A Fable

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY still crowding steadily up to pass through the gate had already entered the city in mind and spirit long before their bodies reached it, their anxiety and dread already one with the city's vast and growing reservoir of it, while their bodies still choked the slow converging roads.

They had begun to arrive yesterday, Tuesday, when news of the regiment's mutiny and arrest first reached the district and before the regiment itself had even been brought back to Chaul-nesmont for the old supreme generalissimo himself to decide its fate. They continued to pour into the city all that night, and this morning they still came, on the heels of the regiment, in the very dust of the lorries which had rushed it back to the city and into it and through it without stopping, coming on foot and in clumsy farm carts, to crowd through the gate where the young woman stood scanning each face with strained and indefatigable rapidity-villagers and farmers, laborers and artisans and publicans and clerks and smiths: other men who in their turn had served in the regiment, other men and women who were parents and kin of the men who belonged to it now and, because of that fact, were now under close guard beneath the threat of execution in the prison-ers' compound on the other side of the town-other men and women who, but for sheer blind chance and luck, might have been the parents and kin this time, and-some of them-would certainly be the next.

It was little they knew on that first day when they left their homes, and they would learn but little more from the others on the same mutual errand of desperation and terror whom they met or overtook or were overtaken by before they reached the city: only that at dawn yesterday morning the regiment had mutinied, refused to make an attack. It had not failed in an attack: it had simply refused to make one, to leave the trench, not before nor even as the attack started, but afterward-had, with no prewarning, no intimation even to the most minor lance-corporal among the officers designated to lead it, declined to perform that ritual act which, after four years, had become as much and as inescapable Tuesday a part of the formal ritual of war as the Grand March which opens the formal ball each evening during a season of festival or carni-val-the regiment had been moved up into the lines the night before, after two weeks of rest and refitting which could have dis-abused even the rawest replacement of what was in store for it, let alone the sudden moil and seethe of activity through which it fumbled in the darkness on the way up: the dense loom and squat of guns, the lightless lurch and crawl of caissons and lorries which could only be ammunition; then the gunfire itself, concentrated on the enemy-held hill sufficient to have notified both lines for kilo-metres in either direction that something was about to happen at this point, the wire-cutting parties out and back, and at dawn the whole regiment standing under arms, quiet and docile while the barrage lifted from the enemy's wire to hurdle his front and iso-late him from reinforcement; and still no warning, no intimation; the company- and section-leaders, officers and N. C. O,'s, had al-ready climbed out of the trench when they looked back and saw that not one man had moved to follow; no sign nor signal from man to man, but the entire three thousand spread one-man deep across a whole regimental front, acting without intercommunication as one man, as-reversed, of course-a line of birds on a tele-phone wire all leave the wire at the same instant like one bird, and that the general commanding the division of which the regiment was a unit, had drawn it out and put it under arrest, and at noon on that same day, Monday, all activity on the whole French front and the German one opposite it from the Alps to the Aisne, except air patrols and spaced token artillery salvos almost like signal guns, had ceased, and by three o'clock that afternoon, the American and British fronts and the enemy one facing them, from the Aisne to the sea, had done likewise, and now the general commanding the division of which the regiment was a unit was sending the regiment back to Grand Headquarters at Chaulnesmont, where he him-self would appear at three o'clock on Wednesday afternoon (nor did they pause to wonder, let alone doubt, how an entire civilian countryside managed to know two days in advance, not only the purpose and intent but the hour, too, of a high military staff con-ference) and, with the support or at least acquiescence of his own immediate superiors-the commander of the corps to which the division belonged, and of the army to which the corps belonged-demand in person of the old generalissimo permission to execute every man in it.

That was all they knew now as they hurried toward the city-old people and women and children, parents and wives and kin and mistresses of the three thousand men whom the old general-issimo at Chaulnesmont could destroy tomorrow by merely lifting his ringer-a whole converging countryside flowing toward the city, panting and stumbling, aghast and frantic, torn not even between terror and hope, but only by anguish and terror; destinationless even, since they had no hope: not quitting their homes and fields and shops to hurry to the city, but wrenched by anguish and terror, out of their huts and hovels and ditches, and drawn to the city whether they would or not: out of the villages and farms and into the city by simple grief to grief, since grief and anxiety, like poverty, take care of their own; to crowd into the already crowded city with no other will and desire except to relinquish their grief and anxiety into the city's vast conglomerate of all the passions and forces-fear, and grief, and despair, and impotence, and unchallengeable power and terror and invincible will; to partake of and share in all by breathing the same air breathed by all, and therefore both: by the grieving and the begrieved on one hand, and on the other the lone gray man supreme, omnipotent and inac-cessible behind the carved stone door and the sentries and the three symbolical flags of the Hotel de Ville, who dealt wholesale in death and who could condemn the whole regiment and miss its three thousand men no more from the myriads he dealt in than he would miss the nod of his head or the reverse of the lifted hand which would save them. Because they did not believe that the war was over. It had gone on too long to cease, finish, over night, at a moment's notice, like this. It had merely arrested itself; not the men engaged in it, but the war itself, War, impervious and Tuesday even inattentive to the anguish, the torn flesh, the whole petty surge and resurge of victories and defeats like the ephemeral re-petitive swarm and swirl of insects on a dung-heap, saying, 'Hush. Be quiet a moment' to the guns and the cries of the wounded too-that whole ruined band of irredeemable earth from the Alps to the sea, studded with faces watching in lipless and lidless detachment for a moment, a day or two days, for the old gray man at Chaulnesmont to lift that hand.

They had got used to the war now, after four years. In four years, they had even learned how to live with it, beside it; or rather, beneath it as beneath a fact or condition of nature, of physical laws-the privations and deprivations, the terror and the threat like the loom of an arrested tornado or a tidal wave beyond a single frail dyke; the maiming and dying too of husbands and fathers and sweethearts and sons, as though bereavement by war were a simple occupational hazard of marriage and parenthood and childbearing and love. And not only just while the war lasted, but after it was officially over too, as if the only broom War knew, or had to redd up its vacated room with, was Death; as though every man touched by even one second's flick of its mud and filth and phys-ical fear had been discharged only under condition of a capital sentence like a fatal disease-so does War ignore its own recessment until it has ground also to dust the last cold and worthless cinder of its satiety and the tag-ends of its unfinished business; whether the war had ceased or not, the men of the regiment would still have had to die individually before their time, but since the regiment as a unit had been responsible for its cessation, the regiment would surely have to die, as a unit, by the old obsolete meth-ods of war, if for no other reason than to enable its executioners to check their rifles back into the quartermasters' stores in order to be disbanded and demobilised. In fact, the only thing that could save the regiment would be the resumption of the war: which was their paradox, their bereavement: that, by mutinying, the regiment had stopped the war; it had saved France (France? England too; the whole West, since nothing else apparently had been able to stop the Germans since the March breakthrough in front of Amiens) and this was to be its reward; the three thousand men who had saved France and the world would lose their lives, not in the act of it, but only after the fact, so that, to the men who had saved the world, the world they saved would not be worth the price they paid for it-not to them, of course, the three thousand men in the regiment; they would be dead: the world, the West, France, all, would not matter to them; but to the wives and parents and children and brothers and sisters and sweethearts who would have lost all in order to save France and the world; they saw themselves no longer as one unit integrated into one resistance, one nation, mutual in suffering and dread and deprivation, against the Ger-man threat, but solitary, one small district, one clan, one family almost, embattled against all that Western Europe whom their sons and fathers and husbands and lovers were having to save. Because, no matter how much longer the threat of the war might have continued, some at least of the lovers and sons and fathers and husbands might have escaped with no more than an injury, while, now that the terror and the threat were past, all of their fathers and lovers and husbands and sons would have to die.

But when they reached the city, they found no placid lake of grieving resignation. Rather, it was a cauldron of rage and con-sternation. Because now they learned that the regiment had not mutinied by mutal concord and design, either planned or spon-taneous, but instead had been led, cajoled, betrayed into revolt by a single squad of twelve soldiers and their corporal; that the entire three thousand men had been corrupted into capital crime and through it, right up into the shadow of the rifles which would be its punishment, by thirteen men, four of whom, including the corporal-leader, were not only not Frenchmen by birth, but three of them were not even naturalised Frenchmen. In fact, only one of the four-the corporal-could even speak French. Even the army records did not seem to know what their nationality was; their very presence in a French regiment or the French army in France was contradictory and obfuscated, though indubitably they Wednesday had, must have, got there through or by means of some carelessly reported or recorded Foreign Legion draft, since armies never really lost anything for good, once it was described and numbered and dated and countersigned onto a scrap of paper; the boot, bay-onet, camel or even regiment, might vanish and leave no physical trace, but not the record of it and the name and rank and desig-nation of whoever had it last, or anyway signed for it last. The other nine of the squad were Frenchmen, but only three of them were less than thirty years old, and two of them were over fifty. But all nine of them had unimpeachable service records extending back not only to August,, but on to the day when the oldest of them turned eighteen and was drafted thirty-five years ago.

And by the next morning, Wednesday, they knew the rest of it-how, not only warned and alerted by the barrage that an attack was coming, the German observation posts must have actually seen the men refuse to leave the trench after their officers, yet no coun-terattack came; and how, even during their best, their priceless op-portunity, which was during the confusion and turmoil while the revolted and no-longer-to-be-trusted regiment was having to be relieved in broad daylight, still the enemy made no counter-move, not even a barrage on the communication lines where the relieved and the relieving regiments would have to pass each other, so that, an hour after the regiment had been relieved and put under arrest, all infantry activity in the sector had stopped, and two hours after that, the general commanding the regiment's division and his corps commander and their army commander, and an American staff-colonel and the British commander-in-chiefs chief of staff \\ere behind locked doors with the general commanding the entire Group of Armies, where, as report and rumor thickened, it emerged that not only the private soldiers in the division's other three regiments, but those in both the divisions flanking it, knew in ad-vance that the attack was to be made and that the selected regiment was going to refuse. And that (staff- and provost-officers with their sergeants and corporals were moving fast now, spurred by amazement and alarm and incredulity too, while the telephones shrilled and the telegraphs chattered and the dispatch-riders' motorcycles roared in and out of the courtyard) not only were the foreign corporal and his strange conglomerate squad known per-sonally to every private in those three divisions, but for over two years now the thirteen men-the obscure corporal whose name few knew and even they could not pronounce it, whose very pres-ence in the regiment, along with that of the other three appar cntly of the same Middle-European nationality, was an enigma, since none of them seemed to have any history at all beyond the clay when they had appeared, materialised seemingly out of no-where and nothingness in the quartermaster's store-room where they had been issued uniforms and equipment, and the nine others who were authentic and, until this morning, unimpeachable Frenchmen and French soldiers, had been spending their leaves and furloughs for two years now among the combat-troop rest-bil-lets not only throughout the entire French Army zone, but the American and the British ones too, sometimes individually, but usually as the intact squad-the entire thirteen, three of whom couldn't even speak French, visiting for days and sometimes weeks at a time, not only among French troops, but American and British too; which was the moment when the inspectors and in-quisitors in their belts and tabs and pips and bars and eagles and wreaths and stars, realised the-not enormity, but monstrosity, incredibility; the monstrous incredibility, the incredible monstros-ity, with which they were confronted: the moment when they learned that during three of these two-week leave-periods, two last year and the third last month, less than three weeks ago, the entire squad had vanished from France itself, vanished one night with their passes and transport and ration warrants from their rest-billets, and reappeared one morning two weeks later in ranks again, with the passes and warrants still unstamped and intact-mon-strous and incredible, since there was but one place on earth in almost four years now where thirteen men in uniform could have gone without having their papers stamped, needing no papers at all in fact, only darkness and a pair of wire-cutters; they-the Wednesday inquisitors and examiners, the inspectors-general and the provost-marshals flanked now by platoons of N. C. O. 's and M. P,'s with pistols riding light to the hand in the unstrapped holsters-were moving rapidly indeed now, with a sort of furious calm, along, among that unbroken line of soiled, stained, unchevroned and braidless men designated only by serial numbers stretching from Alsace to the Channel, who for almost four years now had been standing in sleepless rotation behind their cocked and loaded rifles in the apertures of that one continuous fircstep, but who now were not watching the opposite German line at all but, as though they had turned their backs on war, were watching them, the inquisitors, the inspectors, the alarmed and outraged and amazed; until a heliograph in a French observation post began to blink, and one behind the German line facing it answered; and at noon that Mon-day, the whole French front and the German one opposite it fell silent, and at three o'clock the American and the British fronts and the German one facing them followed suit, so that when night fell, both the dense subterrene warrens lay as dead as Pompeii or Carthage beneath the constant watchful arch and plop of rockets and the slow wink and thud of back-area guns.

So now they had a protagonist for anguishment, an object for execration, stumbling and panting on that Wednesday morning through the kilometres' final converging, above which the city soared into the sunlight the spires and crenellations of its golden diadem, pouring, crowding through the old city gates, becoming one with that vast warrened shadow out of which, until yesterday, the city's iron and martial splendor had serenely stood, but which now had become one seethe and turmoil which had overflowed the boulevard at dawn and was still pouring across the city after the fleeing lorries.

As the lorries sped across the city, they soon outdistanced the crowd, though when its vanguard emerged also onto the sunny plain beyond, the lorries were in sight again, fleeing in a sucking swirl of primrose-colored dust toward the camouflage-painted huddle of the prison-compound a kilometre and a half away.

But for a moment, the crowd seemed unable to discern or dis-tinguish the lorries. It stopped, bunching onto itself like a blind worm thrust suddenly into sunlight, recoiling into arres'I'mcnt, so that motion itself seemed to repudiate it in one fleeing ripple like a line of invisible wind running down a windrow of wheat. Then they distinguished or located the speeding dust, and broke, surged, not running now, because-old men and women and children-they had run themselves out crossing the city, and no longer shouting now either because they had spent themselves voiceless too, but hurrying, panting, stumbling, beginning-now that they were clear of the city-to spread out fanwise across the plain, so that already they no longer resembled a worm, but rather again that wave of water which had swept at dawn across the Place de Ville.

They had no plan: only motion, like a wave; fanned out now across the plain, they---or it-seemed to have more breadth than depth, like a wave, seeming, as they approached the compound, to increase in speed as a wave does neanng the sand, on, until it sud-denly crashed against the wire barrier, and hung for an instant and then burst, split into two lesser waves which flowed in each direction along the fence until each spent itself. And that was all. Instinct, anguish, had started them; motion had carried all of them for an hour, and some of them for twenty-four, and brought them here and flung them like a cast of refuse along the fence (It-the compound-had been a factory once, back in the dead vanished days of what the nations called peace: a rectangle of brick walls covered with peaceful ivy then, converted last year into a training-and replacement-depot by the addition of half a hundred geo-metric plank-and-paper barracks composed of material bought with American money and sawn into numbered sections by American machines in America, and shipped overseas and clapped up by American engineers and artisans, into an eyesore, monument, and portent of a nation's shocking efficiency and speed, and converted again yesterday into a man-proof pen for the mutinied regiment, by the addition of barricades of electrified wire and searchlight Wednesday towers and machine-gun platforms and pits and an elevated cat-walk for guards; French sappers and service troops were still weaving more barricades and stringing more of the lethal wire to crown them.) and then abandoned them, leaving them lying along the barrier in an inextricable mass like victims being resurrected after a holocaust, staring through the taut, vicious, unclimbable strands beyond which the regiment had vanished as completely as though it had never existed, while all circumambience-the sunny spring, the jocund morning, the lark-loud sky, the glinting pristine wire (which, even when close enough to be touched, still had an appear-ance gossamer and ephemeral like Chris'I'mas tinsel, giving to the working parties immersed in its coils the inconsequential air of vil-lagers decorating for a parish festival), the empty parade and the blank lifeless barracks and the Senegalese guarding them, lounging haughtily overhead along the catwalks and lending a gaudy, the-atrical insouciance to the raffish shabbiness of their uniforms like that of an American blackface minstrel troupe dressed hurriedly out of pawnshops-seemed to muse down at them, contemplative, inattentive, inscrutable, and not even interested.

And that was all. Here they had wanted to come for twenty-four hours now, and here at last they were, lying like the cast of spent flotsam along the fence, not even seeing the wire against which they lay, let alone anything beyond it, for the half-minute perhaps which it took them to realize, not that they had had no plan when they came here, nor even that the motion which had served in lieu of plan, had been motion only so long as it had had room to move in, but that motion itself had betrayed them by bringing them here at all, not only in the measure of the time it had taken them to cover the kilometre and a half between the city and the compound, but in that of the time it would take them to retrace back to the city and the Place de Ville, which they comprehended now they should never have quitted in the first place, so that, no matter what speed they might make getting back to it, they would be too late. Nevertheless, for still another half minute they lay immobile against the fence beyond which the fatigue parties, wrestling slowly among their interminable tinsel coils, paused to look quietly and incuriously back at them, and the gaudy Sene-galese, lounging in lethargic disdain among their machine guns above both the white people engaged in labor inside the fence and the ones engaged in anguish outside it, smoked cigarettes and stroked idly the edges of bayonets with broad dark thumbs and didn't bother to look at them at all.

Nor could even the aviator stationed and motionless in the hard blue wind have said exactly where among them the facing-about began as, like the blind headless earth-brute which, apparently without any organ either to perceive alarm or select a course to evade it, can move at instantaneous notice and instantaneous speed in either direction, the crowd began to flow back to the city, turning and beginning to move all at one instant as birds do, hurrying again, weary and indefatigable, indomitable in their capacity not alone for endurance but for frenzy as well, streaming immediately once more between two files of troops stretching the whole distance back to the city--(apparently a whole brigade of cavalry this time, drawn up and facing, across the cleared path, a like number of infantry, without packs again but with bayonets still fixed and with grenades too now, with, one point, the nozzle and looped hose of a flame thrower, and at the far end of the city, the cleared path, the tank again, half-seen beyond the arch of the gate like a surly not-too-courageous dog peering from its kennel) without seeming to have remarked either the arrival of the troops nor to notice, let alone have any curiosity about, their presence now. Nor did the troops pay any attention to the people, alerted of course, but actually almost lounging on the horses and the grounded rifles while the crowd poured between them, as though to the troops themselves and to those who had ordered them here, the crowd was like the herd of Western cattle which, once got into motion about its own vortex, is its own warrant both of its own security and of the public's peace.

They rccrosscd the citv, back into the Place de Ville, filling it again, right up to the spear-tipped iron fence beyond which the Wednesday three sentries flanked the blank door beneath the three morning-windy flags. They still crowded into the Place long after there was no more room, still convinced that, no matter how fast they had come back from the compound, they would be too late, knowing that no courier carrying the order for the execution could possibly have passed them on the road, yet convinced that one must indu-bitably have done so. Yet they still crowded in, as if the last belated ones could not accept the back-passed word, but must see, or try to see, for themselves that they had missed the courier and were too late; until even if they had wished to stream, stumble, pant back to the compound and at least be where they could hear the volley which would bereave them, there would have been no room to turn around in and begin to run; immobilised and fixed by their own density in that stone sink whose walls were older than Clovis and Charlemagne-until suddenly it occurred to them that they could not be late, it was impossible for them to be late; that, no matter what errors and mistakes of time or direction or geography they might make, they could no more be late for the execution than they could prevent it, since the only reason for the whole vast frantic and anguished influx to the city was to be there when the regiment's division commander arrived to ask the old gray general behind the closed stone door facing them to allow him to have the regiment shot, and the division general was not even due there until three o'clock this afternoon.

So all they needed to do now was just to wait. It was a little after nine o'clock now At ten, three corporals, an American, a Briton, and a Frenchman, flanked each by an armed soldier of his nation, came out of the archway from the rear of the Hotel, and exchanged each the sentry of his nation and marched the relieved man back through the archway. Then it was noon. Their shadows crept in from the west and centered; the same three cor-porals came with three fresh sentries and relieved the three posts and went away; it was the hour when, in the old dead time called peace, men went home to eat and rest a little perhaps, but none stirred; their shadows crept eastward, lengthening again; at two o'clock, the three corporals came for the third time; the three sets of three paced and stamped for the third time through the two-hourly ritual, and departed.

This time the car came so fast up the boulevard that it out-stripped its own heralding. The crowd had only time to press fran-tically back and let it enter the Place and then anneal behind it as it shot across the Place and stopped before the Hotel in a bursting puff of dust. It was a staff car also, but stained with dust and caked with dried mud too, since it had come not only from the army zone, but out of the lines themselves, even if its pennon did bear the five stars of an army commander. Though, after these four years, even the children read that much, and if it had flown no pennon at all, even the children would have recognised two of the men in it-the squat, bull-chested man who commanded the regiment's division, who was already beginning to stand up before the car stopped, and the tall, scholarly-looking man who would be the division commander's army-group commander's chief-of-staff, the division commander springing out of the car before the orderly beside the driver in the front seat had time to get down and open the tonneau door, and already chop-striding his short stiff cavalry legs toward the blank, sentry-flanked entrance to the Hotel before the staff officer had even begun to move.

Then the staff officer rose too, taking up a longish object from the scat beside him, and in the next second they-the crowd-had recognised it, swaying forward out of their immobilised recoil and making a sound now, not of execration, because it was not even directed at the division commander; even before they learned about the foreign corporal, they had never really blamed him, and even with the corporal, although they could still dread the division commander as the postulate of their fear and the instrument of their anguish, they had not blamed him: not only a French soldier, but a brave and faithful one, he could have done nothing else but what he was doing, believed nothing else except what he believed, since it was because of such as he that France had endured this long, surrounded and embattled by jealousy and envy-a soldier: Wednesday that not only his own honor and that of his division, but the honor of the entire profession of command, from files and squads to armies and groups of them, had been compromised; a Frenchman: that the security of the motherland itself had been jeopardised or at least threatened. Later, afterward, it would seem to them, some of them, that, during the four or five seconds before they recog-nised the significance of what the staff officer had taken up from the seat of the car, there had been a moment when they had felt in him something almost like pity: not only a Frenchman and a soldier, but a Frenchman and a soldier who had to be a man first, to have been a Frenchman and become a soldier, yet who, to gain the high privilege of being a brave and faithful Frenchman and soldier, had had to forfeit and abdicate his right in the estate of man-where theirs would be only to suffer and grieve, his would be to decree it; he could share only in the bereaving, never in the grief; victim, like they, of his own rank and high estate.

Then they saw what the staff officer had in his hand. It was a sabre. He-the staff officer-had two: wearing one buckled to his ordnance belt, and carrying one, its harness furled about the hilt and sheath, which he was tucking under his arm as he too descended from the car. And even the children knew what that meant: that the division commander too was under arrest, and now they made the sound; it was as though only now, for the first time, had they actually realised that the regiment was going to die-a sound not even of simple agony, but of relinquishment, acceptance almost, so that the division commander himself paused and turned and they seemed to look at, see him too for the first time-victim not even of his rank and high estate, but like them, of that same instant in geography and in time which had destroyed the regiment, but with no rights in its fate; solitary, kin-less, alone, pariah and orphan both from them whose decree of orphanage he would carry out, and from them whom he would orphan; repudiated in advance by them from whom he had bought the high privilege of endurance and fidelity and abnegation with the forfeiture of his birthright in humanity, in compassion and pity and even in the right to die-standing for a moment yet, looking back at them, then turned, already chop-striding again toward the stone steps and the blank door, the staff officer with the furled sabre under his arm following, the three sentries clashing to present arms as the division commander strode up the steps and past them and himself jerked open the door's black yawn before anyone else could have moved to do it, and entered-the squat, short figure kinless, indomitable, and doomed, vanishing rigidly and without a backward look, across that black threshold as though (to the massed faces and eyes watching) into Abyss or into Hell.

And now it was too late. If they could have moved, they might at least have reached the compound wire in time to hear the knell; now, because of their own immobilisation, they would have only the privilege of watching the executioner prepare the empty rope. In a moment now, the armed couriers and outriders would appear and kick into life the motorcycles waiting in the areaway; the cars would draw up to the door, and the officers themselves would emerge-not the old supreme general, not the two lessei ones, not even the division commander, compelled to that last full measure of expiation by watching the doom whose mouthpiece he had been-not any of these, but the provost-marshals, the special-ists: they who by avocation and affinity had been called and as by bishops selected and trained and dedicated into the immutable hierarchy of War to be major-domos to such as this, to preside with all the impunity and authority of civilised usage over the formal orderly shooting of one set of men by another wearing the same uniform, lest there be flaw or violation in the right; trained for this moment and this end as race-horses are brought delicately, with all man's skill and knowledge and care, up to the instant of the springing barrier and the grandstand's roar, of St. Leger or Derby; the pennoned staff cars would roar away, rapid and distancing, feeding them fading dust once more back to the compound which Wednesday they knew now they should never have left; even if they could have moved, only by the most frantic speed could they more than reach the compound fence in time merely to hear and see the clapping away of echoes and the wisping away of smoke which made them orphaned and childless and relict, but now they could not even move enough to face about: the whole Place one aspic of gaped faces from which rose that sound not yelling but half murmuring and half wailing, while they stared at the gray, tomb-like pile into which the two generals in their panoply and regalia and tools of glory had vanished as into a tomb for heroes, and from which, when something did emerge, it would now be Death-glaring at it, anguished and aghast, unable to move anywhere, unless the ones in front might perhaps fling themselves upon and beneath the cavalcade before it could start, and so destroy it, and, dying themselves with it, bequeath to the doomed regiment at least that further span of breathing comprised in the time neces-sary to form a new one.

But nothing happened. A courier did appear after a while from the archway, but he was only an ordinary dispatch-rider, and alone; his whole manner declared that he had no concern what-ever in anything regarding them or their trouble. He didn't even look at them, so that the sound, never too loud, ceased while he straddled one of the waiting motorcycles and moved away, not even in the direction of the compound but toward the boulevard, pushing the popping mechanism along between his straddled legs, since, in the crowd, there was no chance whatever of running it fast enough to establish its balance, the crowd parting just enough to let him through and then closing behind him again, his urgent, constant adjurations for passage marking his progress, lonely, urgent and irritable, like the crying of a lost wildfowl; after a while two more came out, identical, even to the air of private and lei-surely independence, and departed on two more of the machines, their cries too marking their infinitesimal and invisible progress: 'Give way, you bastards-offspring of sheep and camels...'

And that was all. Then it was sunset. As they stood in the turning flood of night, the ebb of day rang abruptly with an orderly discordant diapason of bugles, orderly because they all sounded at once, discordant because they sounded not one call, but three: the Battre dux Champs of the French, the Last Post of the English, the Retreat of the Americans, beginning inside the city and spreading from cantonment and depot to cantonment and depot, rising and falling within its own measured bruit as the bronze throat of orderly and regulated War proclaimed and affirmed the end of day, clarion and sombre above the parade rite of Mount and Stand Down as the old guards, custodians of today, relinquished to tomor-row's, the six sergeants themselves appearing this time, each with his old guard or his new, the six files in ordered tramp and wheel facing each its rigid counterpart juxtaposed, the barked commands in the three different tongues ringing in the same discordant uni-son as the bugles, in staccato poste and riposte as the guards ex-changed and the three sentries of the new ones assumed the posts. Then the sunset gun went from the old citadel, deliberate and profound, as if a single muffled drumstick had been dropped once against the inverted bowl of hollow and resonant air, the sound fading slowly and deliberately, until at last, with no suture to mark its close, it was lost in the murmur of bunting with which the flags, bright blooms of glory myriad across the embattled con-tinent, sank, windless again, down.

They were able to move now. The fading whisper of the gun and the descending flags might have been the draining away of what had been holding them gelid; there would even be time to hasten home and eat, and then return. So they were almost run-ning, walking only when they had to and running again when they could, wan, indomitable and indefatigable, as the morning's ebb flowed back through the twilight, the darkling, the night-assuaged city, toward the warrens and tenements where it had risen. They were like the recessed shift out of a factory furiously abridging the ordered retinue of day and dark producing shells, say, for a retreating yet unconquered army, their eyes bloodshot from the fumes, Wednesday their hair and garments stinking with the reek, hurrying to eat and then return, already eating the waiting food while they still ran toward it, and already back at the clanking flashing unstopping machines while still chewing and swallowing the food they would not taste.