The "fooling around" involved jungle training—how to walk quietly, how to avoid getting slashed by a vine, and so forth. It also involved forming two separate attack groups for Hollerith's plans. That meant drilling the groups to move separately, and drilling each group to stay together.
And there were other details: how to fire a heater from the third rank without incinerating a comrade in the front rank; signal-spotting, in case of emergency and sudden changes of plan; the use of dynamite, its care and feeding; picking targets—and so forth and so forth. Hollerith's three days seemed pretty short when you thought about what they had to cover.
But the new men didn't like it. They wanted action. "That's what we signed on for," they said. "Not all this drill. Hell, we ain't an army—we're guerrillas."
The older hands, and the more sensible members of the band, tried their best to talk the new men into line. Some of the officers tried ordering them into line.
But the talk was ignored. And as for the officers—well, the old United States Civil War tried a democratic army for a while, on both sides. Unfortunately, electing your officers is not an efficient way to run things. The most popular man makes the best officer about as often as the most popular man makes the best criminal-law judge. Or engineer, for that matter. War's not a democratic business.
This one, however, seemed to be. Mass election of officers was one of the rules, along with the voting on staff decisions. The new men out-numbered the older hands. New officers were elected—and that stopped the orders.
Hollerith was about two-thirds of the way out of his mind when the three days were up and the attack time came around. When night fell, the atmosphere around the cave was as tense as it could get without turning into actual lightning. It was a warm, still night; the single moon was quarter-full but it shed a lot more light than Earth's moon; we blacked ourselves and Hollerith went over the plans. We were still divided into two groups—ragged groups, but groups. The first wave was to come around on the depot from the left, attacking in full force with all armaments and some of that dynamite. When things were getting toward a peak in that direction, the second force was to come in from the right and set off its own fireworks. Result (Hollerith hoped): demolition, confusion, catastrophe.
It was a good plan. Hollerith obviously wasn't sure of his own men any more—and neither would I have been, in his spot. But he had the advantage of surprise and superior arms; he was clearly hoping that would overbalance the lack of discipline, training and order in his force. Besides, there was nothing else he could do; he was outvoted, all the way down the line.
I set out, with hardly a qualm, along with the second attack group. We were under the command of a shy, tall man with spectacles who didn't look like much, he'd been a trapper before the war, though, and was one of the original guerrillas, for a wonder, and that meant he was probably a hell of a lot tougher and more knowledgeable than he seemed. Setting traps for Wohlen's animals, for instance, was emphatically not a job for the puny or the frightened. The first group was under Huey's command.