Watch it at Amazon
Major Fambrough the senior officer, throughout the entire scene, demonstrates his lack of sanity. In the next scene just before he commits suicide, he again speaks with another officer as if he was one of his royal subjects. It's assumed that because he is the "king", nobody can stop him from doing what he wants.Also, he is saying to Dunbar, I am totally in charge of you. I can even piss in my pants and you or nobody else can do anything about it.It could also mean that, in addition to his mental problems he also has Urinary incontinence which can't be solved medically.It shows the effect of having to live on the frontier, it would generally have been incompetent or the more lowly officers who would have been 'exiled' to frontier posts rather than have them in a more active duty, and the loneliness and distance from what they would consider civilisation eventually drove them mad. This is reinforced by the abandonment of Sedgwick by it's previous occupants and their bizarre beahviour, the killing of the deer, using them to poison the pond and the fact that they were living in caves rather than the fort itself, and also the questioning of Dunbar as to why he volunteered for the duty when he was a decorated Lieutenant.
r73731
