The rain was like a warm shower. Like one great communal shower, and the men began to sing.
“Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
That washes the weary mud away! . . .”
After they’d sung all the traditional verses, Chief Hans added a few new verses to roars of laughter.
“Sing hey! fer our skipper at close of day,
Nothing or a double helping issss . . . . ever ‘is way!”
“Aye!” added one old salt. “First we was bored to tears, and then a thousand hairy monkeys comes to lunch!”
“And,” chimed in a marine, “first it’s dry as dust and now we ‘ave t’swim fir our supper! Life with our lieutenant will never be dull!”
“Aye,” concluded old Hans quietly, ” ‘e was a right Heinleiner fer us today.”
Melville knew that this was high praise, this acceptance from his men. He also knew that he didn’t deserve it. He’d done little more than any other man, but in the richness of their hearts they were willing to give the victory to their leader. He was lucky, and they rejoiced to serve a lucky man.
Prior to the battle it hadn’t occurred to him to worry about his ability as a combat leader, since he didn’t know that a pocket Armageddon was headed his way. During the battle he was too busy to worry. But now his gut churned with emotions.
He found himself preoccupied with the battle, reliving it over and over in his mind. He second guessed himself, and thought of things that he could have done, that he should have done. He found himself doubting his ability to face such an event in the future.
He mourned his dead. Yet he was glad, no he rejoiced at having survived! And then he felt guilty that so many others should die and he was happy! He’d been taught in the academy that all these things would happen. The writings of the old masters, the founders of warrior science like Alexis Artwohl and Bruce Siddle had survived the Crash. For centuries they’d been required reading for all military leaders. So, intellectually he knew all about these things.
It was good to be warned. The effect would have been devastating without the warning. Still, there was all the difference in the world between knowing about these things and experiencing them. Like the difference between being warned that the adrenaline rush would happen in combat, and actually experiencing it.
In the midst of these emotions, the praise and approval of his men was a balm to his soul. It was what he wanted, what he craved more than anything else in life, even though he didn’t deserve it. He knew that such support wouldn’t always be there. Sometimes leaders needed to make hard, unpopular decisions. But it was good to have their support now, and he’d revel in it while he could. Even if it was coming from a bunch of naked old salts.
Prior to this, the little spider monkeys had seemed aloof, barely glimpsed as brown flashes in the upper branches. Now they hung from the lower branches, gibbering and jumping as they watched the antics of the little company below.
Melville noticed that the monkey Aquinar had saved was now hanging around the young middy’s neck. The little creature clung with all eight limbs, its strange upside-down face, with mouth on top and eyes below, peering forward beside the boy’s neck. All the other members of the company gathered round and gently stroked its dappled brown fur. The tiny creature seemed to accept the attention as its due.
After they cleansed their bodies, while the water continued to flow down, the company began to wash and wring out their clothing. They soaked and soaped their garments in basins created by placing sailcloth over low spots in the ground. Then they wrung them out onto the ground. The monkeys seemed to think this was a grand game. The men watched them carefully, worried that the little creatures would try to steal something, but they seemed content to be spectators at this show.
Finally, all the bathing was done, their laundry was clean and every available container was full. His men were renewed and invigorated by the rain, but he knew that it was just temporary. Melville estimated that there was about an hour of daylight left, and he was determined to put it to good use.
“Gentlemen!” he began. “We’ve won a mighty victory, but this hill isn’t truly ours until we’ve removed all of our uninvited guests! Let us use the remaining daylight to send them home again. Sergeant Broadax, Chief Petty Officer Hans, if you’d see to it I’d be obliged. I suggest that we begin with the ones closest in, and I think we can make good use of the rain to float them back to where they came from.”
The pouring rain was being channeled down the hill in streams, and it proved to be a relatively simple matter to half drag and half float the bodies down to the nearest stream and send them on their way. This was the kind of work best left to the supervision of their sergeants and petty officers, but the young lieutenant couldn’t permit himself to slack off, and he didn’t let his midshipmen do so either. Wherever the work was the hardest, Melville tried to be there, in the thick of it, assisting and guiding. His middies had no option but to follow his example.
As they worked, Melville talked with the men and with his midshipmen. He sounded them out to see how they felt. “Mr. Archer,” he asked, “how did you find combat?”
“Well, sir,” replied the boy with apparent sincerity, “nobody’s ever tried to kill me before. It kind of made me feel important. I think it’s good for a fellow’s self-esteem”
“Aye, sir,” added Crater with a frown of concentration, “surviving combat’s sort of comforting. Only not very.”
In the midst of their labor, they found themselves again with allies from above. First one little brown monkey appeared to help them, comically teaming up with two stalwart men to drag a corpse across the ground. Then another and yet another joined in. Soon there were hundreds, then thousands of the spider monkeys, all delighting in sending the invaders floating downhill. If they’d all come plunging out of the trees together they’d probably have frightened the little company, but in this gradual manner they slowly earned the trust of the men of Westerness.
The slit latrines that had been dug on the downslope sides of their position were flooded. Sergeant Broadax put her most junior troops to work digging drainage ditches downslope from the latrines. The nasty stuff always did flow downhill, and rank did have its privileges.
With the help of gravity, the deluge, and thousands of spider monkeys, all the ape corpses were soon removed. Only two were held back, along with a few dead spider monkeys, for Petreckski and their surgeon to dissect later.
Melville’s food-obsessed midshipmen were hunched around a cooking fire, roasting bits of some mystery meat skewered on sticks. Aquinar was handing up a tasty bit to his monkey, who chewed it eagerly. Not really wanting to know what they were cooking, he called the “young gentlemen” to him, and walked up to Broadax and Hans.
The two NCOs were watching the removal of the last of the enemy corpses. “Sergeant Broadax, Chief Hans.”
“Aye, sir,” they replied together, Hans spitting a stream of tobacco juice, and Broadax still clenching her seemingly indestructible cigar in her teeth.
“I’m not too concerned about hypothermia; this rain still feels like a warm shower. But if it cools off tonight we may be in trouble. So I want a good fire going soon. Be sure it’s tended all night. The men will need to debrief themselves after battle, and sitting around a fire will help. Tomorrow night will be even more important for debriefing, so be sure we have one then, too.”
“Aye, sir,” they replied, again in unison. They knew exactly what he was talking about. For untold thousands of years, warriors almost always took the nights off. Across the millennia they “debriefed” themselves every night after combat, around the campfire.
Then, in the twentieth century, starting with World War I, combat became a twenty-four-hour-a-day endeavor. From that point on, armies fought day and night for months on end, and the age-old process of nightly debriefings disappeared. Throughout that tragic century the price warriors paid for this, in psychiatric casualties and in post-traumatic stress, was profound. In the twenty-first century this process was reintroduced, using labels like “critical incident stress debriefings” and “after action reviews,” but it was really something age-old made new again. It was a simple, universal human equation, first introduced by a classic science fiction author, E.E. “Doc” Smith: “pain shared equals pain divided, and joy shared equals joy multiplied.” Sometimes it was even written as a formula: