A Fable

Wednesday Night

To the young woman waiting just inside the old eastern city gate, that dispersal in the Place de Ville made a long faint hollow faraway rushing sound as remote and impersonal as a pouring of water or the wings of a tremendous migratory flock. With her head turned and arrested and one thin hand clutching the crossing of the shabby shawl on her breast, she seemed to listen to it almost inattentively while it filled the saffron sunset between the violet city and the cobalt-green firmament, and died away.

Then she turned back to where the road entered the city beneath the old arch. It was almost empty now, only a trickle approached and entered, the last of them, the dregs; when she turned back to it her face, though still wan and strained, was almost peaceful now, as if even the morning’s anguish had been exhausted and even at last obliterated by the day of watching and waiting.

Then she was not even watching the road as her hand, releasing the shawl, brushed past the front of her dress and stopped, her whole body motionless while her hand fumbled at something through the cloth, fumbling at whatever it was as if even the hand didn’t know yet what it was about to find. Then she thrust her hand inside the dress and brought the object out—the crust of the bread which the man had given her in the boulevard almost twelve hours ago, warm from her body and which by her expression she had completely forgotten, even the putting it there. Then she even forgot the bread again, clutching it to her mouth in one thin voracious fist, tearing at it with quick darting birdlike snatches as she once more watched the gate which those entering now approached with creeping and painful slowness. Because these were the dregs, the residue—the very old and the very young, belated not because they had had further to come but because some of them had been so long in life as long ago to have outlived the kin and friends who would have owned carts to lend or share with them, and the others had been too brief in it yet to have friends capable of owning carts and who had already been orphaned of kin by the regiment at Bethune and Souchez and the Chemin des Dames three years ago—all creeping cityward now at the pace of the smallest and weakest.

When she began suddenly to run, she was still chewing the bread, still chewing when she darted under the old twilit arch, running around an old woman and a child who were entering it without breaking stride but merely changing feet like a running horse at a jump, flinging the crust behind her, spurning it with her palm against the hollow purchaseless air as she ran toward a group of people coming up the now almost empty road—an old man and three women, one of them carrying a child. The woman carrying the child saw her and stopped. The second woman stopped too, though the others—an old man on a single crutch and carrying a small cloth-knotted bundle and leaning on the arm of an old woman who appeared to be blind—were still walking on when the young woman ran past them and up to the woman carrying the child and stopped facing her, her wan face urgent and frantic again.

‘Marthe!’ she said. ‘Marthe!’

The woman answered, something rapid and immediate, not in French but in a staccato tongue full of harsh rapid consonants, which went with her face—a dark high calm ugly direct competent peasant’s face out of the ancient mountainous central-European cradle, which, though a moment later she spoke in French and with no accent, was no kin whatever to the face of the child she carried, with its blue eyes and florid coloring filtered westward from Flanders. She spoke French at once, as if, having looked at the girl, she realised that, whether or not the girl had ever once understood the other tongue, she was past comprehending or remembering it now. Now the blind woman leading the crippled old man had stopped and turned and was coming back; and now you would have noticed for the first time the face of the second woman, the one who had stopped when the one carrying the child did. It was almost identical with the other’s; they were indubitably sisters. At first glance, the second face was the older of the two. Then you saw that it was much younger. Then you realised that it had no age at all, it had all ages or none; it was the peaceful face of the witless.

‘Hush now,’ the woman carrying the child said. ‘They wont shoot him without the others.’ Then the blind woman dragged the old man up. She faced them all, but none in particular, motionless while she listened for the sound of the girl’s breathing until she located it and turned quickly toward the girl her fierce cataracted stare.

‘Have they got him?’ she said.

‘As we all know,’ the woman with the child said quickly. She started to move again. ‘Let’s get on.’

But the blind woman didn’t move, square and sightless in the road, blocking it, still facing the girl. ‘You,’ she said. ‘I dont mean the fools who listened to him and who deserve to die for it. I mean that foreigner, that anarchist who murdered them. Have they got him? Answer me.’

‘He’s there too,’ the woman carrying the child said, moving again. ‘Come on.’

But still the blind woman didn’t move, except to turn her face toward the woman with the child when she spoke. ‘That’s not what I asked,’ she said.

‘You heard me say they will shoot him too,’ the woman carrying the child said. She moved again, as though to touch the blind woman with her hand and turn her. But before the hand touched her, the woman who could not even see had jerked her own up and struck it down.

‘Let her answer me,’ she said. She faced the girl again. ‘They haven’t shot him yet? Where’s your tongue? You were full enough of something to say when you came up.’ But the girl just stared at her.

‘Answer her,’ the woman carrying the child said.

‘No,’ the girl whispered.

‘So,’ the blind woman said. She had nothing to blink for or from, yet there was nothing else to call it but blinking. Then her face began to turn rapidly between the girl’s and the woman’s carrying the child. Even before she spoke, the girl seemed to shrink, staring at the blind woman in terrified anticipation. Now the blind woman’s voice was silken, smooth. ‘You too have kin in the regiment, eh? Husband—brother—a sweetheart?’

‘Yes,’ the woman carrying the child said.

‘Which one of you?’ the blind woman said.

‘All three of us,’ the woman carrying the child said. ‘A brother.’

‘A sweetheart too, maybe?’ the blind woman said. ‘Come, now.’

‘Yes,’ the woman carrying the child said.

‘So, then,’ the blind woman said. She jerked her face back to the girl. ‘You,’ she said. ‘You may pretend you’re from this district, but you dont fool me. You talk wrong. And you—’ she jerked back to face the woman carrying the child again ‘—you’re not even French. I knew that the minute the two of you came up from nowhere back yonder, talking about having given your cart to a pregnant woman. Maybe you can fool them that dont have anything but eyes, and nothing to do but believe everything they look at. But not me.’

‘Angélique,’ the old man said in a thin quavering disused voice. The blind woman paid no attention to him. She faced the two women. Or the three women, the third one too: the older sister who had not spoken yet, whom anyone looking at her would never know whether she was going to speak or not, and even when she did speak it would be in no language of the used and familiar passions: suspicion or scorn or fear or rage; who had not even greeted the girl who had called the sister by a christian name, who had stopped simply because the sister had stopped and apparently was simply waiting with peaceful and infinite patience for the sister to move again, watching each speaker in turn with serene inattention.

‘So the anarchist who is murdering Frenchmen is your brother,’ the blind woman said. Still facing the woman carrying the child, she jerked her head sideways toward the girl. ‘What does she claim him as? a brother too, or maybe an uncle?’

‘She is his wife,’ the woman carrying the child said.

‘His whore, maybe you mean,’ the blind woman said. ‘Maybe I’m looking at two more of them, even if both of you are old enough to be his grandmothers. Give me the child.’ Again she moved as unerring as light toward the faint sound of the child’s breathing and before the other could move snatched the child down from her shoulder and swung it onto her own. ‘Murderers,’ she said.

‘Angélique,’ the old man said.

‘Pick it up,’ the blind woman snapped at him. It was the cloth-knotted bundle; only the blind woman, who was still facing the three other women, not even the old man himself, knew that he had dropped it. He stooped for it, letting himself carefully and with excruciating slowness hand under hand down the crutch and picked it up and climbed the crutch hand over hand again. As soon as he was up her hand went out with that sightless unerring aim and grasped his arm, jerking him after her as she moved, the child riding high on her other shoulder and staring silently back at the woman who had been carrying it; she was not only holding the old man up, she was actually leading the way. They went on to the old arch and passed beneath it. The last of sunset was gone even from the plain now.

‘Marthe,’ the girl said to the woman who had carried the child. Now the other sister spoke, for the first time. She was carrying a bundle too—a small basket neatly covered with an immaculate cloth tucked neatly down.

‘That’s because he’s different,’ she said with peaceful triumph. ‘Even people in the towns can see it.’

‘Marthe!’ the girl said again. This time she grasped the other’s arm and began to jerk at it. ‘That’s what they’re all saying! They’re going to kill him!’

‘That’s why,’ the second sister said with that serene and happy triumph.

‘Come on,’ Marthe said, moving. But the girl still clung to her arm.

‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid.’

‘We cant do anything just standing here and being afraid,’ Marthe said. ‘We’re all one now. It is the same death, no matter who calls the tune or plays it or pays the fiddler. Come, now. We’re still in time, if we just go on.’ They went on toward the old dusk-filling archway, and entered it. The sound of the crowd had ceased now. It would begin again presently though, when, having eaten, the city would hurry once more back to the Place de Ville. But now what sound it was making was earthy, homely, inturned and appeased, no longer the sound of thinking and hope and dread, but of the peaceful diurnal sublimation of viscera; the very air was colored not so much by twilight as by the smoke of cooking drifting from windows and doorways and chimneys and from braziers and naked fires burning on the cobbles themselves where even the warrens had overflowed, gleaming rosily on the spitted hunks of horses and the pots and on the faces of the men and children squatting about them and the women bending over them with spoons or forks.

That is, until a moment ago. Because when the two women and the girl entered the gate, the street as far as they could see it lay arrested and immobilised under a deathlike silence, rumor having moved almost as fast as anguish did, though they never saw the blind woman and the old man again. They saw only the back-turned squatting faces about the nearest fire and the face of the woman turned too in the act of stooping or rising, one hand holding the fork or spoon suspended over the pot, and beyond them faces at the next fire turning to look, and beyond them people around the third fire beginning to stand up to see, so that even Marthe had already stopped for a second when the girl grasped her arm again.

‘No, Marthe!’ she said. ‘No!’

‘Nonsense,’ Marthe said. ‘Haven’t I told you we are all one now?’ She freed her arm, not roughly, and went on. She walked steadily into the firelight, into the thin hot reek of the meat, the squatting expressionless faces turning like the heads of owls to follow her, and stopped facing across the closed circle the woman with the spoon. ‘God be with all here this night and tomorrow,’ she said.

‘So here you are,’ the woman said. ‘The murderer’s whores.’

‘His sisters,’ Marthe said. ‘This girl is his wife.’

‘We heard that too,’ the woman said. The group at the next fire had left it now, and the one beyond it. But of the three strangers only the girl seemed aware that the whole street was crowding quietly up, growing denser and denser, not staring at them yet, the faces even lowered or turned a little aside and only the gaunt children staring, not at the three strangers but at the covered basket which the sister carried. Marthe had not once even glanced at any of them.

‘We have food,’ she said. ‘We’ll share with you for a share in your fire.’ Without turning her head she said something in the mountain tongue, reaching her hand back as the sister put the handle of the basket into it. She extended the basket toward the woman with the spoon. ‘Here,’ she said.

‘Hand me the basket,’ the woman said. A man in the squatting circle took the basket from Marthe and passed it to her. Without haste the woman put the spoon back into the pot, pausing to give the contents a single circular stir, turning her head to sniff at the rising steam, then in one motion she released the spoon and turned and took the basket from the man and swung her arm back and flung the basket at Marthe’s head. It spun once, the cloth still neatly tucked. It struck Marthe high on the shoulder and caromed on, revolving again and emptying itself (it was food) just before it struck the other sister in the chest. She caught it. That is, although none had seen her move, she now held the empty basket easily against her breast with one hand while she watched the woman who threw it, interested and serene.

‘You’re not hungry,’ she said.

‘Did that look like we want your food?’ the woman said.

‘That’s what I said,’ the sister said. ‘Now you dont have to grieve.’ Then the woman snatched the spoon from the pot and threw it at the sister. But it missed. That is, as the woman stooped and scrabbled for the next missile (it was a wine bottle half full of vinegar) she realised that the spoon had struck nothing, that none of the three strangers had even ducked, as though the spoon had vanished into thin air as it left her hand. And when she threw the bottle she couldn’t see the three women at all. It struck a man in the back and caromed vanishing as the whole crowd surged, baying the three strangers in a little ring of space like hounds holding fixed but still immune some animal not feared but which had completely confounded them by violating all the rules of chase and flight, so that, as hounds fall still and for a moment even cease to whimper, the crowd even stopped yelling and merely held the three women in a ring of gaped suspended uproar until the woman who threw the spoon broke through, carrying a tin mug and two briquettes and flung them without aim, the crowd baying and surging again as Marthe turned, half carrying the girl in one arm and pushing the sister on ahead with the other hand, walking steadily, the crowd falling away in front and closing behind so that the flexing intact ring itself seemed to advance as they did like a miniature whirlpool in a current, then the woman, screaming now, darted and stooped to a scatter of horse droppings among the cobbles and began to hurl the dried globules which might have been briquettes too but for hue and durability. Marthe stopped and turned, the girl half hanging from the crook of her arm, the sister’s ageless interested face watching from behind her shoulder, while refuse of all sorts—scraps of food, rubbish, sticks, cobbles from the street itself—rained about them. A thread of blood appeared suddenly at the corner of her mouth but she didn’t move, until after a time her immobility seemed to stay the missiles too and the gaped crowding faces merely bayed at them again, the sound filling the alley and roaring from wall to wall until the reverberations had a quality not only frantic but cachinnant, recoiling and compounding as it gathered strength, rolling on alley by alley and street to street until it must have been beating along the boulevards’ respectable fringes too.

Because the patrol—it was a mounted provost marshal’s party—met them at the first corner. The crowd broke, burst, because this was a charge. The yelling rose a whole octave without transition like flipping over a playing card, as motionless again the three women watched the crowd stream back upon them; they stood in a rushing vacuum while the mass divided and swept past on either hand, in front of and beneath and behind the running horses, the cobble-clashing fire-ringing hooves and the screams dying away into the single vast murmur of the whole city’s tumult, leaving the alley empty save for the three women when the N.C.O. leader of the patrol reined his horse and held it, short-bitted, ammoniac and reek-spreading and bouncing a little against the snaffle, while he glared down at them. ‘Where do you live?’ he said. They didn’t answer, staring up at him—the wan girl, the tall calm woman, the quicking and serene approval of the sister. The N.C.O. listened for an instant to the distant tumult. Then he looked at them again. ‘All right,’ he said harshly. ‘Get out of town while you can. Come on now. Get started.’

‘We belong here too,’ Marthe said. For a second he glared down at them, he and the horse in high sharp fading silhouette against the sky itself filled with anguish and fury.

‘Is the whole damned world crowding here to crucify a bastard the army’s going to fix anyway?’ he said in thin furious exasperation.

‘Yes,’ Marthe said. Then he was gone. He slacked the horse; its iron feet clashed and sparked on the cobbles; the hot reek sucked after it, pungent for a fading instant, then even the galloping had faded into the sound of the city. ‘Come,’ Marthe said. They went on. At first she seemed to be leading them away from the sound. But presently she seemed to be leading them straight back to it. She turned into an alley, then into another not smaller but emptier, deserted, with an air about it of back premises. But she seemed to know where she was going or at least what she was looking for. She was almost carrying the girl now until the sister moved up unbidden and exchanged the empty basket to the other arm and took half the girl’s weight and then they went quite rapidly, on to the end of the alley and turned the wall and there was what Marthe had gone as directly to as if she had not only known it was there but had been to it before—an empty stone stall, a byre or stable niched into the city’s night-fading flank. There was even a thin litter of dry straw on the stone floor and once inside although the sound was still audible it was as though they had established armistice with the tumult and the fury, not that it should evacuate the city in their favor but at least it should approach no nearer. Marthe didn’t speak, she just stood supporting the girl while the sister set down the empty basket and knelt and with quick deft darting motions like a little girl readying a doll’s house she spread the straw evenly and then removed her shawl and spread it over the straw and still kneeling helped Marthe lower the girl onto the shawl and took the other shawl which Marthe removed from her shoulders and spread it over the girl. Then they lowered themselves onto the straw on either side of the girl and as Marthe drew the girl to her for warmth the sister reached and got the basket and not even triumphant, with another of those clumsy darting childlike motions which at the same time were deft or least efficient or anyway successful, she took from the basket which everyone had seen empty itself when the woman at the fire threw it at her, a piece of broken bread a little larger than two fists. Again Marthe said nothing. She just took the bread from the sister and started to break it.

‘In three,’ the sister said and took the third fragment when Marthe broke it and put it back into the basket and they reclined again, the girl between them, eating. It was almost dark now. What little light remained seemed to have gathered about the door’s worn lintel with a tender nebulous quality like a worn lost halo, the world outside but little lighter than the stone interior—the chill sweating stone which seemed not to conduct nor even contain but to exude like its own moisture the murmur of the unwearying city—a sound no longer auricularly but merely intellectually disturbing, like the breathing of a sick puppy or a sick child. But when the other sound began they stopped chewing. They stopped at the same instant; when they sat up it was together as though a spreader bar connected them, sitting each with a fragment of bread in one poised hand, listening. It was beneath the first sound, beyond it, human too but not the same sound at all because the old one had women in it—the mass voice of the ancient limitless mammalian capacity not for suffering but for grieving, wailing, to endure incredible anguish because it could become vocal without shame or self-consciousness, passing from gland to tongue without transition through thought—while the new one was made by men and though they didn’t know where the prisoners’ compound was nor even (nobody had taken time to tell them yet) that the regiment was in a compound anywhere, they knew at once what it was. ‘Hear them?’ the sister said, serene, in astonished and happy approval, so rapt that Marthe’s movement caused her to look up only after the other had risen and was already stooping to rouse the girl; whereupon the sister reached again with that deft unthinking immediate clumsiness and took the fragment of bread from Marthe and put it and her own fragment back into the basket with the third one and rose to her knees and began to help raise the girl, speaking in a tone of happy anticipation. ‘Where are we going now?’ she said.

‘To the Mayor,’ Marthe said. ‘Get the basket.’ She did so; she had to gather up both the shawls too which delayed her a little, so that when she was on her feet Marthe, supporting the girl, had already reached the door. But even for a moment yet the sister didn’t follow, standing clutching the shawls and the basket, her face lifted slightly in rapt and pleased astonishment in the murmurous last of light which seemed to have brought into the damp stone cubicle not merely the city’s simple anguish and fury but the city itself in all its invincible and impervious splendor. Even inside the stone single-stalled stable it seemed to rise in glittering miniature, tower and spire tall enough and high enough to soar in sunlight still though dark had fallen, high enough and tall enough above earth’s old miasmic mists for the glittering and splendid pinnacles never to be in darkness at all perhaps, invincible, everlasting, and vast.

‘He will wear a fine sword here,’ she said.

Shortly before sunset the last strand of wire enclosing the new compound had been run and joined and the electric current turned into it. Then the whole regiment, with the exception of the thirteen special prisoners who were in a separate cell to themselves, were turned out of the barracks. They were not released, they were evicted, not by simultaneous squads of guards nor even by one single roving detachment moving rapidly, alert compact and heavily armed, from barracks to barracks, but by individual Senegalese. Armed sometimes with a bayoneted rifle and sometimes merely with the naked bayonet carried like a brush knife or a swagger stick and sometimes with nothing at all, they appeared abruptly and without warning in each room and drove its occupants out, hustling them with scornful and contemptuous expedition toward the door, not even waiting to follow but going along with them, each one already well up into the middle of the group before it even reached the door and still pressing on toward the head of it, prodding each his own moving path with the reversed rifle or the bayonet’s handle and, even within the ruck, moving faster than it moved, riding head and shoulders not merely above the moving mass but as though on it, gaudy ethiope and contemptuous, resembling harlequined trees uprooted say from the wild lands, the tameless antipodal fields, moving rigid and upright above the dull sluggish current of a city-soiled commercial canal. So the Senegalese would actually be leading each group when it emerged into its company street. Nor would they even stop then, not even waiting to pair off in couples, let alone in squads, but seeming to stride once or twice, still carrying the bayoneted rifles or the bayonets like the spears and knives of a lion or antelope hunt, and vanish as individual and abrupt as they had appeared.

So when the regiment, unarmed unshaven hatless and half-dressed, began to coalesce without command into the old sheeplike molds of platoons and companies, it found that nobody was paying any attention to it at all, that it had been deserted even by the bayonets which had evicted it out of doors. But for a while yet it continued to shuffle and grope for the old familiar alignments, blinking a little after the dark barracks, in the glare of sunset. Then it began to move. There were no commands from anywhere; the squads and sections simply fell in between the old file-markers and -closers and began to flow, drift as though by some gentle and even unheeded gravitation, into companies in the barracks streets, into battalions onto the parade ground, and stopped. It was not a regiment yet but rather a shapeless mass in which only the squads and platoons had any unity, as the coherence of an evicted city obtains only in the household groups which stick together not because the members are kin in blood but because they have eaten together and slept together and grieved and hoped and fought among themselves so long, huddling immobile and blinking beneath the high unclimbable wire and the searchlights and machine-gun platforms and the lounging scornful guards, all in silhouette on the sunset as if the lethal shock which charged the wire ten minutes ago had at the same instant electrocuted them all into inflexible arrestment against the end of time.

They were still huddled there when the new tumult began in the city. The sun had set, the bugles had rung and ceased, the gun had crashed from the old citadel and clapped and reverberated away, and the huddled regiment was already fading into one neutral mass in the middle of the parade ground when the first faint yelling came across the plain. But they did nothing at first, except to become more still, as dogs do at the rising note of a siren about to reach some unbearable pitch which the human ear will not hear at all. In fact, when they did begin to make the sound, it was not human at all but animal, not yelling but howling, huddling still in the dusk that fading and shapeless mass which might have been Protoplasm itself, eyeless and tongueless on the floor of the first dividing of the sea, palpant and vociferant with no motion nor sound of its own but instead to some gigantic uproar of the primal air-crashing tides’ mighty copulation, while overhead on the catwalks and platforms the Senegalese lounged on their rifles or held to cigarettes the small windless flames of lighters contrived of spent cartridge cases, as if the glare of day had hidden until now that which the dusk exposed: that the electric shock which had fixed them in carbon immobility had left here and there one random not-yet-faded coal.

The dusk seemed to have revealed to them the lighted window too. It was in the old once-ivied wall of what had been the factory’s main building; they might even have seen the man standing in it, though probably the window alone was enough. Not yelling but howling, they began to flow across the compound. But the night moved still faster; the mass of them had already faded completely into it before they had crossed the parade ground, so that it was the sound, the howling, which seemed to roll on and crash and recoil and roar again against the wall beneath the lighted window and the motionless silhouette of the man standing in it, and recoiled and roared again while a hurried bugle began to blat and whistles to shrill and a close body of white infantry came rapidly around the corner and began to push them away from the wall with short jabbing blows of rifle butts.

When the guard came for them, the corporal was still standing at the window, looking down at the uproar. The thirteen of them were in a small perfectly bare perfectly impregnable single-windowed cell which obviously had been a strong room of some sort back in the old dead time when the factory had been merely a factory. A single dingy electric bulb burned in the center of the ceiling behind a wire cage like the end of a rat-trap. It had been burning when they were herded into the room shortly after dawn this morning, and, since it was American electricity, or that is, was already being charged daily one day in advance to the Service of Supply of the American Expeditionary Force, it had been burning ever since. So as the day succumbed to evening, the faces of the thirteen men sitting quietly on the floor against one wall did not fade wanly back into the shadows but rather instead emerged, not even wan but, unshaven and therefore even more virile, gathering to themselves an even further ghastly and jaundiced strength.

When the first stir of movement went through the compound as the Senegalese began to evict the regiment from the barracks, the thirteen men sitting against the wall of the cell did not appear to respond to it, unless there might have been a further completer stillness and arrestment travelling as though from one to another among twelve of them—the half-turn of a face, the quick almost infinitesimal side-glancing of an eye toward the thirteenth one, the corporal, sitting in the center of them, who—the corporal—did not move at all until the first roar of yelling rolled across the parade ground and crashed like a wave against the wall beneath the window. Then the corporal rose to his feet, not quietly nor deliberately so much as easily, as mountain men move, and went to the window and, his hands lying as lightly and easily among the bars as they had lain on the lorry’s top rail, stood looking down at the yelling. He didn’t seem to be listening to it: just looking at it, watching it pour across the compound to break in one inaudible crash beneath the window, in the wan glow from which the men themselves were now visible—the clenched fists, the pale individual faces which, even gaped with yelling he may have recognised, having spent four years crouched with them behind bullet-snicked parapets or trying bitten-tongued to anneal into the stinking muck of shell craters beneath drum fire or rolling barrages or flattened immobile and unbreathing beneath the hiss and whisper of flares on night patrols. He seemed not to listen to it but to watch it, immobile and detached, while the frantic bugle yelped and the whistles shrilled and the infantry section burst on its collapsing flank and whirled it slowly away. He didn’t move. He looked exactly like a stone-deaf man watching with interest but neither surprise nor alarm the pantomime of some cataclysm or even universal uproar which neither threatens nor even concerns him since to him it makes no sound at all.

Then heavy boots tramped and clashed in the corridor. The corporal turned from the window and this time the other twelve faces moved too, lifting as one and pacing along the wall the tramp of the invisible feet beyond it until the feet halted, so that they were all looking at the door when it opened and flung back and a sergeant (they were not Senegalese nor even white infantry this time, but provost marshal’s people) stood in it and made a sweeping peremptory gesture with his arm. ‘On your feet,’ he said.

Still preceding the chief-of-staff, and pausing only long enough for the aide to open the door and get out of the way, the division commander entered the room. It was less large than a modern concert hall. In fact, it had been merely a boudoir back in the time of its dead duchess or marquise, and it still bore the imprint of that princely insensate (and, perhaps one of the duchesses or marquises had thought, impregnable) opulence in its valanced alcoves and pilastered medallioned ceiling and crystal chandeliers and sconces and mirrors and girandoles and buhl etageres and glazed cabinets of faience bibelots, and a white rug into which war-bleachened boots sank ankle-deep as into the muck of trenches say in the cold face of the moon, flooring bland and soft as cloud that majestic vista at the end of which the three old generals sat.

Backed by a hovering frieze of aides and staff, they sat behind a tremendous oblong table as bare and flat and richly austere as the top of a knight’s or a bishop’s sarcophagus, all three in the spectacles of old men and each with a thick identical sheaf of clipped papers before him, so that the whole group in their dust- or horizon-colored clothing and brass-and-scarlet-and-leather harness had a look paradoxical and bizarre, both scholarly and outlandish, like a pack of tameless forest beasts dressed in the regalia and set in the environment of civilised office and waiting in decorous and almost somnolent unhaste while the three old leaders sat for a specified time over the meaningless papers which were a part of the regalia too, until the moment came not to judge nor even condemn but just to fling away the impeding papers and garments and execute.

The windows were open, curtain and casement, so that there came into the room not only the afternoon light and air, but something of the city’s tumult too—not sound, because the voices, even the sudden uproar of them which the division commander and the chief-of-staff had just left outside in the Place de Ville, didn’t reach here. It was rather a sense, a quality as of the light itself, a reflection as of light itself from the massed faces below, refracted upward into the room through the open windows like light from disturbed water, pulsing and quivering faintly and constantly on the ceiling where nobody, not even the clerks and secretaries coming and going steadily on their endless minuscule errands, would notice it without they chanced to look up, unless like now, when something had caused the pulse to beat a little faster, so that when the division commander and the chief-of-staff entered, everyone in the room was looking at the door. Though almost as soon as they entered, that too died away and the refraction merely quivered again.

The division commander had never seen the room before. He did not look at it now. He just entered and paused for a rigid infinitesimal instant until the chief-of-staff came abreast on his right, the sabre between them now under the chief-of-staff’s left arm. Then almost in step they trod the rug’s blanched vista to the table and halted rigidly together while the chief-of-staff saluted and took from under his arm the dead sabre furled loosely in the dangling buckle-ends of its harness like a badly-rolled umbrella, and laid it on the table. And staring rigidly at nothing while the chief-of-staff verbally performed the formal rite of his relinquishment, the division commander thought: It’s true. He knew me at once, thinking, No: worse: that the old man had already known him long before anyone announced the two of them from an anteroom; that apparently he had come all the long way from that instant in the observation post two mornings back where his career died, merely to prove what all who knew the old marshal’s name believed: that the old man remembered the name and face of every man in uniform whom he had ever seen—not only those out of the old regiment into which he had been commissioned from St Cyr, and the ranking commanders of his armies and corps whom he saw daily, but their staffs and secretaries and clerks, and the commanders of divisions and brigades and their staffs, and regimental and battalion and company officers and their orderlies and batmen and runners, and the privates whom he had decorated or reprimanded or condemned, and the N.C.O. leaders and degreeless fileclosers of sections and platoons and squads whose inspection-opened ranks he had merely walked rapidly through once thirty and forty years ago, calling them all ‘my child’ just as he did his own handsome young personal aide and his ancient batman and his chauffeur: a six-and-a-half foot Basque with the face of a murderer of female children. He (the division commander) had seen no movement; his recollection on entering was that the old marshal had been holding the sheaf of papers open in his hand. Yet it was not only closed now, it was pushed slightly aside and the old marshal had removed the spectacles, holding them lightly in a mottled old man’s hand almost completely hidden inside the round tremendous orifice of an immaculately laundered cuff detachable from an old-fashioned starched white civilian shirt, and looking for just a second into the spectacle-less eyes, the division commander remembered something Lallemont had said once: If I were evil, I would hate and fear him. If I were a saint, I would weep. If I were wise, and both or either, I would despair.

‘Yes, General Gragnon?’ the old general said.

Staring again not at anything but at simple eye-level above the old general’s head, the division commander repeated orally the report which he had already recognised as soon as he entered the room—the verbatim typescripts signed by himself and endorsed by the corps commander, lying now in mimeographed triplicate before the three generals, and finished and stopped for a moment as the lecturer pauses to turn a page or sip from the glass of water, then repeated for the fourth time his official request for the regiment’s execution; inflexible and composed before the table on which lay the triumvirate markers of his career’s sepulture, the triplicate monument of what the group commander had called his glory, he discharged for the fourth time the regiment from the rolls of his division as though it had vanished two mornings ago in the face of a machine-gun battery or a single mine explosion. He hadn’t changed it. It had been right thirty-six hours ago when his honor and integrity as its (or any regiment’s) division commander compelled him to anticipate having to make it; it was still right the second after that when he discovered that that which had given him the chance to become commander of a division in exchange for the dedication of his honor and life, was compelling him to deliver it. So it was still right now for the very reason that it was the same honor and integrity which the beneficence had found worthy to be conferred with the three stars of his major general’s rank, rather than the beneficence itself, which was making the demand, the compulsion.

Because the beneficence itself didn’t need the gesture. As the group commander himself had practically told him this morning, what he was saying now had no connection at all beyond mere coincidence, with what lay on the table. The speech was much older than that moment two days ago in the observation post when he discovered that he was going to have to make it. Its conception was the moment he found he was to be posted to officers’ school, its birth the day he received the commission, so that it had become, along with the pistol and sabre and the sublieutenant’s badges, a part of the equipment with which he would follow and serve his destiny with his life as long as life lasted; its analogous coeval was that one of the live cartridges constant through the pistol’s revolving cylinder, against the moment when he would discharge the voluntary lien he had given on his honor by expiating what a civilian would call bad luck and only a soldier disgrace, the—any—bad luck in it being merely this moment now, when the need compelled the speech yet at the same time denied the bullet. In fact, it seemed to him now that the two of them, speech and bullet, were analogous and coeval even in more than birth: analogous in the very incongruity of the origins from which they moved, not even shaped yet, toward their mutual end:—a lump of dross exhumed from the earth and become, under heat, brass, and under fierce and cunning pressure, a cartridge case; from a laboratory, a pinch, a spoonful, a dust, precipitate of earth’s and air’s primordial motion, the two condensed and combined behind a tiny locked grooved slug and all micrometered to a servant breech and bore not even within its cognizance yet, like a footman engaged from an employment agency over the telephone;—half Europe went to war with the other half and finally succeeded in dragging half the western hemisphere along: a plan, a design vast in scope, exalted in conception, in implication (and hope) terrifying, not even conceived here at Grand Headquarters by the three old generals and their trained experts and advisers in orderly conference, but conceived out of the mutual rage and fear of the three ocean-dividing nations themselves, simultaneously at Washington and London and Paris by some immaculate pollenization like earth’s simultaneous leafage, and come to birth at a council not even held at Grand Headquarters but behind locked and guarded doors in the Quai d’Orsay—a council where trained military experts, dedicated as irrevocably to war as nuns are married to God, were outnumbered by those who were not only not trained for war, they were not even braided and panoplied for it—the Prime Ministers and Premiers and Secretaries, the cabinet members and senators and chancellors; and those who outnumbered even them: the board chairmen of the vast establishments which produced the munitions and shoes and tinned foods, and the modest unsung omnipotent ones who were the priests of simple money; and the others still who outnumbered even these: the politicians, the lobbyists, the owners and publishers of newspapers and the ordained ministers of churches, and all the other accredited travelling representatives of the vast solvent organizations and fraternities and movements which control by coercion or cajolery man’s morals and actions and all his mass-value for affirmation or negation;—all that vast powerful terror-inspiring representation which, running all democracy’s affairs in peace, come indeed into their own in war, finding their true apotheosis then, in iron conclave now decreeing for half the earth a design vast in its intention to demolish a frontier, and vaster still in its furious intent to obliterate a people; all in conclave so single that the old gray inscrutable supreme general with the face of one who long ago had won the right to believe in nothing whatever save man’s deathless folly, didn’t need to vote at all but simply to preside, and so presiding, contemplated the plan’s birth and then watched it, not even needing to control it as it took its ordained undeviable course, descending from nations confederated to nations selected, to forces to army groups to armies to corps; all that gigantic long complex chronicle, at the end reduced to a simple regimental attack against a simple elevation of earth too small to show on a map, known only to its own neighborhood and even that by a number and a nickname dating back less than four years to the moment when someone had realised that you could see perhaps a quarter-mile further from its summit than its foot; an attack not allotted to a division but self-compelled to it by its own geography and logistics because the alternatives were either here or nowhere, this or nothing, and compelled to his particular division for the reason that the attack was doomed and intended as failure and his was the division among all with which failure could be bought cheapest, as another might be the division with which a river could be crossed or a village taken cheapest; he realised now that it had not been necessary for anyone to have foreseen the mutiny, because the mutiny itself didn’t matter: the failure alone would have been enough, and how and why it failed, nobody cared, the mutiny flung in as lagniappe to that end whose sole aim had been to bring him to attention here before the table on which lay in its furled scabbard the corpse of his career, to repeat for the fourth time the speech, who had been denied the bullet, and finish it and stop.

‘The whole regiment,’ the old marshal said, repeating in his turn, in a voice inscrutable and pleasant and so void of anything as to seem almost warm, inattentive, almost impersonal. ‘Not just this ring-leader and his twelve disciples. By all means, the nine of them who are Frenchmen yet still permitted themselves to be corrupted.’

‘There was no ring-leader,’ the division commander said, harsh and rigid. ‘The regiment mutinied.’

‘The regiment mutinied,’ the old marshal repeated again. ‘And suppose we do. What of the other regiments in your division, when they learn of it?’

‘Shoot them,’ the division commander said.

‘And the other divisions in your corps, and the other corps on either side of you.’

‘Shoot them,’ the division commander said, and stood again inflexible and composed while the old marshal turned and translated quietly and rapidly to the British general and the American on either side of him, then turned back and said to the chief-of-staff:

‘Thank you, General.’ The chief-of-staff saluted. But the division commander did not wait for him, already about-facing, leaving the chief-of-staff once more the split of a second late since he had to perform his own manoeuver which even a crack drill-sergeant could not have done smoothly with no more warning than this, having in fact to take two long extra steps to get himself again on the division commander’s right hand and failing—or almost—here too, so that it was the old marshal’s personal aide who flanked the division commander, the chief-of-staff himself still half a pace behind, as they trod the white rug once more back to the now open door just outside which a provost marshal’s officer correct with sidearms waited, though before they reached him, the division commander was even in front of the aide.

So the aide was flanking, not the division commander but the chief-of-staff, pacing him correctly on the left, back to the open door beyond which the provost officer waited while the division commander passed through it.

Whereupon the aide not only effaced from the room the entire significance of the surrendered sabre, he obliterated from it the whole gauche inference of war. As he stepped quickly and lightly and even a little swaggeringly toward the open door beyond which the division commander and the provost officer had vanished, it was as though, in declining in advance to hold the door for the division commander (even though the division commander had already declined the courtesy in advance by not waiting for it), he had not merely retaliated upon the junior general for the junior’s affrontment to the senior general’s precedence, he had used the junior as the instrument to postulate both himself and the chief-of-staff as being irrevocably alien and invincibly unconcerned with everything the room and those it contained represented—the very tall elegantly thin captain of twenty-eight or thirty with the face and body of a durable matinee idol, who might have been a creature from another planet, anachronistic and immune, inviolable, so invincibly homeless as to be completely and impregnably at home on this or any other planet where he might find himself: not even of tomorrow but of the day before it, projected by reverse avatar back into a world where what remained of lost and finished man struggled feebly for a moment yet among the jumbled ruins of his yesterdays—a creature who had survived intact the fact that he had no place, no business whatever, in war, who for all gain or loss to war’s inexorable gambit or that of the frantic crumbling nations either, might as well have been floating gowned and capped (and with the golden tassel of a lordship too since he looked more like a scion than any duke’s son) across an Oxford or Cambridge quadrangle, compelling those watching him and the chief-of-staff to condone the deodorization of war’s effluvium even from the uniforms they wore, leaving them simply costumes, stepping rapidly and lightly and elegantly past the chief-of-staff to grasp the knob and shut the door until the latch caught, then turned the knob and opened the door and clicked not to attention but into a rigid brief inclination from the waist as the chief-of-staff passed through it.

Then he closed the door and turned and started back down the room, then in the same instant stopped again and now apparently essayed to efface from it even the rumor of war which had entered at second hand; motionless for that moment at the top of the splendid diminishing vista, there was about him like an aura a quality insouciant solitary and debonair like Harlequin solus on a second- or third-act stage as the curtain goes down or rises, while he stood with his head turned slightly aside, listening. Then he moved, rapid and boneless on his long boneless legs, toward the nearest window. But the old marshal spoke before he had taken the second step, saying quietly in English: ‘Leave them open.’

The aide paid no attention whatever. He strode to the window and thrust his whole upper body out as he reached for the outswung casement and began to swing it in. Then he stopped. He said in French, not loud, in a sort of rapt amazement, dispassionate and momentary: ‘It looks like a crowd at a race track waiting for the two-sou window to open—if they have such. No, they look like they are watching a burning pawnshop.’

‘Leave it open,’ the old general said in English. The aide paused again, the casement half closed. He turned his head and said in English too, perfectly, with no accent whatever, not even of Oxford, not even of Beacon Hill:

‘Why not have them inside and be done with it? They cant hear what’s going on out there.’

This time the old general spoke French. ‘They dont want to know,’ he said. ‘They want only to suffer. Leave it open.’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said in French. He flung the casement out again and turned. As he did so one leaf of the double doors in the opposite wall opened. It opened exactly six inches, by no visible means, and stopped. The aide didn’t even glance toward it. He came on into the room, saying in that perfect accentless English, ‘Dinner, gentlemen,’ as both leaves of the door slid back.

The old general rose when the two other generals did but that was all. When the doors closed behind the last aide, he was already seated again. Then he pushed the closed folder further aside and folded the spectacles into their worn case and buttoned the case into one of his upper tunic pockets, and alone now in the vast splendid room from which even the city’s tumult and anguish was fading as the afternoon light died from the ceiling, motionless in the chair whose high carven back topped him like the back of a throne, his hands hidden below the rich tremendous table which concealed most of the rest of him too and apparently not only immobile but immobilised beneath the mass and glitter of his braid and stars and buttons, he resembled a boy, a child, crouching amid the golden debris of the tomb not of a knight or bishop ravished in darkness but (perhaps the mummy itself) of a sultan or pharaoh violated by Christians in broad afternoon.

Then the same leaf of the double door opened again, exactly as before, for exactly six inches and no hand to show for it and making only the slightest of sounds, and even then giving the impression that if it had wanted to, it could have made none and that what it did make was only the absolute minimum to be audible at all, opening for that six inches and then moving no more until the old general said: ‘Yes, my child.’ Then it began to close, making no sound at all now that sound was no longer necessary, moving on half the distance back to closure with its fellow leaf when it stopped again and with no pause began to open again, still noiseless but quite fast now, so fast that it had opened a good eighteen inches and in another instant who or whatever moved it would of necessity reveal, expose him or itself, before the old general could or did speak. ‘No,’ he said. The door stopped. It didn’t close, it just quit moving at all and seemed to hang like a wheel at balance with neither top nor bottom, hanging so until the old general spoke again: ‘Leave them open.’

Then the door closed. It went all the way to this time, and the old general rose and came around the table and went to the nearest window, walking through the official end of day as across a threshold into night, because as he turned the end of the table the scattered bugles began to sound the three assemblies, and as he crossed the room the clash of boots and rifles came up from the courtyard, and when he reached the window the two guards were already facing one another for the first note of the three retreats and the formal exchange to begin. But the old general didn’t seem to be watching it. He just stood in the window above the thronged motionless Place where the patient mass of people lay against the iron fence; nor did he turn his head when the door opened rapidly this time and the young aide entered, carrying a telephone whose extension flowed behind him across the white rug like the endless tail of a trophy, and went behind the table and with his foot drew up one of the chairs and sat down and set the telephone on the table and lifted the receiver and shot into view the watch on his other wrist and became motionless, the receiver to his ear and his eyes on the watch. Instead, he just stood there, a little back from the window and a little to one side, holding the curtain slightly aside, visible if anyone in the Place had thought to look up, while the scattered brazen adjurations died into the clash and stamp as the two guards came to at ease and the whole borderline, no longer afternoon yet not quite evening either, lay in unbreathing suspension until the bugles began again, the three this time in measured discordant unison, the three voices in the courtyard barking in unison too yet invincibly alien, the two groups of heavily armed men posturing rigidly at each other like a tribal ritual for religious immolation. He could not have heard the telephone, since the aide already had the receiver to his ear and merely spoke an acknowledging word into it, then listened a moment and spoke another word and lowered the receiver and sat waiting too while the bugles chanted and wailed like cocks in the raddled sunset, and died away.

‘He has landed,’ the aide said. ‘He got down from the aeroplane and drew a pistol and called his pilot to attention and shot him through the face. They dont know why.’

‘They are Englishmen,’ the old general said. ‘That will do.’

‘Of course,’ the aide said. ‘I’m surprised they have as little trouble as they do in Continental wars. In any of their wars.’ He said: ‘Yes sir.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I had arranged to have this line open at five points between here and Villeneuve Blanche, so you could keep informed of his progress——’

‘It is indistinguishable from his destination,’ the old general said without moving. ‘That will do.’ The aide put the receiver back on its hook and took up the telephone and went back around the table, the limber endless line recoiling onto itself across the rug until he flicked the diminishing loop after him through the door, and closed it. At that moment the sunset gun thudded: no sound, but rather a postulation of vacuum, as though back into its blast-vacated womb the regurgitated martial day had poured in one reverberant clap; from just beyond the window came the screak and whisper of the three blocks and the three down-reeling lanyards and the same leaf of the door opened again for that exact six inches, paused, then without any sound opened steadily and unmotived on and still the old general stood while the thrice-alien voices barked, and beneath the three tenderly-borne mystical rags the feet of the three color guards rang the cobbled courtyard and, in measured iron diminution, the cobbled evening itself.

And now the mass beyond the fence itself began to move, flowing back across the Place toward the diverging boulevards, emptying the Place, already fading before it was out of the Place, as though with one long quiet inhalation evening was effacing the whole meek mist of man; now the old general stood above the city which, already immune to man’s enduring, was now even free of his tumult. Or rather, the evening effaced not man from the Place de Ville so much as it effaced the Place de Ville back into man’s enduring anguish and his invincible dust, the city itself not really free of either but simply taller than both. Because they endured, as only endurance can, firmer than rock, more invincible than folly, longer than grief, the darkling and silent city rising out of the darkling and empty twilight to lower like a tumescent thunderclap, since it was the effigy and the power, rising tier on inviolate tier out of that mazed chiaroscuro like a tremendous beehive whose crown challenged by day the sun and stemmed aside by night the celestial smore.

First and topmost were the three flags and the three supreme generals who served them: a triumvirate consecrated and anointed, a constellation remote as planets in their immutability, powerful as archbishops in their trinity, splendid as cardinals in their retinues and myriad as Brahmins in their blind followers; next were the three thousand lesser generals who were their deacons and priests and the hierarchate of their households, their acolytes and bearers of monstrance and host and censer: the colonels and majors who were in charge of the portfolios and maps and memoranda, the captains and subalterns who were in charge of the communications and errands which kept the portfolios and maps up to date, and the sergeants and corporals who actually carried the portfolios and mapcases and protected them with their lives and answered the telephone and ran the errands, and the privates who sat at the flickering switchboards at two and three and four oclock in the morning and rode the motorcycles in the rain and snow and drove the starred and pennoned cars and cooked the food for the generals and colonels and majors and captains and subalterns and made their beds and shaved them and cut their hair and polished their boots and brass; and inferior and nethermost even in that braided inviolate hierarchate: so crowded was the city with generals of high rank and their splendid and shining staffs that not only were subalterns and captains and even majors and colonels nothing, distinguishable from civilians only because they wore uniforms, there was even a nadir among these: men who had actually been in, come out of, the battle zone, as high in rank as majors and even colonels sometime, strayed into the glittering and gunless city through nobody knew what bizarre convulsion of that military metabolism which does everything to a man but lose him, which learns nothing and forgets nothing and loses nothing at all whatever and forever—no scrap of paper, no unfinished record or uncompleted memorandum no matter how inconsequential or trivial; a few of them were always there, not many but enough: platoon or section leaders and company commanders and battalion seconds stained with the filth of front lines who amid that thronged pomp and glitter of stars and crossed batons and braid and brass and scarlet tabs moved diffident and bewildered and ignored with the lost air of oafish peasants smelling of field and stable summoned to the castle, the Great House, for an accounting or a punishment: a wounded man armless legless or eyeless was stared at with the same aghast distasteful refusive pity and shock and outrage as a man in an epileptic seizure at high noon on a busy downtown corner; then the civilians: Antipas his friends and their friends, merchant and prince and bishop, administrator clacquer and absolver to ministrate the attempt and applaud the intention and absolve the failed result, and all the nephews and godsons of Tiberius in far Rome and their friends and the friends of the wives and the husbands of their friends come to dine with the generals and sell to the generals’ governments the shells and guns and aircraft and beef and shoes for the generals to expend against the enemy, and their secretaries and couriers and chauffeurs who had got military deferment because the brief-cases had to be carried and the motorcars driven, and those who actually dwelled as paterfamiliae among the city’s boulevards and avenues and even less base streets already before the city entered its four-year apotheosis and while apotheosis obtained and would still (so they hoped) after apotheosis had ceased and been forgotten—mayor and burgher, doctor attorney director inspector and judge who held no particular letter from Tiberius in Rome yet whose contacts were still among generals and colonels and not captains and subalterns even if they were restricted to drawing rooms and dining tables, publican and smith and baker and grocer and wright whose contacts were not with captains nor subalterns nor with sergeants and corporals and privates neither since it was their wives who knitted behind the zinc bars and weighed and exchanged sous for the bread and greens and beat the underwear on the river’s margin stones; and the women who were not the wives of directors or bakers, who traded not in war but because of war and who as in a sense two thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven of the generals were just one general were all one woman too whether staff colonels stood when they entered rooms or whether they lived on the same floor in modest pensions with Service Corps captains or boiled the soup of communications corporals or, troops themselves, received their partners in what is called love and perhaps even is from a sergeant’s roll-call as a soldier receives his iron ration or boots and no need for that partner to put back on his tunic or greatcoat before going on into the lines because the sergeant who checked him into and out of that love which perhaps had never let him take either off, so that as often as not she carried into sleep with her that night a dead man’s still warm and living seed; and then and last even anonymity’s absolute whose nameless faceless mass cluttered old Jerusalem and old Rome too while from time to time governor and caesar flung them bread or a circus as in the old snowy pantomime the fleeing shepherd casts back to the pursuing wolves fragments of his lunch, a garment, and as a last resort the lamb itself—the laborers who owned today only the spending of what they earned yesterday, the beggars and thieves who did not always understand that what they did was beggary and theft, the lepers beneath city gate and temple door who did not even know they were not whole, who belonged neither to the military nor to the merchants and princes and bishops, who neither derived nor hoped for any benefit from army contracts nor battened by simply existing, breathing coeval with the prodigality and waste concomitant with a nation’s mortal agony, that strange and constant few who each time are denied any opportunity whatever to share in the rich carnival of their country’s wasting lifeblood, whose luck is out always with no kin nor friends who have kin or friends who have powerful kin or friends or patrons, who owned nothing in fact save a reversion in endurance without hope of betterment nor any spur of pride—a capacity for endurance which even after four years of existence as tolerated and rightless aliens on their own land and in their own city still enabled them without hope or pride even in the endurance to endure, asking or expecting no more than permission to exercise it, like a sort of immortality. Out of that enduring and anguished dust it rose, out of the dark Gothic dream, carrying the Gothic dream, arch- and buttress-winged, by knight and bishop, angels and saints and cherubim groined and pilastered upward into soaring spire and pinnacle where goblin and demon, gryphon and gargoyle and hermaphrodite yelped in icy soundless stone against the fading zenith. The old general dropped the curtain and began to turn from the window.

‘You may close——’ he said. Then he stopped. It was as though he didn’t anticipate the sound so much as he simply foreknew it, already motionless when the sound came into the window—an uproar thin and distant across the city, not diffuse now but localised and still curiously localised by source even when it began to move as if it were directed at some small specific object no larger than a man and it was not the yelling which moved but the object of it retreating slowly before the yelling—not turning back to the window but simply arrested beside it. Hooves clattered suddenly in the Place and a body of cavalry crossed it at trot and entered the boulevard leading toward the old eastern gate, already at canter and went on. Then for a time the sound of the hooves seemed to have dissolved into, been smothered by the yelling, until suddenly the cavalry had ridden as though into the yelling as into a weightless mass of dead leaves, exploding them, flinging and hurling them, to reappear the next second like centaurs in furious soundless motion intact in an intact visible cloud of swirling frantic screams which continued to swirl and burst in that faint frenetic tossing even after the horses must indubitably have been gone, still swirling and tossing in scattered diminuendo when the other sound began. It came up beneath them, beginning not as sound at all but rather as light, diffused yet steady from across the plain beyond the city: the voices of men alone, choral almost, growing not in volume but in density as dawn itself increases, filling the low horizon beyond the city’s black and soaring bulk with a band not of sound but light while above and into it the thin hysteric nearer screams and cries skittered and spun and were extinguished like sparks into water, still filling the horizon even after the voices themselves had ceased with a resonant humming like a fading sunset and heatless as aurora against which the black tremendous city seemed to rush skyward in one fixed iron roar out of the furious career of earth toward its furious dust, upreared and insensate as an iron ship’s prow among the fixed insensate stars.

This time the old general turned from it. The single leaf of the door was now open about three feet and there stood beside it an old old man, not at all at attention but just standing there. He was hardly larger than a child, not stooped or humped and shrunken was not the word either. He was condensed, intact and unshriveled, the long ellipsoid of his life almost home again now, where rosy and blemishless, without memory or grieving flesh, mewling bald and toothless, he would once more possess but three things and would want no more: a stomach, a few surface nerves to seek warmth, a few cells capable of sleep. He was not a soldier. The very fact that he wore not only a heavy regulation infantryman’s buttoned-back greatcoat but a steel helmet and a rifle slung across his back merely made him look less like one. He stood there in spectacles, in the faded coat which had been removed perhaps from its first (or last) owner’s corpse—it still bore the darker vacancies where an N.C.O.’s chevrons and a regimental number had been removed, and neatly stitched together on the front of it, just above where the skirts folded back, was the suture where something (a bayonet obviously) had entered it, and within the last twenty-four hours it had been brushed carefully and ironed by hand by someone who could not see very well—and processed through a cleansing and delousing plant and then issued to him from a quartermaster’s salvage depot, and the polished steel helmet and the clean polished rifle which looked as lovingly-tended and unused as a twelfth-century pike from a private museum, which he had never fired and did not know how to fire and would not have fired nor accepted a live cartridge for even if there was a single man in all the French armies who would have given him one. He had been the old general’s batman for more than fifty years (except for the thirteen years beginning on the day more than forty years ago now when the old general, a captain with a brilliant and almost incredible future, had vanished not only from the army lists but from the ken of all the people who up to that time had thought they knew him also, to reappear thirteen years later in the army lists and the world too with the rank of brigadier and none to know whence nor why either although as regards the rank they did know how; his first official act had been to find his old batman, then a clerk in a commissary’s office in Saigon, and have him assigned back to his old position and rating); he stood there healthily pink as an infant, ageless and serene in his aura of indomitable fidelity, invincibly hardheaded, incorrigibly opinionated and convinced, undeflectable in advice suggestion and comment and invincibly contemptuous of war and all its ramifications, constant durable faithful and insubordinate and almost invisible within the clutter and jumble of his martial parody so that he resembled an aged servant of some ancient ducal house dressed in ceremonial regalia for the annual commemoration of some old old event, some ancient defeat or glory of the House so long before his time that he had long ago forgotten the meaning and significance if he ever knew it, while the old general crossed the room and went back around the table and sat down again. Then the old batman turned and went back through the door and reappeared immediately with a tray bearing a single plain soup bowl such as might have come from an N.C.O.’s mess or perhaps from that of troops themselves, and a small stone jug and the end of a loaf and a battered pewter spoon and an immaculate folded damask napkin, and set the tray on the table before the old marshal and, the beautifully polished rifle gleaming and glinting as he bent and recovered and stood back, watched, fond and domineering and implacable, the old marshal’s every move as the old marshal took up the bread and began to crumble it into the bowl.

When he entered St Cyr at seventeen, except for that fragment of his splendid fate which even here he could not escape, he seemed to have brought nothing of the glittering outside world he had left behind him but a locket—a small object of chased worn gold, obviously valuable or anyway venerable, resembling a hunting-case watch and obviously capable of containing two portraits; only capable of containing such since none of his classmates ever saw it open and in fact they only learned he possessed it through the circumstance that one or two of them happened to see it on a chain about his neck like a crucifix in the barracks bathroom one day. And even that scant knowledge was quickly adumbrated by the significance of that destiny which even these gates were incapable of severing him from—that of being not only the nephew of a Cabinet Minister, but the godson of the board chairman of that gigantic international federation producing munitions which, with a few alterations in the lettering stamped into the head of each cartridge- and shell-case, fitted almost every military rifle and pistol and light field-piece in all the western hemisphere and half the eastern too. Yet despite this, because of his secluded and guarded childhood, until he entered the Academy the world outside the Faubourg St Germain had scarcely ever seen him, and the world which began at the Paris banlieu had never even heard of him except as a male christian name. He was an orphan, an only child, the last male of his line, who had grown from infancy in the sombre insulate house of his mother’s eldest sister in the rue Vaugirard—wife of a Cabinet Minister who was himself a nobody but a man of ruthless and boundless ambition, who had needed only opportunity and got it through his wife’s money and connections, and—they were childless—had legally adopted her family by hyphenating its name onto his own, the child growing to the threshold of manhood not only that heir and heir to the power and wealth of his bachelor godfather, the Comité de Ferrovie chairman who had been his father’s closest friend, but before any save his aunt’s Faubourg St Germain salons and their servants and his tutors, could connect his face with his splendid background and his fabulous future.

So when he entered the Academy, none of the classmates with whom he was to spend the next four years (and probably the staff and the professors too) had ever seen him before. And he had been there probably twenty-four hours before any of them except one even connected his face with his great name. This one was not a youth too but instead already a man, twenty-two years old, who had entered the Academy two days before and was to stand Number Two to the other’s One on the day of graduation, who on that first afternoon began to believe, and for the next fifteen years would continue, that he had seen at once in that seventeen-year-old face the promise of a destiny which would be the restored (this was 1873, two years after the capitulation and formal occupation of Paris) glory and destiny of France too. As for the rest of them, their first reaction was that of the world outside: surprise and amazement and for the moment downright unbelief, that he, this youth, was here at all. It was not because of his appearance of fragility and indurability; they simply read the face also into that fragility and indurability which, during that first instant when he seemed to be not entering the gates but rather framed immobilely by them, had fixed him as absolutely and irrevocably discrepant to that stone-bastioned iron maw of war’s apprenticeship as a figure out of a stained glass cathedral window set by incomprehensible chance into the breached wall of a fort. It was because to them, his was the golden destiny of an hereditary crown prince of paradise. To them, he was not even a golden youth: he was the golden youth; to them inside the Academy and to all that world stretching from the Paris banlieu to the outermost rim where the word Paris faded, he was not even a Parisian but the Parisian: a millionaire and an aristocrat from birth, an orphan and an only child, not merely heir in his own right to more francs than anyone knew save the lawyers and bankers who guarded and nursed and incremented them, but to the incalculable weight and influence of the uncle who was the nation’s first Cabinet member even though another did bear the title and the precedence, and of that godfather whose name opened doors which (a Comité de Ferrovie chairman’s), because of their implications and commitments, or (a bachelor’s) of their sex, gender, even that of a Cabinet Minister could not; who had only to reach majority in order to inherit that matchless of all catastrophes: the privilege of exhausting his life—or if necessary, shortening it—by that matchless means of all: being young, male, unmarried, an aristocrat, wealthy, secure by right of birth in Paris: that city which was the world too, since of all cities it was supreme, dreamed after and adored by all men, and not just when she was supreme in her pride but when—as now—she was abased from it. Indeed, never more dreamed after and adored than now, while in abasement; never more so than now because of what, in any other city, would have been abasement. Never more than now was she, not France’s Paris but the world’s, the defilement being not only a part of the adored immortality and the immaculateness and therefore necessary to them, but since it was the sort of splendid abasement of which only Paris was capable, being capable of it made her the world’s Paris: conquered—or rather, not conquered, since, France’s Paris, she was inviolate and immune to the very iron heel beneath which the rest of France (and, since she was the world’s Paris too, the rest of the world also) lay supine and abased,—impregnable and immune: the desired, the civilised world’s inviolate and forever unchaste, virgin barren and insatiable: the mistress who renewed her barren virginity in the very act of each barren recordless promiscuity, Eve and Lilith both to every man in his youth so fortunate and blessed as to be permitted within her omnivorous insatiable orbit; the victorious invading hun himself, bemazed not so much by his success as his sudden and incredible whereabouts, shuffling his hobbed boots in the perfumed anteroom, dreaming no less than one born to that priceless fate, on whom, herself immortal, she conferred brief immortality’s godhead in exchange for no more than his young man’s youth.

Yet here he was, just another anonymous one in a class of candidates for professional careers, not merely in the rigid hierarchy of an army but in an army which for the next fifty years would be struggling simply to survive, to emerge from the debacle and debasement of defeat in order not to be feared as a threat but merely respected as a monument. An Anglo-Saxon mind could, and almost any American would, have read into his presence here a young man’s dream in which he would see himself, not by some irremediable sacrifice rescuing that adored city Andromeda-like from her brutal rock perhaps, but at least as one of Niobe’s or Rachel’s children clapping up sword and buckler. But not the Latin, the French mind; to it, that city had nothing to be saved from, who had strangled all man’s heart in any one strand of her vagrant Lilith hair; who, barren, had no sons: they were her lovers, and when they went to war, it was for glory to lay before the altar of that unchaste unstale bed.

So only that single classmate ever believed other than that it was not the youth who repudiated paradise but paradise which repudiated its scion and heir; not he but his family which had put him where he was, not disinherited at all but disfranchised, segregated: the family which had compelled him into the army as—for them, their name and position—at best the isolation, quarantine, of whatever was the threat he had become or represented, and at worst the mausoleum of the shame which would be its result, and—for him—a refuge from the consequences. Because he was still who he was, male and solitary and heir; the family would still use the power and the influence, even though they had had to isolate and quarantine his failure to be what he might—should—have been. In fact, his family had not even merely bought absolution for him. On the contrary, they would gain a sort of blinding redundance on the great name’s original splendor from the golden braid which his hat and sleeves would someday bear. Because even the single classmate believed that all that class (and presently the three ahead of it too) were eating and sleeping with one who would be a general at forty and—given any sort of opportunity for any kind of a military debacle worthy of the name inside the next thirty years—a marshal of France when the nation buried him.

Only he didn’t use the influence, not in the next four years at least. He didn’t even need it. He graduated not only at the top of the class but with the highest marks ever made at the Academy; such was his record that not even his classmates, who would not have been offered it no matter what grades they graduated with, were not even jealous of the Quartermaster captaincy which rumor said was waiting for him at the Academy’s exit like a hat or a cloak on the arm of a footman at the exit from a theatre or a restaurant. Yet when he next came into their cognizance—which was immediately on the succeeding day, when the rest of the class had barely begun the regulation two weeks’ leave before assuming duty—he didn’t have the captaincy. He simply appeared at Toulon without it, still looking little different from what he had four years ago: not fragile so much as invincibly indurable, with his unblemished pay-book for which he would have no more use than would the beggar for the king’s farrier’s nail or the king for the beggar’s almsbox, and his untried spartan subaltern’s kit and his virgin copy of the Manual of War (and the locket of course; his classmates had not forgot that; in fact they even knew now what the two portraits in it would be: the uncle and the godfather: his crucifix indeed, his talisman, his reliquary) but with no more captaincy than the guest or patron leaving the theatre or restaurant by a fire exit or rear alley would have hat or cloak when he reached the boulevard.

But—save that one—they believed they knew the answer to this. It was a gesture, not the youth’s but the family’s—one of those gestures of modesty and discretion of the potent and powerful who are powerful and potent enough to afford even discretion and modesty; they and he too were all waiting for the same thing: for the arrival of the great suave hearselike midnight-colored limousine bringing not the civilian secretary bearing the captaincy like a ducal coronet on a velvet cushion, but rather the uncle-Minister himself, who would walk the nephew back to the Quai d’Orsay and in that privacy fling away the meagre African subaltern’s kit with the cold outrage of a cardinal plucking a copy of Martin Luther from the robe of a kneeling candidate for consecration. But that didn’t happen either. The car would have come too late. Because, although the draft to which he would have been posted was not to leave for two weeks yet and its personnel had not even begun to arrive at the depot, he was gone after only one night, to Africa, to immediate field service, quietly, almost surreptitiously, with the same simple sublieutenant’s rank and the same meagre equipment which the rest of them would have in their turn.

So now those who might have been jealous of him (not only his St Cyr coevals, junior and senior, who had no Minister-uncles and chairman-godfathers, but the career men who did have parents and guardians but not Cabinet members and Comité de Ferrovie chairmen, who hated him not because he had been offered the captaincy but because he had not accepted it) no longer had to be. Because they knew that they would never overtake him now: who would be removed forever more from envy and hence from hatred and fear both, the three of them, nephew godfather and uncle, going fast now, who had been ruthless even to the long tradition of nepotism, the youth hurried to whatever remote frontier where rampant indeed would be the uncle’s and the godfather’s power and will, with none save an occasional inspector-general to challenge it; no bounds to the family’s ambition nor check to that which furthered it. They would be free, who had bought immunity from envy by simply outlasting it; when he reappeared, say two years from now as a colonel of twenty-three, he would be far beyond the range of any envy and jealousy, let alone theirs. Or perhaps it wouldn’t even take two years, one might be enough, so great was their faith in, not just the uncle’s and the godfather’s power and will, but in rapacity itself: the compassionate, the omnipotent, the all-seeing and all-pervading; one day the Quai d’Orsay would gently out-breathe, and against that fierce African foreshore would officially beat a national unanimity loud and long enough not only to obfuscate the mere circumstances of fact, but to distract the mind from all curiosity regarding them; there would remain only the accomplishment and its protagonist juxtaposed without past on a stage without yesterday, like two masques for a pantomime furbished out of the bloodless lumber-room of literature, because by that time he would have escaped not merely from fear and hatred but from the long rigid mosaic of seniority itself, as irrevocably as does a girl from maidenhood; they would—could—even watch him now, heatless peaceful and immune to any remembered anguish—even see him again passing among the windy bunting and the paraded troops in the cheering Oran street in the Governor General’s car, sitting on the right hand of the Governor General himself: the hero of twenty-two or -three who had not at all merely saved some whatever scrap or fragment of an empire, but had set again against the zenith the fierce similitude of a bird, be though as it was but one more lost feather of the eagles which seventy years ago had stooped at all Europe and Africa and Asia too, they watching without jealousy now nor even rancor, but rather with amazed admiration not merely for France but for invincible Man;—the hero still girlish-looking even after two years of African sun and solitude, still frail and fragile in the same way that adolescent girls appear incredibly delicate yet at the same time invincibly durable, like wisps of mist or vapor drifting checkless and insensate among the thunderous concrete-bedded mastodons inside a foundry; appearing now only the more durable because of the proven—no: reproven—fragility, at once frail yet at the same time intact and inviolable because of what in another had been not merely ruin but destruction too: like the saint in the old tale, the maiden who without hesitation or argument fee-ed in advance with her maidenhood the ferryman who set her across the stream and into heaven (an Anglo-Saxon fable too, since only an Anglo-Saxon could seriously believe that anything buyable at no more cost than that could really be worth a sainthood);—the hero, the sheeplike acclaiming mass with not one among them all to ask or even wonder what he had done or when or where, nor even against what or whom the victory, as he passed immune even to the uproar, across the cheering city to the quai and the destroyer (a cruiser maybe, a destroyer certainly) which would carry him to his Paris triumph and then return him, chief of a corps and commander of a department, or perhaps even Governor General himself.

But that didn’t happen either. He crossed the Mediterranean and disappeared; when they followed in the order of their postings, they learned that he had gone on from the port base too, after even less than one night, to assigned duty somewhere in the interior, exactly where and on exactly what service, nobody at the port base knew either. But they had expected that. They believed they even knew where he would be: no place remote merely because it was far away and impossible to reach, like Brazzaville say, where the three pale faces—Commandant-governor, new subaltern, and halfbreed interpreter—would slumber hierarchate and superposed, benignant and inscrutable, irascible and hieroglyph like an American Indian totem pole in ebon Eden innocence; but a place really remote, not even passively isolate but actively and even aggressively private, like an oasis in the desert’s heart itself, more blind than cave and circumferenced than safari—a silken tent odorous with burning pastille and murmurous with the dreamy chock of the woodcutter’s axe and the pad of watercarriers’ feet, where on a lion-robed divan he would await untimed destiny’s hasteless accouchement. But they were wrong. He had left the port base the same day he arrived, for a station as famous in its circles as the Black Hole of Calcutta—a small outpost not only five hundred kilometres from anything resembling a civilised stronghold or even handhold, but sixty and more from its nearest support—a tiny lost compound manned by a sergeant’s platoon out of a foreign legion battalion recruited from the gutter-sweepings of all Europe and South America and the Levant:—a well, a flagstaff, a single building of loop-holed clay set in a seared irreconciliable waste of sun and sand which few living men had ever seen, to which troops were sent as punishment or, incorrigibles, for segregation until heat and monotony on top of their natural and acquired vices divorced them permanently from mankind. He had gone straight there from the port base three years ago and (the only officer present and, for all practical purposes, the only white man too) had not only served out his own one-year tour of command, but that of his successor too, and was now ten months forward in that of what would have been his successor’s successor; in the shock of that first second of knowledge it seemed to them—except that one—that earth itself had faltered, rapacity itself had failed, when regardless of whatever had been the nephew’s old defalcation from his family’s hope or dream seven or eight or ten years ago, even that uncle and that godfather had been incapable of saving him; this, until that single classmate picked up the whole picture and reversed it.

He was a Norman, son of a Caen doctor whose grandfather, while an art student in Paris, had become the friend and then the fanatic disciple of Camille Desmoulins until Robespierre executed them both, the great-grandson come to Paris to be a painter too but relinquished his dream to the Military Academy for the sake of France as the great-grandfather had done his to the guillotine for the sake of Man: who for all his vast peasant bones had looked at twenty-two even more indurable and brittly-keyed than ever had his obsession at seventeen,—a man with a vast sick flaccid moon of a face and hungry and passionate eyes, who had looked once at that one which to all the world else had been that of any seventeen-year-old youth and relinquished completely to it like a sixty-year-old longtime widower to that of a pubic unconscious girl, who picked up the three figures—uncle nephew and godfather—like so many paper dolls and turned them around and set them down again in the same positions and attitudes but obversed. Though this would be several years yet, almost ten in fact after that day when they had watched that sunstricken offing behind Oran accept that fragile stride and then close markless behind it like a painted backdrop, not only markless but impenetrable too; and not just a backdrop but Alice’s looking-glass rather, through which he had stepped not into unreality but instead carrying unreality with him to establish it where before there had been none: four years from that day and he was still there at his little lost barren sunglared unfutured outpost: who, whether or not he had ever been an actual threat once, was now an enigma burying its ostrich-head from the staff commission which would drag him back to Paris and at least into vulnerable range of his old sybaritic renunciation; five years from that day and beginning the sixth voluntary tour of that duty which should have fallen to every officer in the Army List (every man everywhere) before it came to him, and (so grave the defalcation from which his family had had to bury him that not only was mere seniority confounded, but the immutable rotation of military leave too) not even the cafes of Casa Blanca or Oran or Algiers, let alone Paris, had ever seen him.

Then six years from that day and he had vanished from Africa too, none knew where except the Norman classmate’s passionate and hungry hope, vanished not only from the knowledge of man but from the golden warp and woof of the legend too, leaving behind him only a name in the Army List, still with the old unchanged rank of sublieutenant but with nothing after it: not even dead, not even whereabouts unknown; and even this was another two years, by which time all of them who had feared him once, not only the old St Cyr class but its successors too, were scattered and diffused about the perimeter where the thrice-barred flag flew, until the afternoon when five of them, including the Norman classmate and a staff captain, met by chance in a Quai d’Orsay anteroom, were now sitting about a sidewalk table in front of the most adjacent cafe, the staff officer already four years a captain even though only five years out of St Cyr, descendant of a Napoleonic duchy whose founder or recipient had been a butcher then a republican then an imperialist then a duke, and his son a royalist then a republican again and—still alive and still a duke—then a royalist again: so that three of the four watching and listening to him thought how here was the true golden youth which that other one of eleven years ago whom he was talking about, had refused to be, realising, aware for the first time, not just what the other would have been by now, but—with that family and background and power—what matchless pinnacle he might have reached, since this one had behind him only simple proprietors of banks and manipulators of shares; the staff captain using the anteroom to serve his captaincy in, and three of the other four having reported to it that morning by mutual coincidence after three years on the Asiatic Station, and the fourth one, the junior, having been assigned to it right out of the gates themselves, the five of them coincidental about the cramped table on the crowded terrace while three of them—including the Norman giant who sat not among them so much as above them, immense and sick and apparently insensate as a boulder save for his flaccid and hungry face and the passionate and hungry eyes—listening while the staff captain, burly blunt brutal heavy-witted and assured and so loud that people at the other tables had begun to turn, talked about the almost-forgotten sublieutenant at his tiny lost post in the depths of Never-Never: who should have been the idol pattern and hope not merely for all career officers but for all golden youth everywhere, as was Bonaparte not merely for all soldiers but for every ancestorless Frenchman qualified first in poverty, who was willing to hold life and conscience cheap enough: wondering (the staff captain) what could have been out there in that desert to hold for six years above a quartermaster captaincy, the sublieutenant-command of a stinking well enclosed by eight palm trees and inhabited by sixteen un-nationed cutthroats; what out there that Oran or Casa Blanca or even Paris couldn’t match—what paradise within some camel-odored tent—what limbs old and weary and cunning with ancient pleasures that Montmartre bagnios (and even St Germain boudoirs) knew nothing of, yet so ephemeral, so incipient with satiation and at last actual revulsion, that after only six years the sultan-master must vacate it——

‘Vacate it?’ one of the three said. ‘You mean he’s gone? He actually left that place at last?’

‘Not quite gone,’ the staff captain said. ‘Not until his relief arrives. After all, he accepted an oath to France, even he, even if he does hold from the Comité de Ferrovie. He failed. He lost a camel. There was a man too, even if he had spent most of his five enlistments in clink—’ telling it: the soldier spawned by a Marseilles cesspool to be the ultimate and fatal nemesis of a woman a girl whom eighteen years ago he had corrupted and diseased and then betrayed into prostitution and at last murdered and had spent the eighteen years since as member of lost frontier garrisons such as this because this—the rim of oblivion—was the one place on earth where he could continue to walk and breathe and be fed and clothed: whose one fear now was that he might do something which would prompt someone to make him a corporal or a sergeant and so compel him back to some post within a day’s walk of any community large enough to possess one civilian policeman, where not he would see a strange face but where some strange face would see him; he—the soldier, the trooper, had vanished along with the camel, obviously into the hands of an adjacent band or tribe of the Riffs who were the excuse for the garrison being where it was and the reason for its being armed. And though the man was a piece of government property too, even if not a very valuable one, that camel was a camel. Yet the commander of the post had apparently made no effort whatever to recover them; whereupon they—his listeners—might say that the commander’s only failure in the matter had been that he had prevented a local war. Which was wrong. He had not stopped a war: he had simply failed to start one. Which was not his purpose there, not why he had been tested and found competent for that command: not to fail to start wars, but to preserve government property. So he had failed, and yesterday his official request to be relieved had forwarded to the Adjutant-General’s desk——

The Norman was already on his feet while the staff captain was still talking; at least four of them knew how he heard of the command’s vacancy but not even these knew how he managed to get the succession to it—a man without family or influence or money at all, with nothing in fact to front or fend for him in his profession save the dubious capacity of his vast ill body to endure, and the rating of Two in his St Cyr class; already, because of the rating, a sublieutenant of engineers and, because of the rating and his sick body both, in addition to the fact that he had just completed a tour of field service in Indo China, from now on secure for a Home Establishment post probably in Paris itself, until retirement age overtook him. Yet within an hour he was in the office of the Quartermaster General himself, using, having deliberately used the Number Two rating for the first (and probably the last) time in his life for the chance to stand facing the desk which he could not know or dream that someday he himself would sit behind, himself in his turn sole unchallengeable arbiter over the whereabouts and maintenance of every man wearing a French uniform.

‘You? an Engineer?’ the man facing him said.

‘So was he:’—the voice eager, serene, not importunate so much as simply not to be denied: ‘That’s why, you see. Remember, I was Number Two to him in our class. When he leaves it, it belongs to me.’

‘Then you remember this,’ the other said, tapping the medical survey on the desk before him. ‘This is why you are not going back to Saigon after your leave, why you are going on Home Establishment from now on. As for that, you wouldn’t live a year out there in that——’

‘You were about to say “hole”,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that its purpose: for the honorable disposal of that self-proven to have no place in the Establishment of Man?’

‘Man?’

‘France, then,’ he said; and thirteen days later looked from the back of the camel across the glaring markless intervening miles, as a thousand years afterward the first pilgrim must have looked at the barely distinguishable midden which the native guide assured him had been, not Golgotha of course but Gethsemane, at the flagstaff and the sun-blanched walls in a nest of ragged and meagre palms; at sunset he stood inside them, rigid and immolant while the horn chanted and there descended on him in his turn that fringy raveling of empire’s carapace; at first dark, the two camels rumbling and gurgling just beyond earshot above the waiting orderly, he stood at the gate beside the man who had been One to his Two in the old class six years ago, the two of them barely visible to one another, leaving only the voice serene and tender, passionate for suffering, sick with hope:

‘I know. They thought you were hiding. They were afraid of you at first. Then they decided you were just a fool who insisted on becoming a marshal of France at fifty instead of forty-five, using the power and influence at twenty-one and -two and -three and -four and -five to evade at forty-five the baton you would have nothing left to fend off at fifty; the power and the influence to escape the power and influence, the world to escape the world; to free yourself of flesh without having to die, without having to lose the awareness that you were free of flesh: not to escape from it and you could not be immune to it nor did you want to be: only to be free of it, to be conscious always that you were merely at armistice with it at the price of constant and unflagging vigilance, because without that consciousness, flesh would not exist for you to be free of it and so there would be nothing anywhere for you to be free of. Oh yes, I knew: the English poet Byron’s dream or wish or cry that all living women had but one single mouth for his kiss: the supreme golden youth who encompassed all flesh by putting, still virgin to it, all flesh away. But I knew better: who sought a desert not as Simeon did but as Anthony, using Mithridates and Heliogabalus not merely to acquire a roosting-place for contempt and scorn, but for fee to the cave where the lion itself lay down: who—the ones who feared you once—believed that they had seen ambition and greed themselves default before one seventeen-year-old child—had seen the whole vast hitherto invulnerable hegemony of ruthlessness and rapacity reveal itself unfearsome and hollow when even that uncle and that godfather could not cope with your crime or defalcation, as though so poor and thin was the ambition and greed to which even that uncle and that godfather were dedicant, that voracity itself had repudiated them who had been its primest pillars and its supremest crown and glory.

‘Which could not be. That was not merely incredible, it was unbearable. Rapacity does not fail, else man must deny he breathes. Not rapacity: its whole vast glorious history repudiates that. It does not, cannot, must not fail. Not just one family in one nation privileged to soar cometlike into splendid zenith through and because of it, not just one nation among all the nations selected as heir to that vast splendid heritage; not just France, but all governments and nations which ever rose and endured long enough to leave their mark as such, had sprung from it and in and upon and by means of it became forever fixed in the amazement of man’s present and the glory of his past; civilization itself is its password and Christianity its masterpiece, Chartres and the Sistine Chapel, the pyramids and the rock-wombed powder-magazines under the Gates of Hercules its altars and monuments, Michelangelo and Phidias and Newton and Ericsson and Archimedes and Krupp its priests and popes and bishops; the long deathless roster of its glory—Caesar and the Barcas and the two Macedonians, our own Bonaparte and the great Russian and the giants who strode nimbused in red hair like fire across the Aurora Borealis, and all the lesser nameless who were not heroes but, glorious in anonymity, at least served the destiny of heroes—the generals and admirals, the corporals and ratings of glory, the batmen and orderlies of renown, and the chairmen of boards and the presidents of federations, the doctors and lawyers and educators and churchmen who after nineteen centuries have rescued the son of heaven from oblivion and translated him from mere meek heir to earth to chairman of its board of trade; and those who did not even have names and designations to be anonymous from—the hands and the backs which carved and sweated aloft the stone blocks and painted the ceilings and invented the printing presses and grooved the barrels, down to the last indestructible voice which asked nothing but the right to speak of hope in Roman lion-pits and murmur the name of God from the Indian-anticked pyres in Canadian forests—stretching immutable and enduring further back than man’s simple remembering recorded it. Not rapacity: it does not fail; suppose Mithridates’ and Heliogabalus’ heir had used his heritage in order to escape his inheritees: Mithridates and Heliogabalus were Heliogabalus and Mithridates still and that scurry from Oran was still only a mouse’s, since one of Grimalkin’s parents was patience too and that whole St Cyr–Toulon-Africa business merely flight, as when the maiden flees the ravisher not toward sanctuary but privacy, and just enough of it to make the victory memorable and its trophy a prize. Not rapacity, which like poverty, takes care of its own. Because it endures, not even because it is rapacity but because man is man, enduring and immortal; enduring not because he is immortal but immortal because he endures: and so with rapacity, which immortal man never fails since it is in and from rapacity that he gets, holds, his immortality—the vast, the all-being, the compassionate, which says to him only, Believe in Me; though ye doubt seventy times seven, ye need only believe again.

‘But I know. I was there. I saw: that day eleven years ago: paused in that iron maw of war, not fragile actually: just fixed and immune in fragility like the figure in the stained window; not through any Alice’s mirror into unreality, but just immune, moral opposed and invincibly apostate; if there still existed for you even in dream the splendid and glittering boulevards and faubourgs of your old cradle and your lost estate, it was merely as dream forever inextricable from your past and forever interdict from your destiny; inextricable the dream, yourself and the dream annealed, yourself interdict and free from that pain and that longing forever more; inextricable from that youth who is this man now, as is this little lost barren spot here inextricable forever from that destiny,—never that uncle’s and that godfather’s private donjon but rather the figment of that consecration’s necessary tarryment for this time, this space, somewhere in time and space,—not the youth: the fragility; not to test the youth but to test the fragility: to measure and gauge and test; never an intractable and perverse child who fled, never an uncle and godfather coercing and compelling by attrition, starvation, but all of them, the trinity still intact because it had never been otherwise, testing as one the fragility’s capacity for the destiny and the consecration, using the desert for yardstick as when in the old days the cadet would spend that last night of his maiden squiredom on his knees on the lonely chapel’s stone floor before the cushion bearing the virgin spurs of his tomorrow’s knighthood.

‘That’s what they think: not that man failed rapacity, but that man failed man; his own frail flesh and blood lets him down: the blood still runs but cooling now, into the second phase of his brief and furious span when the filling of his belly is better than glory or a throne, then on into the third and last one where anticipation of the latrine is more moving than even the spread of a girl’s hair on the pillow. That’s what they believe is to be your destiny and end. And ten years from now they will still know no better. Because your time, your moment, will not have come even in ten years. It will take longer than that. It will need a new time, a new age, a new century which doesn’t even remember our old passions and failures; a new century from that one when man discovered God for a second and then lost Him, postulated by a new digit in the record of his hope and need; it will be more than twenty years even before the day, the moment when you will appear again, without past, as if you had never been. Because by that time you will no longer exist for them except in mutual remembering: a lay figure not only without life but integrated as myth only in mutual confederation: the property of no one of them because you will be the property of all, possessing unity and integration only when your custodians happen to meet from the ends of the earth (which is the French empire) and match fragments and make you whole for a moment; you will lie weightless across the face of France from Mozambique to Miquelon, and Devil’s Island to the Treaty Ports like a barely remembered odor, a fading word, a habit, a legend—an effigy cut by a jigsaw for souvenirs, becoming whole only over a cafe or mess table in Brazzaville or Saigon or Cayenne or Tananarive, dovetailed for a moment or an hour as when boys match and exchange the pictures of the actresses and generals and presidents from the packs of cigarettes; not even the shadow of a breathing man but instead something synthetic and contrived like the composite one of the homely domestic objects contrived by the nurse’s hand between the nursery lamp and the wall for the child to take into slumber with it: a balloon: a duck: Punchinello: la gloire: the head of a cat—a shadow cast backward on that arid curtain behind Oran beyond which you disappeared, not by the sun but by that quartermaster captain’s commission the refusal of which first struck them with terror and rage, until after twenty years not you nor even your two powerful kinsmen will be real, but only that old fading parchment, and it real only because your refusal of it incorporated it onto your legend—the shopworn and now harmless vellum vainly dangling its fading seals and ribbons beside the rent beyond which you vanished in the oldest of comedies: the youth fleeing, the forsaken aging yet indomitable betrothed pursuing, abject, constant, undis-mayable, undeflectable, terrifying not in threat but in fidelity, until at last those who feared you once will have watched you pass out of enmity to amazement: to contempt: to unreality, and at last out of your race and kind altogether, into the dusty lumber room of literature.

‘But not I,’ he said, looming, visible only as a gaunt gigantic shape, sick, furious, murmuring: ‘Because I know better. I knew that first moment eleven years ago when I looked and saw you standing there in that gate. I knew. I wont be here to see it of course (my last medical survey, you know: that marvelous and amazing thing, a human life, spanned and then—what’s the Boer word?—outspanned by one dry and dusty page of doctor’s jargon. They are wrong of course. I mean in the Quai d’Orsay. They didn’t want to post me here at all, since in doing it they would in their opinion simply double the work of whatever clerk would not only have to relieve me but discharge me from the army list also and then post my successor before my tour here was even completed) and at first I grieved a little because once I thought that you might need me. I mean, need me other than for my simple seniority of hope in the condition of man. —That’s right,’ he said, though the other had made no sound: ‘Laugh, at that dream, that vain hope too. Because you will not need anybody wherever it is you are going now in order to return from it. Mind you, I dont ask where. I was about to say “to find whom or what you will need to be your instrument” but I refrained from that in time too. So at least you dont need to laugh at that, since I know that you are going wherever it is you are going, in order to return from it when the time, the moment comes, in the shape of man’s living hope. May I embrace you?’

‘Must you?’ the other said. Then: ‘Should you?’ Then quickly: ‘Of course,’ but before he moved the taller one had stooped, loomed downward from his vast and depthless height and took the smaller man’s hand and kissed it and released it and, erect again, took the other’s face between his two hands almost like a parent, a mother, and held it for a moment, then released it.

‘With Christ in God,’ he said. ‘Go now.’

‘So I’m to save France,’ the other said.

‘France,’ he said, not even brusquely, not even contemptuously. ‘You will save man. Farewell.’

And he was right for almost two years. That is, he was almost wrong. He did not remember the camel or litter—whatever it had been—at all; only a moment—probably, without doubt, in the base hospital in Oran—a face, a voice, probably a doctor’s, marvelling not that he had failed to keep consciousness over that fierce and empty distance, but that he had kept life at all; then not much again, only motion: the Mediterranean: then he knew peacefully, not with joy or exultation: just peacefully, almost unattentively, unable yet (nor did that matter either) to raise his own head to look, that this was France, Europe, home. Then he could move his head and lift his hands too even if the vast peasant Norman frame did seem still to lie outside its transparent envelope; he said, weakly but aloud, with a sort of peaceful amazement, weakly, but at least aloud: ‘I had forgot what winter looks like,’ lying half-propped all day now on the glassed veranda above Zermatt watching the Matterhorn, watching not the ordered and nameless progression of days fade but rather the lesser earth, since always the great peak carried into the next one as in a gigantic hand, one clutch of light. But that was only the body and it was mending too; soon it would be as strong, not perhaps as it ever was nor even as it ever would but rather as it would ever need to be, since they were the same,—only the body: not the memory because it had forgotten nothing, not even for one second the face which had been the junior that afternoon two years ago around the table on the Quai d’Orsay terrace, come all the way from Paris just to see him——

‘Not Paris,’ the other said. ‘Verdun. We’re building fortifications there now which they will never pass again.’

‘They?’ he said peacefully. ‘It’s too late now.’

‘Too late? Nonsense. The fever and the fury are still there, I grant you. It seems to be born in them; they probably cant help it. But it will be decades, perhaps a whole generation, before it reaches convulsion again.’

‘Not for us,’ he said. ‘Too late for them.’

‘Oh,’ the other said, who did not see at all; he knew that. Then the other said: ‘I brought this. It came out just after you left for Africa. You probably haven’t seen it yet.’ It was a page from the Gazette, yellowed, faded, almost three years old now, the other holding it spread while he looked at the rigid epitaph:

To Lieutenant-Colonel:

Sous-Lieutenant (and the name)

March 29, 1885

Relieved and Retired:

Lieutenant-Colonel (and the name)

March 29, 1885

‘He never came back to Paris,’ the other said. ‘Not even to France——’

‘No,’ he said peacefully.

‘So you were probably the last to see him.—You did see him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Then maybe you even know where he went. Where he is.’

‘Yes,’ he said peacefully.

‘You mean he told you himself? I dont believe it.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is nonsense, isn’t it? Not for me to claim that he told me, but that he should have to have told anyone. He’s in a Tibetan lamasery.’

‘A what?’

‘Yes. The east, the morning, which even the dead, even the pagan dead, lie facing, so that the first faint fall of shadow of the risen son of it can break their sleep.’ Now he could feel the other watching him and there was something in the face but he would not bother about it yet, and when the other spoke there was something in the voice too but he would not bother about that yet either.

‘They gave him a ribbon too,’ the other said. ‘It was the red one. He not only saved your post and garrison for you, he probably saved Africa. He prevented a war. Of course, they had to get rid of him afterward—ask for his resignation.’

‘All right,’ he said peacefully. Then he said, ‘What?’

‘The camel and the soldier he lost: the murderer—dont you remember? Surely, if he told you where he was going, he told you about that too.’ Now the other was looking at him, watching him. ‘There was a woman in it—not his, of course. You mean he didn’t tell you?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He told me.’

‘Then of course I wont have to.’

‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘He told me.’

‘She was a Riff, a native, belonging to the village, tribe, settlement, whatever it was, which was the reason for the post and the garrison being there; you must have seen that anyway while you were there,—a slave, valuable: nobody’s wife or daughter or favorite it appeared, or anyway was reported: just simply merchantable. She died too, like the other one back in Marseilles eighteen years ago; the man’s power over women was indeed a fatal one. Whereupon the next morning the camel—it was his—the commandant’s—private mount: possibly a pet if you can—want to—pet a camel—and its groom, driver, mahout, whatever they are, had vanished and two dawns later the groom returned, on foot and thoroughly terrified, with the ultimatum from the chief, headman to the commandant, giving the commandant until the next dawn to send him the man (there were three involved but the chief would be content with the principal one) responsible for the woman’s death and her spoliation as merchandise; else the chief and his men would invest the post and obliterate it and its garrison, which they could probably have done, if not immediately, certainly in the almost twelve months before the next inspector-general would turn up to look at it. So the commandant asked for a volunteer to slip away that night, before the ultimatum went into effect at dawn and the place was surrounded, and go to the next post and bring back a relieving force.—I beg your pardon?’ But he had not spoken, rigid, himself the fragile one now, who was yet only barely erect from death.

‘I thought you said “chose one”,’ the other said. ‘He didn’t need to choose. Because this was the man’s one chance. He could have escaped at any time—hoarded food and water and stolen away on almost any night during the whole eighteen years, possibly reached the coast and perhaps even France. But where would he go then? who could have escaped only from Africa: never from himself, from the old sentence, from which all that saved him was his uniform, and that only while he wore it in the light of day. But now he could go. He was not even escaping, he was not even entering mere amnesty but absolution; from now on, the whole edifice of France would be his sponsor and his purifaction, even though he got back with the relief too late, because he not only had the commandant’s word, but a signed paper also to avouch his deed and command all men by these presents to make good its reward.

‘So the commandant didn’t need to choose him: only accept him; and at sunset the garrison paraded and the man stepped out of ranks; and now the commandant should have taken the decoration from his own breast and pinned it on that of the sacrifice, except that the commandant had not got the ribbon yet (oh yes, I’ve thought of the locket too: to remove the chain from his own neck and cast it about the condemned’s, but that is reserved for some finer, more durable instant in that rocket’s course than the abolishment of a blackguard or the preservation of a flyspeck). So without doubt that would be the moment when he gave him the signed paper setting him free of his past, the man not knowing that that first step out of ranks had already set him free of whatever else breathing could do to him more; and the man saluted and about faced and marched out the gate into darkness. Into death. And I thought for a moment you had spoken again, were about to ask how, if the ultimatum would not take effect until dawn tomorrow, did the Riff chief discover that a scout would attempt to get out that night, and so have an ambush ready at the mouth of the wadi through which the scout would pass. Yes, how: the man himself probably asking that in the one last choked cry or scream remaining to him of indictment and repudiation, because he didn’t know about the ribbon then either.

‘Into darkness: night: the wadi. Into hell; even Hugo didn’t think of that. Because from the looks of what remained of him, it took him most of that night to die; the sentry above the gate challenged at dawn the next morning, then the camel (not the plump missing one of course but an old mangy one, because the dead woman was valuable; and besides, one camel looks just like another in a Transport Office return) cantered in with the body tied on it, stripped of clothing and most of the flesh too. So the siege, the investment, was lifted; the enemy retired and that sunset the commandant buried its lone casualty (except for the better camel: and after all, the woman had been valuable) with a bugle and a firing-squad, and you relieved him and he departed, a lieutenant-colonel with the rosette in a Himalayan lamasery, leaving nothing behind him but that little corner of France which he saved, to be mausoleum and cenotaph of the man whom he tricked into saving it. A man,’ the other said, watching him. ‘A human being.’

‘A murderer,’ he said. ‘A murderer twice——’

‘Spawned into murder by a French cesspool.’

‘But repudiated by all the world’s cesspools: nationless twice, without fatherland twice since he had forfeited life, worldless twice since he was already forfeit to death, belonging to no man since he was not even his own——’

‘But a man,’ the other said.

‘—speaking, thinking in French only because, nationless, he must of necessity use that tongue which of all is international; wearing that French uniform because inside a French uniform was the only place on earth where a murderer could be safe from his murder——’

‘But bearing it, bearing at least without complaint his rewardless share of the vast glorious burden of empire where few other men dared or could; even behaving himself in his fashion: nothing in his record but a little drunkenness, a little thievery——’

‘Until now,’ he cried. ‘—only thievery, buggery, sodomy—until now.’

‘—which were his sole defense against the corporal’s or sergeant’s warrant which would have been his death sentence. Asking nothing of none until his blind and valueless fate tangled with that of him who had already exhausted the Comité de Ferrovie and the French Army, and was now reduced to rooting about among the hogwallows and cesspools of the human race itself; who, already forfeit of life, owed nothing to France save the uniform he wore and the rifle he oiled and tended, who in return for filling on demand a man’s width of space in a platoon front, asked and expected nothing save the right to hope to die in a barracks-bed still unregenerate, yet who had been tricked into giving his life, without even the chance to prepare himself, for that country which would guillotine him within fifteen minutes of putting its civilian hand on him.’

‘He was a man,’ the other said. ‘Even dead, angels—justice itself—still fought for him. You were away at the time, so you have not heard this either. It was at the signing of the citation for that rosette. While bearing the parchment across to the desk for the Grand Commander’s signature, the clerk (in private life an amateur Alpinist) stumbled and overturned a litre bottle of ink onto it, blotting out not merely the recipient’s name but the entire record of the achievement. So they produced a new parchment. It reached the desk, but even as the Grand Commander reached his hand for the pen, a draft of air came from nowhere (if you know General Martel, you know that any room he stops in long enough to remove his hat, must be hermetically sealed)—came from nowhere and wafted the parchment twenty metres across the room and into the fire, where it vanished pouf! like celluloid. But to what avail, between them armed only with the flaming swords of clumsy mythology, and the Comité de Ferrovie snoring with revolving pistols and the rattling belch of Maxim guns? So now he has gone to a Tibetan lamasery. To repent.’

‘To wait!’ he cried. ‘To prepare!’

‘Yes,’ the other said. ‘That’s what they call it too: Der Tag. So maybe I’d better hurry on back to Verdun and get on with our preparing and waiting too, since we are warned now that we shall need them both. Oh, I know. I was not there that day to see his face in that gate as you saw it. But at least I inherited it. We all did: not just that class, but all the others which came after yours and his. And at least we know now what we inherited: only fear, not anguish. A prophet discharged us of that by giving us a warning of it. So only the respect for the other need remain.’

‘A murderer,’ he said.

‘But a man,’ the other said, and was gone, leaving him not quite erect from death perhaps but at least with his back once more toward it; erect enough to be aware of the steadily diminishing numbers of his seniority: that diminishing reservoir on which the bark of his career floated, to be aground soon at this rate. In fact, that day would come when he would know that it was aground, revokable never more by any tide or wave or flood: who had believed all his life, if not in his durability, at least in the vast frame which the indurability clothed; whereupon in the next moment he would know that, aground or not, it—he—would never be abandoned; that that edifice which had accepted the gaunt frame’s dedication would see always that there was at least one number between him and zero, even if it were only his own; so that the day came, Der Tag, the enemy poured, not through Verdun because his caller of that morning twenty-five years back had been right and they would not pass there, but through Flanders so fast and so far that a desperate rag-tag met them in Paris taxi-cabs and held them for the necessary desperate moment, and still behind his glassed veranda he heard how that Number One to his Two in the old St Cyr class was now Number One among all the desperate and allied peoples in Western Europe, and he said, Even from here I will have seen the beginning of it, then two months later he stood across a desk from the face which he had not seen in thirty years, which he had seen the first time in the St Cyr gate forty years ago and had been marked forever with it, looking not much older, still calm, composed, the body, the shoulders beneath it still frail and delicate yet doomed—no: not doomed: potent—to bear the fearful burden of man’s anguish and terror and at last his hope, looking at him for a moment, then saying: ‘The appointment of Quartermaster General is within my gift. Will you accept the office?’ and he said to himself, with a sort of peaceful vindication not even of great and desperate hope now but of simple reason, logic: I will even see the end, accomplishment of it too. I will even be present there.

But that was a quarter of a century away yet, as the caller of ten minutes ago had prophesied; now he lay beneath his own peaceful tears while the nurse bent over him with a folded cloth, saying, weak but indomitable still, invincibly obdurate, incurable and doomed with hope, using the two ‘he’s’ indiscriminately, as though the nurse too knew:

‘Yes, he was a man. But he was young then, not much more than a child. These tears are not anguish: only grief.’

The room was now lighted candelabrum, sconce and girandole. The windows were closed now, curtain and casement; the room seemed now to hang insulate as a diving bell above the city’s murmur where the people had already begun to gather again in the Place below. The jug and bowl were gone and the old general sat once more flanked by his two confreres behind the bare table, though among them now was a fourth figure as incongruous and paradoxical as a magpie in a bowl of goldfish—a bearded civilian sitting between the old generalissimo and the American in that black-and-white costume which to the Anglo-Saxon is the formal regalia for eating or seduction or other diversions of the dark, and to the Continental European and South American the rigid uniform for partitioning other governments or overthrowing his own. The young aide stood facing them. He said rapid and glib in French: ‘The prisoners are here. The motorcar from Villeneuve Blanche will arrive at twenty-two hours. The woman about the spoon.’

‘Spoon?’ the old general said. ‘Did we take her spoon? Return it.’

‘No sir,’ the aide said. ‘Not this time. The three strange women. The foreigners. His Honor the Mayor’s business.’ For a moment the old general sat perfectly still. But there was nothing in his voice.

‘They stole the spoon?’

Nor was there anything in the aide’s either: rigid, inflectionless: ‘She threw the spoon at them. It disappeared. She has witnesses.’

‘Who saw one of them pick up the spoon and hide it,’ the old general said.

The aide stood rigid, looking at nothing. ‘She threw a basket too. It was full of food. The same one caught it in the air without spilling it.’

‘I see,’ the old general said. ‘Does she come here to protest a miracle, or merely affirm one?’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said. ‘Do you want the witnesses too?’

‘Let the strangers wait,’ the old general said. ‘Just the plaintiff.’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said. He went out again by the smaller door at the end of the room. Though when in the next second almost he reappeared, he had not had time to get out of anyone’s way. He returned not swept but tumbled, not in but rather on because he rose, loomed not half a head nor even a whole head but half a human being above a tight clump of shawled or kerchiefed women led by one of a short broad strong fifty-ish who stopped just at the edge of the white rug as if it were water and gave the room one rapid comprehensive look, then another rapid one at the three old men behind the table, then moved again unerringly toward the old generalissimo, leading her group, save the aide who had at last extricated himself beside the door, firmly out onto the blanched surface of the rug, saying in a strong immediate voice:

‘That’s right. Dont hope to conceal yourself—not behind a mayor anyway; there are too many of you for that. Once I would have said that the curse of this country is its forest of mayoral sashes and swords; I know better now. And after four years of this harassment, even the children can tell a general on sight—provided you can ever see one when you need him.’

‘A third miracle then,’ the old general said. ‘Since your first postulate is proved by the confounding of your second.’

‘Miracle?’ the woman said. ‘Bah. The miracle is that we have anything left after four years of being over-run by foreigners. And now, even Americans. Has France come to that sorry pass where you must not only rob us of our kitchen utensils but even import Americans in order to fight your battles? War, war, war. Dont you ever get tired of it?’

‘Indubitably, Madame,’ the old general said. ‘Your spoon——’

‘It vanished. Dont ask me where. Ask them. Or better: have some of your corporals and sergeants search them. It’s true there are two of them beneath whose garments even a sergeant would not want to fumble. But none of them would object.’

‘No,’ the old general said. ‘More should not be demanded of corporals and sergeants beyond the simple hazard of military life.’ He spoke the aide’s name.

‘Sir,’ the aide said.

‘Go to the scene. Find the gentlewoman’s spoon and return it to her.’

‘I, sir?’ the aide cried.

‘Take a full company. On your way out, let the prisoners come in. —No: first, the three officers. They are here?’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said.

‘Good,’ the old general said. He turned toward his two confreres, started to speak, paused, then spoke to the civilian; when he did so, the civilian began to rise from his seat with a sort of startled and diffuse alacrity. ‘That should take care of the spoon,’ the old general said. ‘I believe the rest of your problem was the complaint of the three strange women that they have no place to sleep tonight.’

‘That; and——’ the mayor said.

‘Yes,’ the old general said. ‘I will see them presently. Meanwhile, will you take care of finding quarters for them, or shall——’

‘But certainly, General,’ the mayor said.

‘Thank you. Then, goodnight.’ He turned to the woman. ‘And to you also. And in peace; your spoon will be restored.’ Now it was the mayor who was swept, carried—the magpie this time in a flock of pigeons or perhaps hens or maybe geese—back toward the door which the aide held open, and through it, the aide still looking back at the old general with his expression of shocked disbelief.

‘A spoon,’ the aide said. ‘A company. I’ve never commanded one man, let alone a company of them. And even if I could, knew how, how can I find that spoon?’

‘Of course you will find it,’ the old general said. ‘That will be the fourth miracle. Now, the three officers. But first take the three strange ladies to your office and ask them to wait there for me.’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said. He went out and closed the door. It opened again; three men entered: a British colonel, a French major, an American captain, the two juniors flanking the colonel rigidly down the rug and to rigid attention facing the table while the colonel saluted.

‘Gentlemen,’ the old general said. ‘This is not a parade. It is not even an inquiry: merely an identification.—Chairs, please,’ he said without turning his head to the galaxy of staff behind him. ‘Then the prisoners.’ Three of the aides brought chairs around; now that end of the room resembled one end of an amphitheatre or a section of an American bleachers, the three generals and the three newcomers sitting in the beginning of a semi-circle against the bank of aides and staff as one of the aides who had fetched the chairs went on to the smaller door and opened it and stood aside. And now they could smell the men before they even entered—that thin strong ineradicable stink of front lines: of foul mud and burnt cordite and tobacco and ammonia and human filth. Then the thirteen men entered, led by the sergeant with his slung rifle and closed by another armed private, bare-headed, unshaven, alien, stained still with battle, bringing with them still another compounding of the smell—wariness, alertness, just a little of fear too but mostly just watchfulness, deploying a little clumsily as the sergeant spoke two rapid commands in French and halted them into line. The old general turned to the British colonel. ‘Colonel?’ he said.

‘Yes sir,’ the colonel said immediately. ‘The corporal.’ The old general turned to the American.

‘Captain?’ he said.

‘Yes sir,’ the American said. ‘That’s him. Colonel Beale’s right—I mean, he cant be right——’ But the old general was already speaking to the sergeant.

‘Let the corporal remain,’ he said. ‘Take the others back to the ante-room and wait there.’ The sergeant wheeled and barked, but the corporal had already paced once out of ranks, to stand not quite at attention but almost, while the other twelve wheeled into file, the armed private now leading and the sergeant last, up the room to the door, not through it yet but to it, because the head of the file faltered and fell back on itself for a moment and then gave way as the old general’s personal aide entered and passed them and then himself gave way aside until the file had passed him, the sergeant following last and drawing the door after him, leaving the aide once more solus before it, boneless, tall, baffled still and incredulous still but not outraged now: merely disorganised. The British colonel said:

‘Sir.’ But the old general was looking at the aide at the door. He said in French:

‘My child?’

‘The three women,’ the aide said. ‘In my office now. While we have our hands on them, why dont——’

‘Oh yes,’ the old general said. ‘Your authority for detached duty. Tell the Chief-of-Staff to let it be a reconnaissance, of—say—four hours. That should be enough.’ He turned to the British colonel. ‘Certainly, Colonel,’ he said.

The colonel rose quickly, staring at the corporal—the high calm composed, not wary but merely watchful, mountain face looking, courteous and merely watchful, back at him. ‘Boggan,’ the colonel said. ‘Dont you remember me? Lieutenant Beale?’ But still the face only looked at him, courteous, interrogatory, not baffled: just blank, just waiting. ‘We thought you were dead,’ the colonel said. ‘I——saw you——’

‘I did more than that,’ the American captain said. ‘I buried him.’ The old general raised one hand slightly at the captain. He said to the Briton:

‘Yes, Colonel?’

‘It was at Mons, four years ago. I was a subaltern. This man was in my platoon that afternoon when they … caught us. He went down before a lance. I.… saw the point come through his back before the shaft broke. The next two horses galloped over him. On him. I saw that too, afterward. I mean, just for a second or two, how his face looked after the last horse, before I—I mean, what had used to be his face——’ He said, still staring at the corporal, his voice if anything even more urgent because of what its owner had now to cope with: ‘Boggan!’ But still the corporal only looked at him, courteous, attentive, quite blank. Then he turned and said to the old general in French:

‘I’m sorry. I understand only French.’

‘I know that,’ the old general said also in French. He said in English to the Briton: ‘Then this is not the man.’

‘It cant be, sir,’ the colonel said. ‘I saw the head of that lance. I saw his face after the horses——Besides, I—I saw——’ He stopped and sat there, martial and glittering in his red tabs and badges of rank and the chain-wisps symbolising the mail in which the regiment had fought at Crecy and Agincourt seven and eight hundred years ago, with his face above them like death itself.

‘Tell me,’ the old general said gently. ‘You saw what? You saw him again later, afterward? Perhaps I know already—the ghosts of your ancient English bowmen there at Mons?—in leather jerkins and hose and crossbows, and he among them in khaki and a steel helmet and an Enfield rifle? Was that what you saw?’

‘Yes sir,’ the colonel said. Then he sat erect; he said quite loudly: ‘Yes sir.’

‘But if this could be the same man,’ the old general said.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the colonel said.

‘You wont say either way: that he is or is not that man?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the colonel said. ‘I’ve got to believe in something.’

‘Even if only death?’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the colonel said. The old general turned to the American.

‘Captain?’ he said.

‘That puts us all in a fix, doesn’t it?’ the American captain said. ‘All three of us; I dont know who’s worst off. Because I didn’t just see him dead: I buried him, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. His name is—was—no, it cant be because I’m looking at him—wasn’t Brzonyi. At least it wasn’t last year. It was—damn it—I’m sorry sir—is Brzewski. He’s from one of the coal towns back of Pittsburgh. I was the one that buried him. I mean, I commanded the burial party, read the service: you know. We were National Guard; you probably dont know what that means——’

‘I know,’ the old general said.

‘Sir?’ the captain said.

‘I know what you mean,’ the old general said. ‘Continue.’

‘Yes sir.—Civilians, organised our own company ourselves, to go out and die for dear old Rutgers—that sort of thing; elected our officers, notified the government who was to get what commission and then got hold of the Articles of War and tried to memorise as much of it as we could before the commission came back. So when the flu hit us, we were in the transport coming over last October, and when the first one died—it was Brzewski—we found out that none of us had got far enough in the manual to find out how to bury a dead soldier except me—I was a sha—second lieutenant then—and I just happened to have found out by accident the last night before we left because a girl had stood me up and I thought I knew why. I mean, who it was, who the guy was. And you know how it is: you think of all the things to do to get even, make her sorry; you lying dead right there where she’s got to step over you to pass, and it’s too late now and boy, wont that fix her——’

‘Yes,’ the old general said. ‘I know.’

‘Sir?’ the captain said.

‘I know that too,’ the old general said.

‘Of course you do—remember, anyway,’ the captain said. ‘Nobody’s really that old, I dont care how——’ going that far before he managed to stop himself. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said.

‘Dont be,’ the old general said. ‘Continue. So you buried him.’

‘So that night just by chance or curiosity or maybe it was personal interest, I was reading up on what somebody would have to do to get rid of me afterward and make Uncle Sam’s books balance, and so when Br——’ he paused and glanced rapidly at the corporal, but only for a second, even less than that: barely a falter even: ‘—the first one died, I was elected, to certify personally with the M.O. that the body was a dead body and sign the certificate and drill the firing squad and then give the command to dump him overboard. Though by the time we got to Brest two weeks later, all the rest of them had had plenty of practice at it. So you see where that leaves us. I mean, him; he’s the one in the fix: if I buried him in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in October last year, then Colonel Beale couldn’t have seen him killed at Mons in 1914. And if Colonel Beale saw him killed in 1914, he cant be standing here now waiting for you to shoot him tomor——’ He stopped completely. He said quickly: ‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t——’

‘Yes,’ the old general said in his courteous and bland and inflectionless voice. ‘Then Colonel Beale was wrong.’

‘No sir,’ the captain said.

‘Then you wish to retract your statement that this is the man whose death you personally certified and whose body you saw sink into the Atlantic Ocean?’

‘No sir,’ the captain said.

‘So you believe Colonel Beale.’

‘If he says so, sir.’

‘That’s not quite an answer. Do you believe him?’ He watched the captain. The captain looked as steadily back at him. Then the captain said:

‘And that I certified him dead and buried him.’ He said to the corporal, even in a sort of French: ‘So you came back. I’m glad to see you and I hope you had a nice trip,’ and looked back at the old general again, as steadily as he, as courteously and as firm, a good moment this time until the old general said in French:

‘You speak my tongue also.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the captain answered him. ‘No other Frenchman ever called it that.’

‘Do not demean yourself. You speak it well. What is your name?’

‘Middleton, sir.’

‘You have … twenty-five years, perhaps?’

‘Twenty-four, sir.’

‘Twenty-four. Some day you are going to be a very dangerous man, if you are not already so:’ and said to the corporal: ‘Thank you, my child. You may return to your squad,’ and spoke a name over his shoulder without turning his head, though the aide had already come around the table as the corporal about-faced, the aide flanking him back to the door and through it and out, the American captain turning his head back in time to meet for another second yet the quiet and inscrutable eyes, the courteous, bland, almost gentle voice: ‘Because his name is Brzonyi here too.’ He sat back in the chair; again he looked like a masquerading child beneath the illusion of crushing and glittering weight of his blue-and-scarlet and gold and brass and leather, until even the five who were still sitting had the appearance of standing too, surrounding and enclosing him. He said in English: ‘I must leave you presently, for a short time. But Major Blum speaks English. It is not as good as yours of course, nor as good as Captain Middleton’s French, but it should do; one of our allies—Colonel Beale—saw him slain, and the other—Captain Middleton—buried him, so all that remains for us is to witness to his resurrection, and none more competent for that than Major Blum, who was graduated from the Academy into the regiment in 1913 and so was in it before and has been in it ever since the day when this ubiquitous corporal reached it. So the only question is—’ he paused a second; it was as though he had even glanced about at them without even moving: the delicate and fragile body, the delicate face beautiful, serene, and terrifying ‘—who knew him first: Colonel Beale at Mons in August 1914, or Major Blum at Chalons in that same month—before of course Captain Middleton buried him at sea in 1917. But that is merely academic: identity—if there is such—has been established (indeed, it was never disputed): there remains only recapitulation, and Major Blum will do that.’ He stood up; except for the two generals, the others rose quickly too and although he said rapidly: ‘No no, sit down, sit down,’ the three newcomers continued to stand. He turned to the French major. ‘Colonel Beale has his ghostly bowmen in Belgium; at least we can match that with our archangels on the Aisne. Surely you can match that for us—the tremendous aerial shapes patrolling our front, and each time they are thickest, heaviest, densest, most archangelic, our corporal is there too perhaps, pacing with them—the usual night firing going on, just enough to make a sane man keep his head below the trench and be glad he has a trench to keep his head below, yet this corporal is outside the trench, between the parapet and the wire, pacing along as peacefully as a monk in his cloister while the great bright formless shapes pace the dark air beside and above him? or perhaps not even pacing but simply leaning on the wire contemplating that desolation like a farmer his turnip-field? Come, Major.’

‘My imagination wears only a majority, sir,’ the major said. ‘It cannot compete with yours.’

‘Nonsense,’ the old general said. ‘The crime—if any—is already established. If any? established? we did not even need to establish it; he did not even merely accept it in advance: he abrogated it. All that remains now is to find extenuation—pity, if we can persuade him to accept pity. Come, tell them.’

‘There was the girl,’ the major said.

‘Yes,’ the old general said. ‘The wedding and the wine.’

‘No sir,’ the major said. ‘Not quite now. You see, I can—how do you say?—démentir—contredire—say against——’

‘Contradict,’ the American captain said.

‘Thank you,’ the major said. ‘—contradict you here; my majority can cope with simple regimental gossip.’

‘Tell them,’ the old general said. So the major did, though that was after the old general had left the room—a little girl, a child going blind in one of the Aisne towns for lack of an operation which a certain famous Paris surgeon could perform, the corporal levying upon the troops of two nearby divisions, a franc here and two francs there until the surgeon’s fee was raised and the child sent to him. And an old man; he had a wife, daughter and grandson and a little farm in 1914 but waited too long to evacuate it, unable until too late to tear himself away from what he possessed; his daughter and grandson vanished in the confusion which ended at the First Marne battle, his old wife died of exposure on the roadside, the old man returning alone to the village when it was freed again and he could, where, an idiot, name forgotten, grief and all forgotten, only moaning a little, drooling, grubbing for food in the refuse of army kitchens, sleeping in ditches and hedgerows on the spot of earth which he had owned once, until the corporal used one of his leaves to hunt out a remote kinsman of the old man’s in a distant Midi village and levied again on the regiment for enough to send him there.

‘And now,’ the major said. He turned to the American captain. ‘How to say, touché?’

‘You’re out,’ the captain said. ‘And I wish he was still present so I could hear you say it to him.’

‘Bah,’ the major said. ‘He is a Frenchman. It is only a boche marshal that no man can speak to. And now, you’re out, from him to me. Because now the wedding and the wine—’ and told that—a village behind Montfaucon and only this past winter because they were American troops; they had just been paid, a dice game was going on, the floor littered with franc notes and half the American company crowded around them when the French corporal entered and without a word began to gather up the scattered money; for a time a true international incident was in the making until the corporal finally managed to communicate, explain, what it was about: a wedding: one of the young American soldiers, and a girl, an orphan refugee from somewhere beyond Rheims, who was now a sort of slavey in the local estaminet; she and the young American had—had——

‘The rest of his company would say he had knocked her up,’ the American captain said. ‘But we know what you mean. Go on.’ So the major did: the matter ending with the entire company not only attending the wedding but adopting it, taking charge of it, buying up all the wine in the village for the supper and inviting the whole countryside; adopting the marriage too: endowing the bride with a wedding gift sufficient to set up as a lady in her own right, to wait in her own single rented room until—if—her husband returned from his next tour in the lines. But that would be after the old general had left the room; now the three newcomers made way for him as he came around the table and paused and said:

‘Tell them. Tell them how he got the medal too. What we seek now is not even extenuation, not even pity, but mercy—if there is such—if he will accept that either,’ and turned and went on toward the small door: at which moment it opened and the aide who had taken the prisoner out stood at attention beside it for the old general to pass, then followed and closed the door behind them. ‘Yes?’ the old general said.

‘They are in De Montigny’s office,’ the aide said. ‘The youngest one, the girl, is a Frenchwoman. One of the older ones is the wife of a Frenchman, a farmer——’

‘I know,’ the old general said. ‘Where is the farm?’

‘Was, sir,’ the aide said. ‘It was near a village called Vienne-la-pucelle, north of St Mihiel. That country was all evacuated in 1914. On Monday morning Vienne-la-pucelle was under the enemy’s front line.’

‘Then she and her husband dont know whether they have a farm or not,’ the old general said.

‘No sir,’ the aide said.

‘Ah,’ the old general said. Then he said again: ‘Yes?’

‘The motorcar from Villeneuve Blanche has just entered the courtyard.’

‘Good,’ the old general said. ‘My compliments to our guest, and conduct him to my study. Serve his dinner there, and request his permission to receive us in one hour.’

The aide’s office had been contrived three years ago by carpenters out of—or into—a corner of what had been a ballroom and then a courtroom. The aide saw it each twenty-four hours and obviously even entered it at least once during those periods because on a rack in the corner hung his hat and topcoat and a very fine beautifully-furled London umbrella, in juxtaposition to that hat and that coat as bizarre and paradox as a domino or a fan, until you realised that it could quite well have owed its presence there to the same thing which the only other two objects of any note in the room did: two bronzes which sat at either end of the otherwise completely bare desk—a delicate and furious horse poised weightless and epicene on one leg, and a savage and slumbrous head not cast, molded but cut by hand out of the amalgam by Gaudier-Brzeska. Otherwise the cubicle was empty save for a wooden bench against the wall facing the desk. When the old general entered, the three women were sitting on it, the two older ones on the outside and the younger one between them; as he crossed to the desk without yet looking at them, the younger one gave a quick, almost convulsive start, as though to get up, until one of the others stopped her with one hand. Then they sat again, immobile, watching him while he went around the desk and sat down behind the two bronzes and looked at them—the harsh high mountain face which might have been a twin of the corporal’s except for the difference in age, the serene and peaceful one which showed no age at all or perhaps all ages, and between them the strained and anguished one of the girl. Then, as though on a signal, as if she had waited for him to complete the social amenity of sitting too, the peaceful one—she held on her lap a wicker basket neatly covered by an immaculate tucked-in cloth—spoke.

‘I’m glad to see you, anyway,’ she said. ‘You look so exactly like what you are.’

‘Marya,’ the other older one said.

‘Dont be ashamed,’ the first one said. ‘You cant help it. You should be pleased, because so many dont.’ She was already rising. The other said again:

‘Marya,’ and even raised her hand again, but the first one came on to the desk, carrying the basket, beginning to raise her other hand as though to approach the basket with it as she reached the desk, then extending the hand until it lay on the desk. It now held a long-handled iron spoon.

‘That nice young man,’ she said. ‘At least you should be ashamed of that. Sending him out to tramp about the city at night with all those soldiers.’

‘The fresh air will be good for him,’ the old general said. ‘He doesn’t get much of it in here.’

‘You could have told him.’

‘I never said you had it. I only said I believed you could produce it when it was needed.’

‘Here it is.’ She released the spoon and laid that hand lightly on the one which held the tucked-in and undisturbed basket. Then immediately and peacefully but without haste she smiled at him, serene and uncritical. ‘You really cant help it, can you? You really cant.’

‘Marya,’ the woman on the bench said. Again immediately but without haste, the smile went away. It was not replaced by anything: it just went away, leaving the face unchanged, uncritical, serene.

‘Yes, Sister,’ she said. She turned and went back to the bench where the other woman had risen now; again the girl had made that convulsive start to rise too; this time the tall woman’s hard thin peasant hand was gripping her shoulder, holding her down.

‘This is——’ the old general said.

‘His wife,’ the tall woman said harshly. ‘Who did you expect it to be?’

‘Ah yes,’ the old general said, looking at the girl; he said, in that gentle inflectionless voice: ‘Marseilles? Toulon perhaps?’ then named the street, the district, pronouncing the street name which was its by-word. The woman started to answer but the old general raised his hand at her. ‘Let her answer,’ he said, then to the girl: ‘My child? A little louder.’

‘Yes sir,’ the girl said.

‘Oh yes,’ the woman said. ‘A whore. How else do you think she got here—got the papers to come this far, to this place, except to serve France also?’

‘But his wife too,’ the old general said.

‘His wife now,’ the woman corrected. ‘Accept that, whether you believe it or not.’

‘I do both,’ the old general said. ‘Accept that from me too.’ Then she moved, released the girl’s shoulder and came toward the desk, almost to it in fact, then stopping as though at the exact spot from which her voice would be only a murmur to the two still on the bench when she spoke:

‘Do you want to send them out first?’

‘Why?’ the old general said. ‘So you are Magda.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Not Marthe: Magda. I wasn’t Marthe until after I had a brother and had to cross half of Europe to face thirty years later the French general who would hold the refusal of his life. Not gift: refusal; and even that’s wrong: the taking back of it.’ She stood, tall, still, looking down at him. ‘So you even knew us. I was about to say “Not remembered us, because you never saw us”. But maybe that’s wrong too and you did see us then. If you did, you would remember us even if I wasn’t but nine then and Marya eleven, because as soon as I saw your face tonight I knew that it would never need to flee, hide from, fear or dread or grieve at having to remember anything it ever looked at. Marya might fail to see that maybe—Marya now too, since she also had to come all the way to France to watch the refusal of her half-brother’s life, even if she doesn’t need to fear or dread or grieve at having to remember either—but not I. Maybe Marya is why you remember us if you saw us then: because she was eleven then and in our country girls at eleven are not girls anymore, but women. But I wont say that, not because of the insult that would be even to our mother, let alone to you—our mother who had something in her—I dont mean her face—which did not belong in that village—that village? in all our mountains, all that country—while what you must have had—had? have—in you is something which all the earth had better beware and dread and be afraid of. The insult would have been to evil itself. I dont mean just that evil. I mean Evil, as if there was a purity in it, a severity, a jealousy like in God—a strictness of untruth incapable of compromise or second-best or substitute. A purpose, an aim in it, as though not just our mother but you neither could help yourselves; and not just you but our—mine and Marya’s—father too: not two of you but three of you doing not what you would but what you must. That people, men and women, dont choose evil and accept it and enter it, but evil chooses the men and women by test and trial, proves and tests them and then accepts them forever until the time comes when they are consumed and empty and at last fail evil because they no longer have anything that evil can want or use; then it destroys them. So it wasn’t just you, a stranger happened by accident into a country so far away and hard to get to that whole generations of us are born and live and die in it without even knowing or wondering or caring what might be on the other side of our mountains or even if the earth extends there. Not just a man come there by chance, having already whatever he would need to charm, trance, bewitch a weak and vulnerable woman, then finding a woman who was not only weak and vulnerable but beautiful too—oh yes, beautiful; if that was what you had had to plead, her beauty and your love, my face would have been the first to forgive you, since the jealousy would be not yours but hers—just to destroy her home, her husband’s faith, her children’s peace, and at last her life,—to drive her husband to repudiate her just to leave her children fatherless, then her to die in childbirth in a cow-byre behind a roadside inn just to leave them orphans, then at last have the right—privilege—duty, whatever you want to call it—to condemn that last and only male child to death just that the name which she betrayed shall be no more. Because that’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. It must be something much bigger than that, much more splendid, much more terrible: not our father gone all that long distance from our valley to seek a beautiful face to be the mother of his name’s succession, then finding instead the fatal and calamitous one which would end it; not you blundered there by chance, but sent there to meet that beautiful and fatal face; not her so weak in pride and virtue, but rather doomed by that face from them;—not the three of you compelled there just to efface a name from man’s history, because who on earth outside our valley ever heard that name, or cares? but instead to create a son for one of you to condemn to death as though to save the earth, save the world, save man’s history, save mankind.’

She brought both hands up in front of her and let them rest there, the fist of one lying in the other palm. ‘Of course you knew us. My folly was in even thinking I would need to bring you proof. So now I dont know just what to do with it, when to use it, like a knife capable of only one stroke or a pistol with just one bullet, which I cant afford to risk too soon and dare not wait too late. Maybe you even know the rest of it already too; I remember how wrong I was that you would not know who we are. Maybe your face is telling me now that you already know the rest of it, end of it, even if you weren’t there, had served your destiny—or anyway hers—and gone away.’

‘Tell me then,’ the old general said.

‘—if I must? Is that it? the ribbons and stars and braid that turned forty years of spears and bullets, yet not one of them to stop a woman’s tongue?—Or try to tell you, that is, because I dont know; I was only nine then, I only saw and remembered; Marya too, even if she was eleven, because even then she already didn’t need to dread or grieve for anything just because her face had looked at it. Not that we needed to look at this because it had been there all our lives, most of the valley’s too. It was already ours, our—the valley’s—pride (with a little awe in it) as another one might have a peak or glacier or waterfall—that speck, that blank white wall or dome or tower—whatever it was—which was first in all our valley that the sun touched and the last that lost it, still holding light long after the gulch we crouched in had lost what little it had ever snared. Yet it wasn’t high either; high wasn’t the right word either; you couldn’t—we didn’t—measure where it was that way. It was just higher than any of our men, even herdsmen and hunters, ever went. Not higher than they could but than they did, dared; no shrine or holy place because we knew them too and even the kind of men that lived in, haunted, served them; mountain men too before they were priests because we knew their fathers and our fathers had known their grandfathers, so they would be priests only afterward with what was left. Instead, it was an eyrie like where eagles nested, where people—men—came as if through the air itself (you), leaving no more trace of coming or arriving (yes, you) or departing (oh yes, you) than eagles would (oh yes, you too; if Marya and I ever saw you then, we did not remember it, nor when you saw us if you ever did except for our mother’s telling; I almost said If our father himself ever saw you in the flesh because of course he did, you would have seen to that yourself: a gentleman honorable in gentleman fashion and brave too since it would have taken courage, our father having already lost too much for that little else to be dear spending), come there not to tremble on their knees on stone floors, but to think. To think: not that dreamy hoping and wishing and believing (but mainly just waiting) that we would think is thinking, but some fierce and rigid concentration that at any time—tomorrow, today, next moment, this one—will change the shape of the earth.

‘Not high, just high enough to stand between us and the sky like a way-station to heaven, so no wonder when we died the rest of us believed the soul hadn’t stopped there maybe but at least had paused to surrender half the coupon; no wonder when our mother was gone for that week in the spring, Marya and I knew where she had gone to; not dead: we had buried nothing, so she wouldn’t have to pass it. But certainly there, since where else could she be—that face which had never belonged to, had no place in, our valley from the beginning, not to mention what we, even her children, had felt, sensed, behind that face which had no place in our mountains, among our kind of people anywhere; where else but there? not to think, to be accepted into that awesome and tremendous condition, because even her face and what was behind it could not match that, but at least to breathe, bathe in the lambence of that furious meditation. The wonder was that she came back. Not the valley’s wonder but mine and Marya’s too. Because we were children, we didn’t know: we only watched and saw and knitted, knotted, tried to, what simple threads we had of implication; to us it was simply that the face, that something—whatever it was—in her that had never been ours and our father’s anyway even if it had been wife to one and mother to the others, had at last simply done what from the beginning it had been doomed to do. Yet she came back. She didn’t change forever that house, home, life and all, she had already done that by leaving as she did and coming back to it only compounded what she had already left there; she had been alien and a passing guest always anyhow, she couldn’t possibly come back any more so. So Marya and I, even children, knew even more than the valley did that it couldn’t last. The child, another child, a new brother or sister or whichever it would be next winter, meant nothing to us. Even if we were children, we knew about babies; who so young in our country as not to know, since in our country, our hard and unpiteous mountains, people used, had to use, needed, required, had nothing else to use, children as people in lands savage with dangerous animals used guns and bullets: to defend, preserve themselves, endure; we didn’t see, as our father did, that child not the brand of sin but incontrovertible proof of something which otherwise he might have schooled himself to bear. He didn’t turn her out of his house. Dont think that. It was us—she. He was just going to leave himself, put home, past, all the dreams and hopes that people call home; the rage, the impotence, the outraged masculinity—oh yes, heartbreak too: why not?—all behind him. It was she who cut that cord and left, swollen belly and all because it could not be long now, it was already winter and maybe we couldn’t compute gestation but we had seen enough swelled female bellies to guess approximations.

‘So we left. It was at night, after dark. He had left right after supper, we didn’t know where, and now I would say, maybe just hunting dark and solitude and space and silence for what wasn’t there or anywhere else for him either. And I know now why the direction we—she—took was west too, and where the money came from that we had for a while too until we couldn’t pay for riding anymore and had to walk, because she—we—took nothing from that house except the clothes we wore and our shawls and a little food which Marya carried in that same basket yonder. And I could say here also: “But you were safe; it was not enough” except that I dont, not to you who have in you what all heaven too might do well to blench at. So we walked then, and still westward: who might not have learned to think in that place during that week but at least she had memorised something of geography. Then there was no more food except what we could beg, but it would not be long now even if we had had money left to ride with too. Then that night, it was already winter when we left home and now it was Christmas, the eve before; and now I dont remember if we were driven from the inn itself or just turned away or maybe perhaps it was our mother still who would cut even that cord too with man. I remember only the straw, the dark stable and the cold, nor whether it was Marya or I who ran back through the snow to beat on the closed kitchen door until someone came—only the light at last, the lantern, the strange and alien faces crowding downward above us, then the blood and lymph and wet: I, a child of nine and an eleven-year-old idiot sister trying to hide into what privacy we could that outraged betrayed abandon and forsaken nakedness while her closed hand fumbled at mine and she tried to speak, the hand still gripping, holding onto it even after I had given my word, my promise, my oath——’

She stood looking down at him, the closed fist of the one hand lying in the palm of the other. ‘Not for you: for him. No, that’s wrong; it was already for you, for this moment, that night thirty-five years ago when she first gripped it into my hand and tried to speak; I must have known even at nine that I would cross half of Europe to bring it to you some day, just as I must have known even at nine how vain the bringing it would be. A fate, a doom communicated, imposed on me by the mere touch of it against my flesh, before I even opened it to look inside and divine, surmise who the face belonged to, even before I—we—found the purse, the money which was to bring us here. Oh you were generous; nobody denied that. Because how could you have known that the money which was to have bought you immunity from the consequence of your youthful folly—a dowry if the child should be a girl, a tilted scrap of pasture and a flock to graze it if a boy, and a wife for him in time and so even the same grandchildren to immobilise your folly’s partner forever beyond the geographic range of your vulnerability—would instead accomplish the exact opposite by paying our passage to Beirut and—with what was left over—becoming what was its original intent: a dowry?

‘Because we could have stayed there, in our mountains, our country, among people whose kind we knew and whose kind knew us. We could have stayed right there at the inn, the village where we were because people are really kind, they really are capable of pity and compassion for the weak and orphaned and helpless because it is pity and compassion and they are weak and helpless and orphaned and people though of course you cannot, dare not believe that: who dare believe only that people are to be bought and used empty and then thrown away. In fact we did stay there for almost ten years. We worked of course, at the inn—in the kitchen, with the milk cows; in—for—the village too; being witless Marya had a way with simple unmartial creatures like cows and geese which were content to be simple cows and geese instead of lions and stags: but then so would we have worked back home, which was where for all their kindness, perhaps because of their kindness, they tried at first to persuade us to return.

‘But not I. The doom might have been his, but the curse to hurry it, consummate it, at least was mine; I was the one now wearing the secret talisman, token, not to remember, cherish: no tender memento of devoted troth nor plighted desertion either: but lying instead against my flesh beneath my dress like a brand a fever a coal a goad driving me (I was his mother now; the doom that moved him would have to move me first; already at nine and ten and eleven I was the mother of two—the infant brother and the idiot sister two years my senior too—until at Beirut I found a father for them both) toward the day the hour the moment the instant when with his same blood he would discharge the one and expiate the other. Yes, the doom was his but at least I was its handmaiden: to bring you this, I must bring you the reason for its need too; to bring you this I must bring with me into your orbit the very object which would constitute and make imperative that need. Worse: by bringing it into your orbit I myself created the need which the token, the last desperate cast remaining to me, would be incapable of discharging.

‘A curse and doom which in time was to corrupt the very kindly circumambience which harbored us because already you are trying to ask how in the world we managed to have to pass through Asia Minor in order to reach Western Europe, and I will tell you. It was not us. It was the village. No: it was all of us together: a confederation. France: a word a name a designation significant yet foundationless like the ones for grace or Tuesday or quarantine, esoteric and infrequent not just to us but to the ignorant and kindly people among whom we had found orphaned and homeless haven: who had barely heard of France either and did not care until our advent among them: whereupon it was as though they had established a living rapport with it through, by means of us who did not even know where it was except West and that we—I, dragging the other two with me—must go there: until presently we were known to the whole village—valley, district—as the little Franchini: the three who were going to—bound for—dedicated for—France as others might be for some distant and irrevocable state or condition like a nunnery or the top of Mount Everest—not heaven; everybody believes he will be on his way there just as soon as he finds time to really concentrate on it—but some peculiar and individual esoteric place to which no one really wants to go save in idle speculation yet which reflects a certain communal glory on the place which was host to the departure and witnessed the preparations.

‘Because we had never heard of Beirut at all; it required older and more worldly than us to have known that Beirut even was, let alone that there was a French colony there, a garrison, official—in effect France, the nearest France to where we were. That is, the real France might have been nearer but that was overland and therefore expensive and we were poor; what we had to travel on was time and leisure. There was the purse of course which probably wouldn’t have taken all three of us to France the quickest route anyway, even if there had not been a better reason than that to save the purse. So we spent what we had the most of, travelling as only the very poor or the very rich can; only they travel rapidly who are too rich to have time and too poor to have leisure: by sea, spending only enough of the purse to set the three of us in the nearest available official authentic fringe of France and still leave as much as possible over. Because I was nineteen now and in me we had now something even more mutually compoundable than the purse, of which we needed only enough to set me, not empty-handed, into the quickest marriage-range of the French husband who would be the passport of all three of us into the country where our brother’s destiny waited for him.

‘That was why Beirut. I had never heard of it but why should I have doubted when the village didn’t? any more that in its or God’s good time Beirut would appear at the end of the ship, the voyage than that the French husband would be waiting for me there. Which he was. I had never even heard his name before and I dont even recall all the circumstances of our meeting: only that it was not long and he was—is—a good man and has been a good husband to me and brother to Marya and father to him of whom I am apparently to have all the anguishes save the initial one of having borne him, and I have tried—will still try—to be a good wife to him. He was a soldier in the garrison. That is, doing his military service because he was bred a farmer and his time was just up; oh yes, it was that close; one more day and I would have missed him, which should have told me, warned me that what faced us was doom, not destiny, since only destiny is clumsy, inefficient, procrastinative, while doom never is. But I didn’t know that then. I knew only that we must reach France, which we did: the farm—I wont even bother to tell you where it is——’

‘I know where it is,’ the old general said. She had been immobile all the while so she couldn’t become stiller—a tall figure breathing so quietly that she didn’t seem to be doing that either, clasping the closed fist into the other motionless palm, looking down at him.

‘So we have already come to that,’ she said. ‘Of course you have learned where the farm is; how else could you know what spot to hesitate to give me permission to bury the flesh and bone of the flesh and bone you loved once—lusted after once at least—in? You even know already in advance the request I’ll finally demand of you, since we both know now that this—’ without uncrossing her hands she moved the closed one slightly then returned it to the other palm ‘—will be in vain.’

‘Yes,’ the old general said. ‘I know that too.’

‘And granted in advance too, since by that time he’ll be no more a threat? No no, dont answer yet; let me believe a little longer that I could never have believed that anyone, not even you, could any more control the flux of the bowels of natural compassion than he could his physical ones. Where was I? oh yes, the farm. In that ship to Beirut I had heard them talk of landfall and harbor; by Beirut I even knew what haven meant and now at last in France I believed that we—he—had found them. Home: who had never known one before: four walls and a hearth to come back to at the end of day because they were mutually his walls and hearth; work to be done not for pay or the privilege of sleeping in a hay-loft or left-over food at a kitchen door but because the finished task was mutually his too to choose between its neglect and its completion. Because already he was not just a natural farmer: he was a good one, as though that half of his blood and background and heritage which was peasant had slept in untimed suspension until his destiny found and matched him with land, earth good and broad and rich and deep enough, so that by the end of the second year he was my husband’s heir and would still be co-heir even if we had children of our own. And not just home but fatherland too; he was already a French subject; in ten more years he would be a French citizen too, a citizen of France, a Frenchman to all effect and purpose, and his very nameless origin would be as though it had never been.

‘So now at last we—I, he—could forget you. No, not that: we couldn’t forget you because you were why we were where we were, had at last found the harbor, haven where as they said in the ship, we could drop anchor and make fast and secure. Besides, he couldn’t very well forget you because he had never heard of you yet. It was rather that I forgave you. Now at last I could stop seeking you, harrying, dragging two other people over the earth in order to find and face and reproach, compel, whatever it would be; remember, I was a child still even if I had been the mother of two since I was nine years old. It was as though it had been I in my ignorance who had misread you and owed you the apology and the shame where you in your wisdom had known all the time the one restitution for which he was fitted; that, because of that ineradicable peasant other half of his origin, any other relationship, juxtaposition, with you would have brought him only disaster, perhaps even to the point of destroying him. Oh yes, I believed now that you already knew this history, not only where we were but how and what we were doing there, hoped—yes, believed—there, that you had deliberately arranged and planned it to be even if you may not quite have anticipated that I should establish it intact on your own doorstep—haven and harbor and home not just for him but us too, Marya and me too: all four of us, not just yourself and the one you had begot but the other two whose origin you had had no part in, all branded forever more into one irremediable kinship by that one same passion which had created three of our lives and altered forever the course or anyway the pattern of your own; the four of us together even obliterating that passion’s irremediable past in which you had not participated: in your own get you dispossessed your predecessor; in Marya and me you effaced even his seniority; and in Marya, her first child, you even affirmed to yourself the trophy of its virginity. More: in the two of us—not Marya this time because, unrational and witless, she was incapable of threatening you and, herself innocent of harm, was herself invulnerable even to you since the witless know only loss and absence: never bereavement—but he and I were not only your absolution but even your expiation too, as though in your design’s first completion you had even foreseen this moment here now and had decreed already to me in proxy the last right and privilege of your dead abandoned paramour: to vaunt her virtue for constancy at the same time she heaped on you the reproach of her fall.

‘So I didn’t even need to forgive you either: we were all four one now in that workable mutual neither compassionate nor uncompassionate armistice and none of us neither needed or had the time to waste forgiving or reproaching one another because we would all be busy enough in supporting, balancing that condition of your expiation and our—his—reparations whose instrument you had been. Nor had I ever seen your face to remember either and now I began to believe that I never would, never would have to: that even when—if—the moment ever came when you would have, could no longer evade having, to face one another he alone would be enough and he would not require my ratification or support. No, it was the past itself which I had forgiven, could at last forgive now: swapped all that bitter and outraged impotence for the home—harbor—haven which was within the range of his capacities, which he was fitted and equipped for—more: would have chosen himself if he had had the choice—whose instrument you in your anonymity had been whether you actually intended for it to be in France or not, where, since he was free of you, the two others of us could be also. Then his military class was called. He went almost eagerly—not that he could have done else as I know, but then so do you know that there are ways and still ways of accepting what you have no choice of refusing. But he went almost eagerly and served his tour—I almost said time but didn’t I just say he went almost eagerly?—and came back home and then I believed that he was free of you—that you and he also had struck a balance, an armistice in liability and threat; he was a French citizen and a Frenchman now not only legally but morally too since the date of his birth proved his right to the one and he had just doffed the uniform in which he himself had proved his right and worthiness to the other; not only was he free of you but each of you were free now of the other: you absolved of the liability since, having given him life, you had now created for him security and dignity in which to end it and so you owed him nothing; he absolved of threat since you no longer harmed him now and so you didn’t need to fear him anymore.

‘Yes, free of you at last, or so I thought. Or you were free of him that is, since he was the one who had better be afraid. If any minuscule of danger still remained for you in him, he himself would eradicate it now by the surest means of all: marriage, a wife and family; so many economic responsibilities to bear and discharge that he would have no time over to dream of his moral rights; a family, children: that strongest and most indissoluble bond of all to anneal him harmless forever more into his present and commit him irrevocable to his future and insulate him for good and always from the griefs and anguishes (he had none of course in the sense I mean because he still had never heard of you) of his past. But it seems that I was wrong. Wrong always in regard to you, wrong every time in what I thought you thought or felt or feared from him. Never more wrong than now, when apparently you had come to believe that bribing him with independence of you had merely scotched the snake, not killed it, and marriage would compound his threat in children any one of which might prove impervious to the bribe of a farm. Any marriage, even this one. And at first it looked like your own blood was trying to fend and shield you from this threat as though in a sort of instinctive filial loyalty. We had long ago designed marriage for him and, now that he was free, grown, a man, a citizen, heir to the farm because we—my husband and I—knew now that we would have no children, his military service forever (so we thought then) behind him, we began to plan one. Except that he refused twice, declined twice the candidates virtuous and solvent and suitable which we picked for him, and still in such a way that we could never tell if it was the girl he said no to or the institution. Perhaps both, being your son though as far as I know he still didn’t know you even existed; perhaps both, having inherited both from you: the repudiation of the institution since his own origin had done without it; the choicy choosing of a partner since with him once passion had had to be enough because it was all and he in his turn felt, desired, believed that he deserved, no less to match his own inheritance with.

‘Or was it even worse than that to you: your own son truly, demanding not even revenge on you but vengeance: refusing the two we picked who were not only solvent but virtuous too, for that one who had not even sold the one for the other but in bartering one had trafficked them both away? I didn’t know, we didn’t know: only that he had refused, declined, and still in that way I told you of less of refusal than negation, so that we just thought he wasn’t ready yet, that he still wanted a little more of that young man’s bachelor and tieless freedom which he had only regained—regained? found—yesterday when he doffed the uniform. So we could wait too and we did; more time passed but we still thought there was enough of it since marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it. Then—suddenly, with no warning to us who knew only work and bread, not politics and glory—it was 1914 and whether there had been time enough or not or he had been right to wait or not didn’t matter. Because he didn’t wait now either; he was gone that first week in the old uniform still stinking of the mothballs from the garret trunk but even that was no quicker nor faster than we were; you know where the farm is—was (no: still is since it will have to still be there in order to be a basis for what you will finally grant us) so I dont need to tell you how we left it either since a part of your trade is coping with the confused and anguished mass of the civilian homeless in order to make room for your victories.

‘He didn’t even wait to be called by his class. A stranger might have guessed it to be a young bachelor accepting even war as a last desperate cast to escape matrimony, but that stranger would be wrong of course, as he himself proved two years later. But we knew better. He was a Frenchman now. All France asked of him in return for that dignity and right and that security and independence was his willingness to defend it and them, and he had gone to do that. Then suddenly all France (all western Europe too for that matter) was loud with your name; every child even in France knew your face because you would save us—you, to be supreme of all, not to command our armies and the armies of our allies because they did not need to be commanded since the terror and the threat was their terror and threat too and all they needed was to be led, comforted, reassured and you were the one to do that because they had faith in you, believed in you. But I knew more. Not better: just more; I had only to match almost any newspaper with this—’ again she moved slightly the closed hand lying in the other palm ‘—and now I knew not only who you were but what you were and where you were. No no, you didn’t start this war just to further prove him as your son and a Frenchman, but rather since this war had to be, his own destiny, fate would use it to prove him to his father. You see? you and he together to be one in the saving of France, he in his humble place and you in your high and matchless one and victory itself would be that day when at last you would see one another face to face, he rankless still save for the proven bravery and constancy and devotion which the medal you would fasten to his breast would symbolise and affirm.

‘It was the girl of course; his revenge and vengeance on you which you feared: a whore, a Marseilles whore to mother the grandchildren of your high and exalted blood. He told us of her on his leave in the second year. We—I—said no of course too, but then he had that of you also: the capacity to follow his will always. Oh yes, he told us of her: a good girl he said, leading through her own fate, necessity, compulsions (there is an old grandmother) a life which was not her life. And he was right. We saw that as soon as he brought her to us. She is a good girl, now anyway, since then anyway, maybe always a good girl as he believed or maybe only since she loved him. Anyway, who are we to challenge him and her, if what this proves is what love can do: save a woman as well as doom her. But no matter now. You will never believe, perhaps you dare not risk it, chance it, that he would never have made any claim on you: that this whore’s children would bear not his father’s name but my father’s. You would never believe that they would never any more know whose blood they carried than he would have known except for this. But it’s too late now. That’s all over now; I had imagined you facing him for the first time on that last victorious field while you fastened a medal to his coat; instead you will see him for the first time—no, you wont even see him; you wont even be there—tied to a post, you to see him—if you were to see him, which you will not—over the shoulders and the aimed rifles of a firing-squad.’

The hand, the closed one, flicked, jerked, so fast that the eye almost failed to register it and the object seemed to gleam once in the air before it even appeared, already tumbling across the vacant top of the desk until it sprang open as though of its own accord and came to rest—a small locket of chased worn gold, opening like a hunting-case watch upon twin medallions, miniatures painted on ivory. ‘So you actually had a mother. You really did. When I first saw the second face inside it that night, I thought it was your wife or sweetheart or mistress, and I hated you. But I know better now and I apologise for imputing to your character a capacity so weak as to have earned the human warmth of hatred.’ She looked down at him. ‘So I did wait too late to produce it, after all. No, that’s wrong too. Any moment would have been too late; any moment I might have chosen to use it as a weapon the pistol would have misfired, the knife-blade shattered at the stroke. So of course you know what my next request will be.’

‘I know it,’ the old general said.

‘And granted in advance of course, since then he can no longer threaten you. But at least it’s not too late for him to receive the locket, even though it cannot save him. At least you can tell me that. Come. Say it: At least it’s not too late for him to receive it.’

‘It’s not too late,’ the old general said.

‘So he must die.’ They looked at one another. ‘Your own son.’

‘Then will he not merely inherit from me at thirty what I had already bequeathed to him at birth?’

By its size and location, the room which the old general called his study had probably been the chamber, cell of the old marquise’s favorite lady-in-waiting or perhaps tiring-woman, though by its appearance now it might have been a library lifted bodily from an English country home and then reft of the books and furnishings. The shelves were empty now except for one wall, and those empty too save for a brief row of the text-books and manuals of the old general’s trade, stacked neatly at one end of one shelf. Beneath this, against the wall, was a single narrow army cot pillowless beneath a neatly and immaculately drawn gray army blanket; at the foot of it sat the old general’s battered field desk. Otherwise the room contained a heavyish, Victorian-looking, almost American-looking table surrounded by four chairs in which the four generals were sitting. The table had been cleared of the remains of the German general’s meal; an orderly was just going out with the final tray of soiled dishes. Before the old general sat a coffee service and its cups and a tray of decanters and glasses. The old general filled the cups and passed them. Then he took up one of the decanters.

‘Schnaps, General, of course,’ he said to the German general.

‘Thanks,’ the German general said. The old general filled and passed the glass. The old general didn’t speak to the British general at all, he simply passed the port decanter and an empty glass to him, then a second empty glass.

‘Since General (he called the American general’s name) is already on your left.’ He said to no one directly, calling the American general’s name again: ‘—doesn’t drink after dinner, as a rule. Though without doubt he will void it tonight.’ Then to the American: ‘Unless you will have brandy too?’

‘Port, thank you, General,’ the American said. ‘Since we are only recessing an alliance: not abrogating it.’

‘Bah,’ the German general said. He sat rigid, bright with medals, the ground glass monocle (it had neither cord nor ribbon; it was not on his face, his head like an ear, but set as though inevictable into the socket of his right eye like an eyeball itself) fixed in a rigid opaque glare at the American general. ‘Alliances. That is what is wrong each time. The mistake we—us, and you—and you—and you—’ his hard and rigid stare jerking from face to face as he spoke ‘—have made always each time as though we will never learn. And this time, we are going to pay for it. Oh yes, we. Dont you realise that we know as well as you do what is happening, what is going to be the end of this by another twelve months? twelve months? bah. It wont last twelve months; another winter will see it. We know better than you do—’ to the British general ‘—because you are on the run now and do not have time to do anything else. Even if you were not running, you probably would not realise it, because you are not a martial people. But we are. Our national destiny is for glory and war; they are not mysteries to us and so we know what we are looking at. So we will pay for that mistake. And since we will, you—and you—and you—’ the cold and lifeless glare stopping again at the American ‘—who only think you came in late enough to gain at little risk—must pay also.’ Then he was looking at none of them; it was almost as though he had drawn one rapid quiet and calming inhalation, still rigid though and still composed. ‘But you will excuse me, please. It is too late for that now—this time. Our problem now is the immediate one. Also, first——’ He rose, tossing his crumpled napkin onto the table and picking up the filled brandy glass, so rapidly that his chair scraped back across the floor and would have crashed over had not the American general put out a quick hand and saved it, the German general standing rigid, the brandy glass raised, his close uniform as unwrinkleable as mail against the easy coat of the Briton like the comfortable jacket of a game-keeper, and the American’s like a tailor-made costume for a masquerade in which he would represent the soldier of fifty years ago, and the old general’s which looked like a wife had got it out of a moth-balled attic trunk and cut some of it off and stitched some braid and ribbons and buttons on what remained. ‘Hoch!’ the German general said and tossed the brandy down and with the same motion flung the empty glass over his shoulder to crash against the wall.

‘Hoch,’ the old general said courteously. He drank too but he set his empty glass back on the table. ‘You must excuse us,’ he said. ‘We are not situated as you are; we cannot afford to break French glasses.’ He took another brandy glass from the tray and began to fill it. ‘Be seated, General,’ he said. The German general didn’t move.