp with sweat, but he appeared no more fatigued than a man who had sprinted a few yards to catch a bus. The faint smile hovered at the corners of his lips. Once more it was neither complacent nor superior but, if anything, almost benevolent, so that by the unnatural light, in which his delicate features became fiery red and again now, along the borders of his slim tapering fingers, nearly transparent, he looked still not so much the soldier but the priest in whom passion and faith had made an alloy, at last, of only the purest good intentions; above meanness or petty spite, he was leading a march to some humorless salvation, and his smile--his solicitous words, too--had at least a bleak sincerity. “I got a nail in my shoe,” Mannix said. The Colonel squatted down and inspected Mannix’s foot, cupping it almost tenderly in his hand. Mannix appeared to squirm at the Colonel’s touch. “That looks bad,” he said after a moment, “did you see the corpsman?”