To Have And Have Not

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
red-headed one said. 'Listen, pal/ to Richard
Gordon, 'How's to have another?5
'Aren't they fine boys?' said the tall man. cWar
is a purifying and ennobling force. The question is
whether only people like ourselves here are fitted to
be soldiers or whether the different services have
formed us.'
'I don't know,' said Richard Gordon,
'I would like to bet you that not three men in this
room were drafted/ the tall man said. 'These are
the tlite. The very top cream of the scum. What
Wellington won at Waterloo with. Well, Mr.
Hoover ran us out of Anticosti flats and Mr. Roose-
velt has shipped us down here to get rid of us.
They've run the camp in a way to invite an epidemic
but the poor bastards won't die. They shipped a few
of us to Tortugas but that's healthy now. Besides,
we wouldn't stand for it. So they've brought us
back. What's the next move? They've got to get
rid of us. You can see that, can't you?'
'Why?'
'Because we are the desperate ones,' the man said,
'The ones with nothing to lose. We are the com-
pletely brutalized ones. We're worse than the stuff
the original Spartacus worked with. But it's tough
to try to do anything with because we have been
beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the
only pride is in being able to take it* But we're
not all like that. There are some of us that are
eoincr to hand it out/
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