“Thank you, sir. Sir-“

“Don’t mention it. How do you like living out there in the woods, Chaplain? Is everything hunky dory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s good. You get in touch with us if you need anything.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Sir-“

“Thanks for dropping around, Chaplain. I’ve got some work to do now. You’ll let me know if you can think of anything for getting our names into The Saturday Evening Post, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I will.” The chaplain braced himself with a prodigious effort of the will and plunged ahead brazenly. “I’m particularly concerned about the condition of one of the bombardiers, sir. Yossarian.”

The colonel glanced up quickly with a start of vague recognition. “Who?” he asked in alarm.

“Yossarian, sir.”

“Yossarian?”

“Yes, sir. Yossarian. He’s in a very bad way, sir. I’m afraid he won’t be able to suffer much longer without doing something desperate.”

“Is that a fact, Chaplain?”

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid it is.”

The colonel thought about it in heavy silence for a few moments. “Tell him to trust in God,” he advised finally.

“Thank you, sir,” said the chaplain. “I will.”

20 CORPORAL WHITCOMB

The late-August morning sun was hot and steamy, and there was no breeze on the balcony. The chaplain moved slowly. He was downcast and burdened with self-reproach when he stepped without noise from the colonel’s office on his rubber-soled and rubber-heeled brown shoes. He hated himself for what he construed to be his own cowardice. He had intended to take a much stronger stand with Colonel Cathcart on the matter of the sixty missions, to speak out with courage, logic and eloquence on a subject about which he had begun to feel very deeply. Instead he had failed miserably, had choked up once again in the face of opposition from a stronger personality. It was a familiar, ignominious experience, and his opinion of himself was low.

He choked up even more a second later when he spied Colonel Korn’s tubby monochrome figure trotting up the curved, wide, yellow stone staircase toward him in lackadaisical haste from the great dilapidated lobby below with its lofty walls of cracked dark marble and circular floor of cracked grimy tile. The chaplain was even more frightened of Colonel Korn than he was of Colonel Cathcart. The swarthy, middle-aged lieutenant colonel with the rimless, icy glasses and faceted, bald, domelike pate that he was always touching sensitively with the tips of his splayed fingers disliked the chaplain and was impolite to him frequently. He kept the chaplain in a constant state of terror with his curt, derisive tongue and his knowing, cynical eyes that the chaplain was never brave enough to meet for more than an accidental second. Inevitably, the chaplain’s attention, as he cowered meekly before him, focused on Colonel Korn’s midriff, where the shirttails bunching up from inside his sagging belt and ballooning down over his waist gave him an appearance of slovenly girth and made him seem inches shorter than his middle height. Colonel Korn was an untidy disdainful man with an oily skin and deep, hard lines running almost straight down from his nose between his crepuscular jowls and his square, clefted chin. His face was dour, and he glanced at the chaplain without recognition as the two drew close on the staircase and prepared to pass.

“Hiya, Father,” he said tonelessly without looking at the chaplain. “How’s it going?”

“Good morning, sir,” the chaplain replied, discerning wisely that Colonel Korn expected nothing more in the way of a response.

Colonel Korn was proceeding up the stairs without slackening his pace, and the chaplain resisted the temptation to remind him again that he was not a Catholic but an Anabaptist, and that it was therefore neither necessary nor correct to address him as Father. He was almost certain now that Colonel Korn remembered and that calling him Father with a look of such bland innocence was just another one of Colonel Korn’s methods of taunting him because he was only an Anabaptist.

Colonel Korn halted without warning when he was almost by and came whirling back down upon the chaplain with a glare of infuriated suspicion. The chaplain was petrified.

“What are you doing with that plum tomato, Chaplain?” Colonel Korn demanded roughly.

The chaplain looked down his arm with surprise at the plum tomato Colonel Cathcart had invited him to take. “I got it in Colonel Cathcart’s office, sir,” he managed to reply.

“Does the colonel know you took it?”

“Yes, sir. He gave it to me.”

“Oh, in that case I guess it’s okay,” Colonel Korn said, mollified. He smiled without warmth, jabbing the crumpled folds of his shirt back down inside his trousers with his thumbs. His eyes glinted keenly with a private and satisfying mischief. “What did Colonel Cathcart want to see you about, Father?” he asked suddenly.

The chaplain was tongue-tied with indecision for a moment. “I don’t think I ought-“

“Saying prayers to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post?”

The chaplain almost smiled. “Yes, sir.”

Colonel Korn was enchanted with his own intuition. He laughed disparagingly. “You know, I was afraid he’d begin thinking about something so ridiculous as soon as he saw this week’s Saturday Evening Post. I hope you succeeded in showing him what an atrocious idea it is.”

“He has decided against it, sir.”

“That’s good. I’m glad you convinced him that the editors of The Saturday Evening Post were not likely to run that same story twice just to give some publicity to some obscure colonel. How are things in the wilderness, Father? Are you able to manage out there?”

“Yes, sir. Everything is working out.”

“That’s good. I’m happy to hear you have nothing to complain about. Let us know if you need anything to make you comfortable. We all want you to have a good time out there.”

“Thank you, sir. I will.”

Noise of a growing stir rose from the lobby below. It was almost lunchtime, and the earliest arrivals were drifting into the headquarters mess halls, the enlisted men and officers separating into different dining halls on facing sides of the archaic rotunda. Colonel Korn stopped smiling.

“You had lunch with us here just a day or so ago, didn’t you, Father?” he asked meaningfully.

“Yes, sir. The day before yesterday.”

“That’s what I thought,” Colonel Korn said, and paused to let his point sink in. “Well, take it easy, Father. I’ll see you around when it’s time for you to eat here again.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The chaplain was not certain at which of the five officers’ and five enlisted men’s mess halls he was scheduled to have lunch that day, for the system of rotation worked out for him by Colonel Korn was complicated, and he had forgotten his records back in his tent. The chaplain was the only officer attached to Group Headquarters who did not reside in the moldering red-stone Group Headquarters building itself or in any of the smaller satellite structures that rose about the grounds in disjuncted relationship. The chaplain lived in a clearing in the woods about four miles away between the officers’ club and the first of the four squadron areas that stretched away from Group Headquarters in a distant line. The chaplain lived alone in a spacious, square tent that was also his office. Sounds of revelry traveled to him at night from the officers’ club and kept him awake often as he turned and tossed on his cot in passive, half-voluntary exile. He was not able to gauge the effect of the mild pills he took occasionally to help him sleep and felt guilty about it for days afterward.

The only one who lived with the chaplain in his clearing in the woods was Corporal Whitcomb, his assistant. Corporal Whitcomb, an atheist, was a disgruntled subordinate who felt he could do the chaplain’s job much better than the chaplain was doing it and viewed himself, therefore, as an underprivileged victim of social inequity. He lived in a tent of his own as spacious and square as the chaplain’s. He was openly rude and contemptuous to the chaplain once he discovered that the chaplain would let him get away with it. The borders of the two tents in the clearing stood no more than four or five feet apart.