Panic-stricken, limping with blisters and with exhaustion, and in mutinous despair, the men fled westward, whipped on by Mannix’s cries. They pressed into the humid, sweltering light of the new day. Culver followed; O’Leary, without a murmur, puffed along beside him, while to the rear, with steady slogging footsteps, trailed the remnants of the battalion. Dust billowed up and preceded them, like Egypt’s pillar of cloud, filling the air with its dry oppressive menace. It coated their lips and moist brows with white powdery grit, like a spray of plaster, and gave to the surrounding trees, the underbrush and vacant fields, a blighted pallor, as if touched by unseasonable frost. The sun rose higher, burning down at their backs so that each felt he bore on his shoulders not the burden of a pack but, almost worse, a portable oven growing hotter and hotter as the sun came up from behind the sheltering pines. They walked automatically, no longer with that light and tentative step in order to ease the pain in their feet, but with the firm, dogged tread of robots; and if they were all like Culver they had long since parted with a sensation of motion below the hips, and felt there only a constant throbbing pain--of blisters and battered muscles and the protest of exhausted bones. Then one time Culver saw the Colonel go by in a jeep, boiling along in a cloud of dust toward the head of the column. He caught a glimpse of him as he passed: he looked sweaty and tired, far from rested, and Culver wondered how justified Mannix’s outrage had been, assigning to the Colonel that act of cowardice. So he hadn’t been pacing the march, but God knows he must have been hiking along to the rear; and his doubts were bolstered by O’Leary’s voice, coming painfully beside him: “Old Captain Mannix’s mighty pissed off at the Colonel.” He paused, wheezing steadily. “Don’t know if he’s got a right to be that way. Old Colonel ain’t gonna crap out without a reason. Colonel’s kind of rough sometimes but he’ll go with the troops.” Culver said nothing. They plodded ahead silently. Culver felt like cursing the Sergeant. How could he be so stupid? How could he, in the midst of this pain, yield up still only words of accord and respect and even admiration for the creator of such a wild and lunatic punishment? Only a man so firmly cemented to the system that all doubts were beyond countenance could say what O’Leary did--and yet--and yet God knows, Culver thought wearily, he could be right and himself and Mannix, and the rest of them, inescapably wrong. His mind was confused. A swarm of dust came up and filled his lungs. Mannix was screwing everything up horribly, and Culver wanted suddenly to sprint forward--in spite of the effort it took--reach the Captain, take him aside and tell him: _Al, Al, let up, you’ve already lost the battle_. Defiance, pride, endurance--none of these would help. He only mutilated himself by this perverse and violent rebellion; no matter what