Milo was paying no attention. "Let me be your partner," he blurted out imploringly.
Yossarian turned him down, even though he had no doubt that the truckloads of fruit would be theirs to dispose of any way they saw fit once Yossarian had requisitioned them from the mess hall with Doc Daneeka's letter. Milo was crestfallen, but from that moment on he trusted Yossarian with every secret but one, reasoning shrewdly that anyone who would not steal from the country he loved would not steal from anybody. Milo trusted Yossarian with every secret but the location of the holes in the hills in which he began burying his money once he returned from Smyrna with his planeload of figs and learned from Yossarian that a C.I.D. man had come to the hospital. To Milo, who had been gullible enough to volunteer for it, the position of mess officer was a sacred trust.
"I didn't even realize we weren't serving enough prunes," he had admitted that first day. "I suppose it's because I'm still so new. I'll raise the question with my first chef."
Yossarian eyed him sharply. "What first chef?" he demanded. "You don't have a first chef."
"Corporal Snark," Milo explained, looking away a little guiltily. "He's the only chef I have, so he really is my first chef, although I hope to move him over to the administrative side. Corporal Snark tends to be a little too creative, I feel. He thinks being a mess sergeant is some sort of art form and is always complaining about having to prostitute his talents. Nobody is asking him to do any such thing! Incidentally, do you happen to know why he was busted to private and is only a corporal now?"
"Yes," said Yossarian. "He poisoned the squadron."
Milo went pale again. "He did what?"
"He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don't know the difference between good and bad. Every man in the squadron was sick. Missions were canceled."
"Well!" Milo exclaimed, with thin-upped disapproval. "He certainly found out how wrong he was, didn't he?"
"On the contrary," Yossarian corrected. "He found out how right he was. We packed it away by the plateful and clamored for more. We all knew we were sick, but we had no idea we'd been poisoned."
Milo sniffed in consternation twice, like a shaggy brown hare. "In that case, I certainly do want to get him over to the administrative side. I don't want anything like that happening while I'm in charge. You see," he confided earnestly, "what I hope to do is give the men in this squadron the best meals in the whole world. That's really something to shoot at, isn't it? If a mess officer aims at anything less, it seems to me, he has no right being mess officer. Don't you agree?"
Yossarian turned slowly to gaze at Milo with probing distrust. He saw a simple, sincere face that was incapable of subtlety or guile, an honest, frank face with disunited large eyes, rusty hair, black eyebrows and an unfortunate reddish-brown mustache. Milo had a long, thin nose with sniffing, damp nostrils heading sharply off to the right, always pointing away from where the rest of him was looking. It was the face of a man of hardened integrity who could no more consciously violate the moral principles on which his virtue rested than he could transform himself into a despicable toad. One of these moral principles was that it was never a sin to charge as much as the traffic would bear. He was capable of mighty paroxysms of righteous indignation, and he was indignant as could be when he learned that a C.I.D. man was in the area looking for him.
"He's not looking for you," Yossarian said, trying to placate him. "He's looking for someone up in the hospital who's been signing Washington Irving's name to the letters he's been censoring."
"I never signed Washington Irving's name to any letters," Milo declared.
"Of course not."
"But that's just a trick to get me to confess I've been making money in the black market." Milo hauled violently at a disheveled hunk of his off-colored mustache. "I don't like guys like that. Always snooping around people like us. Why doesn't the government get after ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, if it wants to do some good? He's got no respect for rules and regulations and keeps cutting prices on me."
Milo's mustache was unfortunate because the separated halves never matched. They were like Milo's disunited eyes, which never looked at the same thing at the same time. Milo could see more things than most people, but he could see none of them too distinctly. In contrast to his reaction to news of the C.I.D. man, he learned with calm courage from Yossarian that Colonel Cathcart had raised the number of missions to fifty-five.
"We're at war," he said. "And there's no use complaining about the number of missions we have to fly. If the colonel says we have to fly fifty-five missions, we have to fly them."
"Well, I don't have to fly them," Yossarian vowed. "I'll go see Major Major."
"How can you? Major Major never sees anybody."
"Then I'll go back into the hospital."
"You just came out of the hospital ten days ago," Milo reminded him reprovingly. "You can't keep running into the hospital every time something happens you don't like. No, the best thing to do is fly the missions. It's our duty."
Milo had rigid scruples that would not even allow him to borrow a package of pitted dates from the mess hall that day of McWatt's stolen bedsheet, for the food at the mess hall was all still the property of the government.
"But I can borrow it from you," he explained to Yossarian, "since all this fruit is yours once you get it from me with Doctor Daneeka's letter. You can do whatever you want to with it, even sell it at a high profit instead of giving it away free. Wouldn't you want to do that together?"
"No."
Milo gave up. "Then lend me one package of pitted dates," he requested. "I'll give it back to you. I swear I will, and there'll be a little something extra for you."
Milo proved good as his word and handed Yossarian a quarter of McWatt's yellow bedsheet when he returned with the unopened package of dates and with the grinning thief with the sweet tooth who had stolen the bedsheet from McWatt's tent. The piece of bedsheet now belonged to Yossarian. He had earned it while napping, although he did not understand how. Neither did McWatt.
"What's this?" cried McWatt, staring in mystification at the ripped half of his bedsheet.
"It's half of the bedsheet that was stolen from your tent this morning," Milo explained. "I'll bet you didn't even know it was stolen."
"Why should anyone want to steal half a bedsheet?" Yossarian asked.
Milo grew flustered. "You don't understand," he protested. "He stole the whole bedsheet, and I got it back with the package of pitted dates you invested. That's why the quarter of the bedsheet is yours. You made a very handsome return on your investment, particularly since you've gotten back every pitted date you gave me." Milo next addressed himself to McWatt. "Half the bedsheet is yours because it was all yours to begin with, and I really don't understand what you're complaining about, since you wouldn't have any part of it if Captain Yossarian and I hadn't intervened in your behalf."
"Who's complaining?" McWatt exclaimed. "I'm just trying to figure out what I can do with half a bedsheet."
"There are lots of things you can do with half a bedsheet," Milo assured him. "The remaining quarter of the bedsheet I've set aside for myself as a reward for my enterprise, work and initiative. It's not for myself, you understand, but for the syndicate. That's something you might do with half the bedsheet. You can leave it in the syndicate and watch it grow."
"What syndicate?"
"The syndicate I'd like to form someday so that I can give you men the good food you deserve."
"You want to form a syndicate?"
"Yes, I do. No, a mart. Do you know what a mart is?"
"It's a place where you buy things, isn't it?"
"And sell things," corrected Milo.
"And sell things."
"All my life I've wanted a mart. You can do lots of things if you've got a mart. But you've got to have a mart."
"You want a mart?"
"And every man will have a share."
Yossarian was still puzzled, for it was a business matter, and there was much about business matters that always puzzled him.
"Let me try to explain it again," Milo offered with growing weariness and exasperation, jerking his thumb toward the thief with the sweet tooth, still grinning beside him. "I knew he wanted the dates more than the bedsheet. Since he doesn't understand a word of English, I made it a point to conduct the whole transaction in English."
"Why didn't you just hit him over the head and take the bedsheet away from him?" Yossarian asked.
Pressing his lips together with dignity, Milo shook his head. "That would have been most unjust," he scolded firmly. "Force is wrong, and two wrongs never make a right. It was much better my way. When I held the dates out to him and reached for the bedsheet, he probably thought I was offering to trade."
"What were you doing?"
"Actually, I was offering to trade, but since he doesn't understand English, I can always deny it."
"Suppose he gets angry and wants the dates?"
"Why, we'll just hit him over the head and take them away from him," Milo answered without hesitation. He looked from Yossarian to McWatt and back again. "I really can't see what everyone is complaining about. We're all much better off than before. Everybody is happy but this thief, and there's no sense worrying about him, since he doesn't even speak our language and deserves whatever he gets. Don't you understand?"
But Yossarian still didn't understand either how Milo could buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents.
8 LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
Not even Clevinger understood how Milo could do that, and Clevinger knew everything. Clevinger knew everything about the war except why Yossarian had to die while Corporal Snark was allowed to live, or why Corporal Snark had to die while Yossarian was allowed to live. It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it -- lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them. To die or not to die, that was the question, and Clevinger grew limp trying to answer it. History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
Clevinger knew so much because Clevinger was a genius with a pounding heart and blanching face. He was a gangling, gawky, feverish, famish-eyed brain. As a Harvard undergraduate he had won prizes in scholarship for just about everything, and the only reason he had not won prizes in scholarship for everything else was that he was too busy signing petitions, circulating petitions and challenging petitions, joining discussion groups and resigning from discussion groups, attending youth congresses, picketing other youth congresses and organizing student committees in defense of dismissed faculty members. Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out.
In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger's predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.
He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
Yossarian tried to help him. "Don't be a dope," he had counseled Clevinger when they were both at cadet school in Santa Ana, California.
"I'm going to tell him," Clevinger insisted, as the two of them sat high in the reviewing stands looking down on the auxiliary paradeground at Lieutenant Scheisskopf raging back and forth like a beardless Lear.
"Why me?" Lieutenant Scheisskopf wailed.
"Keep still, idiot," Yossarian advised Clevinger avuncularly.
"You don't know what you're talking about," Clevinger objected.
"I know enough to keep still, idiot."
Lieutenant Scheisskopf tore his hair and gnashed his teeth. His rubbery cheeks shook with gusts of anguish. His problem was a squadron of aviation cadets with low morale who marched atrociously in the parade competition that took place every Sunday afternoon. Their morale was low because they did not want to march in parades every Sunday afternoon and because Lieutenant Scheisskopf had appointed cadet officers from their ranks instead of permitting them to elect their own.
