Catch-22 ..(3)

"The hides."
"The hides?"
"The hides. In Buenos Aires. They have to be tanned."
"Tanned?"
"In Newfoundland. And shipped to Helsinki N.M.I.F. before the spring thaw begins. Everything to Finland
goes N.M.I.F. before the spring thaw begins."
"No Money in Front?" guessed Colonel Cathcart.
"Good, Colonel. You have a gift, sir. And then there's the cork."
"The cork?"
"That must go to New York, the shoes for Toulouse, the ham for Siam, the nails from Wales, and the
tangerines for New Orleans."
"Milo."
"We have coals in Newcastle, sir."
Colonel Cathcart threw up his hands. "Milo, stop!" he cried, almost in tears. "It's no use. You're just like I
am-indispensable!" He pushed his pencil aside and rose to his feet in frantic exasperation. "Milo, you can't fly
sixty-four more missions. You can't even fly one more mission. The whole system would fall apart if anything
happened to you."
Milo nodded serenely with complacent gratification. "Sir, are you forbidding me to fly any more combat
missions?"
"Milo, I forbid you to fly any more combat missions," Colonel Cathcart declared in a tone of stern and
inflexible authority.
"But that's not fair, sir," said Milo. "What about my record? The other men are getting all the fame and
medals and publicity. Why should I be penalized just because I'm doing such a good job as mess officer?"
"No, Milo, it isn't fair. But I don't see anything we can do about it."
"Maybe we can get someone else to fly my missions for me."
"But maybe we can get someone else to fly your missions for you," Colonel Cathcart suggested. "How
about the striking coal miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia?"
Milo shook his head. "It would take too long to train them. But why not the men in the squadron, sir? After
all, I'm doing this for them. They ought to be willing to do something for me in return."
"But why not the men in the squadron, Milo?" Colonel Cathcart exclaimed. "After all, you're doing all this
for them. They ought to be willing to do something for you in return."
"What's fair is fair."
"What's fair is fair."
"They could take turns, sir."
"They might even take turns flying your missions for you, Milo."
"Who gets the credit?"
"You get the credit, Milo. And if a man wins a medal flying one of your missions, you get the medal."
"Who dies if he gets killed?"
"Why, he dies, of course. After all, Milo, what's fair is fair. There's just one thing."
"You'll have to raise the number of missions."
"I might have to raise the number of missions again, and I'm not sure the men will fly them. They're still
pretty sore because I jumped them to seventy. If I can get just one of the regular officers to fly more, the rest
will probably follow."
"Nately will fly more missions, sir," Milo said. "I was told in strictest confidence just a little while ago that
he'll do anything he has to in order to remain overseas with a girl he's fallen in love with."
"But Nately will fly more!" Colonel Cathcart declared, and he brought his hands together in a resounding
clap of victory. "Yes, Nately will fly more. And this time I'm really going to jump the missions, right up to
eighty, and really knock General Dreedle's eye out. And this is a good way to get that lousy rat Yossarian back
into combat where he might get killed."
"Yossarian?" A tremor of deep concern passed over Milo's simple, homespun features, and he scratched the
corner of his reddish-brown mustache thoughtfully.
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"Yeah, Yossarian. I hear he's going around saying that he's finished his missions and the war's over for him.
Well, maybe he has finished his missions. But he hasn't finished your missions, has he? Ha! Ha! Has he got a
surprise coming to him!"
"Sir, Yossarian is a friend of mine," Milo objected. "I'd hate to be responsible for doing anything that
would put him back in combat. I owe a lot to Yossarian. Isn't there any way we could make an exception of
him?"
"Oh, no, Milo." Colonel Cathcart clucked sententiously, shocked by the suggestion. "We must never play
favorites. We must always treat every man alike."
"I'd give everything I own to Yossarian," Milo persevered gamely on Yossarian's behalf. "But since I don't
own anything, I can't give everything to him, can I? So he'll just have to take his chances with the rest of the
men, won't he?"
"What's fair is fair, Milo."
"Yes, sir, what's fair is fair," Milo agreed. "Yossarian is no better than the other men, and he has no right to
expect any special privileges, has he?"
"No, Milo. What's fair is fair."
And there was no time for Yossarian to save himself from combat once Colonel Cathcart issued his
announcement raising the missions to eighty late that same afternoon, no time to dissuade Nately from flying
them or even to conspire again with Dobbs to murder Colonel Cathcart, for the alert sounded suddenly at
dawn the next day and the men were rushed into the trucks before a decent breakfast could be prepared, and
they were driven at top speed to the briefing room and then out to the airfield, where the clitterclattering fuel
trucks were still pumping gasoline into the tanks of the planes and the scampering crews of armorers were
toiling as swiftly as they could at hoisting the thousand-pound demolition bombs into the bomb bays.
Everybody was running, and engines were turned on and warmed up as soon as the fuel trucks had finished.
Intelligence had reported that a disabled Italian cruiser in drydock at La Spezia would be towed by the
Germans that same morning to a channel at the entrance of the harbor and scuttled there to deprive the Allied
armies of deep-water port facilities when they captured the city. For once, a military intelligence report proved
accurate. The long vessel was halfway across the harbor when they flew in from the west, and broke it apart
with direct hits from every flight that filled them all with waves of enormously satisfying group pride until
they found themselves engulfed in great barrages of flak that rose from guns in every bend of the huge
horseshoe of mountainous land below. Even Havermeyer resorted to the wildest evasive action he could
command when he saw what a vast distance he had still to travel to escape, and Dobbs, at the pilot's controls
in his formation, zigged when he should have zagged, skidding his plane into the plane alongside, and chewed
off its tail. His wing broke off at the base, and his plane dropped like a rock and was almost out of sight in an
instant. There was no fire, no smoke, not the slightest untoward noise. The remaining wing revolved as
ponderously as a grinding cement mixer as the plane plummeted nose downward in a straight line at
accelerating speed until it struck the water, which foamed open at the impact like a white water lily on the
dark-blue sea, and washed back in a geyser of apple-green bubbles when the plane sank. It was over in a
matter of seconds. There were no parachutes. And Nately, in the other plane, was killed too.
36 THE CELLAR
Nately's death almost killed the chaplain. Chaplain Shipman was seated in his tent, laboring over his
paperwork in his reading spectacles, when his phone rang and news of the mid-air collision was given to him
from the field. His insides turned at once to dry clay. His hand was trembling as he put the phone down. His
other hand began trembling. The disaster was too immense to contemplate. Twelve men killed-how ghastly,
how very, very awful! His feeling of terror grew. He prayed instinctively that Yossarian, Nately, Hungry Joe
and his other friends would not be listed among the victims, then berated himself repentantly, for to pray for
their safety was to pray for the death of other young men he did not even know. It was too late to pray; yet that
was all he knew how to do. His heart was pounding with a noise that seemed to be coming from somewhere
outside, and he knew he would never sit in a dentist's chair again, never glance at a surgical tool, never witness
an automobile accident or hear a voice shout at night, without experiencing the same violent thumping in his
chest and dreading that he was going to die. He would never watch another fist fight without fearing he was
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going to faint and crack his skull open on the pavement or suffer a fatal heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage.
He wondered if he would ever see his wife again or his three small children. He wondered if he ever should
see his wife again, now that Captain Black had planted in his mind such strong doubts about the fidelity and
character of all women. There were so many other men, he felt, who could prove more satisfying to her
sexually. When he thought of death now, he always thought of his wife, and when he thought of his wife he
always thought of losing her.
In another minute the chaplain felt strong enough to rise and walk with glum reluctance to the tent next
door for Sergeant Whitcomb. They drove in Sergeant Whitcomb's jeep. The chaplain made fists of his hands
to keep them from shaking as they lay in his lap. He ground his teeth together and tried not to hear as Sergeant
Whitcomb chirruped exultantly over the tragic event. Twelve men killed meant twelve more form letters of
condolence that could be mailed in one bunch to the next of kin over Colonel Cathcart's signature, giving
Sergeant Whitcomb hope of getting an article on Colonel Cathcart into The Saturday Evening Post in time for
Easter.
At the field a heavy silence prevailed, overpowering motion like a ruthless, insensate spell holding in thrall
the only beings who might break it. The chaplain was in awe. He had never beheld such a great, appalling
stillness before. Almost two hundred tired, gaunt, downcast men stood holding their parachute packs in a
somber and unstirring crowd outside the briefing room, their faces staring blankly in different angles of
stunned dejection. They seemed unwilling to go, unable to move. The chaplain was acutely conscious of the
faint noise his footsteps made as he approached. His eyes searched hurriedly, frantically, through the immobile
maze of limp figures. He spied Yossarian finally with a feeling of immense joy, and then his mouth gaped
open slowly in unbearable horror as he noted Yossarian's vivid, beaten, grimy look of deep, drugged despair.
He understood at once, recoiling in pain from the realization and shaking his head with a protesting and
imploring grimace, that Nately was dead. The knowledge struck him with a numbing shock. A sob broke from
him. The blood drained from his legs, and he thought he was going to drop. Nately was dead. All hope that he
was mistaken was washed away by the sound of Nately's name emerging with recurring clarity now from the
almost inaudible babble of murmuring voices that he was suddenly aware of for the first time. Nately was
dead: the boy had been killed. A whimpering sound rose in the chaplain's throat, and his jaw began to quiver.
His eyes filled with tears, and he was crying. He started toward Yossarian on tiptoe to mourn beside him and
share his wordless grief. At that moment a hand grabbed him roughly around the arm and a brusque voice
demanded,
"Chaplain Shipman?"
He turned with surprise to face a stout, pugnacious colonel with a large head and mustache and a smooth,
florid skin. He had never seen the man before. "Yes. What is it?" The fingers grasping the chaplain's arm were
hurting him, and he tried in vain to squirm loose.
"Come along."
The chaplain pulled back in frightened confusion. "Where? Why? Who are you, anyway?"
"You'd better come along with us, Father," a lean, hawk-faced major on the chaplain's other side intoned
with reverential sorrow. "We're from the government. We want to ask you some questions."
"What kind of questions? What's the matter?"
"Aren't you Chaplain Shipman?" demanded the obese colonel.
"He's the one," Sergeant Whitcomb answered.
"Go on along with them," Captain Black called out to the chaplain with a hostile and contemptuous sneer.
"Go on into the car if you know what's good for you."
Hands were drawing the chaplain away irresistibly. He wanted to shout for help to Yossarian, who seemed
too far away to hear. Some of the men nearby were beginning to look at him with awakening curiosity. The
chaplain bent his face away with burning shame and allowed himself to be led into the rear of a staff car and
seated between the fat colonel with the large, pink face and the skinny, unctuous, despondent major. He
automatically held a wrist out to each, wondering for a moment if they wanted to handcuff him. Another
officer was already in the front seat. A tall M.P. with a whistle and a white helmet got in behind the wheel.
The chaplain did not dare raise his eyes until the closed car had lurched from the area and the speeding wheels
were whining on the bumpy blacktop road.
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"Where are you taking me?" he asked in a voice soft with timidity and guilt, his gaze still averted. The
notion came to him that they were holding him to blame for the mid-air crash and the death of Nately. "What
have I done?"
"Why don't you keep your trap shut and let us ask the questions?" said the colonel.
"Don't talk to him that way," said the major. "It isn't necessary to be so disrespectful."
"Then tell him to keep his trap shut and let us ask the questions."
"Father, please keep your trap shut and let us ask the questions," urged the major sympathetically. "It will
be better for you."
"It isn't necessary to call me Father," said the chaplain. "I'm not a Catholic."
"Neither am I, Father," said the major. "It's just that I'm a very devout person, and I like to call all men of
God Father."
"He doesn't even believe there are atheists in foxholes," the colonel mocked, and nudged the chaplain in the
ribs familiarly. "Go on, Chaplain, tell him. Are there atheists in foxholes?"
"I don't know, sir," the chaplain replied. "I've never been in a foxhole."
The officer in front swung his head around swiftly with a quarrelsome expression. "You've never been in
heaven either, have you? But you know there's a heaven, don't you?"
"Or do you?" said the colonel.
"That's a very serious crime you've committed, Father," said the major.
"What crime?"
"We don't know yet," said the colonel. "But we're going to find out. And we sure know it's very serious."
The car swung off the road at Group Headquarters with a squeal of tires, slackening speed only slightly,
and continued around past the parking lot to the back of the building. The three officers and the chaplain got
out. In single file, they ushered him down a wobbly flight of wooden stairs leading to the basement and led
him into a damp, gloomy room with a low cement ceiling and unfinished stone walls. There were cobwebs in
all the corners. A huge centipede blew across the floor to the shelter of a water pipe. They sat the chaplain in a
hard, straight-backed chair that stood behind a small, bare table.
"Please make yourself comfortable, Chaplain," invited the colonel cordially, switching on a blinding
spotlight and shooting it squarely into the chaplain's face. He placed a set of brass knuckles and box of
wooden matches on the table. "We want you to relax."
The chaplain's eyes bulged out incredulously. His teeth chattered and his limbs felt utterly without strength.
He was powerless. They might do whatever they wished to him, he realized; these brutal men might beat him
to death right there in the basement, and no one would intervene to save him, no one, perhaps, but the devout
and sympathetic major with the sharp face, who set a water tap dripping loudly into a sink and returned to the
table to lay a length of heavy rubber hose down beside the brass knuckles.
"Everything's going to be all right, Chaplain," the major said encouragingly. "You've got nothing to be
afraid of if you're not guilty. What are you so afraid of? You're not guilty, are you?"
"Sure he's guilty," said the colonel. "Guilty as hell."
"Guilty of what?" implored the chaplain, feeling more and more bewildered and not knowing which of the
men to appeal to for mercy. The third officer wore no insignia and lurked in silence off to the side. "What did I
do?"
"That's just what we're going to find out," answered the colonel, and he shoved a pad and pencil across the
table to the chaplain. "Write your name for us, will you? In your own handwriting."
"My own handwriting?"
"That's right. Anywhere on the page." When the chaplain had finished, the colonel took the pad back and
held it up alongside a sheet of paper he removed from a folder. "See?" he said to the major, who had come to
his side and was peering solemnly over his shoulder.
"They're not the same, are they?" the major admitted.
"I told you he did it."
"Did what?" asked the chaplain.
"Chaplain, this comes as a great shock to me," the major accused in a tone of heavy lamentation.
"What does?"
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"I can't tell you how disappointed I am in you."
"For what?" persisted the chaplain more fiantically. "What have I done?"
"For this," replied the major, and, with an air of disillusioned disgust, tossed down on the table the pad on
which the chaplain had signed his name. "This isn't your handwriting."
The chaplain blinked rapidly with amazement. "But of course it's my handwriting."
"No it isn't, Chaplain. You're lying again."
"But I just wrote it!" the chaplain cried in exasperation. "You saw me write it."
"That's just it," the major answered bitterly. "I saw you write it. You can't deny that you did write it. A
person who'll lie about his own handwriting will lie about anything."
"But who lied about my own handwriting?" demanded the chaplain, forgetting his fear in the wave of anger
and indignation that welled up inside him suddenly. "Are you crazy or something? What are you both talking
about?"
"We asked you to write your name in your own handwriting. And you didn't do it."
"But of course I did. In whose handwriting did I write it if not my own?"
"In somebody else's."
"Whose?"
"That's just what we're going to find out," threatened the colonel.
"Talk, Chaplain."
The chaplain looked from one to the other of the two men with rising doubt and hysteria. "That handwriting
is mine," he maintained passionately. "Where else is my handwriting, if that isn't it?"
"Right here," answered the colonel. And looking very superior, he tossed down on the table a photostatic
copy of a piece of V mail in which everything but the salutation "Dear Mary" had been blocked out and on
which the censoring officer had written, "I long for you tragically. R. O. Shipman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." The
colonel smiled scornfully as he watched the chaplain's face turn crimson. "Well, Chaplain? Do you know who
wrote that?"
The chaplain took a long moment to reply; he had recognized Yossarian's handwriting. "No."
"You can read, though, can't you?" the colonel persevered sarcastically. "The author signed his name."
"That's my name there."
"Then you wrote it. Q.E.D."
"But I didn't write it. That isn't my handwriting, either."
"Then you signed your name in somebody else's handwriting again," the colonel retorted with a shrug.
"That's all that means."
"Oh, this is ridiculous!" the chaplain shouted, suddenly losing all patience. He jumped to his feet in a
blazing fury, both fists clenched. "I'm not going to stand for this any longer! Do you hear? Twelve men were
just killed, and I have no time for these silly questions. You've no right to keep me here, and I'm just not going
to stand for it."
Without saying a word, the colonel pushed the chaplain's chest hard and knocked him back down into the
chair, and the chaplain was suddenly weak and very much afraid again. The major picked up the length of
rubber hose and began tapping it menacingly against his open palm. The colonel lifted the box of matches,
took one out and held it poised against the striking surface, watching with glowering eyes for the chaplain's
next sign of defiance. The chaplain was pale and almost too petrified to move. The bright glare of the spotlight
made him turn away finally; the dripping water was louder and almost unbearably irritating. He wished they
would tell him what they wanted so that he would know what to confess. He waited tensely as the third
officer, at a signal from the colonel, ambled over from the wall and seated himself on the table just a few
inches away from the chaplain. His face was expressionless, his eyes penetrating and cold.
"Turn off the light," he said over his shoulder in a low, calm voice. "It's very annoying."
The chaplain gave him a small smile of gratitude. "Thank you, sir. And the drip too, please."
"Leave the drip," said the officer. "That doesn't bother me." He tugged up the legs of his trousers a bit, as
though to preserve their natty crease. "Chaplain," he asked casually, "of what religious persuasion are you?"
"I'm an Anabaptist, sir."
"That's a pretty suspicious religion, isn't it?"
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"Suspicious?" inquired the chaplain in a kind of innocent daze. "Why, sir?"
"Well, I don't know a thing about it. You'll have to admit that, won't you? Doesn't that make it pretty
suspicious?"
"I don't know, sir," the chaplain answered diplomatically, with an uneasy stammer. He found the man's lack
of insignia disconcerting and was not even sure he had to say "sir". Who was he? And what authority had he to
interrogate him?
"Chaplain, I once studied Latin. I think it's only fair to warn you of that before I ask my next question.
Doesn't the word Anabaptist simply mean that you're not a Baptist?"
"Oh, no, sir. There's much more."
"Are you a Baptist?"
"No, sir."
"Then you are not a Baptist, aren't you?"
"Sir?"
"I don't see why you're bickering with me on that point. You've already admitted it. Now, Chaplain, to say
you're not a Baptist doesn't really tell us anything about what you are, does it? You could be anything or
anyone." He leaned forward slightly and his manner took on a shrewd and significant air. "You could even
be," he added, "Washington Irving, couldn't you?"
"Washington Irving?" the chaplain repeated with surprise.
"Come on, Washington," the corpulent colonel broke in irascibly. "Why don't you make a clean breast of
it? We know you stole that plum tomato."
After a moment's shock, the chaplain giggled with nervous relief. "Oh, is that it!" he exclaimed. "Now I'm
beginning to understand. I didn't steal that plum tomato, sir. Colonel Cathcart gave it to me. You can even ask
him if you don't believe me."
A door opened at the other end of the room and Colonel Cathcart stepped into the basement as though from
a closet.
"Hello, Colonel. Colonel, he claims you gave him that plum tomato. Did you?"
"Why should I give him a plum tomato?" answered Colonel Cathcart.
"Thank you, Colonel. That will be all."
"It's a pleasure, Colonel," Colonel Cathcart replied, and he stepped back out of the basement, closing the
door after him.
"Well, Chaplain? What have you got to say now?"
"He did give it to me!" the chaplain hissed in a whisper that was both fierce and fearful. "He did give it to
me!"
"You're not calling a superior officer a liar are you, Chaplain?"
"Why should a superior officer give you a plum tomato, Chaplain?"
"Is that why you tried to give it to Sergeant Whitcomb, Chaplain? Because it was a hot tomato?"
"No, no, no," the chaplain protested, wondering miserably why they were not able to understand. "I offered
it to Sergeant Whitcomb because I didn't want it."
"Why'd you steal it from Colonel Cathcart if you didn't want it?"
"I didn't steal it from Colonel Cathcard"
"Then why are you so guilty, if you didn't steal it?"
"I'm not guilty!"
"Then why would we be questioning you if you weren't guilty?"
"Oh, I don't know," the chaplain groaned, kneading his fingers in his lap and shaking his bowed and
anguished head. "I don't know."
"He thinks we have time to waste," snorted the major.
"Chaplain," resumed the officer without insignia at a more leisurely pace, lifting a typewritten sheet of
yellow paper from the open folder, "I have a signed statement here from Colonel Cathcart asserting you stole
that plum tomato from him." He lay the sheet face down on one side of the folder and picked up a second page
from the other side. "And I have a notarized affidavit from Sergeant Whitcomb in which he states that he knew
the tomato was hot just from the way you tried to unload it on him."
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"I swear to God I didn't steal it, sir," the chaplain pleaded with distress, almost in tears. "I give you my
sacred word it was not a hot tomato."
"Chaplain, do you believe in God?"
"Yes, sir. Of course I do."
"That's odd, Chaplain," said the officer, taking from the folder another typewritten yellow page, "because I
have here in my hands now another statement from Colonel Cathcart in which he swears that you refused to
co-operate with him in conducting prayer meetings in the briefing room before each mission."
After looking blank a moment, the chaplain nodded quickly with recollection. "Oh, that's not quite true,
sir," he explained eagerly. "Colonel Cathcart gave up the idea himself once he realized enlisted men pray to
the same God as officers."
"He did what?" exclaimed the officer in disbelief.
"What nonsense!" declared the red-faced colonel, and swung away from the chaplain with dignity and
annoyance.
"Does he expect us to believe that?" cried the major incredulously.
The officer without insignia chuckled acidly. "Chaplain, aren't you stretching things a bit far now?" he
inquired with a smile that was indulgent and unfriendly.
"But, sir, it's the truth, sir! I swear it's the truth."
"I don't see how that matters one way or the other," the officer answered nonchalantly, and reached
sideways again toward the open folder filled with papers. "Chaplain, did you say you did believe in God in
answer to my question? I don't remember."
"Yes, sir. I did say so, sir. I do believe in God."
"Then that really is very odd, Chaplain, because I have here another affidavit from Colonel Cathcart that
states you once told him atheism was not against the law. Do you recall ever making a statement like that to
anyone?"
The chaplain nodded without any hesitation, feeling himself on very solid ground now. "Yes, sir, I did
make a statement like that. I made it because it's true. Atheism is not against the law."
"But that's still no reason to say so, Chaplain, is it?" the officer chided tartly, frowning, and picked up still
one more typewritten, notarized page from the folder. "And here I have another sworn statement from
Sergeant Whitcomb that says you opposed his plan of sending letters of condolence over Colonel Cathcart's
signature to the next of kin of men killed or wounded in combat. Is that true?"
"Yes, sir, I did oppose it," answered the chaplain. "And I'm proud that I did. Those letters are insincere and
dishonest. Their only purpose is to bring glory to Colonel Cathcart."
"But what difference does that make?" replied the officer. "They still bring solace and comfort to the
families that receive them, don't they? Chaplain, I simply can't understand your thinking process."
The chaplain was stumped and at a complete loss for a reply. He hung his head, feeling tongue-tied and
naive.
The ruddy stout colonel stepped forward vigorously with a sudden idea. "Why don't we knock his goddam
brains out?" he suggested with robust enthusiasm to the others.
"Yes, we could knock his goddam brains out, couldn't we?" the hawk-faced major agreed. "He's only an
Anabaptist."
"No, we've got to find him guilty first," the officer without insignia cautioned with a languid restraining
wave. He slid lightly to the floor and moved around to the other side of the table, facing the chaplain with both
hands pressed flat on the surface. His expression was dark and very stern, square and forbidding. "Chaplain,"
he announced with magisterial rigidity, "we charge you formally with being Washington Irving and taking
capricious and unlicensed liberties in censoring the letters of officers and enlisted men. Are you guilty or
innocent?"
"Innocent, sir." The chaplain licked dry lips with a dry tongue and leaned forward in suspense on the edge
of his chair.
"Guilty," said the colonel.
"Guilty," said the major.
"Guilty it is, then," remarked the officer without insignia, and wrote a word on a page in the folder.
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"Chaplain," he continued, looking up, "we accuse you also of the commission of crimes and infractions we
don't even know about yet. Guilty or innocent?"
"I don't know, sir. How can I say if you don't tell me what they are?"
"How can we tell you if we don't know?"
"Guilty," decided the colonel.
"Sure he's guilty," agreed the major. "If they're his crimes and infractions, he must have committed them."
"Guilty it is, then," chanted the officer without insignia, and moved off to the side of the room. "He's all
yours, Colonel."
"Thank you," commended the colonel. "You did a very good job." He turned to the chaplain. "Okay,
Chaplain, the jig's up. Take a walk."
The chaplain did not understand. "What do you wish me to do?"
"Go on, beat it, I told you!" the colonel roared, jerking a thumb over his shoulder angrily. "Get the hell out
of here."
The chaplain was shocked by his bellicose words and tone and, to his own amazement and mystification,
deeply chagrined that they were turning him loose. "Aren't you even going to punish me?" he inquired with
querulous surprise.
"You're damned right we're going to punish you. But we're certainly not going to let you hang around while
we decide how and when to do it. So get going. Hit the road."
The chaplain rose tentatively and took a few steps away. "I'm free to go?"
"For the time being. But don't try to leave the island. We've got your number, Chaplain. Just remember that
we've got you under surveillance twenty-four hours a day."
It was not conceivable that they would allow him to leave. The chaplain walked toward the exit gingerly,
expecting at any instant to be ordered back by a peremptory voice or halted in his tracks by a heavy blow on
the shoulder or the head. They did nothing to stop him. He found his way through the stale, dark, dank
corridors to the flight of stairs. He was staggering and panting when he climbed out into the fresh air. As soon
as he had escaped, a feeling of overwhelming moral outrage filled him. He was furious, more furious at the
atrocities of the day than he had ever felt before in his whole life. He swept through the spacious, echoing
lobby of the building in a temper of scalding and vindictive resentment. He was not going to stand for it any
more, he told himself, he was simply not going to stand for it. When he reached the entrance, he spied, with a
feeling of good fortune, Colonel Korn trotting up the wide steps alone. Bracing himself with a deep breath, the
chaplain moved courageously forward to intercept him.
"Colonel, I'm not going to stand for it any more," he declared with vehement determination, and watched in
dismay as Colonel Korn went trotting by up the steps without even noticing him. "Colonel Korn!"
The tubby, loose figure of his superior officer stopped, turned and came trotting back down slowly. "What
is it, Chaplain?"
"Colonel Korn, I want to talk to you about the crash this morning. It was a terrible thing to happen,
terrible!"
Colonel Korn was silent a moment, regarding the chaplain with a glint of cynical amusement. "Yes,
Chaplain, it certainly was terrible," he said finally. "I don't know how we're going to write this one up without
making ourselves look bad."
"That isn't what I meant," the chaplain scolded firmly without any fear at all. "Some of those twelve men
had already finished their seventy missions."
Colonel Korn laughed. "Would it be any less terrible if they had all been new men?" he inquired
caustically.
Once again the chaplain was stumped. Immoral logic seemed to be confounding him at every turn. He was
less sure of himself than before when he continued, and his voice wavered. "Sir, it just isn't right to make the
men in this group fly eighty missions when the men in other groups are being sent home with fifty and
fifty-five."
"We'll take the matter under consideration," Colonel Korn said with bored disinterest, and started away.
"Adios, Padre."
"What does that mean, sir?" the chaplain persisted in a voice turning shrill.
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Colonel Korn stopped with an unpleasant expression and took a step back down. "It means we'll think
about it, Padre," he answered with sarcasm and contempt. "You wouldn't want us to do anything without
thinking about it, would you?"
"No, sir, I suppose not. But you have been thinking about it, haven't you?"
"Yes, Padre, we have been thinking about it. But to make you happy, we'll think about it some more, and
you'll be the first person we'll tell if we reach a new decision. And now, adios." Colonel Korn whirled away
again and hurried up the stairs.
"Colonel Korn!" The chaplain's cry made Colonel Korn stop once more. His head swung slowly around
toward the chaplain with a look of morose impatience. Words gushed from the chaplain in a nervous torrent.
"Sir, I would like your permission to take the matter to General Dreedle. I want to bring my protests to Wing
Headquarters."
Colonel Korn's thick, dark jowls inflated unexpectedly with a suppressed guffaw, and it took him a moment
to reply. "That's all right, Padre," he answered with mischievous merriment, trying hard to keep a straight face.
"You have my permission to speak to General Dreedle."
"Thank you, sir. I believe it only fair to warn you that I think I have some influence with General Dreedle."
"It's good of you to warn me, Padre. And I believe it only fair to warn you that you won't find General
Dreedle at Wing." Colonel Korn grinned wickedly and then broke into triumphant laughter. "General Dreedle
is out, Padre. And General Peckem is in. We have a new wing commander."
The chaplain was stunned. "General Peckem!"
"That's right, Chaplain. Have you got any influence with him?"
"Why, I don't even know General Peckem," the chaplain protested wretchedly.
Colonel Korn laughed again. "That's too bad, Chaplain, because Colonel Cathcart knows him very well."
Colonel Korn chuckled steadily with gloating relish for another second or two and then stopped abruptly.
"And by the way, Padre," he warned coldly, poking his finger once into the chaplain's chest. "The jig is up
between you and Dr. Stubbs. We know very well he sent you up here to complain today."
"Dr. Stubbs?" The chaplain shook his head in baffled protest. "I haven't seen Dr. Stubbs, Colonel. I was
brought here by three strange officers who took me down into the cellar without authority and questioned and
insulted me."
Colonel Korn poked the chaplain in the chest once more. "You know damned well Dr. Stubbs has been
telling the men in his squadron they didn't have to fly more than seventy missions." He laughed harshly.
"Well, Padre, they do have to fly more than seventy missions, because we're transferring Dr. Stubbs to the
Pacific. So adios, Padre. Adios."
37 GENERAL SCHEISSKOPF
Dreedle was out, and General Peckem was in, and General Peckem had hardly moved inside General
Dreedle's office to replace him when his splendid military victory began falling to pieces around him.
"General Scheisskopf?" he inquired unsuspectingly of the sergeant in his new office who brought him word
of the order that had come in that morning. "You mean Colonel Scheisskopf, don't you?"
"No, sir, General Scheisskopf He was promoted to general this morning, sir."
"Well, that's certainly curious! Scheisskopf? A general? What grade?"
"Lieutenant general, sir, and-"
"Lieutenant general!"
"Yes, sir, and he wants you to issue no orders to anyone in your command without first clearing them
through him."
"Well, I'll be damned," mused General Peckem with astonishment, swearing aloud for perhaps the first time
in his life. "Cargill, did you hear that? Scheisskopf was promoted way up to lieutenant general. I'll bet that
promotion was intended for me and they gave it to him by mistake."
Colonel Cargill had been rubbing his sturdy chin reflectively. "Why is he giving orders to us?"
General Peckem's sleek, scrubbed, distinguished face tightened. "Yes, Sergeant," he said slowly with an
uncomprehending frown. "Why is he issuing orders to us if he's still in Special Services and we're in combat
operations?"
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"That's another change that was made this morning, sir. All combat operations are now under the
jurisdiction of Special Services. General Scheisskopf is our new commanding officer."
General Peckem let out a sharp cry. "Oh, my God!" he wailed, and all his practical composure went up in
hysteria. "Scheisskopf in charge? Scheisskopf?" He pressed his fists down on his eyes with horror. "Cargill,
get me Wintergreen! Scheisskopf? Not Scheisskopf!"
All phones began ringing at once. A corporal ran in and saluted.
"Sir, there's a chaplain outside to see you with news of an injustice in Colonel Cathcart's squadron."
"Send him away, send him away! We've got enough injustices of our own. Where's Wintergreen?"
"Sir, General Scheisskopf is on the phone. He wants to speak to you at once."
"Tell him I haven't arrived yet. Good Lord!" General Peckem screamed, as though struck by the enormity
of the disaster for the first time. "Scheisskopf? The man's a moron! I walked all over that blockhead, and now
he's my superior officer. Oh, my Lord! Cargill! Cargill, don't desert me! Where's Wintergreen?"
"Sir, I have an ex-Sergeant Wintergreen on your other telephone. He's been trying to reach you all
morning."
"General, I can't get Wintergreen," Colonel Cargill shouted, "His line is busy."
General Peckem was perspiring freely as he lunged for the other telephone.
"Wintergreen!"
"Peckem, you son of a bitch-"
"Wintergreen, have you heard what they've done?"
"-what have you done, you stupid bastard?"
"They put Scheisskopf in charge of everything!"
Wintergreen was shrieking with rage and panic. "You and your goddam memorandums! They've gone and
transferred combat operations to Special Services!"
"Oh, no," moaned General Peckem. "Is that what did it? My memoranda? Is that what made them put
Scheisskopf in charge? Why didn't they put me in charge?"
"Because you weren't in Special Services any more. You transferred out and left him in charge. And do you
know what he wants? Do you know what the bastard wants us all to do?"
"Sir, I think you'd better talk to General Scheisskopf," pleaded the sergeant nervously. "He insists on
speaking to someone."
"Cargill, talk to Scheisskopf for me. I can't do it. Find out what he wants."
Colonel Cargill listened to General Scheisskopf for a moment and went white as a sheet. "Oh, my God!" he
cried, as the phone fell from his fingers. "Do you know what he wants? He wants us to march. He wants
everybody to march!"
38 KID SISTER
Yossarian marched backward with his gun on his hip and refused to fly any more missions. He marched
backward because he was continously spinning around as he walked to make certain no one was sneaking up
on him from behind. Every sound to his rear was a warning, every person he passed a potential assassin. He
kept his hand on his gun butt constantly and smiled at no one but Hungry Joe. He told Captain Piltchard and
Captain Wren that he was through flying. Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren left his name off the flight
schedule for the next mission and reported the matter to Group Headquarters.
Colonel Korn laughed cahnly. "What the devil do you mean, he won't fly more missions?" he asked with a
smile, as Colonel Cathcart crept away into a corner to brood about the sinister import of the name Yossarian
popping up to plague him once again. "Why won't he?"
"His friend Nately was killed in the crash over Spezia. Maybe that's why."
"Who does he think he is-Achilles?" Colonel Korn was pleased with the simile and filed a mental reminder
to repeat it the next time he found himself in General Peckem's presence. "He has to fly more missions. He has
no choice. Go back and tell him you'll report the matter to us if he doesn't change his mind."
"We already did tell him that, sir. It made no difference."
"What does Major Major say?"
"We never see Major Major. He seems to have disappeared."
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"I wish we could disappear him!" Colonel Cathcart blurted out from the corner peevishly. "The way they
did that fellow Dunbar."
"Oh, there are plenty of other ways we can handle this one," Colonel Korn assured him confidently, and
continued to Piltchard and Wren, "Let's begin with the kindest. Send him to Rome for a rest for a few days.
Maybe this fellow's death really did hurt him a bit."
Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately's whore in Rome
she uttered a piercing, heartbroken shriek and tried to stab him to death with a potato peeler.
"Bruto!" she howled at him in hysterical fury as he bent her arm up around behind her back and twisted
gradually until the potato peeler dropped from her grasp. "Bruto! Bruto!" She lashed at him swiftly with the
long-nailed fingers of her free hand and raked open his cheek. She spat in his face viciously.
"What's the matter?" he screamed in stinging pain and bewilderment, flinging her away from him all the
way across the room to the wall. "What do you want from me?"
She flew back at him with both fists flailing and bloodied his mouth with a solid punch before he was able
to grab her wrists and hold her still. Her hair tossed wildly. Tears were streaming in single torrents from her
flashing, hate-filled eyes as she struggled against him fiercely in an irrational frenzy of maddened might,
snarling and cursing savagely and screaming "Bruto! Bruto!" each time he tried to explain. Her great strength
caught him off guard, and he lost his footing. She was nearly as tall as Yossarian, and for a few fantastic,
terror-filled moments he was certain she would overpower him in her crazed determination, crush him to the
ground and rip him apart mercilessly limb from limb for some heinous crime he had never committed. He
wanted to yell for help as they strove against each other frantically in a grunting, panting stalemate, arm
against arm. At last she weakened, and he was able to force her back and plead with her to let him talk,
swearing to her that Nately's death had not been his fault. She spat in his face again, and he pushed her away
hard in disgusted anger and frustration. She hurled herself down toward the potato peeler the instant he
released her. He flung himself down after her, and they rolled over each other on the floor several times before
he could tear the potato peeler away. She tried to trip him with her hand as he scrambled to his feet and
scratched an excruciating chunk out of his ankle. He hopped across the room in pain and threw the potato
peeler out the window. He heaved a huge sigh of relief once he saw he was safe.
"Now, please let me explain something to you," he cajoled in a mature, reasoning, earnest voice.
She kicked him in the groin. Whoosh! went the air out of him, and he sank down on his side with a shrill
and ululating cry, doubled up over his knees in chaotic agony and retching for breath. Nately's whore ran from
the room. Yossarian staggered up to his feet not a moment too soon, for she came charging back in from the
kitchen carrying a long bread knife. A moan of incredulous dismay wafted from his lips as, still clutching his
throbbing, tender, burning bowels in both hands, he dropped his full weight down against her shins and
knocked her legs out from under her. She flipped completely over his head and landed on the floor on her
elbows with a jarring thud. The knife skittered free, and he slapped it out of sight under the bed. She tried to
lunge after it, and he seized her by the arm and yanked her up. She tried to kick him in the groin again, and he
slung her away with a violent oath of his own. She slammed into the wall off balance and smashed a chair
over into a vanity table covered with combs, hairbrushes and cosmetic jars that all went crashing off. A framed
picture fell to the floor at the other end of the room, the glass front shattering.
"What do you want from me?" he yelled at her in whining and exasperated confusion. "I didn't kill him."
She hurled a heavy glass ash tray at his head. He made a fist and wanted to punch her in the stomach when
she came charging at him again, but he was afraid he might harm her. He wanted to clip her very neatly on the
point of the jaw and run from the room, but there was no clear target, and he merely skipped aside neatly at the
last second and helped her along past him with a strong shove. She banged hard against the other wall. Now
she was blocking the door. She threw a large vase at him. Then she came at him with a full wine bottle and
struck him squarely on the temple, knocking him down half-stunned on one knee. His ears were buzzing, his
whole face was numb. More than anything else, he was embarrassed. He felt awkward because she was going
to murder him. He simply did not understand what was going on. He had no idea what to do. But he did know
he had to save himself, and he catapulted forward off the floor when he saw her raise the wine bottle to clout
him again and barreled into her midriff before she could strike him. He had momentum, and he propelled her
before him backward in his driving rush until her knees buckled against the side of the bed and she fell over
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onto the mattress with Yossarian sprawled on top of her between her legs. She plunged her nails into the side
of his neck and gouged as he worked his way up the supple, full hills and ledges of her rounded body until he
covered her completely and pressed her into submission, his fingers pursuing her thrashing arm persistently
until they arrived at the wine bottle finally and wrenched it free. She was still kicking and cursing and
scratching ferociously. She tried to bite him cruelly, her coarse, sensual lips stretched back over her teeth like
an enraged omnivorous beast's. Now that she lay captive beneath him, he wondered how he would ever escape
her without leaving himself vulnerable. He could feel the tensed, straddling inside of her buffeting thighs and
knees squeezing and churning around one of his legs. He was stirred by thoughts of sex that made him
ashamed. He was conscious of the voluptuous flesh of her firm, young-woman's body straining and beating
against him like a humid, fluid, delectable, unyielding tide, her belly and warm, live, plastic breasts thrusting
upward against him vigorously in sweet and menacing temptation. Her breath was scalding. All at once he
realized-though the writhing turbulence beneath him had not diminished one whit-that she was no longer
grappling with him, recognized with a quiver that she was not fighting him but heaving her pelvis up against
him remorselessly in the primal, powerful, rhapsodic instinctual rhythm of erotic ardor and abandonment. He
gasped in delighted surprise. Her face-as beautiful as a blooming flower to him now-was distorted with a new
kind of torture, the tissues serenely swollen, her half-closed eyes misty and unseeing with the stultifying
languor of desire.
"Caro," she murmured hoarsely as though from the depths of a tranquil and luxurious trance. "Ooooh, caro
mio."
He stroked her hair. She drove her mouth against his face with savage passion. He licked her neck. She
wrapped her arms around him and hugged. He felt himself falling, falling ecstatically in love with her as she
kissed him again and again with lips that were steaming and wet and soft and hard, mumbling deep sounds to
him adoringly in an incoherent oblivion of rapture, one caressing hand on his back slipping deftly down inside
his trouser belt while the other groped secretly and treacherously about on the floor for the bread knife and
found it. He saved himself just in time. She still wanted to kill him! He was shocked and astounded by her
depraved subteruge as he tore the knife from her grasp and hurled it away. He bounded out of the bed to his
feet. His face was agog with befuddlement and disillusion. He did not know whether to dart through the door
to freedom or collapse on the bed to fall in love with her and place himself abjectly at her mercy again. She
spared him from doing either by bursting unpredictably into tears. He was stunned again.
This time she wept with no other emotion than grief, profound, debilitating, humble grief, forgetting all
about him. Her desolation was pathetic as she sat with her tempestuous, proud, lovely head bowed, her
shoulders sagging, her spirit melting. This time there was no mistaking her anguish. Great racking sobs
choked and shook her. She was no longer aware of him, no longer cared. He could have walked from the room
safely then. But he chose to remain and console and help her.
"Please," he urged her inarticulately with his arm about her shoulders, recollecting with pained sadness
how inarticulate and enfeebled he had felt in the plane coming back from Avignon when Snowden kept
whimpering to him that he was cold, he was cold, and all Yossarian could offer him in return was "There,
there. There, there." "Please," he repeated to her sympathetically. "Please, please."
She rested against him and cried until she seemed too weak to cry any longer, and did not look at him once
until he extended his handkerchief when she had finished. She wiped her cheeks with a tiny, polite smile and
gave the handkerchief back, murmuring "Grazie, grazie" with meek, maidenly propriety, and then, without any
warning whatsoever of a change in mood, clawed suddenly at his eyes with both hands. She landed with each
and let out a victorious shriek.
"Ha! Assassino!" she hooted, and raced joyously across the room for the bread knife to finish him off.
Half blinded, he rose and stumbled after her. A noise behind him made him turn. His senses reeled in
horror at what he saw. Nately's whore's kid sister, of all people, was coming after him with another long bread
knife!
"Oh, no," he wailed with a shudder, and he knocked the knife out of her hand with a sharp downward blow
on her wrist. He lost patience entirely with the whole grotesque and incomprehensible melee. There was no
telling who might lunge at him next through the doorway with another long bread knife, and he lifted Nately's
whore's kid sister off the floor, threw her at Nately's whore and ran out of the room, out of the apartment and
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down the stairs. The two girls chased out into the hall after him. He heard their footsteps lag farther and farther
behind as he fled and then cease altogether. He heard sobbing directly overhead. Glancing backward up the
stair well, he spied Nately's whore sitting in a heap on one of the steps, weeping with her face in both hands,
while her pagan, irrepressible kid sister hung dangerously over the banister shouting "Bruto! Bruto!" down at
him happily and brandished her bread knife at him as though it were an exciting new toy she was eager to use.
Yossarian escaped, but kept looking back over his shoulder anxiously as he retreated through the street.
People stared at him strangely, making him more apprehensive. He walked in nervous haste, wondering what
there was in his appearance that caught everyone's attention. When he touched his hand to a sore spot on his
forehead, his fingers turned gooey with blood, and he understood. He dabbed his face and neck with a
handkerchief. Wherever it pressed, he picked up new red smudges. He was bleeding everywhere. He hurried
into the Red Cross building and down the two steep flights of white marble stairs to the men's washroom,
where he cleansed and nursed his innumerable visible wounds with cold water and soap and straightened his
shirt collar and combed his hair. He had never seen a face so badly bruised and scratched as the one still
blinking back at him in the mirror with a dazed and startled uneasiness. What on earth had she wanted from
him?
When he left the men's room, Nately's whore was waiting outside in ambush. She was crouched against the
wall near the bottom of the staircase and came pouncing down upon him like a hawk with a glittering silver
steak knife in her fist. He broke the brunt of her assault with his upraised elbow and punched her neatly on the
jaw. Her eyes rolled. He caught her before she dropped and sat her down gently. Then he ran up the steps and
out of the building and spent the next three hours hunting through the city for Hungry Joe so that he could get
away from Rome before she could find him again. He did not feel really safe until the plane had taken off.
When they landed in Pianosa, Nately's whore, disguised in a mechanic's green overalls, was waiting with her
steak knife exactly where the plane stopped, and all that saved him as she stabbed at his chest in her
leather-soled high-heeled shoes was the gravel underfoot that made her feet roll out from under her. Yossarian,
astounded, hauled her up into the plane and held her motionless on the floor in a double armlock while Hungry
Joe radioed the control tower for permission to return to Rome. At the airport in Rome, Yossarian dumped her
out of the plane on the taxi strip, and Hungry Joe took right off for Pianosa again without even cutting his
engines. Scarcely breathing, Yossarian scrutinized every figure warily as he and Hungry Joe walked back
through the squadron toward their tents. Hungry Joe eyed him steadily with a funny expression.
"Are you sure you didn't imagine the whole thing?" Hungry Joe inquired hesitantly after a while.
"Imagine it? You were right there with me, weren't you? You just flew her back to Rome."
"Maybe I imagined the whole thing, too. Why does she want to kill you for?"
"She never did like me. Maybe it's because I broke his nose, or maybe it's because I was the only one in
sight she could hate when she got the news. Do you think she'll come back?"
Yossarian went to the officers' club that night and stayed very late. He kept a leery eye out for Nately's
whore as he approached his tent. He stopped when he saw her hiding in the bushes around the side, gripping a
huge carving knife and all dressed up to look like a Pianosan farmer. Yossarian tiptoed around the back
noiselessly and seized her from behind.
"Caramba!" she exclaimed in a rage, and resisted like a wildcat as he dragged her inside the tent and hurled
her down on the floor.
"Hey, what's going on?" queried one of his roommates drowsily.
"Hold her till I get back," Yossarian ordered, yanking him out of bed on top of her and running out. "Hold
her!"
"Let me kill him and I'll ficky-fick you all," she offered.
The other roommates leaped out of their cots when they saw it was a girl and tried to make her ficky-fick
them all first as Yossarian ran to get Hungry Joe, who was sleeping like a baby. Yossarian lifted Huple's cat
off Hungry Joe's face and shook him awake. Hungry Joe dressed rapidly. This time they flew the plane north
and turned in over Italy far behind the enemy lines. When they were over level land, they strapped a parachute
on Nately's whore and shoved her out the escape hatch. Yossarian was positive that he was at last rid of her
and was relieved. As he approached his tent back in Pianosa, a figure reared up in the darkness right beside the
path, and he fainted. He came to sitting on the ground and waited for the knife to strike him, almost
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welcoming the mortal blow for the peace it would bring. A friendly hand helped him up instead. It belonged to
a pilot in Dunbar's squadron.
"How are you doing?" asked the pilot, whispering.
"Pretty good," Yossarian answered.
"I saw you fall down just now. I thought something happened to you."
"I think I fainted."
"There's a rumor in my squadron that you told them you weren't going to fly any more combat missions."
"That's the truth."
"Then they came around from Group and told us that the rumor wasn't true, that you were just kidding
around."
"That was a lie."
"Do you think they'll let you get away with it?"
"I don't know."
"What will they do to you?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think they'll court-martial you for desertion in the face of the enemy?"
"I don't know."
"I hope you get away with it," said the pilot in Dunbar's squadron, stealing out of sight into the shadows.
"Let me know how you're doing."
Yossarian stared after him a few seconds and continued toward his tent.
"Pssst!" said a voice a few paces onward. It was Appleby, hiding in back of a tree. "How are you doing?"
"Pretty good," said Yossarian.
"I heard them say they were going to threaten to court-martial you for deserting in the face of the enemy.
But that they wouldn't try to go through with it because they're not even sure they've got a case against you on
that. And because it might make them look bad with the new commanders. Besides, you're still a pretty big
hero for going around twice over the bridge at Ferrara. I guess you're just about the biggest hero we've got
now in the group. I just thought you'd like to know that they'll only be bluffing."
"Thanks, Appleby."
"That's the only reason I started talking to you, to warn you."
"I appreciate it."
Appleby scuffed the toes of his shoes into the ground sheepishly. "I'm sorry we had that fist fight in the
officers' club, Yossarian."
"That's all right."
"But I didn't start it. I guess that was Orr's fault for hitting me in the face with his ping-pong paddle. What'd
he want to do that for?"
"You were beating him."
"Wasn't I supposed to beat him? Isn't that the point? Now that he's dead, I guess it doesn't matter any more
whether I'm a better ping-pong player or not, does it?"
"I guess not."
"And I'm sorry about making such a fuss about those Atabrine tablets on the way over. If you want to catch
malaria, I guess it's your business, isn't it?"
"That's all right, Appleby."
"But I was only trying to do my duty. I was obeying orders. I was always taught that I had to obey orders."
"That's all right."
"You know, I said to Colonel Korn and Colonel Cathcart that I didn't think they ought to make you fly any
more missions if you didn't want to, and they said they were very disappointed in me."
Yossarian smiled with rueful amusement. "I'll bet they are."
"Well, I don't care. Hell, you've flown seventy-one. That ought to be enough. Do you think they'll let you
get away with it?"
"No."
"Say, if they do let you get away with it, they'll have to let the rest of us get away with it, won't they?"
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"That's why they can't let me get away with it."
"What do you think they'll do?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think they will try to court-martial you?"
"I don't know."
"Are you afraid?"
"Yes."
"Are you going to fly more missions?"
"No."
"I hope you do get away with it," Appleby whispered with conviction. "I really do."
"Thanks, Appleby."
"I don't feel too happy about flying so many missions either now that it looks as though we've got the war
won. I'll let you know if I hear anything else."
"Thanks, Appleby."
"Hey!" called a muted, peremptory voice from the leafless shrubs growing beside his tent in a waist-high
clump after Appleby had gone. Havermeyer was hiding there in a squat. He was eating peanut brittle, and his
pimples and large, oily pores looked like dark scales. "How you doing?" he asked when Yossarian had walked
to him.
"Pretty good."
"Are you going to fly more missions?"
"No."
"Suppose they try to make you?"
"I won't let them."
"Are you yellow?"
"Yes."
"Will they court-martial you?"
"They'll probably try."
"What did Major Major say?"
"Major Major's gone."
"Did they disappear him?"
"I don't know."
"What will you do if they decide to disappear you?"
"I'll try to stop them."
"Didn't they offer you any deals or anything if you did fly?"
"Piltchard and Wren said they'd arrange things so I'd only go on milk runs."
Havermeyer perked up. "Say, that sounds like a pretty good deal. I wouldn't mind a deal like that myself. I
bet you snapped it up."
"I turned it down."
"That was dumb." Havermeyer's stolid, dull face furrowed with consternation. "Say, a deal like that wasn't
so fair to the rest of us, was it? If you only flew on milk runs, then some of us would have to fly your share of
the dangerous missions, wouldn't we?"
"That's right."
"Say, I don't like that," Havermeyer exclaimed, rising resentfully with his hands clenched on his hips. "I
don't like that a bit. That's a real royal screwing they're getting ready to give me just because you're too
goddam yellow to fly any more missions, isn't it?"
"Take it up with them," said Yossarian and moved his hand to his gun vigilantly.
"No, I'm not blaming you," said Havermeyer, "even though I don't like you. You know, I'm not too happy
about flying so many missions any more either. Isn't there some way I can get out of it, too?"
Yossarian snickered ironically and joked, "Put a gun on and start marching with me."
Havermeyer shook his head thoughtfully. "Nah, I couldn't do that. I might bring some disgrace on my wife
and kid if I acted like a coward. Nobody likes a coward. Besides, I want to stay in the reserves when the war is
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over. You get five hundred dollars a year if you stay in the reserves."
"Then fly more missions."
"Yeah, I guess I have to. Say, do you think there's any chance they might take you off combat duty and
send you home?"
"No."
"But if they do and let you take one person with you, will you pick me? Don't pick anyone like Appleby.
Pick me."
"Why in the world should they do something like that?"
"I don't know. But if they do, just remember that I asked you first, will you? And let me know how you're
doing. I'll wait for you here in these bushes every night. Maybe if they don't do anything bad to you, I won't
fly any more missions either. Okay?"
All the next evening, people kept popping up at him out of the darkness to ask him how he was doing,
appealing to him for confidential information with weary, troubled faces on the basis of some morbid and
clandestine kinship he had not guessed existed. People in the squadron he barely knew popped into sight out
of nowhere as he passed and asked him how he was doing. Even men from other squadrons came one by one
to conceal themselves in the darkness and pop out. Everywhere he stepped after sundown someone was lying
in wait to pop out and ask him how he was doing. People popped out at him from trees and bushes, from
ditches and tall weeds, from around the corners of tents and from behind the fenders of parked cars. Even one
of his roommates popped out to ask him how he was doing and pleaded with him not to tell any of his other
roommates he had popped out. Yossarian drew near each beckoning, overly cautious silhouette with his hand
on his gun, never knowing which hissing shadow would finally turn dishonestly into Nately's whore or, worse,
into some duly constituted governmental authority sent to club him ruthlessly into insensibility. It began to
look as if they would have to do something like that. They did not want to court-martial him for desertion in
the face of the enemy because a hundred and thirty-five miles away from the enemy could hardly be called the
face of the enemy, and because Yossarian was the one who had finally knocked down the bridge at Ferrara by
going around twice over the target and killing Kraft-he was always almost forgetting Kraft when he counted
the dead men he knew. But they had to do something to him, and everyone waited grimly to see what horrible
thing it would be.
During the day, they avoided him, even Aarfy, and Yossarian understood that they were different people
together in daylight than they were alone in the dark. He did not care about them at all as he walked about
backward with his hand on his gun and awaited the latest blandishments, threats and inducements from Group
each time Captains Piltchard and Wren drove back from another urgent conference with Colonel Cathcart and
Colonel Korn. Hungry Joe was hardly around, and the only other person who ever spoke to him was Captain
Black, who called him "Old Blood and Guts" in a merry, taunting voice each time he hailed him and who
came back from Rome toward the end of the week to tell him Nately's whore was gone. Yossarian turned sorry
with a stab of yearning and remorse. He missed her.
"Gone?" he echoed in a hollow tone.
"Yeah, gone." Captain Black laughed, his bleary eyes narrow with fatigue and his peaked, sharp face
sprouting as usual with a sparse reddish-blond stubble. He rubbed the bags under his eyes with both fists. "I
thought I might as well give the stupid broad another boff just for old times' sake as long as I was in Rome
anyway. You know, just to keep that kid Nately's body spinning in his grave, ha, ha! Remember the way I
used to needle him? But the place was empty."
"Was there any word from her?" prodded Yossarian, who had been brooding incessantly about the girl,
wondering how much she was suffering, and feeling almost lonely and deserted without her ferocious and
unappeasable attacks.
"There's no one there," Captain Black exclaimed cheerfully, trying to make Yossarian understand. "Don't
you understand? They're all gone. The whole place is busted."
"Gone?"
"Yeah, gone. Flushed right out into the street." Captain Black chuckled heartily again, and his pointed
Adam's apple jumped up and down with glee inside his scraggly neck. "The joint's empty. The M.P.s busted
the whole apartment up and drove the whores right out. Ain't that a laugh?"
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Yossarian was scared and began to tremble. "Why'd they do that?"
"What difference does it make? responded Captain Black with an exuberant gesture. "They flushed them
right out into the street. How do you like that? The whole batch."
"What about the kid sister?"
"Flushed away," laughed Captain Black. "Flushed away with the rest of the broads. Right out into the
street."
"But she's only a kid!" Yossarian objected passionately. "She doesn't know anybody else in the whole city.
What's going to happen to her?"
"What the hell do I care?" responded Captain Black with an indifferent shrug, and then gawked suddenly at
Yossarian with surprise and with a crafty gleam of prying elation. "Say, what's the matter? If I knew this was
going to make you so unhappy, I would have come right over and told you, just to make you eat your liver.
Hey, where are you going? Come on back! Come on back here and eat your liver!"
39 THE ETERNAL CITY
Yossarian was going absent without official leave with Milo, who, as the plane cruised toward Rome,
shook his head reproachfully and, with pious lips pulsed, informed Yossarian in ecclesiastical tones that he
was ashamed of him. Yossarian nodded. Yossarian was making an uncouth spectacle of himself by walking
around backward with his gun on his hip and refusing to fly more combat missions, Milo said. Yossarian
nodded. It was disloyal to his squadron and embarrassing to his superiors. He was placing Milo in a very
uncomfortable position, too. Yossarian nodded again. The men were starting to grumble. It was not fair for
Yossarian to think only of his own safety while men like Milo, Colonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn and ex-P.F.C.
Wintergreen were willing to do everything they could to win the war. The men with seventy missions were
starring to grumble because they had to fly eighty, and there was a danger some of them might put on guns
and begin walking around backward, too. Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian's fault. The
country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to
exercise them.
Yossarian kept nodding in the co-pilot's seat and tried not to listen as Milo prattled on. Nately's whore was
on his mind, as were Kraft and Orr and Nately and Dunbar, and Kid Sampson and McWatt, and all the poor
and stupid and diseased people he had seen in Italy, Egypt and North Africa and knew about in other areas of
the world, and Snowden and Nately's whore's kid sister were on his conscience, too. Yossarian thought he
knew why Nately's whore held him responsible for Nately's death and wanted to kill him. Why the hell
shouldn't she? It was a man's world, and she and everyone younger had every right to blame him and everyone
older for every unnatural tragedy that befell them; just as she, even in her grief, was to blame for every
man-made misery that landed on her kid sister and on all other children behind her. Someone had to do
something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up
sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all. In parts of Africa little
boys were still stolen away by adult slave traders and sold for money to men who disemboweled them and ate
them. Yossarian marveled that children could suffer such barbaric sacrifice without evincing the slightest hint
of fear or pain. He took it for granted that they did submit so stoically. If not, he reasoned, the custom would
certainly have died, for no craving for wealth or immortality could be so great, he felt, as to subsist on the
sorrow of children.
He was rocking the boat, Milo said, and Yossarian nodded once more. He was not a good member of the
team, Milo said. Yossarian nodded and listened to Milo tell him that the decent thing to do if he did not like
the way Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn were running the group was go to Russia, instead of stirring up
trouble. Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn had both been very good to Yossarian, Milo said; hadn't they
given him a medal after the last mission to Ferrara and promoted him to captain? Yossarian nodded. Didn't
they feed him and give him his pay every month? Yossarian nodded again. Milo was sure they would be
charitable if he went to them to apologize and recant and promise to fly eighty missions. Yossarian said he
would think it over, and held his breath and prayed for a safe landing as Milo dropped his wheels and glided in
toward the runway. It was funny how he had really come to detest flying.
Rome was in ruins, he saw, when the plane was down. The airdrome had been bombed eight months
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before, and knobby slabs of white stone rubble had been bulldozed into flat-topped heaps on both sides of the
entrance through the wire fence surrounding the field. The Colosseum was a dilapidated shell, and the Arch of
Constantine had fallen. Nately's whore's apartment was a shambles. The girls were gone, and the only one
there was the old woman. The windows in the apartment had been smashed. She was bundled up in sweaters
and skirts and wore a dark shawl about her head. She sat on a wooden chair near an electric hot plate, her arms
folded, boiling water in a battered aluminum pot. She was talking aloud to herself when Yossarian entered and
began moaning as soon as she saw him.
"Gone," she moaned before he could even inquire. Holding her elbows, she rocked back and forth
mournfully on her creaking chair. "Gone."
"Who?"
"All. All the poor young girls."
"Where?"
"Away. Chased away into the street. All of them gone. All the poor young girls."
"Chased away by who? Who did it?"
"The mean tall soldiers with the hard white hats and clubs. And by our carabinieri. They came with their
clubs and chased them away. They would not even let them take their coats. The poor things. They just chased
them away into the cold."
"Did they arrest them?"
"They chased them away. They just chased them away."
"Then why did they do it if they didn't arrest them?"
"I don't know," sobbed the old woman. "I don't know. Who will take care of me? Who will take care of me
now that all the poor young girls are gone? Who will take care of me?"
"There must have been a reason," Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. "They couldn't just
barge in here and chase everyone out."
"No reason," wailed the old woman. "No reason."
"What right did they have?"
"Catch-22."
"What?" Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. "What
did you say?"
"Catch-22" the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. "Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a
right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Yossarian shouted at her in bewildered, furious protest. "How did
you know it was Catch-22? Who the hell told you it was Catch-22?"
"The soldiers with the hard white hats and clubs. The girls were crying. 'Did we do anything wrong?' they
said. The men said no and pushed them away out the door with the ends of their clubs. 'Then why are you
chasing us out?' the girls said. 'Catch-22,' the men said. 'What right do you have?' the girls said. 'Catch-22,' the
men said. All they kept saying was 'Catch-22, Catch-22.' What does it mean, Catch-22? What is Catch-22?"
"Didn't they show it to you?" Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress. "Didn't you even
make them read it?"
"They don't have to show us Catch-22," the old woman answered. "The law says they don't have to."
"What law says they don't have to?"
"Catch-22."
"Oh, God damn!" Yossarian exclaimed bitterly. "I bet it wasn't even really there." He stopped walking and
glanced about the room disconsolately. "Where's the old man?"
"Gone," mourned the old woman.
"Gone?"
"Dead," the old woman told him, nodding in emphatic lament, pointing to her head with the flat of her
hand. "Something broke in here. One minute he was living, one minute he was dead."
"But he can't be dead!" Yossarian cried, ready to argue insistently. But of course he knew it was true, knew
it was logical and true; once again the old man had marched along with the majority.
Yossarian turned away and trudged through the apartment with a gloomy scowl, peering with pessimistic
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curiosity into all the rooms. Everything made of glass had been smashed by the men with the clubs. Torn
drapes and bedding lay dumped on the floor. Chairs, tables and dressers had been overturned. Everything
breakable had been broken. The destruction was total. No wild vandals could have been more thorough. Every
window was smashed, and darkness poured like inky clouds into each room through the shattered panes.
Yossarian could imagine the heavy, crashing footfalls of the tall M.P.s in the hard white hats. He could picture
the fiery and malicious exhilaration with which they had made their wreckage, and their sanctimonious,
ruthless sense of right and dedication. All the poor young girls were gone. Everyone was gone but the weeping
old woman in the bulky brown and gray sweaters and black head shawl, and soon she too would be gone.
"Gone," she grieved, when he walked back in, before he could even speak. "Who will take care of me
now?"
Yossarian ignored the question. "Nately's girl friend-did anyone hear from her?" he asked.
"Gone."
"I know she's gone. But did anyone hear from her? Does anyone know where she is?"
"Gone."
"The little sister. What happened to her?"
"Gone." The old woman's tone had not changed.
"Do you know what I'm talking about?" Yossarian asked sharply, staring into her eyes to see if she were
not speaking to him from a coma. He raised his voice. "What happened to the kid sister, to the little girl?"
"Gone, gone," the old woman replied with a crabby shrug, irritated by his persistence, her low wail
growing louder. "Chased away with the rest, chased away into the street. They would not even let her take her
coat."
"Where did she go?"
"I don't know. I don't know."
"Who will take care of her?"
"Who will take care of me?"
"She doesn't know anybody else, does she?"
"Who will take care of me?"
Yossarian left money in the old woman's lap-it was odd how many wrongs leaving money seemed to
right-and strode out of the apartment, cursing Catch-22 vehemently as he descended the stairs, even though he
knew there was no such thing. Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What
did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to
ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn
up.
It was cold outside, and dark, and a leaky, insipid mist lay swollen in the air and trickled down the large,
unpolished stone blocks of the houses and the pedestals of monuments. Yossarian hurried back to Milo and
recanted. He said he was sorry and, knowing he was lying, promised to fly as many more missions as Colonel
Cathcart wanted if Milo would only use all his influence in Rome to help him locate Nately's whore's kid
sister.
"She's just a twelve-year-old virgin, Milo," he explained anxiously, "and I want to find her before it's too
late."
Milo responded to his request with a benign smile. "I've got just the twelve-year-old virgin you're looking
for," he announced jubilantly. "This twelve-year-old virgin is really only thirty-four, but she was brought up
on a low-protein diet by very strict parents and didn't start sleeping with men until-"
"Milo, I'm talking about a little girl!" Yossarian interrupted him with desperate impatience. "Don't you
understand? I don't want to sleep with her. I want to help her. You've got daughters. She's just a little kid, and
she's all alone in this city with no one to take care of her. I want to protect her from harm. Don't you know
what I'm talking about?"
Milo did understand and was deeply touched. "Yossarian, I'm proud of you," he exclaimed with profound
emotion. "I really am. You don't know how glad I am to see that everything isn't always just sex with you.
You've got principles. Certainly I've got daughters, and I know exactly what you're talking about. We'll find
that girl if we have to turn this whole city upside down. Come along."
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Yossarian went along in Milo Minderbinder's speeding M & M staff car to police headquarters to meet a
swarthy, untidy police commissioner with a narrow black mustache and unbuttoned tunic who was fiddling
with a stout woman with warts and two chins when they entered his office and who greeted Milo with warm
surprise and bowed and scraped in obscene servility as though Milo were some elegant marquis.
"Ah, Marchese Milo," he declared with effusive pleasure, pushing the fat, disgruntled woman out the door
without even looking toward her. "Why didn't you tell me you were coming? I would have a big party for you.
Come in, come in, Marchese. You almost never visit us any more."
Milo knew that there was not one moment to waste. "Hello, Luigi," he said, nodding so briskly that he
almost seemed rude. "Luigi, I need your help. My friend here wants to find a girl."
"A girl, Marchese?" said Luigi, scratching his face pensively. "There are lots of girls in Rome. For an
American officer, a girl should not be too difficult."
"No, Luigi, you don't understand. This is a twelve-year-old virgin that he has to find right away."
"Ah, yes, now I understand," Luigi said sagaciously. "A virgin might take a little time. But if he waits at the
bus terminal where the young farm girls looking for work arrive, I-"
"Luigi, you still don't understand," Milo snapped with such brusque impatience that the police
commissioner's face flushed and he jumped to attention and began buttoning his uniform in confusion. "This
girl is a friend, an old friend of the family, and we want to help her. She's only a child. She's all alone in this
city somewhere, and we have to find her before somebody harms her. Now do you understand? Luigi, this is
very important to me. I have a daughter the same age as that little girl, and nothing in the world means more to
me right now than saving that poor child before it's too late. Will you help?"
"Si, Marchese, now I understand," said Luigi. "And I will do everything in my power to find her. But
tonight I have almost no men. Tonight all my men are busy trying to break up the traffic in illegal tobacco."
"Illegal tobacco?" asked Milo.
"Milo," Yossarian bleated faintly with a sinking heart, sensing at once that all was lost.
"Si, Marchese," said Luigi. "The profit in illegal tobacco is so high that the smuggling is almost impossible
to control."
"Is there really that much profit in illegal tobacco?" Milo inquired with keen interest, his rust-colored
eyebrows arching avidly and his nostrils sniffing.
"Milo," Yossarian called to him. "Pay attention to me, will you?"
"Si, Marchese," Luigi answered. "The profit in illegal tobacco is very high. The smuggling is a national
scandal, Marchese, truly a national disgrace."
"Is that a fact?" Milo observed with a preoccupied smile and started toward the door as though in a spell.
"Milo!" Yossarian yelled, and bounded forward impulsively to intercept him. "Milo, you've got to help
me."
"Illegal tobacco," Milo explained to him with a look of epileptic lust, struggling doggedly to get by. "Let
me go. I've got to smuggle illegal tobacco."
"Stay here and help me find her," pleaded Yossarian. "You can smuggle illegal tobacco tomorrow."
But Milo was deaf and kept pushing forward, nonviolently but irresistibly, sweating, his eyes, as though he
were in the grip of a blind fixation, burning feverishly, and his twitching mouth slavering. He moaned calmly
as though in remote, instinctive distress and kept repeating, "Illegal tobacco, illegal tobacco." Yossarian
stepped out of the way with resignation finally when he saw it was hopeless to try to reason with him. Milo
was gone like a shot. The commissioner of police unbuttoned his tunic again and looked at Yossarian with
contempt.
"What do you want here?" he asked coldly. "Do you want me to arrest you?"
Yossarian walked out of the office and down the stairs into the dark, tomblike street, passing in the hall the
stout woman with warts and two chins, who was already on her way back in. There was no sign of Milo
outside. There were no lights in any of the windows. The deserted sidewalk rose steeply and continuously for
several blocks. He could see the glare of a broad avenue at the top of the long cobblestone incline. The police
station was almost at the bottom; the yellow bulbs at the entrance sizzled in the dampness like wet torches. A
frigid, fine rain was falling. He began walking slowly, pushing uphill. Soon he came to a quiet, cozy, inviting
restaurant with red velvet drapes in the windows and a blue neon sign near the door that said: TONY's
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RESTAURANT FINE FOOD AND DRINK. KEEP OUT. The words on the blue neon sign surprised him
mildly for only an instant. Nothing warped seemed bizarre any more in his strange, distorted surroundings.
The tops of the sheer buildings slanted in weird, surrealistic perspective, and the street seemed tilted. He raised
the collar of his warm woolen coat and hugged it around him. The night was raw. A boy in a thin shirt and thin
tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and
shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain
puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that
he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought
to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and
socks. He made Yossarian think of cripples and of cold and hungry men and women, and of all the dumb,
passive, devout mothers with catatonic eyes nursing infants outdoors that same night with chilled animal
udders bared insensibly to that same raw rain. Cows. Almost on cue, a nursing mother padded past holding an
infant in black rags, and Yossarian wanted to smash her too, because she reminded him of the barefoot boy in
the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had
provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy
earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how
many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were
bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many
hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go
insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes
failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy
endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men
were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how
many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best
families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and
then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist
or sculptor somewhere. Yossarian walked in lonely torture, feeling estranged, and could not wipe from his
mind the excruciating image of the barefoot boy with sickly cheeks until he turned the corner into the avenue
finally and came upon an Allied soldier having convulsions on the ground, a young lieutenant with a small,
pale, boyish face. Six other soldiers from different countries wrestled with different parts of him, striving to
help him and hold him still. He yelped and groaned unintelligibly through clenched teeth, his eyes rolled up
into his head. "Don't let him bite his tongue off," a short sergeant near Yossarian advised shrewdly, and a
seventh man threw himself into the fray to wrestle with the ill lieutenant's face. All at once the wrestlers won
and turned to each other undecidedly, for now that they held the young lieutenant rigid they did not know what
to do with him. A quiver of moronic panic spread from one straining brute face to another. "Why don't you lift
him up and put him on the hood of that car?" a corporal standing in back of Yossarian drawled. That seemed
to make sense, so the seven men lifted the young lieutenant up and stretched him out carefully on the hood of
a parked car, still pinning each struggling part of him down. Once they had him stretched out on the hood of
the parked car, they stared at each other uneasily again, for they had no idea what to do with him next. "Why
don't you lift him up off the hood of that car and lay him down on the ground?" drawled the same corporal
behind Yossarian. That seemed like a good idea, too, and they began to move him back to the sidewalk, but
before they could finish, a jeep raced up with a flashing red spotlight at the side and two military policemen in
the front seat.
"What's going on?" the driver yelled.
"He's having convulsions," one of the men grappling with one of the young lieutenant's limbs answered.
"We're holding him still."
"That's good. He's under arrest."
"What should we do with him?"
"Keep him under arrest!" the M.P. shouted, doubling over with raucous laughter at his jest, and sped away
in his jeep.
Yossarian recalled that he had no leave papers and moved prudently past the strange group toward the
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sound of muffled voices emanating from a distance inside the murky darkness ahead. The broad, rain-blotched
boulevard was illuminated every half-block by short, curling lampposts with eerie, shimmering glares
surrounded by smoky brown mist. From a window overhead he heard an unhappy female voice pleading,
"Please don't. Please don't." A despondent young woman in a black raincoat with much black hair on her face
passed with her eyes lowered. At the Ministry of Public Affairs on the next block, a drunken lady was backed
up against one of the fluted Corinthian columns by a drunken young soldier, while three drunken comrades in
arms sat watching nearby on the steps with wine bottles standing between their legs. "Pleeshe don't," begged
the drunken lady. "I want to go home now. Pleeshe don't." One of the sitting men cursed pugnaciously and
hurled a wine bottle at Yossarian when he turned to look up. The bottle shattered harmlessly far away with a
brief and muted noise. Yossarian continued walking away at the same listless, unhurried pace, hands buried in
his pockets. "Come on, baby," he heard the drunken soldier urge determinedly. "It's my turn now." "Pleeshe
don't," begged the drunken lady. "Pleeshe don't." At the very next corner, deep inside the dense, impenetrable
shadows of a narrow, winding side street, he heard the mysterious, unmistakable sound of someone shoveling
snow. The measured, labored, evocative scrape of iron shovel against concrete made his flesh crawl with terror
as he stepped from the curb to cross the ominous alley and hurried onward until the haunting, incongruous
noise had been left behind. Now he knew where he was: soon, if he continued without turning, he would come
to the dry fountain in the middle of the boulevard, then to the officers' apartment seven blocks beyond. He
heard snarling, inhuman voices cutting through the ghostly blackness in front suddenly. The bulb on the corner
lamp post had died, spilling gloom over half the street, throwing everything visible off balance. On the other
side of the intersection, a man was beating a dog with a stick like the man who was beating the horse with a
whip in Raskolnikov's dream. Yossarian strained helplessly not to see or hear. The dog whimpered and
squealed in brute, dumbfounded hysteria at the end of an old Manila rope and groveled and crawled on its
belly without resisting, but the man beat it and beat it anyway with his heavy, flat stick. A small crowd
watched. A squat woman stepped out and asked him please to stop. "Mind your own business," the man
barked gruffly, lifting his stick as though he might beat her too, and the woman retreated sheepishly with an
abject and humiliated air. Yossarian quickened his pace to get away, almost ran. The night was filled with
horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist
through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves. What a welcome sight a leper must
have been! At the next corner a man was beating a small boy brutally in the midst of an immobile crowd of
adult spectators who made no effort to intervene. Yossarian recoiled with sickening recognition. He was
certain he had witnessed that same horrible scene sometime before. Déjà vu? The sinister coincidence
shook him and filled him with doubt and dread. It was the same scene he had witnessed a block before,
although everything in it seemed quite different. What in the world was happening? Would a squat woman
step out and ask the man to please stop? Would he raise his hand to strike her and would she retreat? Nobody
moved. The child cried steadily as though in drugged misery. The man kept knocking him down with hard,
resounding open-palm blows to the head, then jerking him up to his feet in order to knock him down again. No
one in the sullen, cowering crowd seemed to care enough about the stunned and beaten boy to interfere. The
child was no more than nine. One drab woman was weeping silently into a dirty dish towel. The boy was
emaciated and needed a haircut. Bright-red blood was streaming from both ears. Yossarian crossed quickly to
the other side of the immense avenue to escape the nauseating sight and found himself walking on human
teeth lying on the drenched, glistening pavement near splotches of blood kept sticky by the pelting raindrops
poking each one like sharp fingernails. Molars and broken incisors lay scattered everywhere. He circled on
tiptoe the grotesque debris and came near a doorway containing a crying soldier holding a saturated
handkerchief to his mouth, supported as he sagged by two other soldiers waiting in grave impatience for the
military ambulance that finally came clanging up with amber fog lights on and passed them by for an
altercation on the next block between a civilian Italian with books and a slew of civilian policemen with
armlocks and clubs. The screaming, struggling civilian was a dark man with a face white as flour from fear.
His eyes were pulsating in hectic desperation, flapping like bat's wings, as the many tall policemen seized him
by the arms and legs and lifted him up. His books were spilled on the ground. "Help!" he shrieked shrilly in a
voice strangling in its own emotion, as the policemen carried him to the open doors in the rear of the
ambulance and threw him inside. "Police! Help! Police!" The doors were shut and bolted, and the ambulance
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raced away. There was a humorless irony in the ludicrous panic of the man screaming for help to the police
while policemen were all around him. Yossarian smiled wryly at the futile and ridiculous cry for aid, then saw
with a start that the words were ambiguous, realized with alarm that they were not, perhaps, intended as a call
for police but as a heroic warning from the grave by a doomed friend to everyone who was not a policeman
with a club and a gun and a mob of other policemen with clubs and guns to back him up. "Help! Police!" the
man had cried, and he could have been shouting of danger. Yossarian responded to the thought by slipping
away stealthily from the police and almost tripped over the feet of a burly woman of forty hastening across the
intersection guiltily, darting furtive, vindictive glances behind her toward a woman of eighty with thick,
bandaged ankles doddering after her in a losing pursuit. The old woman was gasping for breath as she minced
along and muttering to herself in distracted agitation. There was no mistaking the nature of the scene; it was a
chase. The triumphant first woman was halfway across the wide avenue before the second woman reached the
curb. The nasty, small, gloating smile with which she glanced back at the laboring old woman was both
wicked and apprehensive. Yossarian knew he could help the troubled old woman if she would only cry out,
knew he could spring forward and capture the sturdy first woman and hold her for the mob of policemen
nearby if the second woman would only give him license with a shriek of distress. But the old woman passed
by without even seeing him, mumbling in terrible, tragic vexation, and soon the first woman had vanished into
the deepening layers of darkness and the old woman was left standing helplessly in the center of the
thoroughfare, dazed, uncertain which way to proceed, alone. Yossarian tore his eyes from her and hurried
away in shame because he had done nothing to assist her. He darted furtive, guilty glances back as he fled in
defeat, afraid the old woman might now start following him, and he welcomed the concealing shelter of the
drizzling, drifting, lightless, nearly opaque gloom. Mobs... mobs of policemen-everything but England was in
the hands of mobs, mobs, mobs. Mobs with clubs were in control everywhere.
The surface of the collar and shoulders of Yossarian's coat was soaked. His socks were wet and cold. The
light on the next lamppost was out, too, the glass globe broken. Buildings and featureless shapes flowed by
him noiselessly as though borne past immutably on the surface of some rank and timeless tide. A tall monk
passed, his face buried entirely inside a coarse gray cowl, even the eyes hidden. Footsteps sloshed toward him
steadily through a puddle, and he feared it would be another barefoot child. He brushed by a gaunt,
cadaverous, tristful man in a black raincoat with a star-shaped scar in his cheek and a glossy mutilated
depression the size of an egg in one temple. On squishing straw sandals, a young woman materialized with her
whole face disfigured by a God-awful pink and piebald burn that started on her neck and stretched in a raw,
corrugated mass up both cheeks past her eyes! Yossarian could not bear to look, and shuddered. No one would
ever love her. His spirit was sick; he longed to lie down with some girl he could love who would soothe and
excite him and put him to sleep. A mob with a club was waiting for him in Pianosa. The girls were all gone.
The countess and her daughter-in-law were no longer good enough; he had grown too old for fun, he no longer
had the time. Luciana was gone, dead, probably; if not yet, then soon enough. Aarfy's buxom trollop had
vanished with her smutty cameo ring, and Nurse Duckett was ashamed of him because he had refused to fly
more combat missions and would cause a scandal. The only girl he knew nearby was the plain maid in the
officers' apartment, whom none of the men had ever slept with. Her name was Michaela, but the men called
her filthy things in dulcet, ingratiating voices, and she giggled with childish joy because she understood no
English and thought they were flattering her and making harmless jokes. Everything wild she watched them
do filled her with enchanted delight. She was a happy, simple-minded, hard-working girl who could not read
and was barely able to write her name. Her straight hair was the color of rotting straw. She had sallow skin and
myopic eyes, and none of the men had ever slept with her because none of the men had ever wanted to, none
but Aarfy, who had raped her once that same evening and had then held her prisoner in a clothes closet for
almost two hours with his hand over her mouth until the civilian curfew sirens sounded and it was unlawful
for her to be outside.
Then he threw her out the window. Her dead body was still lying on the pavement when Yossarian arrived
and pushed his way politely through the circle of solemn neighbors with dim lanterns, who glared with venom
as they shrank away from him and pointed up bitterly toward the second-floor windows in their private, grim,
accusing conversations. Yossarian's heart pounded with fright and horror at the pitiful, ominous, gory
spectacle of the broken corpse. He ducked into the hallway and bolted up the stairs into the apartment, where
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he found Aarfy pacing about uneasily with a pompous, slightly uncomfortable smile. Aarfy seemed a bit
unsettled as he fidgeted with his pipe and assured Yossarian that everything was going to be all right. There
was nothing to worry about.
"I only raped her once," he explained.
Yossarian was aghast. "But you killed her, Aarfy! You killed her!"
"Oh, I had to do that after I raped her," Aarfy replied in his most condescending manner. "I couldn't very
well let her go around saying bad things about us, could I?"
"But why did you have to touch her at all, you dumb bastard?" Yossarian shouted. "Why couldn't you get
yourself a girl off the street if you wanted one? The city is full of prostitutes."
"Oh, no, not me," Aarfy bragged. "I never paid for it in my life."
"Aarfy, are you insane?" Yossarian was almost speechless. "You killed a girl. They're going to put you in
jail!"
"Oh, no," Aarfy answered with a forced smile. "Not me. They aren't going to put good old Aarfy in jail.
Not for killing her."
"But you threw her out the window. She's lying dead in the street."
"She has no right to be there," Aarfy answered. "It's after curfew."
"Stupid! Don't you realize what you've done?" Yossarian wanted to grab Aarfy by his well-fed,
caterpillar-soft shoulders and shake some sense into him. "You've murdered a human being. They are going to
put you in jail. They might even hang you!"
"Oh, I hardly think they'll do that," Aarfy replied with a jovial chuckle, although his symptoms of
nervousness increased. He spilled tobacco crumbs unconsciously as his short fingers fumbled with the bowl of
his pipe. "No, sirree. Not to good old Aarfy." He chortled again. "She was only a servant girl. I hardly think
they're going to make too much of a fuss over one poor Italian servant girl when so many thousands of lives
are being lost every day. Do you?"
"Listen!" Yossarian cried, almost in joy. He pricked up his ears and watched the blood drain from Aarfy's
face as sirens mourned far away, police sirens, and then ascended almost instantaneously to a howling,
strident, onrushing cacophony of overwhelming sound that seemed to crash into the room around them from
every side. "Aarfy, they're coming for you," he said in a flood of compassion, shouting to be heard above the
noise. "They're coming to arrest you. Aarfy, don't you understand? You can't take the life of another human
being and get away with it, even if she is just a poor servant girl. Don't you see? Can't you understand?"
"Oh, no," Aarfy insisted with a lame laugh and a weak smile. "They're not coming to arrest me. Not good
old Aarfy."
All at once he looked sick. He sank down on a chair in a trembling stupor, his stumpy, lax hands quaking in
his lap. Cars skidded to a stop outside. Spotlights hit the windows immediately. Car doors slammed and police
whistles screeched. Voices rose harshly. Aarfy was green. He kept shaking his head mechanically with a
queer, numb smile and repeating in a weak, hollow monotone that they were not coming for him, not for good
old Aarfy, no sirree, striving to convince himself that this was so even as heavy footsteps raced up the stairs
and pounded across the landing, even as fists beat on the door four times with a deafening, inexorable force.
Then the door to the apartment flew open, and two large, tough, brawny M.P.s with icy eyes and firm, sinewy,
unsmiling jaws entered quickly, strode across the room, and arrested Yossarian.
They arrested Yossarian for being in Rome without a pass.
They apologized to Aarfy for intruding and led Yossarian away between them, gripping him under each
arm with fingers as hard as steel manacles. They said nothing at all to him on the way down. Two more tall
M.P.s with clubs and hard white helmets were waiting outside at a closed car. They marched Yossarian into
the back seat, and the car roared away and weaved through the rain and muddy fog to a police station. The
M.P.s locked him up for the night in a cell with four stone walls. At dawn they gave him a pail for a latrine
and drove him to the airport, where two more giant M.P.s with clubs and white helmets were waiting at a
transport plane whose engines were already warming up when they arrived, the cylindrical green cowlings
oozing quivering beads of condensation. None of the M.P.s said anything to each other either. They did not
even nod. Yossarian had never seen such granite faces. The plane flew to Pianosa. Two more silent M.P.s
were waiting at the landing strip. There were now eight, and they filed with precise, wordless discipline into
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two cars and sped on humming tires past the four squadron areas to the Group Headquarters building, where
still two more M.P.s were waiting at the parking area. All ten tall, strong, purposeful, silent men towered
around him as they turned toward the entrance. Their footsteps crunched in loud unison on the cindered
ground. He had an impression of accelerating haste. He was terrified. Every one of the ten M.P.s seemed
powerful enough to bash him to death with a single blow. They had only to press their massive, toughened,
boulderous shoulders against him to crush all life from his body. There was nothing he could do to save
himself. He could not even see which two were gripping him under the arms as they marched him rapidly
between the two tight single-file columns they had formed. Their pace quickened, and he felt as though he
were flying along with his feet off the ground as they trotted in resolute cadence up the wide marble staircase
to the upper landing, where still two more inscrutable military policemen with hard faces were waiting to lead
them all at an even faster pace down the long, cantilevered balcony overhanging the immense lobby. Their
marching footsteps on the dull tile floor thundered like an awesome, quickening drum roll through the vacant
center of the building as they moved with even greater speed and precision toward Colonel Cathcart's office,
and violent winds of panic began blowing in Yossarian's ears when they turned him toward his doom inside
the office, where Colonel Korn, his rump spreading comfortably on a corner of Colonel Cathcart's desk, sat
waiting to greet him with a genial smile and said,
"We're sending you home."
40 CATCH-22
There was, of course, a catch.
"Catch-22?" inquired Yossarian.
"Of course," Colonel Korn answered pleasantly, after he had chased the mighty guard of massive M.P.s out
with an insouciant flick of his hand and a slightly contemptuous nod-most relaxed, as always, when he could
be most cynical. His rimless square eyeglasses glinted with sly amusement as he gazed at Yossarian. "After
all, we can't simply send you home for refusing to fly more missions and keep the rest of the men here, can
we? That would hardly be fair to them."
"You're goddam right!" Colonel Cathcart blurted out, lumbering back and forth gracelessly like a winded
bull, puffing and pouting angrily. "I'd like to tie him up hand and foot and throw him aboard a plane on every
mission. That's what I'd like to do."
Colonel Korn motioned Colonel Cathcart to be silent and smiled at Yossarian. "You know, you really have
been making things terribly difficult for Colonel Cathcart," he observed with flip good humor, as though the
fact did not displease him at all. "The men are unhappy and morale is beginning to deteriorate. And it's all
your fault."
"It's your fault," Yossarian argued, "for raising the number of missions."
"No, it's your fault for refusing to fly them," Colonel Korn retorted. "The men were perfectly content to fly
as many missions as we asked as long as they thought they had no alternative. Now you've given them hope,
and they're unhappy. So the blame is all yours."
"Doesn't he know there's a war going on?" Colonel Cathcart, still stamping back and forth, demanded
morosely without looking at Yossarian.
"I'm quite sure he does," Colonel Korn answered. "That's probably why he refuses to fly them."
"Doesn't it make any difference to him?"
"Will the knowledge that there's a war going on weaken your decision to refuse to participate in it?"
Colonel Korn inquired with sarcastic seriousness, mocking Colonel Cathcart.
"No, sir," Yossarian replied, almost returning Colonel Korn's smile.
"I was afraid of that," Colonel Korn remarked with an elaborate sigh, locking his fingers together
comfortably on top of his smooth, bald, broad, shiny brown head. "You know, in all fairness, we really haven't
treated you too badly, have we? We've fed you and paid you on time. We gave you a medal and even made
you a captain."
"I never should have made him a captain," Colonel Cathcart exclaimed bitterly. "I should have given him a
court-martial after he loused up that Ferrara mission and went around twice."
"I told you not to promote him," said Colonel Korn, "but you wouldn't listen to me."
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"No you didn't. You told me to promote him, didn't you?"
"I told you not to promote him. But you just wouldn't listen."
"I should have listened."
"You never listen to me," Colonel Korn persisted with relish. "That's the reason we're in this spot."
"All right, gee whiz. Stop rubbing it in, will you?"
Colonel Cathcart burrowed his fists down deep inside his pockets and turned away in a slouch. "Instead of
picking on me, why don't you figure out what we're going to do about him?"
"We're going to send him home, I'm afraid." Colonel Korn was chuckling triumphantly when he turned
away from Colonel Cathcart to face Yossarian. "Yossarian, the war is over for you. We're going to send you
home. You really don't deserve it, you know, which is one of the reasons I don't mind doing it. Since there's
nothing else we can risk doing to you at this time, we've decided to return you to the States. We've worked out
this little deal to-"
"What kind of deal?" Yossarian demanded with defiant mistrust.
Colonel Korn tossed his head back and laughed. "Oh, a thoroughly despicable deal, make no mistake about
that. It's absolutely revolting. But you'll accept it quickly enough."
"Don't be too sure."
"I haven't the slightest doubt you will, even though it stinks to high heaven. Oh, by the way. You haven't
told any of the men you've refused to fly more missions, have you?"
"No, sir," Yossarian answered promptly.
Colonel Korn nodded approvingly. "That's good. I like the way you lie. You'll go far in this world if you
ever acquire some decent ambition."
"Doesn't he know there's a war going on?" Colonel Cathcart yelled out suddenly, and blew with vigorous
disbelief into the open end of his cigarette holder.
"I'm quite sure he does," Colonel Korn replied acidly, "since you brought that identical point to his
attention just a moment ago." Colonel Korn frowned wearily for Yossarian's benefit, his eyes twinkling
swarthily with sly and daring scorn. Gripping the edge of Colonel Cathcart's desk with both hands, he lifted
his flaccid haunches far back on the corner to sit with both short legs dangling freely. His shoes kicked lightly
against the yellow oak wood, his sludge-brown socks, garterless, collapsed in sagging circles below ankles
that were surprisingly small and white. "You know, Yossarian," he mused affably in a manner of casual
reflection that seemed both derisive and sincere, "I really do admire you a bit. You're an intelligent person of
great moral character who has taken a very courageous stand. I'm an intelligent person with no moral character
at all, so I'm in an ideal position to appreciate it."
"These are very critical times," Colonel Cathcart asserted petulantly from a far corner of the office, paying
no attention to Colonel Korn.
"Very critical times indeed," Colonel Korn agreed with a placid nod. "We've just had a change of command
above, and we can't afford a situation that might put us in a bad light with either General Scheisskopf or
General Peckem. Isn't that what you mean, Colonel?"
"Hasn't he got any patriotism?"
"Won't you fight for your country?" Colonel Korn demanded, emulating Colonel Cathcart's harsh,
self-righteous tone. "Won't you give up your life for Colonel Cathcart and me?"
Yossarian tensed with alert astonishment when he heard Colonel Korn's concluding words. "What's that?"
he exclaimed. "What have you and Colonel Cathcart got to do with my country? You're not the same."
"How can you separate us?" Colonel Korn inquired with ironical tranquillity.
"That's right," Colonel Cathcart cried emphatically. "You're either for us or against us. There's no two ways
about it."
"I'm afraid he's got you," added Colonel Korn. "You're either for us or against your country. It's as simple
as that."
"Oh, no, Colonel. I don't buy that."
Colonel Korn was unrufed. "Neither do I, frankly, but everyone else will. So there you are."
"You're a disgrace to your uniform!" Colonel Cathcart declared with blustering wrath, whirling to confront
Yossarian for the first time. "I'd like to know how you ever got to be a captain, anyway."
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"You promoted him," Colonel Korn reminded sweetly, stifling a snicker. "Don't you remember?"
"Well, I never should have done it."
"I told you not to do it," Colonel Korn said. "But you just wouldn't listen to me."
"Gee whiz, will you stop rubbing it in?" Colonel Cathcart cried. He furrowed his brow and glowered at
Colonel Korn through eyes narrow with suspicion, his fists clenched on his hips. "Say, whose side are you on,
anyway?"
"Your side, Colonel. What other side could I be on?"
"Then stop picking on me, will you? Get off my back, will you?"
"I'm on your side, Colonel. I'm just loaded with patriotism."
"Well, just make sure you don't forget that." Colonel Cathcart turned away grudgingly after another
moment, incompletely reassured, and began striding the floor, his hands kneading his long cigarette holder. He
jerked a thumb toward Yossarian. "Let's settle with him. I know what I'd like to do with him. I'd like to take
him outside and shoot him. That's what I'd like to do with him. That's what General Dreedle would do with
him."
"But General Dreedle isn't with us any more," said Colonel Korn, "so we can't take him outside and shoot
him." Now that his moment of tension with Colonel Cathcart had passed, Colonel Korn relaxed again and
resumed kicking softly against Colonel Cathcart's desk. He returned to Yossarian. "So we're going to send you
home instead. It took a bit of thinking, but we finally worked out this horrible little plan for sending you home
without causing too much dissatisfaction among the friends you'll leave behind. Doesn't that make you
happy?"
"What kind of plan? I'm not sure I'm going to like it."
"I know you're not going to like it." Colonel Korn laughed, locking his hands contentedly on top of his
head again. "You're going to loathe it. It really is odious and certainly will offend your conscience. But you'll
agree to it quickly enough. You'll agree to it because it will send you home safe and sound in two weeks, and
because you have no choice. It's that or a court-martial. Take it or leave it."
Yossarian snorted. "Stop bluffing, Colonel. You can't court-martial me for desertion in the face of the
enemy. It would make you look bad and you probably couldn't get a conviction."
"But we can court-martial you now for desertion from duty, since you went to Rome without a pass. And
we could make it stick. If you think about it a minute, you'll see that you'd leave us no alternative. We can't
simply let you keep walking around in open insubordination without punishing you. All the other men would
stop flying missions, too. No, you have my word for it. We will court-martial you if you turn our deal down,
even though it would raise a lot of questions and be a terrible black eye for Colonel Cathcart."
Colonel Cathcart winced at the words "black eye" and, without any apparent premeditation, hurled his
slender onyx-and-ivory cigarette holder down viciously on the wooden surface on his desk. "Jesus Christ!" he
shouted unexpectedly. "I hate this goddam cigarette holder!" The cigarette holder bounced off the desk to the
wall, ricocheted across the window sill to the floor and came to a stop almost where he was standing. Colonel
Cathcart stared down at it with an irascible scowl. "I wonder if it's really doing me any good."
"It's a feather in your cap with General Peckem, but a black eye for you with General Scheisskopf,"
Colonel Korn informed him with a mischievous look of innocence.
"Well, which one am I supposed to please?"
"Both."
"How can I please them both? They hate each other. How am I ever going to get a feather in my cap from
General Scheisskopf without getting a black eye from General Peckem?"
"March."
"Yeah, march. That's the only way to please him. March. March." Colonel Cathcart grimaced sullenly.
"Some generals! They're a disgrace to their uniforms. If people like those two can make general, I don't see
how I can miss."
"You're going to go far." Colonel Korn assured him with a flat lack of conviction, and turned back
chuckling to Yossarian, his disdainful merriment increasing at the sight of Yossarian's unyielding expression
of antagonism and distrust. "And there you have the crux of the situation. Colonel Cathcart wants to be a
general and I want to be a colonel, and that's why we have to send you home."
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"Why does he want to be a general?"
"Why? For the same reason that I want to be a colonel. What else have we got to do? Everyone teaches us
to aspire to higher things. A general is higher than a colonel, and a colonel is higher than a lieutenant colonel.
So we're both aspiring. And you know, Yossarian, it's a lucky thing for you that we are. Your timing on this is
absolutely perfect, but I suppose you took that factor into account in your calculations."
"I haven't been doing any calculating," Yossarian retorted.
"Yes, I really do enjoy the way you lie," Colonel Korn answered. "Won't it make you proud to have your
commanding officer promoted to general-to know you served in an outfit that averaged more combat missions
per person than any other? Don't you want to earn more unit citations and more oak leaf clusters for your Air
Medal? Where's your 'sprit de corps?' Don't you want to contribute further to this great record by flying more
combat missions? It's your last chance to answer yes."
"No."
"In that case, you have us over a barrel-" said Colonel Korn without rancor.
"He ought to be ashamed of himself!"
"-and we have to send you home. Just do a few little things for us, and-"
"What sort of things?" Yossarian interrupted with belligerent misgiving.
"Oh, tiny, insignificant things. Really, this is a very generous deal we're making with you. We will issue
orders returning you to the States-really, we will-and all you have to do in return is..."
"What? What must I do?"
Colonel Korn laughed curtly. "Like us."
Yossarian blinked. "Like you?"
"Like us."
"Like you?"
"That's right," said Colonel Korn, nodding, gratified immeasurably by Yossarian's guileless surprise and
bewilderment. "Like us. Join us. Be our pal. Say nice things about us here and back in the States. Become one
of the boys. Now, that isn't asking too much, is it?"
"You just want me to like you? Is that all?"
"That's all."
"That's all?"
"Just find it in your heart to like us."
Yossarian wanted to laugh confidently when he saw with amazement that Colonel Korn was telling the
truth. "That isn't going to be too easy," he sneered.
"Oh, it will be a lot easier than you think," Colonel Korn taunted in return, undismayed by Yossarian's
barb. "You'll be surprised at how easy you'll find it to like us once you begin." Colonel Korn hitched up the
waist of his loose, voluminous trousers. The deep black grooves isolating his square chin from his jowls were
bent again in a kind of jeering and reprehensible mirth. "You see, Yossarian, we're going to put you on easy
street. We're going to promote you to major and even give you another medal. Captain Flume is already
working on glowing press releases describing your valor over Ferrara, your deep and abiding loyalty to your
outfit and your consummate dedication to duty. Those phrases are all actual quotations, by the way. We're
going to glorify you and send you home a hero, recalled by the Pentagon for morale and public-relations
purposes. You'll live like a millionaire. Everyone will lionize you. You'll have parades in your honor and
make speeches to raise money for war bonds. A whole new world of luxury awaits you once you become our
pal. Isn't it lovely?"
Yossarian found himself listening intently to the fascinating elucidation of details. "I'm not sure I want to
make speeches."
"Then we'll forget the speeches. The important thing is what you say to people here." Colonel Korn leaned
forward earnestly, no longer smiling. "We don't want any of the men in the group to know that we're sending
you home as a result of your refusal to fly more missions. And we don't want General Peckem or General
Scheisskopf to get wind of any friction between us, either. That's why we're going to become such good pals."
"What will I say to the men who asked me why I refused to fly more missions?"
"Tell them you had been informed in confidence that you were being returned to the States and that you
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were unwilling to risk your life for another mission or two. Just a minor disagreement between pals, that's all."
"Will they believe it?"
"Of course they'll believe it, once they see what great friends we've become and when they see the press
releases and read the flattering things you have to say about me and Colonel Cathcart. Don't worry about the
men. They'll be easy enough to discipline and control when you've gone. It's only while you're still here that
they may prove troublesome. You know, one good apple can spoil the rest," Colonel Korn concluded with
conscious irony. "You know-this would really be wonderful-you might even serve as an inspiration to them to
fly more missions."
"Suppose I denounce you when I get back to the States?"
"After you've accepted our medal and promotion and all the fanfare? No one would believe you, the Army
wouldn't let you, and why in the world should you want to? You're going to be one of the boys, remember?
You'll enjoy a rich, rewarding, luxurious, privileged existence. You'd have to be a fool to throw it all away just
for a moral principle, and you're not a fool. Is it a deal?"
"I don't know."
"It's that or a court-martial."
"That's a pretty scummy trick I'd be playing on the men in the squadron, isn't it?"
"Odious," Colonel Korn agreed amiably, and waited, watching Yossarian patiently with a glimmer of
private delight.
"But what the hell!" Yossarian exclaimed. "If they don't want to fly more missions, let them stand up and
do something about it the way I did. Right?"
"Of course," said Colonel Korn.
"There's no reason I have to risk my life for them, is there?"
"Of course not."
Yossarian arrived at his decision with a swift grin. "It's a deal!" he announced jubilantly.
"Great," said Colonel Korn with somewhat less cordiality than Yossarian had expected, and he slid himself
off Colonel Cathcart's desk to stand on the floor. He tugged the folds of cloth of his pants and undershorts free
from his crotch and gave Yossarian a limp hand to shake. "Welcome aboard."
"Thanks, Colonel. I-"
"Call me Blackie, John. We're pals now."
"Sure, Blackie. My friends call me Yo-Yo. Blackie, I-"
"His friends call him Yo-Yo," Colonel Korn sang out to Colonel Cathcart. "Why don't you congratulate
Yo-Yo on what a sensible move he's making?"
"That's a real sensible move you're making, Yo-Yo," Colonel Cathcart said, pumping Yossarian's hand with
clumsy zeal.
"Thank you, Colonel, I-"
"Call him Chuck," said Colonel Korn.
"Sure, call me Chuck," said Colonel Cathcart with a laugh that was hearty and awkward. "We're all pals
now."
"Sure, Chuck."
"Exit smiling," said Colonel Korn, his hands on both their shoulders as the three of them moved to the
door.
"Come on over for dinner with us some night, Yo-Yo," Colonel Cathcart invited hospitably. "How about
tonight? In the group dining room."
"I'd love to, sir."
"Chuck," Colonel Korn corrected reprovingly.
"I'm sorry, Blackie. Chuck. I can't get used to it."
"That's all right, pal."
"Sure, pal."
"Thanks, pal."
"Don't mention it, pal."
"So long, pal."
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Yossarian waved goodbye fondly to his new pals and sauntered out onto the balcony corridor, almost
bursting into song the instant he was alone. He was home free: he had pulled it off; his act of rebellion had
succeeded; he was safe, and he had nothing to be ashamed of to anyone. He started toward the staircase with a
jaunty and exhilarated air. A private in green fatigues saluted him. Yossarian returned the salute happily,
staring at the private with curiosity. He looked strangely familiar. When Yossarian returned the salute, the
private in green fatigues turned suddenly into Nately's whore and lunged at him murderously with a
bone-handled kitchen knife that caught him in the side below his upraised arm. Yossarian sank to the floor
with a shriek, shutting his eyes in overwhelming terror as he saw the girl lift the knife to strike at him again.
He was already unconscious when Colonel Korn and Colonel Cathcart dashed out of the office and saved his
life by frightening her away.
41 SNOWDEN
"Cut," said a doctor.
"You cut," said another.
"No cuts," said Yossarian with a thick, unwieldy tongue.
"Now look who's butting in," complained one of the doctors. "Another county heard from. Are we going to
operate or aren't we?"
"He doesn't need an operation," complained the other. "It's a small wound. All we have to do is stop the
bleeding, clean it out and put a few stitches in."
"But I've never had a chance to operate before. Which one is the scalpel? Is this one the scalpel?"
"No, the other one is the scalpel. Well, go ahead and cut already if you're going to. Make the incision."
"Like this?"
"Not there, you dope!"
"No incisions," Yossarian said, perceiving through the lifting fog of insensibility that the two strangers
were ready to begin cutting him.
"Another county heard from," complained the first doctor sarcastically. "Is he going to keep talking that
way while I operate on him?"
"You can't operate on him until I admit him," said a clerk.
"You can't admit him until I clear him," said a fat, gruff colonel with a mustache and an enormous pink
face that pressed down very close to Yossarian and radiated scorching heat like the bottom of a huge frying
pan. "Where were you born?"
The fat, gruff colonel reminded Yossarian of the fat, gruff colonel who had interrogated the chaplain and
found him guilty. Yossarian stared up at him through a glassy film. The cloying scents of formaldehyde and
alcohol sweetened the air.
"On a battlefield," he answered.
"No, no. In what state were you born?"
"In a state of innocence."
"No, no, you don't understand."
"Let me handle him," urged a hatchet-faced man with sunken acrimonious eyes and a thin, malevolent
mouth. "Are you a smart aleck or something?" he asked Yossarian.
"He's delirious," one of the doctors said. "Why don't you let us take him back inside and treat him?"
"Leave him right here if he's delirious. He might say something incriminating."
"But he's still bleeding profusely. Can't you see? He might even die."
"Good for him!"
"It would serve the finky bastard right," said the fat, gruff colonel. "All right, John, let's speak out. We want
to get to the truth."
"Everyone calls me Yo-Yo."
"We want you to co-operate with us, Yo-Yo. We're your friends and we want you to trust us. We're here to
help you. We're not going to hurt you."
"Let's jab our thumbs down inside his wound and gouge it," suggested the hatchet-faced man.
Yossarian let his eyes fall closed and hoped they would think he was unconscious.
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"He's fainted," he heard a doctor say. "Can't we treat him now before it's too late? He really might die."
"All right, take him. I hope the bastard does die."
"You can't treat him until I admit him," the clerk said.
Yossarian played dead with his eyes shut while the clerk admitted him by shuffling some papers, and then
he was rolled away slowly into a stuffy, dark room with searing spotlights overhead in which the cloying
smell of formaldehyde and sweet alcohol was even stronger. The pleasant, permeating stink was intoxicating.
He smelled ether too and heard glass tinkling. He listened with secret, egotistical mirth to the husky breathing
of the two doctors. It delighted him that they thought he was unconscious and did not know he was listening. It
all seemed very silly to him until one of the doctors said,
"Well, do you think we should save his life? They might be sore at us if we do."
"Let's operate," said the other doctor. "Let's cut him open and get to the inside of things once and for all. He
keeps complaining about his liver. His liver looks pretty small on this X ray."
"That's his pancreas, you dope. This is his liver."
"No it isn't. That's his heart. I'll bet you a nickel this is his liver. I'm going to operate and find out. Should I
wash my hands first?"
"No operations," Yossarian said, opening his eyes and trying to sit up.
"Another county heard from," scoffed one of the doctors indignantly. "Can't we make him shut up?"
"We could give him a total. The ether's right here."
"No totals," said Yossarian.
"Another county heard from," said a doctor.
"Let's give him a total and knock him out. Then we can do what we want with him."
They gave Yossarian total anesthesia and knocked him out. He woke up thirsty in a private room, drowning
in ether fumes. Colonel Korn was there at his bedside, waiting calmly in a chair in his baggy, wool, olive-drab
shirt and trousers. A bland, phlegmatic smile hung on his brown face with its heavy-bearded cheeks, and he
was buffing the facets of his bald head gently with the palms of both hands. He bent forward chuckling when
Yossarian awoke, and assured him in the friendliest tones that the deal they had made was still on if Yossarian
didn't die. Yossarian vomited, and Colonel Korn shot to his feet at the first cough and fled in disgust, so it
seemed indeed that there was a silver lining to every cloud, Yossarian reflected, as he drifted back into a
suffocating daze. A hand with sharp fingers shook him awake roughly. He turned and opened his eyes and saw
a strange man with a mean face who curled his lip at him in a spiteful scowl and bragged,
"We've got your pal, buddy. We've got your pal."
Yossarian turned cold and faint and broke into a sweat.
"Who's my pal?" he asked when he saw the chaplain sitting where Colonel Korn had been sitting.
"Maybe I'm your pal," the chaplain answered.
But Yossarian couldn't hear him and closed his eyes. Someone gave him water to sip and tiptoed away. He
slept and woke up feeling great until he turned his head to smile at the chaplain and saw Aarfy there instead.
Yossarian moaned instinctively and screwed his face up with excruciating irritability when Aarfy chortled and
asked how he was feeling. Aarfy looked puzzled when Yossarian inquired why he was not in jail. Yossarian
shut his eyes to make him go away. When he opened them, Aarfy was gone and the chaplain was there.
Yossarian broke into laughter when he spied the chaplain's cheerful grin and asked him what in the hell he was
so happy about.
"I'm happy about you," the chaplain replied with excited candor and joy. "I heard at Group that you were
very seriously injured and that you would have to be sent home if you lived. Colonel Korn said your condition
was critical. But I've just learned from one of the doctors that your wound is really a very slight one and that
you'll probably be able to leave in a day or two. You're in no danger. It isn't bad at all."
Yossarian listened to the chaplain's news with enormous relief. "That's good."
"Yes," said the chaplain, a pink flush of impish pleasure creeping into his cheeks. "Yes, that is good."
Yossarian laughed, recalling his first conversation with the chaplain. "You know, the first time I met you
was in the hospital. And now I'm in the hospital again. Just about the only time I see you lately is in the
hospital. Where've you been keeping yourself?"
The chaplain shrugged. "I've been praying a lot," he confessed. "I try to stay in my tent as much as I can,
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and I pray every time Sergeant Whitcomb leaves the area, so that he won't catch me."
"Does it do any good?"
"It takes my mind off my troubles," the chaplain answered with another shrug. "And it gives me something
to do."
"Well that's good, then, isn't it?"
"Yes," agreed the chaplain enthusiastically, as though the idea had not occurred to him before. "Yes, I
guess that is good." He bent forward impulsively with awkward solicitude. "Yossarian, is there anything I can
do for you while you're here, anything I can get you?"
Yossarian teased him jovially. "Like toys, or candy, or chewing gum?"
The chaplain blushed again, grinning self-consciously, and then turned very respectful. "Like books,
perhaps, or anything at all. I wish there was something I could do to make you happy. You know, Yossarian,
we're all very proud of you."
"Proud?"
"Yes, of course. For risking your life to stop that Nazi assassin. It was a very noble thing to do."
"What Nazi assassin?"
"The one that came here to murder Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. And you saved them. He might
have stabbed you to death as you grappled with him on the balcony. It's a lucky thing you're alive!"
Yossarian snickered sardonically when he understood. "That was no Nazi assassin."
"Certainly it was. Colonel Korn said it was."
"That was Nately's girl friend. And she was after me, not Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. She's been
trying to kill me ever since I broke the news to her that Nately was dead."
"But how could that be?" the chaplain protested in livid and resentful confusion. "Colonel Cathcart and
Colonel Korn both saw him as he ran away. The official report says you stopped a Nazi assassin from killing
them."
"Don't believe the official report," Yossarian advised dryly. "It's part of the deal."
"What deal?"
"The deal I made with Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. They'll let me go home a big hero if I say nice
things about them to everybody and never criticize them to anyone for making the rest of the men fly more
missions."
The chaplain was appalled and rose halfway out of his chair. He bristled with bellicose dismay. "But that's
terrible! That's a shameful, scandalous deal, isn't it?"
"Odious," Yossarian answered, staring up woodenly at the ceiling with just the back of his head resting on
the pillow. "I think 'odious' is the word we decided on."
"Then how could you agree to it?"
"It's that or a court-martial, Chaplain."
"Oh," the chaplain exclaimed with a look of stark remorse, the back of his hand covering his mouth. He
lowered himself into his chair uneasily. "I shouldn't have said anything."
"They'd lock me in prison with a bunch of criminals."
"Of course. You must do whatever you think is right, then." The chaplain nodded to himself as though
deciding the argument and lapsed into embarrassed silence.
"Don't worry," Yossarian said with a sorrowful laugh after several moments had passed. "I'm not going to
do it."
"But you must do it," the chaplain insisted, bending forward with concern. "Really, you must. I had no right
to influence you. I really had no right to say anything."
"You didn't influence me." Yossarian hauled himself over onto his side and shook his head in solemn
mockery. "Christ, Chaplain! Can you imagine that for a sin? Saving Colonel Cathcart's life! That's one crime I
don't want on my record."
The chaplain returned to the subject with caution. "What will you do instead? You can't let them put you in
prison."
"I'll fly more missions. Or maybe I really will desert and let them catch me. They probably would."
"And they'd put you in prison. You don't want to go to prison."
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"Then I'll just keep flying missions until the war ends, I guess. Some of us have to survive."
"But you might get killed."
"Then I guess I won't fly any more missions."
"What will you do?"
"I don't know."
"Will you let them send you home?"
"I don't know. Is it hot out? It's very warm in here."
"It's very cold out," the chaplain said.
"You know," Yossarian remembered, "a very funny thing happened-maybe I dreamed it. I think a strange
man came in here before and told me he's got my pal. I wonder if I imagined it."
"I don't think you did," the chaplain informed him. "You started to tell me about him when I dropped in
earlier."
"Then he really did say it. 'We've got your pal, buddy,' he said. 'We've got your pal.' He had the most
malignant manner I ever saw. I wonder who my pal is."
"I like to think that I'm your pal, Yossarian," the chaplain said with humble sincerity. "And they certainly
have got me. They've got my number and they've got me under surveillance, and they've got me right where
they want me. That's what they told me at my interrogation."
"No, I don't think it's you he meant," Yossarian decided. "I think it must be someone like Nately or Dunbar.
You know, someone who was killed in the war, like Clevinger, Orr, Dobbs, Kid Sampson or McWatt."
Yossarian emitted a startled gasp and shook his head. "I just realized it," he exclaimed. "They've got all my
pals, haven't they? The only ones left are me and Hungry Joe." He tingled with dread as he saw the chaplain's
face go pale. "Chaplain, what is it?"
"Hungry Joe was killed."
"God, no! On a mission?"
"He died in his sleep while having a dream. They found a cat on his face."
"Poor bastard," Yossarian said, and began to cry, hiding his tears in the crook of his shoulder. The chaplain
left without saying goodbye. Yossarian ate something and went to sleep. A hand shook him awake in the
middle of the night. He opened his eyes and saw a thin, mean man in a patient's bathrobe and pajamas who
looked at him with a nasty smirk and jeered.
"We've got your pal, buddy. We've got your pal."
Yossarian was unnerved. "What the hell are you talking about?" he pleaded in incipient panic.
"You'll find out, buddy. You'll find out."
Yossarian lunged for his tormentor's throat with one hand, but the man glided out of reach effortlessly and
vanished into the corridor with a malicious laugh. Yossarian lay there trembling with a pounding pulse. He
was bathed in icy sweat. He wondered who his pal was. It was dark in the hospital and perfectly quiet. He had
no watch to tell him the time. He was wide-awake, and he knew he was a prisoner in one of those sleepless,
bedridden nights that would take an eternity to dissolve into dawn. A throbbing chill oozed up his legs. He
was cold, and he thought of Snowden, who had never been his pal but was a vaguely familiar kid who was
badly wounded and freezing to death in the puddle of harsh yellow sunlight splashing into his face through the
side gunport when Yossarian crawled into the rear section of the plane over the bomb bay after Dobbs had
beseeched him on the intercom to help the gunner, please help the gunner. Yossarian's stomach turned over
when his eyes first beheld the macabre scene; he was absolutely revolted, and he paused in fright a few
moments before descending, crouched on his hands and knees in the narrow tunnel over the bomb bay beside
the sealed corrugated carton containing the first-aid kit. Snowden was lying on his back on the floor with his
legs stretched out, still burdened cumbersomely by his flak suit, his flak helmet, his parachute harness and his
Mae West. Not far away on the floor lay the small tail-gunner in a dead faint. The wound Yossarian saw was
in the outside of Snowden's thigh, as large and deep as a football, it seemed. It was impossible to tell where the
shreds of his saturated coveralls ended and the ragged flesh began.
There was no morphine in the first-aid kit, no protection for Snowden against pain but the numbing shock
of the gaping wound itself. The twelve syrettes of morphine had been stolen from their case and replaced by a
cleanly lettered note that said: "What's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country. Milo
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Minderbinder." Yossarian swore at Milo and held two aspirins out to ashen lips unable to receive them. But
first he hastily drew a tourniquet around Snowden's thigh because he could not think what else to do in those
first tumultuous moments when his senses were in turmoil, when he knew he must act competently at once
and feared he might go to pieces completely. Snowden watched him steadily, saying nothing. No artery was
spurting, but Yossarian pretended to absorb himself entirely into the fashioning of a tourniquet, because
applying a tourniquet was something he did know how to do. He worked with simulated skill and composure,
feeling Snowden's lack-luster gaze resting upon him. He recovered possession of himself before the tourniquet
was finished and loosened it immediately to lessen the danger of gangrene. His mind was clear now, and he
knew how to proceed. He rummaged through the first-aid kit for scissors.
"I'm cold," Snowden said softly. "I'm cold."
"You're going to be all right, kid," Yossarian reassured him with a grin. "You're going to be all right."
"I'm cold," Snowden said again in a frail, childlike voice. "I'm cold."
"There, there," Yossarian said, because he did not know what else to say. "There, there."
"I'm cold," Snowden whimpered. "I'm cold."
"There, there. There, there."
Yossarian was frightened and moved more swiftly. He found a pair of scissors at last and began cutting
carefully through Snowden's coveralls high up above the wound, just below the groin. He cut through the
heavy gabardine cloth all the way around the thigh in a straight line. The tiny tailgunner woke up while
Yossarian was cutting with the scissors, saw him, and fainted again. Snowden rolled his head to the other side
of his neck in order to stare at Yossarian more directly. A dim, sunken light glowed in his weak and listless
eyes. Yossarian, puzzled, tried not to look at him. He began cutting downward through the coveralls along the
inside seam. The yawning wound-was that a tube of slimy bone he saw running deep inside the gory scarlet
flow behind the twitching, startling fibers of weird muscle? -- was dripping blood in several trickles, like snow
melting on eaves, but viscous and red, already thickening as it dropped. Yossarian kept cutting through the
coveralls to the bottom and peeled open the severed leg of the garment. It fell to the floor with a plop,
exposing the hem of khaki undershorts that were soaking up blotches of blood on one side as though in thirst.
Yossarian was stunned at how waxen and ghastly Snowden's bare leg looked, how loathsome, how lifeless and
esoteric the downy, fine, curled blond hairs on his odd white shin and calf. The wound, he saw now, was not
nearly as large as a football, but as long and wide as his hand and too raw and deep to see into clearly. The raw
muscles inside twitched like live hamburger meat. A long sigh of relief escaped slowly through Yossarian's
mouth when he saw that Snowden was not in danger of dying. The blood was already coagulating inside the
wound, and it was simply a matter of bandaging him up and keeping him calm until the plane landed. He
removed some packets of sulfanilamide from the first-aid kit. Snowden quivered when Yossarian pressed
against him gently to turn him up slightly on his side.
"Did I hurt you?"
"I'm cold," Snowden whimpered. "I'm cold."
"There, there," Yossarian said. "There, there."
"I'm cold. I'm cold."
"There, there. There, there."
"It's starting to hurt me," Snowden cried out suddenly with a plaintive, urgent wince.
Yossarian scrambled frantically through the first-aid kit in search of morphine again and found only Milo's
note and a bottle of aspirin. He cursed Milo and held two aspirin tablets out to Snowden. He had no water to
offer. Snowden rejected the aspirin with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. His face was pale and
pasty. Yossarian removed Snowden's flak helmet and lowered his head to the floor.
"I'm cold," Snowden moaned with half-closed eyes. "I'm cold."
The edges of his mouth were turning blue. Yossarian was petrified. He wondered whether to pull the rip
cord of Snowden's parachute and cover him with the nylon folds. It was very warm in the plane. Glancing up
unexpectedly, Snowden gave him a wan, co-operative smile and shifted the position of his hips a bit so that
Yossarian could begin salting the wound with sulfanilamide. Yossarian worked with renewed confidence and
optimism. The plane bounced hard inside an air pocket, and he remembered with a start that he had left his
own parachute up front in the nose. There was nothing to be done about that. He poured envelope after
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envelope of the white crystalline powder into the bloody oval wound until nothing red could be seen and then
drew a deep, apprehensive breath, steeling himself with gritted teeth as he touched his bare hand to the
dangling shreds of drying flesh to tuck them up inside the wound. Quickly he covered the whole wound with a
large cotton compress and jerked his hand away. He smiled nervously when his brief ordeal had ended. The
actual contact with the dead flesh had not been nearly as repulsive as he had anticipated, and he found an
excuse to caress the wound with his fingers again and again to convince himself of his own courage.
Next he began binding the compress in place with a roll of gauze. The second time around Snowden's thigh
with the bandage, he spotted the small hole on the inside through which the piece of flak had entered, a round,
crinkled wound the size of a quarter with blue edges and a black core inside where the blood had crusted.
Yossarian sprinkled this one with sulfanilamide too and continued unwinding the gauze around Snowden's leg
until the compress was secure. Then he snipped off the roll with the scissors and slit the end down the center.
He made the whole thing fast with a tidy square knot. It was a good bandage, he knew, and he sat back on his
heels with pride, wiping the perspiration from his brow, and grinned at Snowden with spontaneous
friendliness.
"I'm cold," Snowden moaned. "I'm cold."
"You're going to be all right, kid," Yossarian assured him, patting his arm comfortingly. "Everything's
under control."
Snowden shook his head feebly. "I'm cold," he repeated, with eyes as dull and blind as stone. "I'm cold."
"There, there," said Yossarian, with growing doubt and trepidation. "There, there. In a little while we'll be
back on the ground and Doc Daneeka will take care of you."
But Snowden kept shaking his head and pointed at last, with just the barest movement of his chin, down
toward his armpit. Yossarian bent forward to peer and saw a strangely colored stain seeping through the
coveralls just above the armhole of Snowden's flak suit. Yossarian felt his heart stop, then pound so violently
he found it difficult to breathe. Snowden was wounded inside his flak suit. Yossarian ripped open the snaps of
Snowden's flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden's insides slithered down to the floor in a
soggy pile and just kept dripping out. A chunk of flak more than three inches big had shot into his other side
just underneath the arm and blasted all the way through, drawing whole mottled quarts of Snowden along with
it through the gigantic hole in his ribs it made as it blasted out. Yossarian screamed a second time and
squeezed both hands over his eyes. His teeth were chattering in horror. He forced himself to look again. Here
was God's plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared-liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the
stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch. Yossarian hated stewed tomatoes and turned away
dizzily and began to vomit, clutching his burning throat. The tail gunner woke up while Yossarian was
vomiting, saw him, and fainted again. Yossarian was limp with exhaustion, pain and despair when he finished.
He turned back weakly to Snowden, whose breath had grown softer and more rapid, and whose face had
grown paler. He wondered how in the world to begin to save him.
"I'm cold," Snowden whimpered. "I'm cold."
"There, there," Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. "There, there."
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he
gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read
the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall.
Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is
garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.
"I'm cold," Snowden said. "I'm cold."
"There, there," said Yossarian. "There, there." He pulled the rip cord of Snowden's parachute and covered
his body with the white nylon sheets.
"I'm cold."
"There, there."
42 YOSSARIAN
"Colonel Korn says," said Major Danby to Yossarian with a prissy, gratified smile, "that the deal is still on.
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Everything is working out fine."
"No it isn't."
"Oh, yes, indeed," Major Danby insisted benevolently. "In fact, everything is much better. It was really a
stroke of luck that you were almost murdered by that girl. Now the deal can go through perfectly."
"I'm not making any deals with Colonel Korn."
Major Danby's effervescent optimism vanished instantly, and he broke out all at once into a bubbling
sweat. "But you do have a deal with him, don't you?" he asked in anguished puzzlement. "Don't you have an
agreement?"
"I'm breaking the agreement."
"But you shook hands on it, didn't you? You gave him your word as a gentleman."
"I'm breaking my word."
"Oh, dear," sighed Major Danby, and began dabbing ineffectually at his careworn brow with a folded white
handkerchief. "But why, Yossarian? It's a very good deal they're offering you."
"It's a lousy deal, Danby. It's an odious deal."
"Oh, dear," Major Danby fretted, running his bare hand over his dark, wiry hair, which was already soaked
with perspiration to the tops of the thick, close-cropped waves. "Oh dear."
"Danby, don't you think it's odious?"
Major Danby pondered a moment. "Yes, I suppose it is odious," he conceded with reluctance. His globular,
exophthalmic eyes were quite distraught. "But why did you make such a deal if you didn't like it?"
"I did it in a moment of weakness," Yossarian wisecracked with glum irony. "I was trying to save my life."
"Don't you want to save your life now?"
"That's why I won't let them make me fly more missions."
"Then let them send you home and you'll be in no more danger."
"Let them send me home because I flew more than fifty missions," Yossarian said, "and not because I was
stabbed by that girl, or because I've turned into such a stubborn son of a bitch."
Major Danby shook his head emphatically in sincere and bespectacled vexation. "They'd have to send
nearly every man home if they did that. Most of the men have more than fifty missions. Colonel Cathcart
couldn't possibly requisition so many inexperienced replacement crews at one time without causing an
investigation. He's caught in his own trap."
"That's his problem."
"No, no, no, Yossarian," Major Danby disagreed solicitously. "It's your problem. Because if you don't go
through with the deal, they're going to institute court-martial proceedings as soon as you sign out of the
hospital."
Yossarian thumbed his nose at Major Danby and laughed with smug elation. "The hell they will! Don't lie
to me, Danby. They wouldn't even try."
"But why wouldn't they?" inquired Major Danby, blinking with astonishment.
"Because I've really got them over a barrel now. There's an official report that says I was stabbed by a Nazi
assassin trying to kill them. They'd certainly look silly trying to court-martial me after that."
"But, Yossarian!" Major Danby exclaimed. "There's another official report that says you were stabbed by
an innocent girl in the course of extensive black-market operations involving acts of sabotage and the sale of
military secrets to the enemy."
Yossarian was taken back severely with surprise and disappointment. "Another official report?"
"Yossarian, they can prepare as many official reports as they want and choose whichever ones they need on
any given occasion. Didn't you know that?"
"Oh, dear," Yossarian murmured in heavy dejection, the blood draining from his face. "Oh, dear."
Major Danby pressed forward avidly with a look of vulturous well-meaning. "Yossarian, do what they want
and let them send you home. It's best for everyone that way."
"It's best for Cathcart, Korn and me, not for everyone."
"For everyone," Major Danby insisted. "It will solve the whole problem."
"Is it best for the men in the group who will have to keep flying more missions?"
Major Danby flinched and turned his face away uncomfortably for a second. "Yossarian," he replied, "it
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will help nobody if you force Colonel Cathcart to court-martial you and prove you guilty of all the crimes with
which you'll be charged. You will go to prison for a long time, and your whole life will be ruined."
Yossarian listened to him with a growing feeling of concern. "What crimes will they charge me with?"
"Incompetence over Ferrara, insubordination, refusal to engage the enemy in combat when ordered to do
so, and desertion."
Yossarian sucked his cheeks in soberly. "They could charge me with all that, could they? They gave me a
medal for Ferrara. How could they charge me with incompetence now?"
"Aarfy will swear that you and McWatt lied in your official report."
"I'll bet the bastard would!"
"They will also find you guilty," Major Danby recited, "of rape, extensive black-market operations, acts of
sabotage and the sale of military secrets to the enemy."
"How will they prove any of that? I never did a single one of those things."
"But they have witnesses who will swear you did. They can get all the witnesses they need simply by
persuading them that destroying you is for the good of the country. And in a way, it would be for the good of
the country."
"In what way?" Yossarian demanded, rising up slowly on one elbow with bridling hostility.
Major Danby drew back a bit and began mopping his forehead again. "Well, Yossarian," he began with an
apologetic stammer, "it would not help the war effort to bring Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn into
disrepute now. Let's face it, Yossarian-in spite of everything, the group does have a very good record. If you
were court-martialed and found innocent, other men would probably refuse to fly missions, too. Colonel
Cathcart would be in disgrace, and the military efficiency of the unit might be destroyed. So in that way it
would be for the good of the country to have you found guilty and put in prison, even though you are
innocent."
"What a sweet way you have of putting things!" Yossarian snapped with caustic resentment.
Major Danby turned red and squirmed and squinted uneasily. "Please don't blame me," he pleaded with a
look of anxious integrity. "You know it's not my fault. All I'm doing is trying to look at things objectively and
arrive at a solution to a very difficult situation."
"I didn't create the situation."
"But you can resolve it. And what else can you do? You don't want to fly more missions."
"I can run away."
"Run away?"
"Desert. Take off I can turn my back on the whole damned mess and start running."
Major Danby was shocked. "Where to? Where could you go?"
"I could get to Rome easily enough. And I could hide myself there."
"And live in danger every minute of your life that they would find you? No, no, no, no, Yossarian. That
would be a disastrous and ignoble thing to do. Running away from problems never solved them. Please
believe me. I am only trying to help you."
"That's what that kind detective said before he decided to jab his thumb into my wound," Yossarian retorted
sarcastically.
"I am not a detective," Major Danby replied with indignation, his cheeks flushing again. "I'm a university
professor with a highly developed sense of right and wrong, and I wouldn't try to deceive you. I wouldn't lie to
anyone."
"What would you do if one of the men in the group asked you about this conversation?"
"I would lie to him."
Yossarian laughed mockingly, and Major Danby, despite his blushing discomfort, leaned back with relief,
as though welcoming the respite Yossarian's changing mood promised. Yossarian gazed at him with a mixture
of reserved pity and contempt. He sat up in bed with his back resting against the headboard, lit a cigarette,
smiled slightly with wry amusement, and stared with whimsical sympathy at the vivid, pop-eyed horror that
had implanted itself permanently on Major Danby's face the day of the mission to Avignon, when General
Dreedle had ordered him taken outside and shot. The startled wrinkles would always remain, like deep black
scars, and Yossarian felt sorry for the gentle, moral, middle-aged idealist, as he felt sorry for so many people
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whose shortcomings were not large and whose troubles were light.
With deliberate amiability he said, "Danby, how can you work along with people like Cathcart and Korn?
Doesn't it turn your stomach?"
Major Danby seemed surprised by Yossarian's question. "I do it to help my country," he replied, as though
the answer should have been obvious. "Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn are my superiors, and obeying
their orders is the only contribution I can make to the war effort. I work along with them because it's my duty.
And also," he added in a much lower voice, dropping his eyes, "because I am not a very aggressive person."
"Your country doesn't need your help any more," Yossarian reasoned with antagonism. "So all you're doing
is helping them."
"I try not to think of that," Major Danby admitted frankly. "But I try to concentrate on only the big result
and to forget that they are succeeding, too. I try to pretend that they are not significant."
"That's my trouble, you know," Yossarian mused sympathetically, folding his arms. "Between me and
every ideal I always find Scheisskopfs, Peckems, Korns and Cathcarts. And that sort of changes the ideal."
"You must try not to think of them," Major Danby advised affirmatively. "And you must never let them
change your values. Ideals are good, but people are sometimes not so good. You must try to look up at the big
picture."
Yossarian rejected the advice with a skeptical shake of his head. "When I look up, I see people cashing in. I
don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human
tragedy."
"But you must try not to think of that, too," Major Danby insisted. "And you must try not to let it upset
you."
"Oh, it doesn't really upset me. What does upset me, though, is that they think I'm a sucker. They think that
they're smart, and that the rest of us are dumb. And, you know, Danby, the thought occurs to me right now, for
the first time, that maybe they're right."
"But you must try not to think of that too," argued Major Danby. "You must think only of the welfare of
your country and the dignity of man."
"Yeah," said Yossarian.
"I mean it, Yossarian. This is not World War One. You must never forget that we're at war with aggressors
who would not let either one of us live if they won."
"I know that," Yossarian replied tersely, with a sudden surge of scowling annoyance. "Christ, Danby, I
earned that medal I got, no matter what their reasons were for giving it to me. I've flown seventy goddam
combat missions. Don't talk to me about fighting to save my country. I've been fighting all along to save my
country. Now I'm going to fight a little to save myself. The country's not in danger any more, but I am."
"The war's not over yet. The Germans are driving toward Antwerp."
"The Germans will be beaten in a few months. And Japan will be beaten a few months after that. If I were
to give up my life now, it wouldn't be for my country. It would be for Cathcart and Korn. So I'm turning my
bombsight in for the duration. From now on I'm thinking only of me."
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile, "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way."
"Then I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?" Yossarian sat up straighter with a
quizzical expression. "You know, I have a queer feeling that I've been through this exact conversation before
with someone. It's just like the chaplain's sensation of having experienced everything twice."
"The chaplain wants you to let them send you home," Major Danby remarked.
"The chaplain can jump in the lake."
"Oh, dear." Major Danby sighed, shaking his head in regretful disappointment. "He's afraid he might have
influenced you."
"He didn't influence me. You know what I might do? I might stay right here in this hospital bed and
vegetate. I could vegetate very comfortably right here and let other people make the decisions."
"You must make decisions," Major Danby disagreed. "A person can't live like a vegetable."
"Why not?"
A distant warm look entered Major Danby's eyes. "It must be nice to live like a vegetable," he conceded
wistfully.
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"It's lousy," answered Yossarian.
"No, it must be very pleasant to be free from all this doubt and pressure," insisted Major Danby. "I think I'd
like to live like a vegetable and make no important decisions."
"What kind of vegetable, Danby?"
"A cucumber or a carrot."
"What kind of cucumber? A good one or a bad one?"
"Oh, a good one, of course."
"They'd cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad."
Major Danby's face fell. "A poor one, then."
"They'd let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow."
"I guess I don't want to live like a vegetable, then," said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation.
"Danby, must I really let them send me home?" Yossarian inquired of him seriously.
Major Danby shrugged. "It's a way to save yourself."
"It's a way to lose myself, Danby. You ought to know that."
"You could have lots of things you want."
"I don't want lots of things I want," Yossarian replied, and then beat his fist down against the mattress in an
outburst of rage and frustration. "Goddammit, Danby! I've got friends who were killed in this war. I can't make
a deal now. Getting stabbed by that bitch was the best thing that ever happened to me."
"Would you rather go to jail?"
"Would you let them send you home?"
"Of course I would!" Major Danby declared with conviction. "Certainly I would," he added a few moments
later, in a less positive manner. "Yes, I suppose I would let them send me home if I were in your place," he
decided uncomfortably, after lapsing into troubled contemplation. Then he threw his face sideways
disgustedly in a gesture of violent distress and blurted out, "Oh, yes, of course I'd let them send me home! But
I'm such a terrible coward I couldn't really be in your place."
"But suppose you weren't a coward?" Yossarian demanded, studying him closely. "Suppose you did have
the courage to defy somebody?"
"Then I wouldn't let them send me home," Major Danby vowed emphatically with vigorous joy and
enthusiasm. "But I certainly wouldn't let them court-martial me."
"Would you fly more missions?"
"No, of course not. That would be total capitulation. And I might be killed."
"Then you'd run away?"
Major Danby started to retort with proud spirit and came to an abrupt stop, his half-opened jaw swinging
closed dumbly. He pursed his lips in a tired pout. "I guess there just wouldn't be any hope for me, then, would
there?"
His forehead and protuberant white eyeballs were soon glistening nervously again. He crossed his limp
wrists in his lap and hardly seemed to be breathing as he sat with his gaze drooping toward the floor in
acquiescent defeat. Dark, steep shadows slanted in from the window. Yossarian watched him solemnly, and
neither of the two men stirred at the rattling noise of a speeding vehicle skidding to a stop outside and the
sound of racing footsteps pounding toward the building in haste.
"Yes, there's hope for you," Yossarian remembered with a sluggish flow of inspiration. "Milo might help
you. He's bigger than Colonel Cathcart, and he owes me a few favors."
Major Danby shook his head and answered tonelessly. "Milo and Colonel Cathcart are pals now. He made
Colonel Cathcart a vice-president and promised him an important job after the war."
"Then ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen will help us," Yossarian exclaimed. "He hates them both, and this will
infuriate him."
Major Danby shook his head bleakly again. "Milo and ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen merged last week. They're all
partners now in M & M Enterprises."
"Then there is no hope for us, is there?"
"No hope."
"No hope at all, is there?"
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"No, no hope at all," Major Danby conceded. He looked up after a while with a half-formed notion.
"Wouldn't it be nice if they could disappear us the way they disappeared the others and relieve us of all these
crushing burdens?"
Yossarian said no. Major Danby agreed with a melancholy nod, lowering his eyes again, and there was no
hope at all for either of them until footsteps exploded in the corridor suddenly and the chaplain, shouting at the
top of his voice, came bursting into the room with the electrifying news about Orr, so overcome with hilarious
excitement that he was almost incoherent for a minute or two. Tears of great elation were sparkling in his eyes,
and Yossarian leaped out of bed with an incredulous yelp when he finally understood.
"Sweden?" he cried.
"Orr!" cried the chaplain.
"Orr?" cried Yossarian.
"Sweden!" cried the chaplain, shaking his head up and down with gleeful rapture and prancing about
uncontrollably from spot to spot in a grinning, delicious frenzy. "It's a miracle, I tell you! A miracle! I believe
in God again. I really do. Washed ashore in Sweden after so many weeks at sea! It's a miracle."
"Washed ashore, hell!" Yossarian declared, jumping all about also and roaring in laughing exultation at the
walls, the ceiling, the chaplain and Major Danby. "He didn't wash ashore in Sweden. He rowed there! He
rowed there, Chaplain, he rowed there."
"Rowed there?"
"He planned it that way! He went to Sweden deliberately."
"Well, I don't care!" the chaplain flung back with undiminished zeal. "It's still a miracle, a miracle of
human intelligence and human endurance. Look how much he accomplished!" The chaplain clutched his head
with both hands and doubled over in laughter. "Can't you just picture him?" he exclaimed with amazement.
"Can't you just picture him in that yellow raft, paddling through the Straits of Gibraltar at night with that tiny
little blue oar-"
"With that fishing line trailing out behind him, eating raw codfish all the way to Sweden, and serving
himself tea every afternoon-"
"I can just see him!" cried the chaplain, pausing a moment in his celebration to catch his breath. "It's a
miracle of human perseverance, I tell you. And that's just what I'm going to do from now on! I'm going to
persevere. Yes, I'm going to persevere."
"He knew what he was doing every step of the way!" Yossarian rejoiced, holding both fists aloft
triumphantly as though hoping to squeeze revelations from them. He spun to a stop facing Major Danby.
"Danby, you dope! There is hope, after all. Can't you see? Even Clevinger might be alive somewhere in that
cloud of his, hiding inside until it's safe to come out."
"What are you talking about?" Major Danby asked in confusion. "What are you both talking about?"
"Bring me apples, Danby, and chestnuts too. Run, Danby, run. Bring me crab apples and horse chestnuts
before it's too late, and get some for yourself."
"Horse chestnuts? Crab apples? What in the world for?"
"To pop into our cheeks, of course." Yossarian threw his arms up into the air in a gesture of mighty and
despairing selfrecrimination. "Oh, why didn't I listen to him? Why wouldn't I have some faith?"
"Have you gone crazy?" Major Danby demanded with alarm and bewilderment. "Yossarian, will you please
tell me what you are talking about?"
"Danby, Orr planned it that way. Don't you understand-he planned it that way from the beginning. He even
practiced getting shot down. He rehearsed for it on every mission he flew. And I wouldn't go with him! Oh,
why wouldn't I listen? He invited me along, and I wouldn't go with him! Danby, bring me buck teeth too, and
a valve to fix and a look of stupid innocence that nobody would ever suspect of any cleverness. I'll need them
all. Oh, why wouldn't I listen to him. Now I understand what he was trying to tell me. I even understand why
that girl was hitting him on the head with her shoe."
"Why?" inquired the chaplain sharply.
Yossarian whirled and seized the chaplain by the shirt front in an importuning grip. "Chaplain, help me!
Please help me. Get my clothes. And hurry, will you? I need them right away."
The chaplain started away alertly. "Yes, Yossarian, I will. But where are they? How will I get them?"
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"By bullying and browbeating anybody who tries to stop you. Chaplain, get me my uniform! It's around
this hospital somewhere. For once in your life, succeed at something."
The chaplain straightened his shoulders with determination and tightened his jaw. "Don't worry, Yossarian.
I'll get your uniform. But why was that girl hitting Orr over the head with her shoe? Please tell me."
"Because he was paying her to, that's why! But she wouldn't hit him hard enough, so he had to row to
Sweden. Chaplain, find me my uniform so I can get out of here. Ask Nurse Duckett for it. She'll help you.
She'll do anything she can to be rid of me."
"Where are you going?" Major Danby asked apprehensively when the chaplain had shot from the room.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to run away," Yossarian announced in an exuberant, clear voice, already tearing open the
buttons of his pajama tops.
"Oh, no," Major Danby groaned, and began patting his perspiring face rapidly with the bare palms of both
hands. "You can't run away. Where can you run to? Where can you go?"
"To Sweden."
"To Sweden?" Major Danby exclaimed in astonishment. "You're going to run to Sweden? Are you crazy?"
"Orr did it."
"Oh, no, no, no, no, no," Major Danby pleaded. "No, Yossarian, you'll never get there. You can't run away
to Sweden. You can't even row."
"But I can get to Rome if you'll keep your mouth shut when you leave here and give me a chance to catch a
ride. Will you do it?"
"But they'll find you," Major Danby argued desperately, "and bring you back and punish you even more
severely."
"They'll have to try like hell to catch me this time."
"They will try like hell. And even if they don't find you, what kind of way is that to live? You'll always be
alone. No one will ever be on your side, and you'll always live in danger of betrayal."
"I live that way now."
"But you can't just turn your back on all your responsibilities and run away from them," Major Danby
insisted. "It's such a negative move. It's escapist."
Yossarian laughed with buoyant scorn and shook his head. "I'm not running away from my responsibilities.
I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life. You know who the
escapists are, don't you, Danby? Not me and Orr."
"Chaplain, please talk to him, will you? He's deserting. He wants to run away to Sweden."
"Wonderful!" cheered the chaplain, proudly throwing on the bed a pillowcase full of Yossarian's clothing.
"Run away to Sweden, Yossarian. And I'll stay here and persevere. Yes. I'll persevere. I'll nag and badger
Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn every time I see them. I'm not afraid. I'll even pick on General Dreedle."
"General Dreedle's out," Yossarian reminded, pulling on his trousers and hastily stuffing the tails of his
shirt inside. "It's General Peckem now."
The chaplain's babbling confidence did not falter for an instant. "Then I'll pick on General Peckem, and
even on General Scheisskopf. And do you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to punch Captain Black
in the nose the very next time I see him. Yes, I'm going to punch him in the nose. I'll do it when lots of people
are around so that he may not have a chance to hit me back."
"Have you both gone crazy?" Major Danby protested, his bulging eyes straining in their sockets with
tortured awe and exasperation. "Have you both taken leave of your senses? Yossarian, listen-"
"It's a miracle, I tell you," the chaplain proclaimed, seizing Major Danby about the waist and dancing him
around with his elbows extended for a waltz. "A real miracle. If Orr could row to Sweden, then I can triumph
over Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn, if only I persevere."
"Chaplain, will you please shut up?" Major Danby entreated politely, pulling free and patting his perspiring
brow with a fluttering motion. He bent toward Yossarian, who was reaching for his shoes. "What about
Colonel-"
"I couldn't care less."
"But this may actua-"
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"To hell with them both!"
"This may actually help them," Major Danby persisted stubbornly. "Have you thought of that?"
"Let the bastards thrive, for all I care, since I can't do a thing to stop them but embarrass them by running
away. I've got responsibilities of my own now, Danby. I've got to get to Sweden."
"You'll never make it. It's impossible. It's almost a geographical impossibility to get there from here."
"Hell, Danby, I know that. But at least I'll be trying. There's a young kid in Rome whose life I'd like to save
if I can find her. I'll take her to Sweden with me if I can find her, so it isn't all selfish, is it?"
"It's absolutely insane. Your conscience will never let you rest."
"God bless it." Yossarian laughed. "I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings. Right, Chaplain?"
"I'm going to punch Captain Black right in the nose the next time I see him," gloried the chaplain, throwing
two left jabs in the air and then a clumsy haymaker. "Just like that."
"What about the disgrace?" demanded Major Danby.
"What disgrace? I'm more in disgrace now." Yossarian tied a hard knot in the second shoelace and sprang
to his feet. "Well, Danby, I'm ready. What do you say? Will you keep your mouth shut and let me catch a
ride?"
Major Danby regarded Yossarian in silence, with a strange, sad smile. He had stopped sweating and
seemed absolutely calm. "What would you do if I did try to stop you?" he asked with rueful mockery. "Beat
me up?"
Yossarian reacted to the question with hurt surprise. "No, of course not. Why do you say that?"
"I will beat you up," boasted the chaplain, dancing up very close to Major Danby and shadowboxing. "You
and Captain Black, and maybe even Corporal Whitcomb. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I found I didn't have to
be afraid of Corporal Whitcomb any more?"
"Are you going to stop me?" Yossarian asked Major Danby, and gazed at him steadily.
Major Danby skipped away from the chaplain and hesitated a moment longer. "No, of course not!" he
blurted out, and suddenly was waving both arms toward the door in a gesture of exuberant urgency. "Of course
I won't stop you. Go, for God sakes, and hurry! Do you need any money?"
"I have some money."
"Well, here's some more." With fervent, excited enthusiasm, Major Danby pressed a thick wad of Italian
currency upon Yossarian and clasped his hand in both his own, as much to still his own trembling fingers as to
give encouragement to Yossarian. "It must be nice to be in Sweden now," he observed yearningly. "The girls
are so sweet. And the people are so advanced."
"Goodbye, Yossarian," the chaplain called. "And good luck. I'll stay here and persevere, and we'll meet
again when the fighting stops."
"So long, Chaplain. Thanks, Danby."
"How do you feel, Yossarian?"
"Fine. No, I'm very frightened."
"That's good," said Major Danby. "It proves you're still alive. It won't be fun."
Yossarian started out. "Yes it will."
"I mean it, Yossarian. You'll have to keep on your toes every minute of every day. They'll bend heaven and
earth to catch you."
"I'll keep on my toes every minute."
"You'll have to jump."
"I'll jump."
"Jump!" Major Danby cried.
Yossarian jumped. Nately's whore was hiding just outside the door. The knife came down, missing him by
inches, and he took off.
THE END
APPENDIX
Joseph Heller's Preface to the 1994 Edition of Catch-22
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In 1961, The New York Times was a newspaper with eight columns. And on November 11 of that year,
one day after the official publication date of Catch-22, the page with the book review carried an unusual
advertisement that ran from top to bottom and was five columns wide. To the eye the effect was stupendous.
The book review that day, of a work by somebody else, was squeezed aside to the fold of the page, as were the
crossword puzzle and all else. The ad had this caption: WHAT's THE CATCH? And displayed at the top in
silhouette was the comic cartoon of a uniformed figure in flight, glancing off to the side at some unspecified
danger with an expression of panic.
It was an announcement ad for Catch-22. Interwoven with the text were mentions of praise from
twenty-one individuals and groups of some public standing, most connected to literature and the publishing
world, who had received the novel before publication and had already reviewed it or commented about it
favorably.
Within days after publication, there was a review in The Nation by Nelson Algren (a client of my own
literary agent, who had urged him to read it), who wrote of Catch-22 that it "was the best novel to come out of
anywhere in years". And there was a review by Studs Terkel in a Chicago daily newspaper that recommended
it about as highly.
So much attention to the work at publication was in large part the result of the industrious zeal and
appreciation of my literary agent, Candida Donadio, and my editor, Robert Gottlieb, and I embrace the
opportunity afforded now to dedicate this new edition to both of them, as colleagues and allies with talents
that were of immeasurable value.
The work was not reviewed in the Times on publication. However, it was reviewed in the Herald Tribune
by Maurice Dolbier, and Mr. Dolbier said of it: "A wild, moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating,
giant roller-coaster of a book."
That the reviewer for the Herald Tribune came to review at all this war novel by someone unknown was
almost entirely the product of coincidence. S. J. Perelman, much better known and the subject of an interview
by Mr. Dolbier, was publishing his own book at just about that time. His publisher was Simon & Schuster,
mine too, and the editor in charge of his work there was also the same, Bob Gottlieb. In answer to a question
put to him by Dolbier about his own reading, Mr. Perelman replied that he was very much engrossed in a
novel pressed upon him by his editor, a novel called Catch-22. Returning to his office, Mr. Dolbier later
confessed to me, he found the book already in a pile with others he had decided he would not have time to
study as prospects to write about. Had it not been for Gottlieb, there would have been no Perelman, and had it
not been for Perelman, there would have been no review by Dolbier.
And had it not been for Dolbier, there might not have been the Times. Two weeks afterward, and probably
only because of Mr. Dolbier, the book was described with approbation in the daily Times by the reviewer
Orville Prescott, who predicted it would not be forgotten by those who could take it and called it: "A dazzling
performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights."
The rest, one might say is history, but it is a history easily misconstrued. The novel won no prizes and was
not on any bestseller list.
And, as Mr. Prescott foresaw, for just about every good report, there seemed to appear one that was
negative. Looking back at this novel after twenty-five years, John Aldridge, to my mind the most perceptive
and persistent commentator of American literature over the decades, lauded Robert Brustein for his superbly
intelligent review in The New Republic, which contained "essential arguments that much of the later criticism
has done little to improve on", and Mr. Aldridge recognised that many in the early audience of Catch-22 "liked
the book for just the reasons that caused others to hate it".
The disparagements were frequently venomous. In the Sunday Times, in a notice in back so slender that the
only people seeing it were those awaiting it, the reviewer (a novelist who also by chance was a client of my
own agent, Candida) decided that the "novel gasps for want of craft and sensibility", "is repetitious and
monotonous", "fails", "is an emotional hodgepodge", and was no novel; and in the esteemed The New Yorker,
the reviewer, a staff writer who normally writes about jazz, compared the book unfavorably with a novel of
similar setting by Mitchell Goodman and decided that Catch-22 "doesn't even seem to have been written;
instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper", "what remains is a debris of sour jokes",
and that in the end Heller "wallows in his own laughter and finally drowns in it". (I am tempted now to drown
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in laughter as I jot this down.)
I do not recall that the novel was included in the several hundred books in the Christmas roundup of
recommended reading of the Times that year or in the several hundred others picked out in the spring for
summer reading.
But in late summer of 1962, Raymond Walters, on the bestseller page of the Sunday Times, which then
carried regularly the column "In and Out of Books", reported that the underground book New Yorkers seemed
to be talking about most was Catch-22. (The novel probably was more heavily advertised than any other that
year, but it was still underground.) Not that much later, Newsweek carried a story to the same effect in a space
more than a page wide. And late that same summer, I was invited to my first television interview. The
program was the Today show, then a variety show as much as anything else. The interim host was John
Chancellor. Mr. Chancellor had recently returned from his newsman's post in the Kremlin, and he had agreed
to accept the position on condition that he interview only those people he himself chose to.
After the show, in a bar close by the studio in which I found myself drinking martinis at an earlier hour
than ever in my life, he handed me a packet of stickers he'd had printed privately. They read: YOSSARIAN
LIVES. And he confided he'd been pasting these stickers secretly on the walls of the corridors and in the
executive rest rooms of the NBC building.
Then came September and the paperback edition and with it, finally, an expansion in popular appeal that
seemed to take the publishers, Dell, by surprise, despite elaborate promotion and distribution strategies. It
seemed for a while that the people there could not fully bring themselves to believe the sales figures and that
they would never catch up.
Paperback publishers print in the hundreds of thousands. For this, after an initial release of 300,000 copies,
they went back to press five more times between September and the end of the year, twice each in October and
December, and by the end of 1963, there were eleven printings. In England, under the auspices of the
enterprising young editor, there Tom Maschler, it was that way from the start. Bestseller lists were new and
rudimentary then, but Catch-22 was quickly at the head of them.
For me the history of Catch-22 begins back in 1953, when I started writing it. In 1953, I was employed as a
copywriter at a small advertising agency in New York, after two years as an instructor in English composition
at Pennsylvania State University, which was then a college. Early on, in anxious need of an approving
opinion, I sent the opening chapter off to the literary agents I had managed to obtain after publishing a few
short stories in magazines, in Esquire and The Atlantic. The agents were not impressed, but a young assistant
there, Ms. Candida Donadio, was, and she secured permission to submit that chapter to a few publications that
regularly published excerpts from "novels in progress".
In 1955 the chapter appeared in a paperback quarterly, New World Writing (an anthology that also
contained, under a pseudonym, an extract from another novel in progress-Jack Kerouac's On the Road). There
came complimentary letters of interest from a few editors at established book publishers, and I was
encouraged to continue with a work I now saw realistically was going to take me a good many years longer
than I at first had guessed.
In 1957, when I had about 270 pages in typescript, I was employed at Time magazine, writing
advertising-sales presentations by day when not furtively putting thoughts down on paper for my work on the
novel at home that evening. And Candida Donadio was establishing herself as a pre-eminent agent in her own
right, with a list of American authors as clients as impressive as any. We agreed it made sense to submit the
partial manuscript to some publishers, mainly to obtain a practical idea of the potential for publication of the
novel we both thought so much of. She was drawn toward a new young editor she knew of at Simon &
Schuster, one she thought might prove more receptive to innovation than most. His name was Robert Gottlieb,
and she was right.
While Gottlieb busied himself with those pages, I, with a four-week summer vacation from bountiful Time
magazine, began rewriting them. Gottlieb and I met for lunch, mainly for him to gauge my temperament and
ascertain how amenable I would be as an author to work with. After I listened to him allude with tact to certain
broad suggestions he thought he eventually might be compelled to make, I handed him my new pages with the
boastful response that I had already taken care of nearly all of them.
He surprised me with concern that I might take exception to working with someone so young-he was
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twenty-six, I think, and I was thirty-four. I was more greatly surprised to learn from him later that both he and
his closest colleague at Simon & Schuster, Nina Bourne, were intimidated at first by an air of suspicion I
projected that I did not know I even possessed. I have not been suspicious of him since, and I doubt very much
that Gottlieb, who went on to become the head of Alfred A. Knopf and then the editor of The New Yorker
magazine, has ever again been intimidated by anybody.
And what I still remember most agreeably about him is that he did not ask for an outline or once seek for
even a hint of where this one-third of a novel he'd seen was going to go. The contract I received called for an
advance of fifteen hundred dollars, half on signing, which I did not need, and the remainder on completion and
acceptance.
Probably, I was his first novelist, but not his first to be published; other authors with completed
manuscripts came to him in the three more years I needed to finish mine. Probably, I was Candida's earliest
client too. Both were as delighted as I was with the eventual success of Catch-22, and the three of us have
been reveling in our recollections of the experience ever since.
On February 28, 1962, the journalist Richard Starnes published a column of unrestrained praise in his
newspaper, The New York World-Telegram, that opened with these words: "Yossarian will, I think, live a
very long time."
His tribute was unexpected, because Mr. Starnes was a newspaperman in the hard-boiled mode whose
customary beat was local politics, and the World-Telegram was widely regarded as generally conservative.
To this day I am grateful to Mr. Starnes for his unqualified and unsolicited approval and bless him for the
accuracy of his prediction. Yossarian has indeed lived a long time. Mr. Starnes has passed on. Many people
mentioned in that first advertisement have died, and most of the rest of us are on the way.
But Yossarian is alive when the novel ends. Because of the motion picture, even close readers of the novel
have a final, lasting image of him at sea, paddling toward freedom in a yellow inflated lifeboat. In the book he
doesn't get that far; but he is not captured and he isn't dead. At the end of the successor volume I've just
completed, Closing Time (that fleeing cartoon figure is again on the book jacket of the American edition, but
wearing a businessman's chapeau and moving with a cane), he is again still alive, more than forty years older
but definitely still there. "Everyone has got to go," his physician friend in that novel reminds him with
emphasis. "Everyone!" But should I ever write another sequel, he would still be around at the end.
Sooner or later, I must concede, Yossarian, now seventy, will have to pass away too. But it won't be by my
hand.
JOSEPH HELLER, 1994
East Hampton, New York
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