The Colonel looked at him steadily for a moment, coldly. Mannix was no longer a simple doubter but the heretic, and was about to receive judgment. Yet there was still an almost paternal reluctance in Templeton’s voice as he spoke, slowly and very softly, out of the troops’ hearing: “Captain Mannix, I want you to go in on the trucks.” “No, sir,” Mannix said hoarsely, “I’m going to make this march.” The Colonel looked utterly whipped; gray bags of fatigue hung beneath his eyes. He seemed no longer to have strength enough to display his odd theatrical smile; his posture was taut and vaguely stooped, the unmistakable bent-kneed stance of a man with blisters, and Culver was forced to concede--with a sense of mountainous despair--that he _had_ made the march after all, somewhere toward the rear and for legitimate reasons of his own, even if Mannix now was too blind, too outraged, to tell. _Goddam_, Culver heard himself moaning aloud, _if just he only hadn’t made it_, but he heard the Colonel go on coolly: “Not with that foot you aren’t.” He glanced down. The Captain’s ankle had swollen to a fat milky purple above the top of his shoe; he was unable to touch his heel to the ground even if he had wanted to. “Not with that foot,” he repeated. Mannix was silent, panting deeply--not as if taken aback at all, but only as if gathering wind for an outburst. He and the Colonel gazed at each other, twin profiles embattled against an escarpment of pines, the chaste blue sky of morning. “Listen, Colonel,” he rasped, “you ordered this goddam hike and I’m going to walk it even if I haven’t got one goddam man left. You can crap out yourself for half the march--” Culver wanted desperately, somehow, by any means to stop him--not just because he was pulling catastrophe down on his head but because it was simply no longer worth the effort. Couldn’t he see? That the Colonel didn’t care and that was that? That with him the hike had had nothing to do with courage or sacrifice or suffering, but was only a task to be performed, that whatever he was he was no coward, he had marched the whole way--or most of it, any idiot could see that--and that he was as far removed from the vulgar battle, the competition, which Mannix had tried to promote as the frozen, remotest stars. He just didn’t care. Culver strove, in a sick, heaving effort, to rise, to go and somehow separate them, but Mannix was charging on: “You run your troops. Fine. O.K. But what’s all this about crapping out--” “Wait a minute, Captain, now--” the Colonel blurted ominously. “For your information--” “_Fuck_ you and your information,” said Mannix in a hoarse, choked voice. He was almost sobbing. “If you think--”