Yossarian ran right into the hospital, determined to remain there forever rather than fly one mission more thanthe thirty-two missions he had. Ten days after he changed his mind and came out, the colonel raised the missionsto forty-five and Yossarian ran right back in, determined to remain in the hospital forever rather than fly onemission more than the six missions more he had just flown.

　　Yossarian could run into the hospital whenever he wanted to because of his liver and because of his eyes; thedoctors couldn’t fix his liver condition and couldn’t meet his eyes each time he told them he had a livercondition. He could enjoy himself in the hospital, just as long as there was no one really very sick in the sameward. His system was sturdy enough to survive a case of someone else’s malaria or influenza with scarcely anydiscomfort at all. He could come through other people’s tonsillectomies without suffering any postoperativedistress, and even endure their hernias and hemorrhoids with only mild nausea and revulsion. But that was justabout as much as he could go through without getting sick. After that he was ready to bolt. He could relax in thehospital, since no one there expected him to do anything. All he was expected to do in the hospital was die or getbetter, and since he was perfectly all right to begin with, getting better was easy.

　　Being in the hospital was better than being over Bologna or flying over Avignon with Huple and Dobbs at thecontrols and Snowden dying in back.

　　There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, andthere were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower deathrate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily.

　　People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater, more orderly job of it. Theycouldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners.

　　They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was in she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost withdelicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was socommon outside the hospital. They did not blow up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret toYossarian in the back of the plane.

　　“I’m cold,” Snowden had whimpered. “I’m cold.”

　　“There, there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him. “There, there.”

　　They didn’t take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn’t explode into bloodand clotted matter. They didn’t drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides.

　　They didn’t get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned todeath with axes by parents or children or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death.

　　People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. Therewas none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none ofthat now-I-am-and-now-I-ain’t. There were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradles or iceboxesor fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jumpin front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!,accelerating at the rate of sixteen feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and diedisgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.

　　All things considered, Yossarian often preferred the hospital, even though it had its faults. The help tended to beofficious, the rules, if heeded, restrictive, and the management meddlesome. Since sick people were apt to bepresent, he could not always depend on a lively young crowd in the same ward with him, and the entertainmentwas not always good. He was forced to admit that the hospitals had altered steadily for the worse as the warcontinued and one moved closer to the battlefront, the deterioration in the quality of the guests becoming mostmarked within the combat zone itself where the effects of booming wartime conditions were apt to makethemselves conspicuous immediately. The people got sicker and sicker the deeper he moved into combat, untilfinally in the hospital that last time there had been the soldier in white, who could not have been any sickerwithout being dead, and he soon was.

　　The soldier in white was constructed entirely of gauze, plaster and a thermometer, and the thermometer wasmerely an adornment left balanced in the empty dark hole in the bandages over his mouth early each morningand late each afternoon by Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett right up to the afternoon Nurse Cramer read thethermometer and discovered he was dead. Now that Yossarian looked back, it seemed that Nurse Cramer, ratherthan the talkative Texan, had murdered the soldier in white; if she had not read the thermometer and reportedwhat she had found, the soldier in white might still be lying there alive exactly as he had been lying there allalong, encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze with both strange, rigid legs elevated from the hips and bothstrange arms strung up perpendicularly, all four bulky limbs in casts, all four strange, useless limbs hoisted up inthe air by taut wire cables and fantastically long lead weights suspended darkly above him. Lying there that waymight not have been much of a life, but it was all the life he had, and the decision to terminate it, Yossarian felt,should hardly have been Nurse Cramer’s.

　　The soldier in white was like an unrolled bandage with a hole in it or like a broken block of stone in a harborwith a crooked zinc pipe jutting out. The other patients in the ward, all but the Texan, shrank from him with a tenderhearted aversion from the moment they set eyes on him the morning after the night he had been sneaked in.

　　They gathered soberly in the farthest recess of the ward and gossiped about him in malicious, offendedundertones, rebelling against his presence as a ghastly imposition and resenting him malevolently for thenauseating truth of which he was bright reminder. They shared a common dread that he would begin moaning.

　　“I don’t know what I’ll do if he does begin moaning,” the dashing young fighter pilot with the golden mustachehad grieved forlornly. “It means he’ll moan during the night, too, because he won’t be able to tell time.”

　　No sound at all came from the soldier in white all the time he was there. The ragged round hole over his mouthwas deep and jet black and showed no sign of lip, teeth, palate or tongue. The only one who ever came closeenough to look was the affable Texan, who came close enough several times a day to chat with him about morevotes for the decent folk, opening each conversation with the same unvarying greeting: “What do you say, fella?

　　How you coming along?” The rest of the men avoided them both in their regulation maroon corduroy bathrobesand unraveling flannel pajamas, wondering gloomily who the soldier in white was, why he was there and whathe was really like inside.

　　“He’s all right, I tell you,” the Texan would report back to them encouragingly after each of his social visits.

　　“Deep down inside he’s really a regular guy. He’s feeling a little shy and insecure now because he doesn’t knowanybody here and can’t talk. Why don’t you all just step right up to him and introduce yourselves? He won’t hurtyou.”

　　“What the goddam hell are you talking about?” Dunbar demanded. “Does he even know what you’re talkingabout?”

　　“Sure he knows what I’m talking about. He’s not stupid. There ain’t nothing wrong with him.”

　　“Can he hear you?”

　　“Well, I don’t know if he can hear me or not, but I’m sure he knows what I’m talking about.”

　　“Does that hole over his mouth ever move?”

　　“Now, what kind of a crazy question is that?” the Texan asked uneasily.

　　“How can you tell if he’s breathing if it never moves?”

　　“How can you tell it’s a he?”

　　“Does he have pads over his eyes underneath that bandage over his face?”

　　“Does he ever wiggle his toes or move the tips of his fingers?”

　　The Texan backed away in mounting confusion. “Now, what kind of a crazy question is that? You fellas must allbe crazy or something. Why don’t you just walk right up to him and get acquainted? He’s a real nice guy, I tellyou.”

　　The soldier in white was more like a stuffed and sterilized mummy than a real nice guy. Nurse Duckett andNurse Cramer kept him spick-and-span. They brushed his bandages often with a whiskbroom and scrubbed theplaster casts on his arms, legs, shoulders, chest and pelvis with soapy water. Working with a round tin of metalpolish, they waxed a dim gloss on the dull zinc pipe rising from the cement on his groin. With damp dish towelsthey wiped the dust several times a day from the slim black rubber tubes leading in and out of him to the twolarge stoppered jars, one of them, hanging on a post beside his bed, dripping fluid into his arm constantly througha slit in the bandages while the other, almost out of sight on the floor, drained the fluid away through the zincpipe rising from his groin. Both young nurses polished the glass jars unceasingly. They were proud of theirhousework. The more solicitous of the two was Nurse Cramer, a shapely, pretty, sexless girl with a wholesomeunattractive face. Nurse Cramer had a cute nose and a radiant, blooming complexion dotted with fetching spraysof adorable freckles that Yossarian detested. She was touched very deeply by the soldier in white. Her virtuous,pale-blue, saucerlike eyes flooded with leviathan tears on unexpected occasions and made Yossarian mad.

　　“How the hell do you know he’s even in there?” he asked her.

　　“Don’t you dare talk to me that way!” she replied indignantly.

　　“Well, how do you? You don’t even know if it’s really him.”

　　“Who?”

　　“Whoever’s supposed to be in all those bandages. You might really be weeping for somebody else. How do youknow he’s even alive?”

　　“What a terrible thing to say!” Nurse Cramer exclaimed. “Now, you get right into bed and stop making jokesabout him.”

　　“I’m not making jokes. Anybody might be in there. For all we know, it might even be Mudd.”

　　“What are you talking about?” Nurse Cramer pleaded with him in a quavering voice.

　　“Maybe that’s where the dead man is.”

　　“What dead man?”

　　“I’ve got a dead man in my tent that nobody can throw out. His name is Mudd.”

　　Nurse Cramer’s face blanched and she turned to Dunbar desperately for aid. “Make him stop saying things likethat,” she begged.

　　“Maybe there’s no one inside,” Dunbar suggested helpfully. “Maybe they just sent the bandages here for a joke.”

　　She stepped away from Dunbar in alarm. “You’re crazy,” she cried, glancing about imploringly. “You’re bothcrazy.”

　　Nurse Duckett showed up then and chased them all back to their own beds while Nurse Cramer changed thestoppered jars for the soldier in white. Changing the jars for the soldier in white was no trouble at all, since thesame clear fluid was dripped back inside him over and over again with no apparent loss. When the jar feeding theinside of his elbow was just about empty, the jar on the floor was just about full, and the two were simplyuncoupled from their respective hoses and reversed quickly so that the liquid could be dripped right back intohim. Changing the jars was no trouble to anyone but the men who watched them changed every hour or so andwere baffled by the procedure.

　　“Why can’t they hook the two jars up to each other and eliminate the middleman?” the artillery captain withwhom Yossarian had stopped playing chess inquired. “What the hell do they need him for?”

　　“I wonder what he did to deserve it,” the warrant officer with malaria and a mosquito bite on his ass lamentedafter Nurse Cramer had read her thermometer and discovered that the soldier in white was dead.

　　“He went to war,” the fighter pilot with the golden mustache surmised.

　　“We all went to war,” Dunbar countered.

　　“That’s what I mean,” the warrant officer with malaria continued. “Why him? There just doesn’t seem to be anylogic to this system of rewards and punishment. Look what happened to me. If I had gotten syphilis or a dose ofclap for my five minutes of passion on the beach instead of this damned mosquito bite, I could see justice. Butmalaria? Malaria? Who can explain malaria as a consequence of fornication?” The warrant officer shook hishead in numb astonishment.

　　“What about me?”............