HOW LIKE A GOD
13
der the weight of his concentrated muteness, the pegged and glued
joints of the inadequate student chair. Perhaps two minutes would
pass this way while he glared at the immobile page; at last he
would gasp, clear his throat, mutter "Uh...." or "The...." and
then collapse once more into impenetrable vacancy. When he was
not called upon and others were answering questions, he would ac–
company their recitations with a volley of noise-grunts, groans,
whistles of assent or wonder, coughs of refined disapprobation or
sighs of simple envy. He was chorus to the melodrama of scholarship
that was played each week upon the boards of the I
&
E Section.
Sometimes he would wait for me to correct someone in an obvious
blunder and then chortle with satisfaction at having been a party
to the correction. Frequently when I would ask what was wrong
with an answer one of them had just given, his arm would rocket
up in a waggle of joy. I would nod to him, he would open his mouth,
shut it, hack in his throat, and start up that rhythmic wheeze of ex–
haustion which invariably accompanied whatever mental process it
was in him that so strongly suggested respiration. We all would wait,
then I would call on someone else, and as soon as the answer was
achieved he would vent an exclamation of delight-it was just what
he had wanted to say all along. He never seemed to resent my turn–
ing to someone else and leaving him with the answer dangling and
all but expressed there on the very membranes of his lips.
However, he was not stupid. Indeed when I saw him the first
night I fancied that he might be one of the better students. His name
was Niederweg, and he was the field first sergeant of one of the
companies in the Third Battalion. I knew
him
from his work in the
regiment and from conversations I had had with him in the course
of my daily duties. In his public and professional image he seemed
quite another person. He was oppressively articulate in dealing with
the trainees, and no one else in the regiment could degrade and
bully and cow the new troops with comparable results. In matters
of profanity he was matchless, and I was once privileged to witness
him
exhort a company, several of whose members had had the
temerity to fall asleep during a particularly boring lecture about the
Geneva Convention which I was obliged to be giving them. Sgt.
Niederwcg interrupted my drone, stood the troops at attention and
chewed at them for about five minutes without pause; he then pro-
