A Fable

Thursday

Thursday Night

This time it was a bedroom. The grave and noble face was framed by a pillow, looking at him from beneath a flannel nightcap tied under the chin. The nightshirt was flannel too, open at the throat to reveal a small cloth bag, not new and not very clean and apparently containing something which smelled like asafoetida, on a soiled string like a necklace. The youth stood beside the bed in a brocade dressing gown.

‘They were blank shells,’ the runner said in his light dry voice. ‘The aeroplane—all four of them—flew right through the bursts. The German one never even deviated, not even going fast, even when one of ours hung right on its tail from about fifty feet for more than a minute while I could actually see the tracer going into it. The same one—aeroplane—ours—dove at us, at me; I even felt one of whatever it was coming out of the gun hit me on the leg here. It was like when a child blows a garden pea at you through a tube except for the smell, the stink, the burning phosphorus. There was a German general in it, you see. I mean, in the German one. There had to be; either we had to send someone there or they had to send someone here. And since we—or the French—were the ones who started it, thought of it first, obviously it would be our right—privilege—duty to be host. Only it would have to look all right from beneath; they couldn’t—couldn’t dare anyway—issue a synchronised simultaneous order for every man on both sides to shut their eyes and count a hundred so they had to do the next best thing to make it look all regular, all orthodox to anyone they couldn’t hide it from——’

‘What?’ the old Negro said.

‘Dont you see yet? It’s because they cant afford to let it stop like this. I mean, let us stop it. They dont dare. If they ever let us find out that we can stop a war as simply as men tired of digging a ditch decide calmly and quietly to stop digging the ditch——’

‘I mean that suit,’ the old Negro said. ‘That policeman’s suit. You just took it, didn’t you?’

‘I had to,’ the runner said with that peaceful and terrible patience. ‘I had to get out. To get back in too. At least back to where I hid my uniform. It used to be difficult enough to pass either way, in or out. But now it will be almost impossible to get back in. But dont worry about that; all I need——’

‘Is he dead?’ the old Negro said.

‘What?’ the runner said. ‘Oh, the policeman. I dont know. Probably not.’ He said with a sort of amazement: ‘I hope not.’ He said: ‘I knew night before last—two nights ago, Tuesday night—what they were planning to do, though of course I had no proof then. I tried to tell him. But you know him, you’ve probably tried yourself to tell him something you couldn’t prove or that he didn’t want to believe. So I’ll need something else. Not to prove it to him, make him believe it: there’s not time enough left to waste that way. That’s why I came here. I want you to make me a Mason too. Or maybe there’s not even time for that either. So just show me the sign—like this——’ he jerked, flicked his hand low against his flank, as near as he had been able to divine at the time or anyway remember now from the man two years ago on the day he joined the battalion.

‘That will be enough. It will have to be; I’ll bluff the rest of it through——’

‘Wait,’ the old Negro said. ‘Tell me slow.’

‘I’m trying to,’ the runner said with that terrible patience. ‘Every man in the battalion owes him his pay for weeks ahead, provided they live long enough to earn it and he lives long enough to collect it from them. He did it by making them all Masons or anyway making them believe they are Masons. He owns them, you see. They cant refuse him. All he will need to do is——’

‘Wait,’ the old Negro said. ‘Wait.’

‘Dont you see?’ the runner said. ‘If all of us, the whole battalion, at least one battalion, one unit out of the whole line to start it, to lead the way—leave the rifles and grenades and all behind us in the trench: simply climb barehanded out over the parapet and through the wire and then just walk on barehanded, not with our hands up for surrender but just open to show that we had nothing to hurt, harm anyone; not running, stumbling: just walking forward like free men,—just one of us, one man; suppose just one man, then multiply him by a battalion; suppose a whole battalion of us, who want nothing except just to go home and get themselves clean into clean clothes and work and drink a little beer in the evening and talk and then lie down and sleep and not be afraid. And maybe, just maybe that many Germans who dont want anything more too, or maybe just one German who doesn’t want more than that, to put his or their rifles and grenades down and climb out too with their hands empty too not for surrender but just so every man could see there is nothing in them to hurt or harm either——’

‘Suppose they dont,’ the old Negro said. ‘Suppose they shoot at us.’ But the runner didn’t even hear the us. He was still talking.

‘Wont they shoot at us tomorrow anyway, as soon as they have recovered from the fright? as soon as the people at Chaulnesmont and Paris and Poperinghe and whoever it was in that German aeroplane this afternoon have had time to meet and compare notes and decide exactly where the threat, danger is, and eradicate it and then start the war again: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow until the last formal rule of the game has been fulfilled and discharged and the last ruined player removed from sight and the victory immolated like a football trophy in a club-house show-case. That’s all I want. That’s all I’m trying to do. But you may be right. So you tell me.’

The old Negro groaned. He groaned peacefully. One hand came out from beneath the covers and turned them back and he swung his legs toward the edge of the bed and said to the youth in the dressing gown: ‘Hand me my shoes and britches.’

‘Listen to me,’ the runner said. ‘There’s not time. It will be daylight in two hours and I’ve got to get back. Just show me how to make the sign, the signal.’

‘You cant learn it right in that time,’ the old Negro said. ‘And even if you could, I’m going too. Maybe this is what I been hunting for too.’

‘Didn’t you just say the Germans might shoot at us?’ the runner said. ‘Dont you see? That’s it, that’s the risk: if some of the Germans do come out. Then they will shoot at us, both of them, their side and ours too—put a barrage down on all of us. They’ll have to. There wont be anything else for them to do.’

‘So your mind done changed about it,’ the old Negro said.

‘Just show me the sign, the signal,’ the runner said. Again the old Negro groaned, peaceful, almost inattentive, swinging his legs on out of the bed. The innocent and unblemished corporal’s uniform was hanging neatly on a chair, the shoes and the socks were placed neatly beneath it. The youth had picked them up and he now knelt beside the bed, holding one of the socks open for the old Negro’s foot. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ the runner said.

‘Aint we already got enough ahead of us without bringing that up?’ the old Negro said pettishly. ‘And I know what you’re fixing to say next: How am I going to get up there? And I can answer that: I never had no trouble getting here to France; I reckon I can make them other just sixty miles. And I know what you are fixing to say after that one too: I cant wear this French suit up there neither, without no general with me. Only I dont need to answer that one because you done already answered it.’

‘Kill a British soldier this time?’ the runner said.

‘You said he wasn’t dead.’

‘I said maybe he wasn’t.’

‘You said you hoped he wasn’t. Dont never forget that.’

The runner was the last thing which the sentry would ever see. In fact, he was the first thing the sentry saw that morning except for the relief guard who had brought his breakfast and who now sat, his rifle leaning beside him against the dugout’s opposite earthen shelf.

He had been under arrest for almost thirty hours now. That was all: just under arrest, as though the furious blows of the rifle-butt two nights ago had not simply hushed a voice which he could bear no longer but had somehow separated him from mankind; as if that aghast reversal, that cessation of four years of mud and blood and its accompanying convulsion of silence had cast him up on this buried dirt ledge with no other sign of man at all save the rotation of guards who brought him food and then sat opposite him until the time came for their relief. Yesterday and this morning too in ordained rote the orderly officer’s sergeant satellite had appeared suddenly in the orifice, crying ‘’Shun!’ and he had stood bareheaded while the guard saluted and the orderly officer himself entered and said, rapid and glib out of the glib and routine book: ‘Any complaints?’ and was gone again before he could have made any answer he did not intend to make. But that was all. Yesterday he had tried for a little while to talk to one of the rotated guards and since then some of them had tried to talk to him, but that was all of that too, so that in effect for over thirty hours now he had sat or sprawled and lay asleep on his dirt shelf, morose, sullen, incorrigible, foul-mouthed and snarling, not even waiting but just biding pending whatever it was they would finally decide to do with him or with the silence, both or either, if and when they did make up their minds.

Then he saw the runner. At the same moment he saw the pistol already in motion as the runner struck the guard between the ear and the rim of the helmet and caught him as he toppled and tumbled him onto the ledge and turned and the sentry saw the burlesque of a soldier entering behind him—the travesty of the wrapped putties, the tunic whose lower buttons would not even meet across the paunch not of sedentation but of age and above it, beneath the helmet, the chocolate face which four years ago he had tried to relegate and repudiate into the closed book of his past.

‘That makes five,’ the old Negro said.

‘All right, all right,’ the runner answered, rapidly and harshly. ‘He’s not dead either. Dont you think that by this time I have learned how to do it?’ He said rapidly to the sentry: ‘You dont need to worry either now. All we need from you now is inertia.’ But the sentry was not even looking at him. He was looking at the old Negro.

‘I told you to leave me alone,’ he said. And it was the runner who answered him, in that same rapid and brittle voice:

‘It’s too late for that now. Because I am wrong; we dont want inertia from you: what we want is silence. Come along. Notice, I have the pistol. If I must, I shall use it. I’ve already used it six times, but only the flat of it. This time I’ll use the trigger.’ He said to the old Negro, in the rapid brittle and almost despairing voice: ‘All right, this one will be dead. Then you suggest something.’

‘You cant get away with this,’ the sentry said.

‘Who expects to?’ the runner said. ‘That’s why we have no time to waste. Come along. You’ve got your investments to protect, you know; after a breathing spell like this and the fresh start it will give them, let alone the discovery of what can happen simply by letting the same men hang around in uniforms too long, the whole battalion will probably be wiped out as soon as they can get us up in gun-range again. Which may be this afternoon. They flew a German general over yesterday; without doubt he was at Chaulnesmont by late dinner last night, with our pooh-bahs and the American ones too already waiting for him and the whole affair settled and over with by the time the port passed (if German generals drink port, though why not, since we have had four years to prove to us even if all history had not already done it, that the biped successful enough to become a general had ceased to be a German or British or American or Italian or French one almost as soon as it never was a human one) and without doubt he is already on his way back and both sides are merely waiting until he is out of the way as you hold up a polo game while one of the visiting rajahs rides off the field——’

The sentry—in what time he had left—would remember it. He knew at once that the runner meant exactly what he said about the pistol; he had proof of that at once—of the flat side of it anyway—when he almost stumbled over the sprawled bodies of the orderly officer and his sergeant in the tunnel before he saw them. But it would seem to him that it was not the hard muzzle of the pistol in the small of his back, but the voice itself—the glib calm rapid desperate and despairing voice carrying, sweeping them into the next dugout where an entire platoon lay or sat along the earthen shelf, the faces turning as one to look at them as the runner thrust him in with the muzzle of the pistol and then thrust the old Negro forward too, saying:

‘Make the sign. Go on. Make it.’—the tense calm desperate voice not even stopping then, as it seemed to the sentry that it never had: ‘That’s right, of course he doesn’t need to make the sign. He has enough without. He has come from outside. So have I, for that matter but you wont even need to doubt me now, you need only look at him; some of you may even recognise Horn’s D.C.M. on that tunic. But dont worry; Horn isn’t dead any more than Mr Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe; I have learned to use the flat of this—’ he raised the pistol for an instant into sight ‘—quite neatly now. Because here is our chance to have done with it, be finished with it, quit of it, not just the killing, the getting dead, because that’s only a part of the nightmare, of the rot and the stinking and the waste——’

The sentry would remember it, incorrigible still, merely acquiescent, believing still that he was waiting, biding the moment when he or perhaps two or three of them at once would take the runner off guard and smother him, listening to the glib staccato voice, watching the turned faces listening to it too, believing still that he saw in them only astonishment, surprise, presently to fade into one incorrigible concert which he would match: ‘And neither of us would have got back in if it had not been for his pass from the Ministry of War in Paris. So you dont even know yet what they have done to you. They’ve sealed you up in here—the whole front from the Channel to Switzerland. Though from what I saw in Paris last night—not only military police, the French and American and ours too, but the civilian police too—I wouldn’t have thought they’d have enough left to seal anything with. But they have; the colonel himself could not have got back in this morning unless the pass bore the signature of that old man in the castle at Chaulnesmont. It’s like another front, manned by all the troops in the three forces who cant speak the language belonging to the coat they came up from under the equator and half around the world to die in, in the cold and the wet—Senegalese and Moroccans and Kurds and Chinese and Malays and Indians—Polynesian Melanesian Mongol and Negro who couldn’t understand the password nor read the pass either: only to recognise perhaps by memorised rote that one cryptic hieroglyph. But not you. You cant even get out now, to try to come back in. No-man’s Land is no longer in front of us. It’s behind us now. Before, the faces behind the machine guns and the rifles at least thought Caucasian thoughts even if they didn’t speak English or French or American; now they dont even think Caucasian thoughts. They’re alien. They dont even have to care. They have tried for four years to get out of the white man’s cold and mud and rain just by killing Germans, and failed. Who knows? by killing off the Frenchmen and Englishmen and Americans which they have bottled up here, they might all be on the way home tomorrow. So there is nowhere for us to go now but east——’

Now the sentry moved. That is, he did not move yet, he dared not yet: he simply made a single infinitesimal transition into a more convulsive rigidity, speaking now, harsh and obscene, cursing the rapt immobilised faces: ‘Are you going to let them get away with this? Dont you know we’re all going to be for it? They have already killed Lieutenant Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe——’

‘Nonsense,’ the runner said. ‘They aren’t dead. Didn’t I just tell you I have learned how to use the flat of a pistol? It’s his money. That’s all. Everyone in the battalion owes him. He wants us to sit here and do nothing until he has earned his month’s profit. Then he wants them to start it up again so we will be willing to bet him twenty shillings a month that we will be dead in thirty days. Which is what they are going to do—start it up again. You all saw those four aeroplanes yesterday, and all that archie. The archie were blank shells. There was a German general in the hun aeroplane. Last night he was at Chaulnesmont. He would have to have been; else, why did he come at all? why else wafted across on a cloud of blank archie shell, with three S.E.5’s going through the motion of shooting him down with blank ammunition? Oh yes, I was there; I saw the lorries fetching up the shells night before last, and yesterday I stood behind one of the batteries firing them when one of the S.E.’s—that pilot would have been a child of course, too young for them to have dared inform him in advance, too young to be risked with the knowledge that fact and truth are not the same—dived and put a burst right into the battery and shot me in the skirt of my tunic with something—whatever it was—which actually stung a little for a moment. What else, except to allow a German general to visit the French and the British and the American ones in the Allied Commandery-in-Chief without alarming the rest of us bipeds who were not born generals but simply human beings? And since they—all four of them—would speak the same language, no matter what clumsy isolated national tongues they were compelled by circumstance to do it in, the matter probably took them no time at all and very likely the German one is already on his way back home at this moment, not even needing the blank shells now because the guns will be already loaded with live ones, merely waiting for him to get out of the way in order to resume, efface, obliterate forever this ghastly and incredible contretemps. So we have no time, you see. We may not even have an hour. But an hour will be enough, if only it is all of us, the whole battalion. Not to kill the officers; they themselves have abolished killing for a recess of three days. Besides, we wont need to, with all of us. If we had time, we could even draw lots: one man to each officer, to simply hold his hands while the rest of us go over. But the flat of a pistol is quicker and no more harmful really, as Mr Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe and Horn will tell you when they awake. Then never to touch pistol or rifle or grenade or machine gun again, to climb out of ditches forever and pass through the wire and then advance with nothing but our bare hands, to dare, defy the Germans not to come out too and meet us.’ He said quickly, in the desperate and calmly despairing voice: ‘All right: meet us with machine-gun fire, you will say. But the hun archie yesterday was blank too.’ He said to the old Negro: ‘Now, make them the sign. Have not you already proved that, if anything, it means brotherhood and peace?’

‘You fools!’ the sentry cried, except that he did not say fools: virulent and obscene out of his almost inarticulate paucity, struggling now, having defied the pistol in one outraged revulsion of repudiation before he realized that the hard little iron ring was gone from his spine and that the runner was merely holding him, he (the sentry) watching, glaring at the faces which he had thought were merely fixed in a surprise precursive to outrage too, looming, bearing down on him, identical and alien and concerted, until so many hard hands held him that he could not even struggle, the runner facing him now, the pistol poised flat on one raised palm, shouting at him:

‘Stop it! Stop it! Make your choice, but hurry. You can come with us, or you can have the pistol. But decide.’

He would remember; they were topside now, in the trench, he could see a silent and moiling group within which or beneath which the major and two company commanders and three or four sergeants had vanished (they had taken the adjutant and the sergeant-major and the corporal signalman in the orderly dugout and the colonel still in bed) and in both directions along the trench he could see men coming up out of their holes and warrens, blinking in the light, dazed still yet already wearing on their faces that look of amazed incredulity fading with one amazed concert into dawning and incredulous hope. The hard hands still grasped him; as they lifted, flung him up onto the firestep and then over the lip of the parapet, he already saw the runner spring up and turn and reach down and pull the old Negro up beside him while other hands boosted from beneath, the two of them now standing on the parapet facing the trench, the runner’s voice thin and high now with that desperate and indomitable despair:

‘The sign! The sign! Give it us! Come on, men! If this is what they call staying alive, do you want that on these terms forever either?’

Then he was struggling again. He didn’t even know he was about to, when he found himself jerking and thrashing, cursing, flinging, beating away the hands, not even realising then why, for what, until he found himself in the wire, striking, hitting backward at the crowding bodies at the entrance to the labyrinthine passageway which the night patrols used, hearing his own voice in one last invincible repudiation: ‘F … them all! Bugger all of you!’ crawling now, not the first one through because when he rose to his feet, running, the old Negro was panting beside him, while he shouted at the old Negro: ‘Serve you f … ing well right! Didn’t I warn you two years ago to stay away from me? Didn’t I?’

Then the runner was beside him, grasping his arm and stopping him and turning him about, shouting: ‘Look at them!’ He did so and saw them, watched them, crawling on their hands and knees through the gaps in the wire as though up out of hell itself, faces clothes hands and all stained as though forever one single nameless and identical color from the mud in which they had lived like animals for four years, then rising to their feet as though in that four years they had not stood on earth, but had this moment returned to light and air from purgatory as ghosts stained forever to the nameless single color of purgatory. ‘Over there too!’ the runner cried, turning him again until he saw that also: the distant German wire one faint moil and pulse of motion, indistinguishable until it too broke into men rising erect; whereupon a dreadful haste came over him, along with something else which he had not yet time to assimilate, recognise, knowing, aware of only the haste; and not his haste but one haste, not only the battalion but the German one or regiment or whatever it was, the two of them running toward each other now, empty-handed, approaching until he could see, distinguish the individual faces but still all one face, one expression, and then he knew suddenly that his too looked like that, all of them did: tentative, amazed, defenseless, and then he heard the voices too and knew that his was one also—a thin murmuring sound rising into the incredible silence like a chirping of lost birds, forlorn and defenseless too; and then he knew what the other thing was even before the frantic uprush of the rockets from behind the two wires, German and British too.

‘No!’ he cried, ‘no! Not to us!’ not even realising that he had said ‘we’ and not ‘I’ for the first time in his life probably, certainly for the first time in four years, not even realising that in the next moment he had said ‘I’ again, shouting to the old Negro as he whirled about: ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you to let me alone?’ Only it was not the old Negro, it was the runner, standing facing him as the first ranging burst of shells bracketed in. He never heard them, nor the wailing rumble of the two barrages either, nor saw nor heard little more of anything in that last second except the runner’s voice crying out of the soundless rush of flame which enveloped half his body neatly from heel through navel through chin:

‘They cant kill us! They cant! Not dare not: they cant!’

Except of course that he couldn’t sit here save for a definitely physically limited length of time because after a while it would be daylight. Unless of course the sun really failed to rise tomorrow, which as they taught you in that subsection of philosophy they called dialectics which you were trying to swot through in order to try to swot through that section of being educated they called philosophy, was for the sake of argument possible. Only why shouldn’t he be sitting here after daylight or for the rest of the day itself for that matter, since the only physical limitation to that would be when someone with the authority and compulsion to resist the condition of a young man in a second lieutenant’s uniform sitting on the ground against the wall of a Nissen hut, had his attention called to it by a horn or whistle; and that greater condition which yesterday had sent three fairly expensive aeroplanes jinking up and down the sky with their Vickerses full of blank ammunition, might well abrogate that one too.

Then the first limitation had been discharged, because now it was day and none to know where the night had gone: not a dialectic this time, but he who didn’t know where night had gone this soon, this quick. Or maybe it was a dialectic since as far as he knew only he had watched it out and since only he in waking had watched it out, to all the others still in slumber it still obtained, like the tree in darkness being no longer green, and since he who had watched it out still didn’t know where it had gone, for him it was still night too. Then almost before he had had time to begin to bother to think that out and so have done with it, a bugle blowing reveille confounded him, the sound (that sound: who had never heard it before or even heard of it: a horn blowing at daybreak on a forward aerodrome where people did not even have guns but were armed only with maps and what Monaghan called monkeywrenches) even getting him up onto his feet: that greater condition’s abrogation which had now reabrogated. In fact, if he had been a cadet still, he would even know what crime whoever found him sitting there would charge him with: not shaving: and, standing now, he realised that he had even forgot his problem too, who had sat there all night thinking that he had none evermore, as though sitting so long within that peaceful stink had robbed olfactory of its single sense or perhaps the sidcott of its smell and only getting up restored them both. In fact, for a moment he toyed with the idea of unrolling the sidcott to see how far the burning had spread, except that if he did that and let the air in, the burning might spread faster, thinking, with a sort of peaceful amazement hearing himself: Because it’s got to last; no more: not last until, just last.

At least he wouldn’t take it inside with him so he left it against the wall and went around the hut and inside it—Burk and Hanley and De Marchi had not stirred so the tree was not green for some yet anyway—and got his shaving tackle and then picked up the sidcott again and went to the washroom; nor would the tree be quite green yet here either, and if not here, certainly not in the latrines. Though now it would because the sun was well up now and, once more smooth of face, the sidcott stinking peacefully under his arm, he could see movement about the mess, remembering suddenly that he had not eaten since lunch yesterday. But then there was the sidcott, when suddenly he realised that the sidcott would serve that too, turning and already walking. They—someone—had brought his bus back and rolled it in so he trod his long shadow toward only the petrol tin and put the sidcott into it and stood peaceful and empty while the day incremented, the infinitesimal ineluctable shortening of the shadows. It was going to rain probably, but then it always was anyway; that is, it always did on days-off from patrols, he didn’t know why yet, he was too new. ‘You will though,’ Monaghan told him. ‘Just wait till after the first time you’ve been good and scared’—pronouncing it ‘skeered’.

So it would be all right now, the ones who were going to get up would have already had breakfast and the others would sleep on through till lunch; he could even take his shaving kit on to the mess without going to the hut at all: and stopped, he could not even remember when he had heard it last, that alien and divorced—that thick dense mute furious murmur to the north and east; he knew exactly where it would be because he had flown over the spot yesterday afternoon, thinking peacefully I came home too soon. If I had only sat up there all night instead I could have seen it start again—listening, motionless in midstride, hearing it murmur toward and into its crescendo and sustain a time, a while and then cut short off, murmuring in his ears for a little time still until he discovered that what he was actually listening to was a lark: and he had been right, the sidcott had served even better than it knew even or even perhaps intended, carrying him still intact across lunch too since it was after ten now. Provided he could eat enough of course, the food—the eggs and bacon and the marmalade—having no taste to speak of, so that only in that had he been wrong; then presently he was wrong there too, eating steadily on in the empty mess until at last the orderly told him there was simply no more toast.

Much better than the sidcott could have known to plan or even dream because during lunch the hut itself would be empty and for that while he could use his cot to do some of the reading he had imagined himself doing between patrols—the hero living by proxy the lives of heroes between the monotonous peaks of his own heroic derring: which he was doing for another moment or two while Bridesman stood in the door, until he looked up. ‘Lunch?’ Bridesman said.

‘Late breakfast, thanks,’ he said.

‘Drink?’ Bridesman said.

‘Later, thanks,’ he said: and moved in time, taking the book with him; there was a tree, he had discovered it in the first week—an old tree with two big roots like the arms of a chair on the bank above the cut through which the road ran past the aerodrome to Villeneuve Blanche so that you could sit like in a chair with the roots to prop the elbows which propped in turn the book, secure from war yet still of it, not that remote, in those days when they had called it war: who apparently were not decided yet what to call this now. And so now there would have been time enough, Bridesman would know by now what that had been this morning: thinking peacefully, the open book still propped before he began to move: Yes, he will know by now. He will have to make the decision to tell me or not, but he will make it.

Nor was there any reason to take the book to the hut because he might even read some more, entering and then leaving Bridesman’s hut with the book still closed on one finger to mark his place, still strolling; he had never been walking fast anyway and finally stopping, empty and peaceful, only blinking a little, looking out across the empty field, the line of closed hangars, the mess and the office where a few people came and went. Not too many though; apparently Collyer had lifted the ban on Villeneuve Blanche; soon he would be looking at evening too and suddenly he thought of Conventicle but for an instant only and then no more because what could he say to Conventicle or they to each other? ‘Well, Flight, Captain Bridesman tells me one of our battalions put their guns down this morning and climbed out of the trench and through the wire and met a similar unarmed German one until both sides could get a barrage down on them. So all we need now is just to stand by until time to take that jerry general home.’ And then Conventicle: ‘Yes sir. So I heard.’

And now he was looking at evening, the aftermath of sun, treading no shadow at all now to the petrol tin. Though almost at once he began to hurry a little, remembering not the sidcott but the burning; it had been more than twelve hours now since he left it in the tin and there might not be anything left of it. But he was in time: just the tin itself too hot to touch so that he kicked it over and tumbled the sidcott out, which would have to cool a little too. Which it did: not evening incrementing now but actual night itself, almost summer night this time at home in May; and in the latrine the tree once more was no longer green: only the stink of the sidcott which had lasted, he had wasted that concern, dropping it into the sink where it unfolded as of its own accord into visibility, into one last repudiation—the slow thick invincible smell of the burning itself visible now in creeping overlaps, almost gone now—only a beggar’s crumb but perhaps there had been an instant in the beginning when only a crumb of fire lay on the face of darkness and the falling waters and he moved again, one of the cubicles had a wooden latch inside the door if you were there first and he was and latched the invisible door and drew the invisible pistol from his tunic pocket and thumbed the safety off.

Again the room was lighted, candelabrum sconce and girandole, curtain and casement once more closed against the swarm-dense city’s unsleeping and anguished murmur; again the old general looked like a gaudy toy in his blanched and glittering solitude, just beginning to crumble the heel of bread into the waiting bowl as the smaller door opened and the youthful aide stood in it. ‘He is here?’ the old general said.

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said.

‘Let him come in,’ the old general said. ‘Then let nobody else.’

‘Yes sir,’ the aide said and went out and closed the door and in a time opened it again; the old general had not moved except to put quietly down beside the bowl the uncrumbled bread, the aide entering and turning stiffly to attention beside the door as the Quartermaster General entered and came on a pace or two and then stopped, paused, the aide going back out the door and drawing it to behind him, the Quartermaster General standing for a moment longer—the gaunt gigantic peasant with his sick face and his hungry and stricken eyes, the two old men looking at one another for another moment, then the Quartermaster General partly raised one hand and dropped it and came on until he faced the table.

‘Have you dined?’ the old general said. The other didn’t even answer.

‘I know what happened,’ he said. ‘I authorised it, permitted it, otherwise it couldn’t have. But I want you to tell me. Not admit, confess: affirm it, tell me to my face that we did this. Yesterday afternoon a German general was brought across the lines and here, to this house, into this house.’

‘Yes,’ the old general said. But the other still waited, inexorable. ‘We did it then,’ the old general said.

‘Then this morning an unarmed British battalion met an unarmed German force between the lines until artillery from both sides was able to destroy them both.’

‘We did it then,’ the old general said.

‘We did it,’ the Quartermaster General said. ‘We. Not British and American and French we against German them nor German they against American and British and French us, but We against all because we no longer belong to us. A subterfuge not of ours to confuse and mislead the enemy nor of the enemy to mislead and confuse us, but of We to betray all since all has had to repudiate us in simple defensive horror; no barrage by us or vice versa to prevent an enemy running over us with bayonets and hand grenades or vice versa, but a barrage by both of We to prevent naked and weaponless hand touching opposite naked and weaponless hand. We, you and I and our whole unregenerate and unregenerable kind; not only you and I and our tight close jealous unchallengeable hierarchy behind this wire and our opposite German one behind that one, but more, worse: our whole small repudiated and homeless species about the earth who not only no longer belong to man but even to earth itself since we have had to make this last base desperate cast in order to hold our last desperate and precarious place on it.’

‘Sit down,’ the old general said.

‘No,’ the other said. ‘I was standing when I accepted this appointment. I can stand to divest myself of it.’ He thrust one big fleshless hand rapidly inside his tunic then out again, though once more he stood just holding the folded paper in it, looking down at the old general. ‘Because I didn’t just believe in you. I loved you. I believed from that first moment when I saw you in that gate that day forty-seven years ago that you had been destined to save us. That you were chosen by destiny out of the paradox of your background, to be a paradox to your past in order to be free of human past to be the one out of all earth to be free of the compulsions of fear and weakness and doubt which render the rest of us incapable of what you were competent for; that you in your strength would even absolve us of our failure due to our weakness and fears. I dont mean the men out there tonight—’ this time the vast hand holding the folded paper made a single rapid clumsy gesture which indicated, seemed to shape somehow in the brilliant insulate room the whole scope of the murmurous and anguished darkness outside and even as far away as the lines themselves—the wire, the ditches dense and, for this time anyway, silent with dormant guns and amazed and incredulous men, waiting, alerted, confused and incredulous with hope ‘—they dont need you, they are capable of saving themselves, as three thousand of them proved four days ago. They only needed to be defended, protected from you. Not expected to be nor even hope to be: just should have been except that we failed them. Not you this time, who did not even what you would but what you must, since you are you. But I and my few kind, who had rank enough and authority and position enough, as if God Himself had put this warrant in my hand that day against this one three years later, until I failed them and Him and brought it back.’ His hand also jerked, flicked, and tossed the folded paper onto the desk in front of the bowl and jug and the still intact morsel, on either side of which the old general’s veined and mottled hands lay faintly curled at rest. ‘Back to you by hand, as I received it from you. I will have no more of it. I know: by my own token I am too late in returning what I should never have accepted to begin with because even at first I would have known myself incapable of coping with what it was going to entail, if I had only known then what that entailment was going to be. I am responsible. I am responsible, mine is the blame and solely mine; without me and this warrant which you gave me that day three years ago, you could not have done this. By this authority I could have prevented you then, and even afterward I could have stopped it, remanded it. As you—the Commander-in-Chief of all the Allied Armies in France—as Quartermaster General over all embattled Europe west of our and the British and the American wire, I could have decreed that whole zone containing Villeneuve Blanche (or arbitrarily any other point which you might have threatened) at one hundred point one of saturation and forbidden whatever number of men it took to drive those lorries of blank anti-aircraft shells to enter it and even at one hundred absolute of saturation and so forbidden that single supernumerary German one to come out of it. But I didn’t. So I was responsible even more than you because you had no choice. You didn’t even do what you would but only what you could since you were incapable of else, born and doomed incapable of else. While I did have a choice between could and would, between shall and must and cannot, between must and dare not, between will do and I am afraid to do: had that choice, and found myself afraid. Oh yes, afraid. But then why shouldn’t I be afraid of you, since you are afraid of man?’

‘I am not afraid of man,’ the old general said. ‘Fear implies ignorance. Where ignorance is not, you do not need to fear: only respect. I dont fear man’s capacities, I merely respect them.’

‘And use them,’ the Quartermaster General said.

‘Beware of them,’ the old general said.

‘Which, fear them or not, you should. You someday will. Not I, of course. I’m an old man, finished; I had my chance and failed; who—what—wants or needs me further now? what midden or rubbish heap, least of all that one beside the Seine yonder with its gold hemisphere ravaged from across all of Europe by a lesser one than you since he embroiled himself with all the armies of Europe in order to lose a petty political empire where you have allied all the armies of both hemispheres and finally even the German one too, to lose the world to man.’

‘Will you let me speak a moment?’ the old general said.

‘Of course,’ the other said. ‘Didn’t I tell you I loved you once? Who can control that? All you dare assume mandate over is oath, contract.’

‘You say they do not need me to save themselves from me and us since they themselves will save themselves if they are only let alone, only defended and preserved that long from me and us. How do you think we coped with this in time at time and place—at this particular moment in four whole years of moments, at this particular point in that thousand kilometres of regimental fronts? just by being alert? not only alert at this specific spot and moment but prepared to cope and concentrate and nullify at this specific spot and moment with that which every trained soldier had been trained and taught to accept as a factor in war and battle as he must logistics and climate and failure of ammunition; this, in four long years of fateful and vulnerable moments and ten hundred kilometres of fateful and vulnerable spots—spots and moments fateful and vulnerable because as yet we have found nothing better to man them with than man? How do you think we knew in time? Dont you know how? who, since you believe in man’s capacities, must certainly know them?’

Now the other had stopped, immobile, looming, vast, his sick and hungry face as though sick anew with foreknowledge and despair. Though his voice was quiet, almost gentle. ‘How?’ he said.

‘One of them told us. One of his own squad. One of his close and familiar own—as always. As that or them or at least one among them for whom man sets in jeopardy what he believes to be his life and assumes to be his liberty or his honor, always does. His name was Polchek. He went on sick parade that Sunday midnight and we should have known about it inside an hour except that apparently a traitor too (by all means call him that if you like) had to outface regimental tape. So we might not have learned in time at all until too late, the division commander being himself already an hour before dawn in a forward observation post where he likewise had no business being, except for a lieutenant (a blatant and unregenerate eccentric whose career very probably ended there also since he held the sanctity of his native soil above that of his divisional channels; he will get a decoration of course but no more, the utmost venerability of his beard can only expose that same lieutenant’s insigne) who rang directly through to, and insisted on speaking to someone in authority at, his Army Headquarters. That was how we knew, had even that little time to nullify, get in touch with the enemy and offer him too an alternate to chaos.’

‘So I was right,’ the other said. ‘You were afraid.’

‘I respect him as an articulated creature capable of locomotion and vulnerable to self-interest.’

‘You were afraid,’ the Quartermaster General said. ‘Who with two armies which had already been beaten once and a third one not yet blooded to where it was a calculable quantity, had nevertheless managed to stalemate the most powerful and skillful and dedicated force in Europe, yet had had to call upon that enemy for help against the simple unified hope and dream of simple man. No, you are afraid. And so I am well to be. That’s why I brought it back. There it lies. Touch it, put your hand on it. Or take my word for it that it’s real, the same one, not defiled since the defilement was mine who shirked it in the middle of a battle, and a concomitant of your rank is the right and privilege to obliterate the human instrument of a failure.’

‘But can you bring it back here? to me?’ the old general said mildly.

‘Why not? Weren’t you the one who gave it to me?’

‘But can you?’ the old general said. ‘Dare you? ask me to grant you a favor, let alone accept it from me. This favor,’ the old general said in that gentle and almost inflectionless voice. ‘A man is to die what the world will call the basest and most ignominious of deaths: execution for cowardice while defending his native—anyway adopted—land. That’s what the ignorant world will call it, who will not know that he was murdered for that principle which, by your own bitter self-scoriation, you were incapable of risking death and honor for. Yet you dont demand that life. You demand instead merely to be relieved of a commission. A gesture. A martyrdom. Does it match his?’

‘He wont accept that life!’ the other cried. ‘If he does——’ and stopped, amazed, aghast, foreknowing and despaired while the gentle voice went on:

‘If he does, if he accepts his life, keeps his life, he will have abrogated his own gesture and martyrdom. If I gave him his life tonight, I myself could render null and void what you call the hope and the dream of his sacrifice. By destroying his life tomorrow morning, I will establish forever that he didn’t even live in vain, let alone die so. Now tell me who’s afraid?’

Now the other began to turn, slowly, a little jerkily, as though he were blind, turning on until he faced the small door again and stopping not as though he saw it but as if he had located its position and direction by some other and lesser and less exact sense, like smell, the old general watching him until he had completely turned before he spoke:

‘You’ve forgotten your paper.’

‘Of course,’ the other said. ‘So I have.’ He turned back, jerkily, blinking rapidly; his hand fumbled on the table top for a moment, then it found the folded paper and put it back inside the tunic, and he stood again, blinking rapidly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So I did.’ Then he turned again, a little stiffly still but moving almost quickly now, directly anyhow, and went on across the blanched rug, toward the door; at once it opened and the aide entered, carrying the door with him and already turning into rigid attention, holding it while the Quartermaster General walked toward it, a little stiffly and awkwardly, too big too gaunt too alien, then stopped and half-turned his head and said: ‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye,’ the old general said. The other went on, to the door now, almost into it, beginning to bow his head a little as though from long habit already too tall for most doors, stopping almost in the door now, his head still bowed a little even after he turned it not quite toward where the old general sat immobile and gaudy as a child’s toy behind the untouched bowl and jug and the still uncrumbled bread.

‘And something else,’ the Quartermaster General said. ‘To say. Something else——’

‘With God,’ the old general said.

‘Of course,’ the Quartermaster General said. ‘That was it. I almost said it.’

The door clashed open, the sergeant with his slung rifle entered first, followed by a private carrying his unslung one, unbelievably long now with the fixed bayonet, like a hunter dodging through a gap in a fence. They took position one on either side of the door, the thirteen prisoners turning their thirteen heads as one to watch quietly while two more men carried in a long wooden bench-attached mess table and set it in the center of the cell and went back out.

‘Going to fatten us up first, huh?’ one of the prisoners said. The sergeant didn’t answer; he was now working at his front teeth with a gold toothpick.

‘If the next thing they bring is a tablecloth, the third will be a priest,’ another prisoner said. But he was wrong, although the number of casseroles and pots and dishes (including a small caldron obviously soup) which did come next, followed by a third man carrying a whole basket of bottles and a jumble of utensils and cutlery, was almost as unnerving, the sergeant speaking now though still around, past the toothpick:

‘Hold it now. At least let them get their hands and arms out of the way.’ Though the prisoners had really not moved yet to rush upon the table, the food: it was merely a shift, semicircular, poised while the third orderly set the wine (there were seven bottles) on the table and then began to place the cups, vessels, whatever anyone wanted to call them—tin cups, pannikins from mess kits, two or three cracked tumblers, two flagons contrived by bisecting laterally one canteen.

‘Dont apologise, garçon,’ the wit said. ‘Just so it’s got a bottom at one end and a hole at the other.’ Then the one who had brought the wine scuttled back to the door after the two others, and out of it; the private with the bayonet dodged his seven-foot-long implement through it again and turned, holding the door half closed for the sergeant.

‘All right, you bastards,’ the sergeant said. ‘Be pigs.’

‘Speak for yourself, maître,’ the wit said. ‘If we must dine in stink, we prefer it to be our own.’ Then suddenly, in unpremeditated concert as though they had not even planned it or instigated it, they had not even been warned of it but instead had been overtaken from behind by it like wind, they had all turned on the sergeant, or perhaps not even the sergeant, the human guards, but just the rifles and the bayonets and the steel lockable door, not moving, rushing toward them but just yelling at them—a sound hoarse, loud, without language, not of threat or indictment either: just a hoarse concerted affirmation of invincible repudiation which continued for another moment or so even after the sergeant had passed through the door and it had clashed shut again. Then they stopped. Yet they still didn’t rush at the table, still hovering, semicircular, almost diffidently, merely enclosing it, their noses trembling questing like those of rabbits at the odors from it, grimed, filthy, reeking still of the front lines and uncertainty and perhaps despair; unshaven, faces not alarming nor even embittered but harassed—faces of men who had already borne not only more than they expected but than they believed they could and who knew that it was still not over and—with a sort of amazement, even terror—that no matter how much more there would be, they would still bear that too.

‘Come on, Corp,’ a voice said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘O.K.,’ the corporal said. ‘Watch it now.’ But still there was no stampede, rush. It was just a crowding, a concentration, a jostling itself almost inattentive, not of famishment, hunger but rather of the watchful noncommittance of people still—so far at least—keeping pace with, holding their own still within the fringe of a fading fairy-tale, the cursing itself inattentive and impersonal, not eager: just pressed as they crowded in onto both the fixed benches, five on one side and six on the other facing them until the twelfth man dragged up the cell’s one stool to the head of the table for the corporal and then himself took the remaining place at the foot end of the unfilled bench like the Vice to the Chair in a Dickensian tavern’s back room—a squat powerful weathered man with the blue eyes and reddish hair and beard of a Breton fisherman, captain say of his own small tough and dauntless boat—laden doubtless with contraband. The corporal filled the bowls while they passed them hand to hand. But still there was no voracity. A leashed quality, but even, almost unimpatient as they sat holding each his upended unsoiled spoon like a boat-crew or a parade.

‘This looks bad,’ one said.

‘It’s worse,’ another said. ‘It’s serious.’

‘It’s a reprieve,’ a third said. ‘Somebody besides a garage mechanic cooked this. So if they went to all that trouble——’ a third began.

‘Hold it,’ the Breton said. The man opposite him was short and very dark, his jaw wrenched by an old healed wound. He was saying something rapidly in an almost unintelligible Mediterranean dialect—Midi or perhaps Basque. They looked at one another. Suddenly still another spoke. He looked like a scholar, almost like a professor.

‘He wants someone to say grace,’ he said.

The corporal looked at the Midian. ‘Say it then.’ Again the other said something rapid and incomprehensible. Again the one who resembled a scholar translated.

‘He says he doesn’t know one.’

‘Does anybody know one?’ the corporal said. Again they looked at one another. Then one said to the fourth one:

‘You’ve been to school. Say one.’

‘Maybe he went too fast and passed it,’ another said.

‘Say it then,’ the corporal said to the fourth one. The other said rapidly:

‘Benedictus. Benedicte. Benedictissimus. Will that do?’

‘Will that do, Luluque?’ the corporal said to the Midian.

‘Yes yes,’ the Midian said. They began to eat now. The Breton lifted one of the bottles slightly toward the corporal.

‘Okay?’ he said.

‘Okay,’ the corporal said. Six other hands took up the other bottles; they ate and poured and passed the bottles too.

‘A reprieve,’ the third said. ‘They wouldn’t dare execute us until we have finished eating this cooking. Our whole nation would rise at that insult to what we consider the first of the arts. How’s this for an idea? We stagger this, eat one at a time, one man to each hour, thirteen hours; we’ll still be alive at … almost noon tomorrow——’

‘—when they’ll serve us another meal,’ another said, ‘and we’ll stagger that one into dinner and then stagger dinner on through tomorrow night——’

‘—and in the end eat ourselves into old age when we cant eat anymore——’

‘Let them shoot us then. Who cares?’ the third said. ‘No. That bastard sergeant will be in here with his firing squad right after the coffee. You watch.’

‘Not that quick,’ the first said. ‘You have forgot what we consider the first of the virtues too. Thrift. They will wait until we have digested this and defecated it.’

‘What will they want with that?’ the fourth said.

‘Fertiliser,’ the first said. ‘Imagine that corner, that garden-plot manured with the concentrate of this meal——’

‘The manure of traitors,’ the fourth said. He had the dreamy and furious face of a martyr.

‘In that case, wouldn’t the maize, the bean, the potato grow upside down, or anyway hide its head even if it couldn’t bury it?’ the second said.

‘Stop it,’ the corporal said.

‘Or more than just the corner of a plot,’ the third said. ‘The carrion we’ll bequeath France tomorrow——’

‘Stop it!’ the corporal said.

‘Christ assoil us,’ the fourth said.

‘Aiyiyi,’ the third said. ‘We can call on him then. He need not fear cadavers.’

‘Do you want me to make them shut up, Corp?’ the Breton said.

‘Come on now,’ the corporal said. ‘Eat. You’ll spend the rest of the night wishing you did have something to clap your jaws on. Save the philosophy for then.’

‘The wit too,’ the third said.

‘Then we will starve,’ the first said.

‘Or indigest,’ the third said. ‘If much of what we’ve heard tonight is wit.’

‘Come on now,’ the corporal said. ‘I’ve told you twice. Do you want your bellies to say you’ve had enough, or that sergeant to come back in and say you’ve finished?’ So they ate again, except the man on the corporal’s left, who once more stopped his laden knife blade halfway to his mouth.

‘Polchek’s not eating,’ he said suddenly. ‘He’s not even drinking. What’s the matter, Polchek? Afraid yours wont produce anything but nettles and you wont make it to the latrine in time and we’ll have to sleep in them?’ The man addressed was on the corporal’s immediate right. He had a knowing, almost handsome metropolitan or possibly banlieu face, bold but not at all arrogant, masked, composed, and only when you caught his eyes unawares did you realise how alert.

‘A day of rest at Chaulnesmont wasn’t the right pill for that belly of his maybe,’ the first said.

‘The sergeant-major’s coup de grâce tomorrow morning will be though,’ the fourth said.

‘Maybe it’ll cure all of you of having to run a fever over what I dont eat and drink,’ Polchek said.

‘What’s the matter?’ the corporal said to him. ‘You went on sick parade Sunday night before we came out. Haven’t you got over it yet?’

‘So what?’ Polchek said. ‘Is it an issue? I had a bad belly Sunday night. I’ve still got it but it’s still mine. I was just sitting here with it, not worrying half as much about what I dont put in it, as some innocent bystanders do because I dont.’

‘Do you want to make an issue of it?’ the fourth said.

‘Bang on the door,’ the corporal said to the Breton. ‘Tell the sergeant we want to report a sick man.’

‘Who’s making an issue of it now?’ Polchek said to the corporal before the Breton could move. He picked up his filled glass. ‘Come on,’ he said to the corporal. ‘No heel taps. If my belly dont like wine tonight, as Jean says that sergeant-major’s pistol will pump it all out tomorrow morning.’ He said to all of them: ‘Come on. To peace. Haven’t we finally got what we’ve all been working for for four years now? Come on, up with them!’ he said, louder and sharply, with something momentary and almost fierce in his voice, face, look. At once the same excitement, restrained fierceness, seemed to pass through all of them; they raised their glasses too except one—the fourth one of the mountain faces, not quite as tall as the others and with something momentary and anguished in it almost like despair, who suddenly half raised his glass and stopped it and did not drink when the others did and banged the bizarre and incongruous vessels down and reached for the bottles again as, preceded by the sound of the heavy boots, the door clashed open again and the sergeant and his private entered; he now held an unfolded paper in his hand.

‘Polchek,’ he said. For a second Polchek didn’t stir. Then the man who had not drunk gave a convulsive start and although he arrested it at once, when Polchek stood quietly up they both for a moment were in motion, so that the sergeant, about to address Polchek again, paused and looked from one to the other. ‘Well?’ the sergeant said. ‘Which? Dont you even know who you are?’ Nobody answered. As one the others except Polchek were looking at the man who had not drunk. ‘You,’ the sergeant said to the corporal. ‘Dont you know your own men?’

‘This is Polchek,’ the corporal said, indicating Polchek.

‘Then what’s wrong with him?’ the sergeant said. He said to the other man: ‘What’s your name?’

‘I——’ the man said; again he glanced rapidly about, at nothing, no one, anguished and despairing.

‘His name is——’ the corporal said. ‘I’ve got his papers——’ He reached inside his tunic and produced a soiled dog-eared paper, obviously a regimental posting order. ‘Pierre Bouc.’ He rattled off a number.

‘There’s no Bouc on this list,’ the sergeant said. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘You tell me,’ the corporal said. ‘He got mixed in with us somehow Monday morning. None of us know any Pierre Bouc either.’

‘Why didn’t he say something before this?’

‘Who would have listened?’ the corporal said.

‘Is that right?’ the sergeant said to the man. ‘You dont belong in this squad?’ The man didn’t answer.

‘Tell him,’ the corporal said.

‘No,’ the man whispered. Then he said loudly: ‘No!’ He blundered up. ‘I dont know them!’ he said, blundering, stumbling, half-falling backward over the bench almost as though in flight until the sergeant checked him.

‘The major will have to settle this,’ the sergeant said. ‘Give me that order.’ The corporal passed it to him. ‘Out with you,’ the sergeant said. ‘Both of you.’ Now those inside the room could see beyond the door another file of armed men, apparently a new one, waiting. The two prisoners passed on through the door and into it, the sergeant then the orderly following; the iron door clashed behind them, against that room and all it contained, signified, portended; beyond it Polchek didn’t even lower his voice:

‘They promised me brandy. Where is it?’

‘Shut up,’ the sergeant’s voice said. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, no bloody fear.’

‘I’d better,’ Polchek said. ‘If I dont, I might know what to do about it.’

‘I’ve told him once,’ the sergeant’s voice said. ‘If he dont shut up this time, shut him up.’

‘With pleasure, sergeant,’ another voice said. ‘Can do.’

‘Take them on,’ the sergeant’s voice said. Though before the iron clash of the door had ceased the corporal was already speaking, not loud: just prompt, still mild, not peremptory: just firm:

‘Eat.’ The same man essayed to speak again but again the corporal forestalled him. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Next time he will take it out.’ But they were spared that. The door opened almost immediately, but this time it was only the sergeant, alone, the eleven heads which remained turning as one to look at him where he faced the corporal down the length of the littered table.

‘You,’ the sergeant said.

‘Me?’ the corporal said.

‘Yes,’ the sergeant said. Still the corporal didn’t move. He said again:

‘You mean me?’

‘Yes,’ the sergeant said. ‘Come on.’ The corporal rose then. He gave one rapid look about at the ten faces now turning from the sergeant to look at him—faces dirty, unshaven, strained, which had slept too little in too long, harassed, but absolute, one in whatever it was—not trust exactly, not dependence: perhaps just one-ness, singleness.

‘You’re in charge, Paul,’ he said to the Breton.

‘Right,’ the Breton said. ‘Till you get back.’ But this time the corridor was empty; it was the sergeant himself who closed the door behind them and turned the heavy key and pocketed it. There was no one in sight at all where he—the corporal—had expected to find armed men bristling until they in the white glittering room in the Hôtel de Ville sent for them for the last time. Then the sergeant turned from the door and now he—the corporal—realised that they were even hurrying a little: not at all furtive nor even surreptitious: just expedite, walking rapidly back up the corridor which he had already traversed three times—once yesterday morning when the guards had brought them from the lorry to the cell, and twice last night when the guards had taken them to the Hôtel de Ville and brought them back, their—his and the sergeant’s—heavy boots not ringing because (so recent the factory—when it had been a factory—was) these were not stone but brick, but making instead a dull and heavy sound seeming only the louder because there were only four now instead of twenty-six plus the guards. So to him it was as though there was no other way out of it save that one exit, no destination to go to in it except on, so that he had already begun to pass the small arch with its locked iron gate when the sergeant checked and turned him, nor any other life in or near it so that he didn’t even recognise the silhouette of the helmet and the rifle until the man was in the act of unlocking the gate from the outside and swinging it back for them to pass through.

Nor did he see the car at once, the sergeant not quite touching him, just keeping him at that same pace, rapidity, as though by simple juxtaposition, on through the gate into an alley, a blank wall opposite and at the curb-edge the big dark motionless car which he had not noticed yet because of the silence—not the subterrene and cavernous emptiness in which their boots had echoed a moment back but a cul-de-sac of it, himself and the sergeant and the two sentries—the one who had unlocked the gate for them and then locked it after them, and his opposite flanking the other side of the gate—not even at parade rest but at ease, their rifles grounded, immobile and remote, as though oblivious to that to which they in their turn were invisible, the four of them set down in a vacuum of silence within the city’s distant and indefatigable murmur. Then he saw the car. He didn’t stop, it was barely a falter, the sergeant’s shoulder barely nudged him before he went on. The driver didn’t even move to descend; it was the sergeant who opened the door, the shoulder, a hand too now, firm and urgent against his back because he had stopped now, erect, immobile and immovable even after the voice inside the car said, ‘Get in, my child;’ then immovable for another second yet before he stooped and entered it, seeing as he did so the pallid glint of braid, a single plane of face above the dark enveloping cloak.

Then the sergeant shut the door, the car already in motion and that was all; only the three of them: the old man who bore far too much rank to carry a lethal weapon even if he were not already too old to use it, and the driver whose hands were full with managing the car even if he had not had his back to him who could not remember in four days anyhow when there had not been one arm or two but from twenty to a thousand already cocked and triggered for his life; out of the alley and still no word—direction or command—from the old man in the braided invincible hat and the night-colored cloak in the corner opposite him, not back to the city but skirting through the fringe of it, faster and faster, pacing its cavernous echoes through the narrow ways of the deserted purlieus, taking the rapid turnings as if the mechanism itself knew their destination, making a long concentric through the city’s edge, the ground rising now so that even he began to know where they were probably going, the city itself beginning to tilt toward them as it sank away beneath; nor any word from the old man this time either: the car just stopped, and looking past the fine and delicate profile beneath what should have been the insuperable weight of the barred and braided hat, he could see not the Place de Ville itself, they were not that high above the city yet, but rather as though the concentration of its unwearyable and sleepless anxiety had taken on the glow and glare of light.

‘Now, my child,’ the old general said: not to him this time but to the driver. The car went on and now he did know where they were going because there was nothing else up here but the old Roman citadel. But if he felt any first shock of instinctive and purely physical terror, he didn’t show it. And if at the same instant reason was also telling him, Nonsense. To execute you secretly in a dungeon would undo the very thing which they stopped the war and brought all thirteen of you here to accomplish, nobody heard that either: he just sat there, erect, a little stiffly who never had sat completely back in the seat, alert but quite calm, rapid watchful and composed, the car in second gear now but still going fast around the final convoluted hairpin turns until at last the stone weight of the citadel itself seemed to lean down and rest upon them like a ponderable shadow, the car making the last renversement because now it could go no further, stopping at last and not he nor the driver but the old general himself who opened the door and got out and held the door until he was out and erect again and had begun to turn his head to look until the old general said, ‘No, not yet,’ and turned on himself, he following, up the final steep and rocky pitch where they would have to walk, the old citadel not looming above them but squatting, not Gothic but Roman: not soaring to the stars out of the aspiration of man’s past but a gesture against them of his mortality like a clenched fist or a shield.

‘Now turn and look at it,’ the old general said. But he already had, was—down the declivity’s black pitch to where the city lay trembling and myriad with lights in its bowl of night like a scatter of smoldering autumn leaves in the windy darkness, thicker and denser than the stars in its concentration of anguish and unrepose, as if all of darkness and terror had poured down in one wash, one wave, to lie palpitant and unassuageable in the Place de Ville. ‘Look at it. Listen to it. Remember it. A moment: then close the window on it. Disregard that anguish. You caused them to fear and suffer but tomorrow you will have discharged them of both and they will only hate you: once for the rage they owe you for giving them the terror, once for the gratitude they will owe you for taking it away, and once for the fact that you are beyond the range of either. So close the window on that, and be yourself discharged. Now look beyond it. The earth, or half of it, full half the earth as far as horizon bounds it. It is dark of course, but only dark from here; its darkness is only that anonymity which a man can close behind him like a curtain on his past, not even when he must in his desperation but when he will for his comfort and simple privacy. Of course he can go only in one direction in it now: west; only one hemisphere of it—the Western—is available to him now. But that is large enough for his privacy for a year because this condition will only last another year, then all earth will be free to him. They will ask for a formal meeting, for terms, sometime this winter; by next year we will even have what we will call peace—for a little while. Not we will request it: they will—the Germans, the best soldiers on earth today or in two thousand years for that matter since even the Romans could not conquer them—the one people out of all the earth who have a passion and dedication not even for glory but for war, who make war not even for conquest and aggrandisement but as an occupation, an avocation, and who will lose this one for that very reason: that they are the best soldiers on earth; not we French and British, who accept war only as a last gambit when everything else has failed, and even enter that final one with no confidence in it either; but they, the Germans, who have not receded one foot since they crossed the Belgian frontier almost four years ago and every decision since has been either nil or theirs and who will not stop now even though they themselves know that one more victory will destroy them; who will win perhaps two or even three more (the number will not matter) and then will have to surrender because the phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on: a vice only the more terrible and fatal because there is no intervening breast or division between to frustrate them into health by simple normal distance and lack of opportunity for the copulation from which even orgasm cannot free them; the most expensive and fatal vice which man has invented yet, to which the normal ones of lechery and drink and gambling which man fatuously believes are capable of destroying him, stand as does the child’s lollypop to the bottle the courtesan and the playing-card. A vice so long ingrained in man as to have become an honorable tenet of his behavior and the national altar for his love of bloodshed and glorious sacrifice. More than that even: a pillar not of his nation’s supremacy but of his national survival; you and I have seen war as the last resort of politics; I shant of course but you will—can—see it become the last refuge from bankruptcy; you will—can, provided you will—see the day when a nation insolvent from overpopulation will declare war on whatever richest and most sentimental opponent it can persuade to defeat it quickest, in order to feed its people out of the conqueror’s quartermaster stores. But that is not our problem today; and even if it were, by simply being in alliance with the ultimate victor, we—France and Britain—would find ourselves in the happy situation of gaining almost as much from our victory as the German will through his defeat. Our—call it mine if you like—problem is more immediate. There is the earth. You will have half of it now; by New Year’s you will very probably have all of it, all the vast scope of it except this minuscule suppuration which men call Europe—and who knows? in time and with a little discretion and care, even that again if you like. Take my car—you can drive one, cant you?’

‘Yes,’ the corporal said. ‘Go?’

‘Now,’ the old general said. ‘Take my car. If you can drive at all, the pennon on its bonnet will carry you anywhere in Europe west of the German wire; if you can drive well, the engine beneath it will take you to the coast—Brest or Marseilles either—in two days; I have papers ready to pass you aboard any ship you choose there and command its captain. Then South America—Asia—the Pacific islands; close that window fast; lock it forever on that aberrant and futile dream. No no,’ he said quickly, ‘dont for one second suspect me of that base misreading of your character—you who in five minutes Monday voided that war which the German himself, the best soldier in Europe, in almost four years has never quite nudged from stalemate. Of course you will have money, but only that balance exactly matched to freedom as the eagle or the bandit carry theirs. I dont bribe you with money. I give you liberty.’

‘To desert them,’ the corporal said.

‘Desert whom? Look again.’ His hand appeared in a brief rapid gesture toward the wan city unsleeping below them—a gesture not even contemptuous, not anything: just a flick, then gone, already vanished again within the midnight-colored cloak. ‘Not them. Where have they been since Monday? Why with their bare hands, since they have enough of them, have they not torn down brick by brick the walls which far fewer hands than theirs sufficed to raise, or torn from its hinges that one door which only one hand sufficed to lock, and set all of you free who had essayed to die for them? Where are the two thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven others you had—or thought you had—at dawn Monday? Why, as soon as you were through the wire, didn’t all of them cast down their arms too and simply follow you, if they too believed you were all weaponed and bucklered out of the arsenal of invulnerable human aspiration and hope and belief? why didn’t even that mere three thousand then—they would have been enough—erase the bricks and wrench away that door, who believed in you for five minutes anyway enough to risk what you anyway knew you risked—the three thousand that is lacking the twelve who have been locked inside the same incommunicant bricks with you ever since. Where are they even? one of them, your own countryman, blood brother, kinsman probably since you were all blood kin at some time there—one Zsettlani who has denied you, and the other, whether Zsettlani or not or blood kin or not, at least was—or anyway had been accepted into—the brotherhood of your faith and hope—Polchek, who had already betrayed you by midnight Sunday. Do you see? You even have a substitute to your need as on that afternoon God produced the lamb which saved Isaac—if you could call Polchek a lamb. I will take Polchek tomorrow, execute him with rote and fanfare; you will not only have your revenge and discharge the vengeance of the rest of those three thousand whom he betrayed, you will repossess the opprobrium from all that voice down there which cannot even go to bed because of the frantic need to anathemise you. Give me Polchek, and take freedom.’

‘There are still ten,’ the corporal said.

‘Let’s try it. We will remain here; I will send the car back with orders to unlock and open that door and then for every man in that building to vanish from it, oblivious of all to which they themselves will be invisible—quietly unlock that door, unlock that gate, and vanish. How long before that ten will have denied you too—betrayed you too, if you can call that choice betrayal?’

‘And you see too,’ the corporal said. ‘In ten minutes there would not be ten but a hundred. In ten hours there would not be ten hundred but ten thousand. And in ten days——’

‘Yes,’ the old general said. ‘I have seen that. Have I not said I dont so basely misread your character? oh yes, let us say it: your threat. Why else have I offered to buy my—our—security with things which most men not only do not want but on the contrary do well to fear and flee from, like liberty and freedom? Oh yes, I can destroy you tomorrow morning and save us—for the time. For the length of my life, in fact. But only for the time. And if I must, I will. Because I believe in man within his capacities and limitations. I not only believe he is capable of enduring and will endure, but that he must endure, at least until he himself invents evolves produces a better tool than he to substitute for himself. Take my car and freedom, and I will give you Polchek. Take the highest of all the ecstasies: compassion, pity: the orgasm of forgiving him who barely escaped doing you a mortal hurt—that glue, that catalyst which your philosophers have trained you to believe holds the earth together. Take the earth.’

‘There are still ten,’ the corporal said.

‘Have I forgotten them?’ the old general said. ‘Have I not said twice that I have never misread you? You dont need to threaten me; I know that they, not you, are the problem; not you but they are what we are bargaining for. Because for your profit, I must destroy all eleven of you and so compound tenfold the value of your threat and sacrifice. For my profit, I must let them go too, to be witnesses to all the earth that you forsook them; for, talk as much and as loudly and as long as they will, who to believe in the value—value? validity—of the faith they preach when you, its prophet and instigator, elected your liberty to its martyrdom? No no, we are not two Greek or Armenian or Jewish—or for that matter, Norman—peasants swapping a horse: we are two articulations self-elected possibly, anyway elected, anyway postulated, not so much to defend as to test two inimical conditions which, through no fault of ours but through the simple paucity and restrictions of the arena where they meet, must contend and—one of them—perish: I champion of this mundane earth which, whether I like it or not, is, and to which I did not ask to come, yet since I am here, not only must stop but intend to stop during my allotted while; you champion of an esoteric realm of man’s baseless hopes and his infinite capacity—no: passion—for unfact. No, they are not inimical really, there is no contest actually; they can even exist side by side together in this one restricted arena, and could and would, had yours not interfered with mine. So once more: take the earth. Now, answer as I know you will: There are still ten.’

‘There are still that ten,’ the corporal said.

‘Then take the world,’ the old general said. ‘I will acknowledge you as my son; together we will close the window on this aberration and lock it forever. Then I will open another for you on a world such as caesar nor sultan nor khalif ever saw, Tiberius nor Kubla nor all the emperors of the East ever dreamed of—no Rome and Baiae: mere depot for the rapine of ravagers and bagnio for one last exhaustion of the nerve-ends before returning to their gloomy deserts to wrest more of the one or face at home the hired knives of their immediate underlings thirsting to cure them of the need for both; no Cathay: chimaera of poets bearing the same relation to the reality of attainment as the Mahometan’s paradise—a symbol of his escape and a justification of its need, from the stinking alleys or fierce sand of his inescapable cradle; nor Kubla’s Xanadu which was not even a poet’s rounded and completed dream but a drug-sodden English one’s lightning-bolt which electrocuted him with the splendor he could not even face long enough to describe it down;—none of these which were but random and momentary constellations in the empyrean of the world’s history; but Paris, which is the world as empyrean is the sum of its constellations,—not that Paris in which any man can have all of these—Rome Cathay and Xanadu—provided he is connected a little and does not need to count his money, because you do not want these: have I not said twice now that I have not misread you? but that Paris which only my son can inherit from me—that Paris which I did not at all reject at seventeen but simply held in abeyance for compounding against the day when I should be a father to bequeath it to an heir worthy of that vast and that terrible heritage. A fate, a destiny in it: mine and yours, one and inextricable. Power, matchless and immeasurable; oh no, I have not misread you:—I, already born heir to that power as it stood then, holding that inheritance in escrow to become unchallenged and unchallengeable chief of that confederation which would defeat and subjugate and so destroy the only factor on earth which threatened it; you with the power and gift to persuade three thousand men to accept a sure and immediate death in preference to a problematical one based on tried mathematical percentage, when you had at most only a division of fifteen thousand to work on and your empty hands to work with. What can you not—will you not—do with all the world to work on and the heritage I can give you to work with. A king, an emperor, retaining his light and untensile hold on mankind only until another appears capable of giving them more and bloodier circuses and more and sweeter bread? Bah. You will be God, holding him forever through a far, far stronger ingredient than his simple lusts and appetites: by his triumphant and ineradicable folly, his deathless passion for being led, mystified, and deceived.’

‘So we ally—confederate,’ the corporal said. ‘Are you that afraid of me?’

‘I already respect you; I dont need to fear you. I can do without you. I shall; I intend to. Of course, in that case you will not see it—and how sad that commentary: that one last bitterest pill of martyrdom, without which the martyrdom itself could not be since then it would not be martyrdom: even if by some incredible if you shall have been right, you will not even know it—and paradox: only the act of voluntarily relinquishing the privilege of ever knowing you were right, can possibly make you right.—I know, dont say it: if I can do without you, then so can you yourself; to me, your death is but an ace to be finessed, while to you it is the actual ace of trumps. Nor this either: I mentioned the word bribe once; now I have offered it: I am an old man, you a young one; I will be dead in a few years and you can use your inheritance to win the trick tomorrow which today my deuce finessed you of. Because I will take that risk too. Dont even say——’ and stopped and raised the hand quickly this time from inside the cloak and said: ‘Wait. Dont say it yet.—Then take life. And think well before you answer that. Because the purse is empty now; only one thing else remains in it. Take life. You are young; even after four years of war, the young can still believe in their own invulnerability: that all else may die, but not they. So they dont need to treasure life too highly since they cannot conceive, accept, the possible end of it. But in time you become old, you see death then. Then you realise that nothing—nothing—nothing—not power nor glory nor wealth nor pleasure nor even freedom from pain, is as valuable as simple breathing, simply being alive even with all the regret of having to remember and the anguish of an irreparable wornout body; merely knowing that you are alive—Listen to this. It happened in America, at a remote place called by an Indian name I think: Mississippi: a man who had committed a brutal murder for some base reason—gain or revenge perhaps or perhaps simply to free himself of one woman in order to espouse another; it doesn’t matter—who went to his trial still crying his innocence and was convicted and sentenced still crying it and even in the death cell beneath the gallows still crying it, until a priest came to him; not the first time of course nor the second nor perhaps even the third, but presently and in time: the murderer at last confessing his crime against man and so making his peace with God, until presently it was almost as though the murderer and the priest had exchanged places and offices: not the priest now but the murderer the strong one, the calm one, the strong calm steadfast rock not even of tremulous hope but of conviction and unshakable faith, on which the priest himself could now lean for strength and courage; this right up to the very morning of the execution, toward which the murderer now looked with a sort of impatience almost, as though actually fretting a little for the moment when he could doff the sorry ephemeral world which had brought him to this and demanded this expiation and accepted his forgiveness; right up to the gallows itself: which at Mississippi I understand is out-of-doors in the yard of the jail, enclosed temporarily in a high stockade of planks to shield the principal’s departure from earth from the merely morbid and curious anyway; though they would come: in their carts and carriages for miles, bringing box lunches: men women children and grandparents, to stand along the tall fence until the bell, clock, whatever it was to mark the passing of the soul, struck and released them to go back home; indeed, able to see even less than the man who stood beneath the noose, already free this whole week now of that sorry and mortal body which was the sorry all which penance could rob him of, standing calm composed and at peace, the trivial noose already fitted to his neck and in his vision one last segment of the sky beyond which his theology had taught him he would presently be translated, and one single branch of an adjacent tree extending over the stockade as though in benison, one last gesture of earth’s absolution, with which he had long since severed any frail remaining thread; when suddenly a bird flew onto that bough and stopped and opened its tiny throat and sang—whereupon he who less than a second before had his very foot lifted to step from earth’s grief and anguish into eternal peace, cast away heaven, salvation, immortal soul and all, struggling to free his bound hands in order to snatch away the noose, crying, ‘Innocent! Innocent! I didn’t do it!’ even as the trap earth, world and all, fell from under him—all because of one bird, one weightless and ephemeral creature which hawk might stoop at or snare or lime or random pellet of some idle boy destroy before the sun set—except that tomorrow, next year, there would be another bird, another spring, the same bough leafed again and another bird to sing on it, if he is only here to hear it, can only remain—Do you follow me?’

‘Yes,’ the corporal said.

‘Then take that bird. Recant, confess, say you were wrong; that what you led was—led? you led nothing: you simply participated—an attack which failed to advance. Take life from me; ask mercy and accept it. I can give it, even for a military failure. The general commanding your division will—he already has—demand a sacrifice, not in the name of France or of victory, but in that of his blemished record. But it’s not he, it’s I who wear this hat.’

‘There are still ten,’ the corporal said.

‘Who will hate you—until they forget you. Who will even curse you until they have forgot whom they cursed, and why. No no: close the window upon that baseless dream. Open this other one; perhaps you will—can—see nothing but gray beyond it—except for that bough, always; that one single bough which will be there always waiting and ready for that weightless and ephemeral burden. Take that bird.’

‘Dont be afraid,’ the corporal said. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing worth it.’

For a moment the old general didn’t seem to have heard the corporal at all, standing a head below the other’s high mountain one, beneath the seemingly insuperable weight of the blue-and-scarlet hat cross-barred and dappled with gold braid and heavy golden leaves. Then he said, ‘Afraid? No no, it’s not I but you who are afraid of man; not I but you who believe that nothing but a death can save him. I know better. I know that he has that in him which will enable him to outlast even his wars; that in him more durable than all his vices, even that last and most fearsome one; to outlast even this next avatar of his servitude which he now faces: his enslavement to the demonic progeny of his own mechanical curiosity, from which he will emancipate himself by that one ancient tried and true method by which slaves have always freed themselves: by inculcating their masters with the slaves’ own vices—in this case the vice of war and that other one which is no vice at all but instead is the quality-mark and warrant of man’s immortality: his invincible and deathless folly. He has already begun to put wheels under his patio his terrace and his front veranda; even at my age I may see the day when what was once his house has become a storage-place for his bed and stove and razor and spare clothing; you with your youth could (remember that bird) see the day when he will have invented his own private climate and moved it stove bathroom bed clothing kitchen and all into his automobile and what he once called home will have vanished from human lexicon: so that he wont dismount from his automobile at all because he wont need to: the entire earth one unbroken machined de-mountained dis-rivered expanse of concrete paving protuberanceless by tree or bush or house or anything which might constitute a corner or a threat to visibility, and man in his terrapin myriads enclosed clothesless from birth in his individual wheeled and glovelike envelope, with pipes and hoses leading upward from underground reservoirs to charge him with one composite squirt which at one mutual instant will fuel his mobility, pander his lusts, sate his appetites and fire his dreams; peripatetic, unceasing and long since no longer countable, to die at last at the click of an automatic circuit-breaker on a speedometer dial, and, long since freed of bone and organ and gut, leaving nothing for communal scavenging but a rusting and odorless shell—the shell which he does not get out of because he does not need to but which presently for a time he will not emerge from because he does not dare because the shell will be his only protection from the hail-like iron refuse from his wars. Because by that time his wars will have dispossessed him by simple out-distance; his simple frail physique will be no longer able to keep up, bear them, attend them, be present. He will try of course and for a little while he will even hold his own; he will build tanks bigger and faster and more impervious and with more firepower than any before, he will build aircraft bigger and faster and capable of more load and more destruction than any yet; for a little while he will accompany, direct, as he thinks control them, even after he has finally realised that it is not another frail and mortal dissident to his politics or his notions of national boundaries that he is contending with, but the very monster itself which he inhabits. It will not be someone firing bullets at him who for the moment doesn’t like him. It will be his own frankenstein which roasts him alive with heat, asphyxiates him with speed, wrenches loose his still living-entrails in the ferocity of its prey-seeking stoop. So he will not be able to go along with it at all, though for a little while longer it will permit him the harmless delusion that he controls it from the ground with buttons. Then that will be gone too; years, decades then centuries will have elapsed since it last answered his voice; he will have even forgotten the very location of its breeding-grounds and his last contact with it will be a day when he will crawl shivering out of his cooling burrow to crouch among the delicate stalks of his dead antennae like a fairy geometry, beneath a clangorous rain of dials and meters and switches and bloodless fragments of metal epidermis, to watch the final two of them engaged in the last gigantic wrestling against the final and dying sky robbed even of darkness and filled with the inflectionless uproar of the two mechanical voices bellowing at each other polysyllabic and verbless patriotic nonsense. Oh yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will be already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible and immortal voice still talking, still planning; and there too after the last ding dong of doom has rung and died there will still be one sound more: his voice, planning still to build something higher and faster and louder; more efficient and louder and faster than ever before, yet it too inherent with the same old primordial fault since it too in the end will fail to eradicate him from the earth. I dont fear man. I do better: I respect and admire him. And pride: I am ten times prouder of that immortality which he does possess than ever he of that heavenly one of his delusion. Because man and his folly—’

‘Will endure,’ the corporal said.

‘They will do more,’ the old general said proudly. ‘They will prevail.—Shall we return?’ They went back to the waiting car and descended; they traversed once more the echoing and empty warrens concentric about the distant crowded Place de Ville. Then the alley again, the car slowing and stopping once more opposite the small locked gate in front of which, above a struggling group of five men the bayoneted rifles of four of them waved and jerked like furious exclamations. The corporal looked once at the struggling group and said quietly:

‘There are eleven now.’

‘There are eleven now,’ the old general said as quietly; again one arresting gesture of the fine and delicate hand from beneath the cloak. ‘Wait. Let us watch this a moment: a man freed of it, now apparently trying to fight his way back into what for all he knows will be his death cell.’ So they sat for a moment yet, watching the fifth man (the same one who two hours ago had been taken from the cell by the same guards who came for Polchek) straining stocky and furious in the hands of his four captors apparently not away from the small gate but toward it, until the old general got out of the car, the corporal following, and said, not raising his voice yet either:

‘What’s wrong here, Sergeant?’ The group paused in their straining attitudes. The prisoner looked back then he wrenched free and turned and ran across the pavement toward the old general and the corporal, the four captors following, grasping him again.

‘Stand still, you!’ the sergeant hissed. ‘Attention! His name is Pierre Bouc. He didn’t belong in that squad at all, though we didn’t discover the mistake until one of them—’ he glanced at the corporal ‘—you—condescended to produce his regimental order. We found him trying to get back in. He denied his name; he wouldn’t even produce the order until we took it away from him.’ Holding the short and furious man with one hand, he produced the dog-eared paper from his pocket. Immediately the prisoner snatched it from him.

‘You lie!’ he said to the sergeant. Before they could prevent him he ripped the order to shreds and whirled and flung the shreds in the old general’s face. ‘You lie!’ he shouted at the old general while the bursting gout drifted like a confetti of windless and weightless snow or feathers about the golden and invincible hat, the calm incurious inscrutable face which had looked at everything and believed none of it. ‘You lie!’ the man shouted again. ‘My name is not Pierre Bouc. I am Piotr—’ adding something in a harsh almost musical middle-eastern tongue so full of consonants as to be almost unintelligible. Then he turned to the corporal, going rapidly onto his knees, grasping the corporal’s hand and saying something else in the incomprehensible tongue, to which the corporal answered in it though the man still crouched, clinging to the corporal’s hand, the corporal speaking again in the tongue, as if he had repeated himself but with a different object, noun perhaps, and then a third time, a third slight alteration in its construction or context or direction, at which the man moved, rose and stood now rigid at attention facing the corporal, who spoke again, and the man turned, a smart military quarter-turn, the four captors moving quickly in again until the corporal said in French:

‘You dont need to hold him. Just unlock the gate.’ But still the old general didn’t move, motionless within the cloak’s dark volume, composed, calm, not even bemused: just inscrutable, saying presently in that voice not even recapitulant: not anything:

‘ “Forgive me, I didn’t know what I was doing”. And you said, “Be a man”, but no move. Then you said “Be a Zsettlani” and no move. Then you said “Be a soldier” and he became one.’ Then he turned and got back into the car, the soft voluminous smother of the coat becoming motionless again about him in the corner of the seat; the sergeant came rapidly back across the pavement and stood again just behind the corporal’s shoulder; now the old general himself spoke in the rapid unvoweled tongue:

‘And became one. No: returned to one. Good night, my child.’

‘Goodbye, Father,’ the corporal answered him.

‘Not goodbye,’ the old general said. ‘I am durable too; I dont give up easily either. Remember whose blood it is that you defy me with.’ Then in French to the driver: ‘Let us go home now.’ The car went on. Then he and the sergeant turned together, the sergeant once more at and just behind his shoulder, not touching him, back to the iron gate which one of the sentries held open for them to pass through and then closed and locked. Again, so grooved and locked in old assumption, he had begun to turn down the corridor toward the cell when the sergeant once more checked and turned him, this time into a passage only wide enough for one and barely tall enough for any—a one-way secret duct leading as though into the very bowels of incarceration; the sergeant unlocked a solid door this time and closed it between himself and the corporal upon a cell indeed this time, little larger than a big closet containing one endless man-width wooden bench for sleeping and an iron bucket for latrine and two men, all bathed in one fierce glare of light. One of them did have the swaggering face this time, reckless and sardonic, incorrigible and debonair, even to the thin moustache; he even wore the filthy beret and the knotted handkerchief about his throat, even the limp dead cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets and one foot crossed negligently over the other as he had leaned against the wall of his narrow Montmartre alley, the other shorter man standing beside him with the peaceful and patient fidelity of a blind dog—a squat simian-like man whose tremendous empty and peaceful hands hung almost to his knees as if they were attached to strings inside his sleeves, with a small quite round simian head and a doughy face itself like one single feature, drooling a little at the mouth.

‘Pray to enter,’ the first said. ‘So they tapped you for it, did they? Call me Lapin; anybody in the Prêfecture will validate it.’ Without removing his hand from the pocket, he indicated the man beside him with a nudge of his elbow. ‘This is Cassetête—Horse for short. We’re on our way to town, hey, Horse?’ The second man made a single hoarse indistinguishable sound. ‘Hear that?’ the first said. ‘He can say “Paris” as good as anybody. Tell him again, Uncle—where we’re going tomorrow.’ Again the other made the thick wet sound. It was quite true; the corporal could recognise it now.

‘What’s he doing in that uniform?’ the corporal said.

‘Ah, the sons of bitches scared him,’ the first said. ‘I dont mean Germans either. You dont mean they are going to be satisfied to shoot just one of you out of that whole regiment.’

‘I dont know,’ the corporal said. ‘He hasn’t always been like this?’

‘Got a fag?’ the other said. ‘I’m out.’ The corporal produced a pack of cigarettes. The other spat the stub from his mouth without even moving his head, and took one from the pack. ‘Thanks.’ The corporal produced a lighter. ‘Thanks,’ the other said. He took the lighter and snapped it on and lit the cigarette, already—or still—talking, the cigarette bobbing, his arms now crossed in front of him, each hand grasping lightly the opposite elbow. ‘What was that you said? Has he always been like this? Naah. A few flies upstairs, but he was all right until—What?’ The corporal stood facing him, his hand extended.

‘The lighter,’ the corporal said.

‘I beg pardon?’

‘My lighter,’ the corporal said. They looked at one another. Lapin made a slight motion with his wrists and up-turned his empty palms. The corporal faced him, his hand extended.

‘Jesus,’ the other said. ‘Dont break my heart. Dont tell me you even saw what I did with it. If you did, then they are right; they just waited one day too late.’ He made another rapid movement with one hand; when it opened again, the lighter was in it. The corporal took it.

‘Beats hell, dont it?’ the other said. ‘A man aint even the sum of his vices: just his habits. Here we are, after tomorrow morning neither one of us will have any use for it and until then it wont matter which one of us has it. Yet you’ve got to have it back just because you are in the habit of owning it, and I have to try to cop it just because that’s one of my natural habits too. Maybe that’s what all the bother and trouble they’re getting ready to go to tomorrow morning is for—parading a whole garrison just to cure three lousy bastards of the bad habit of breathing. Hey, Horse?’ he said to the second man.

‘Paris,’ the second man said hoarsely.

‘You bet,’ the other said. ‘That’s the one they’re going to cure us of tomorrow: the bad habit of not getting to Paris after working for four years at it. We’ll make it this time though; the corporal here is going with us to see that we do.’

‘What did he do?’ the corporal said.

‘That’s all right,’ the other said. ‘Say we. Murder. It was the old dame’s fault; all she had to do was just tell us where the money was hidden and then behave herself, keep her mouth shut. Instead she had to lay there in the bed yelling her head off until we had to choke her or we never would have got to Paris——’

‘Paris,’ the second said in his wet hoarse voice.

‘Because that’s all we wanted,’ the other said. ‘All he was trying to do: we were trying to do: just to get to Paris. Only folks kept on steering him wrong, sending him off in the wrong direction, sicking the dogs on him, cops always saying Move on, move on—you know how it is. So when we threw in together that day—that was at Clermont Ferrand in ’14—we didn’t know how long he had been on the road because we didn’t know how old he was. Except that it had been a good while, he hadn’t been nothing but a kid then—You found out you were going to have to go to Paris before you even found out you were going to have to have a woman, hey, Horse?’

‘Paris,’ the second said hoarsely.

‘—working a little whenever he could find it, sleeping in stables and hedgerows until they would set the dogs or the police on him again, telling him to move on without even bothering to tell him which way he wanted to go until you would have thought nobody else in France ever heard of Paris, let alone wanted—had—to go there. Hey, Horse?’

‘Paris,’ the second said hoarsely.

‘Then we run into one another that day in Clermont and decided to throw in together and then it was all right, there was a war on then and all you had to do was get yourself inside a government blue suit and you were free of cops and civilians and the whole human race; all you needed was just to know who to salute and do it quick enough. So we took a bottle of brandy to a sergeant I knew——’

‘The human race?’ the corporal said.

‘Sure,’ the other said. ‘You might not think it to look at him, but he can move in the dark as quiet as a ghost and even see in it like a cat; turn this light off for a second and he will have that lighter out of your pocket and you wont even know it——So he was in too now——’

‘He learned that fast?’ the corporal said.

‘Of course we had to be a little careful about his hands. He never meant nothing, see: he just didn’t know himself how strong they were, like that night last month.’

‘So you got along fine then,’ the corporal said.

‘It was duck soup.—So he was in too now and now he could even ride sometimes, with the government paying for it, getting closer and closer to Paris now; not much over a year and we were all the way up to Verdun, that any boche will tell you is right next door to Paris——’

‘And still doing all right,’ the corporal said.

‘Why not? If you cant trust your money to a bank in peacetime, where else can you put it in a war except up the chimney or under the mattress or inside the clock? Or anywhere else you thought it was hidden for that matter because it didn’t matter to us; Horse here has a nose for a ten-franc note like a pig for a truffle. Until that night last month and that was the old dame’s fault; all she needed to do was tell us where it was and then lay quiet and keep her mouth shut but that didn’t suit her, she had to lay there in the bed hollering her head off until Horse here had to shut her up—you know: no harm intended: just to squeeze her throat a little until we could have a little peace and quiet to hunt for it in. Only we forgot about the hands, and when I got back——’

‘Got back?’ the corporal said.

‘I was downstairs hunting for the money.—got back, it was too late. So they caught us. And you’d have thought that would have satisfied them, especially as they even got the money back——’

‘You found the money?’ the corporal said.

‘Sure. While he was keeping her quiet.—But no, that wasn’t enough——’

‘You found the money and had got away with it, and then turned around and came back?’

‘What?’ the other said.

‘Why did you change your mind?’ the corporal said. After a second the other said:

‘Fag me again.’ The corporal gave him another cigarette. ‘Thanks,’ he said. The corporal extended the lighter. ‘Thanks,’ the other said. He snapped it and lit the cigarette and snuffed the lighter; again his two hands began the rapid and involuted gesture then stopped and in the same motion one of the hands tossed the lighter back to the corporal, the arms crossed again, palms to opposite elbows, the cigarette bobbing while he talked. ‘Where was I? oh yes.—But that didn’t suit them; just to take us out in a decent and peaceful way and shoot us wasn’t enough; they had to take Horse here off in a cellar somewhere and scare the daylights out of him. Justice, see? Protecting our rights. Just catching us wasn’t enough; we got to insist we did it. Just me saying so wasn’t enough; Horse too has got to holler it to high heaven—whatever that means. But it’s all right now. They cant stop us now.’ He turned and clapped the second man a hard quick blow on the back: ‘Paris tomorrow morning, kid. Fasten on to that.’

The door opened. It was the same sergeant again. He did not enter, saying to the corporal: ‘Once more’ and then stood and held the door until the corporal had passed him. Then he closed and locked it. This time it was the office of the prison commandant himself and what he—the corporal—assumed to be just another N.C.O. until he saw, arranged on the cleared desk, the utensils for the Last Sacrament—urn ewer stole candles and crucifix—and only then remarked the small embroidered cross on the coat of the man standing beside them, the other sergeant closing that door too between them so that he and the priest were alone, the priest lifting his hand to inscribe into the invisible air the invisible Passion while the corporal paused for a moment just inside the door, not surprised yet either: just once more alert, looking at him: at which moment a third person in the room would have remarked that they were almost of an age.

‘Come in, my son,’ the priest said.

‘Good evening, Sergeant,’ the corporal said.

‘Cant you say Father?’ the priest said.

‘Of course,’ the corporal said.

‘Then say it,’ the priest said.

‘Of course, Father,’ the corporal said. He came on into the room, looking quietly and rapidly again at the sacred implements on the desk while the priest watched him.

‘Not that,’ the priest said. ‘Not yet. I came to offer you life.’

‘So he sent you,’ the corporal said.

‘He?’ the priest said. ‘What he can you mean, except the Giver of all life? Why should He send me here to offer you what He has already entrusted you with? Because the man you imply, for all his rank and power, can only take it from you. Your life was never his to give you because for all his stars and braid he too before God is just one more pinch of rotten and ephemeral dust. It was neither of them which sent me here: not the One who has already given you life, nor the other who never had yours nor any other life within his gift. It was duty which sent me here. Not this—’ for an instant his hand touched the small embroidered cross on his collar ‘—not my cloth, but my belief in Him; not even as His mouthpiece but as a man——’

‘A French man?’ the corporal said.

‘All right,’ the priest said. ‘Yes, a Frenchman if you like.—commanded me here to command—not ask, offer: command—you to keep the life which you never had and never will have the refusal of, to save another one.’

‘To save another one?’ the corporal said.

‘The commander of your regiment’s division,’ the priest said. ‘He will die too, for what all the world he knows—the only world he does know because it was the one he dedicated his life to—will call his failure, where you will die for what you anyway will call a victory.’

‘So he did send you,’ the corporal said. ‘For blackmail.’

‘Beware,’ the priest said.

‘Then dont tell me this,’ the corporal said. ‘Tell him. If I can save Gragnon’s life only by not doing something you tell me I already cant and never could do anyway. Tell him then. I dont want to die either.’

‘Beware,’ the priest said.

‘That wasn’t who I meant,’ the corporal said. ‘I meant——’

‘I know whom you meant,’ the priest said. ‘That’s why I said Beware. Beware Whom you mock by reading your own mortal’s pride into Him Who died two thousand years ago in the postulate that man shall never never never, need never never never, hold suzerainty over another’s life and death—absolved you and the man you mean both of that terrible burden: you of the right to and he of the need for, suzerainty over your life; absolved poor mortal man forever of the fear of the oppression, and the anguish of the responsibility, which suzerainty over human fate and destiny would have entailed on him and cursed him with, when He refused in man’s name the temptation of that mastery, refused the terrible temptation of that limitless and curbless power when He answered the Temptor: Render unto caesar the things which are caesar’s.—I know,’ he said quickly, before the corporal could have spoken: ‘To Chaulnesmont the things which are Chaulnesmont’s. Oh yes, you’re right; I’m a Frenchman first. And so now you can even cite the record at me, cant you? All right. Do it.’

‘The record?’ the corporal said.

‘The Book,’ the priest said. The corporal looked at him. ‘You mean you dont even know it?’

‘I cant read,’ the corporal said.

‘Then I’ll cite for you, plead for you,’ the priest said. ‘It wasn’t He with His humility and pity and sacrifice that converted the world, it was pagan and bloody Rome which did it with His martyrdom; furious and intractable dreamers had been bringing that same dream out of Asia Minor for three hundred years until at last one found a caesar foolish enough to crucify him. And you are right. But then so is he (I dont mean Him now, I mean the old man in that white room yonder onto whose shoulders you are trying to slough and shirk your right and duty for free will and decision). Because only Rome could have done it, accomplished it, and even He (I do mean Him now) knew it, felt and sensed this, furious and intractable dreamer though He was. Because He even said it Himself: On this rock I found My church, even while He didn’t—and never would—realise the true significance of what He was saying, believing still that He was speaking poetic metaphor, synonym, parable—that rock meant unstable inconstant heart, and church meant airy faith. It wasn’t even His first and favorite sycophant who read that significance, who was also ignorant and intractable like Him and even in the end got himself also electrocuted by the dream’s intractable fire, like Him. It was Paul, who was a Roman first and then a man and only then a dreamer and so of all of them was able to read the dream correctly and to realise that, to endure, it could not be a nebulous and airy faith but instead it must be a church, an establishment, a morality of behavior inside which man could exercise his right and duty for free will and decision, not for a reward resembling the bed-time tale which soothes the child into darkness, but the reward of being able to cope peacefully, hold his own, with the hard durable world in which (whether he would ever know why or not wouldn’t matter either because now he could cope with that too) he found himself. Not snared in that frail web of hopes and fears and aspirations which man calls his heart, but fixed, established, to endure, on that rock whose synonym was the seeded capital of that hard durable enduring earth which man must cope with somehow, by some means, or perish. So you see, he is right. It wasn’t He nor Peter, but Paul who, being only one-third dreamer, was two-thirds man and half of that a Roman, could cope with Rome. Who did more; who, rendering unto caesar, conquered Rome. More: destroyed it, because where is that Rome now? until what remains but that rock, that citadel. Render unto Chaulnesmont. Why should you die?’

‘Tell him that,’ the corporal said.

‘To save another life, which your dream will electrocute,’ the priest said.

‘Tell him that,’ the corporal said.

‘Remember—’ the priest said. ‘No, you cant remember, you dont know it, you cant read. So I’ll have to be both again: defender and advocate. Change these stones to bread, and all men will follow Thee. And He answered, Man cannot live by bread alone. Because He knew that too, intractable and furious dreamer though He was: that He was tempted to tempt and lead man not with the bread, but with the miracle of that bread, the deception, the illusion, the delusion of that bread; tempted to believe that man was not only capable and willing but even eager for that deception, that even when the illusion of that miracle had led him to the point where the bread would revert once more to stone in his very belly and destroy him, his own children would be panting for the opportunity to grasp into their hands in their turn the delusion of that miracle which would destroy them. No no, listen to Paul, who needed no miracle, required no martyrdom. Save that life. Thou shalt not kill.’

‘Tell him that,’ the corporal said.

‘Take your own tomorrow, if you must,’ the priest said. ‘But save his now.’

‘Tell him that,’ the corporal said.

‘Power,’ the priest said. ‘Not just power over the mere earth offered by that temptation of simple miracle, but that more terrible one over the universe itself—that terrible power over the whole universe which that mastery over man’s mortal fate and destiny would have given Him had He not cast back into the Temptor’s very teeth that third and most terrible temptation of immortality: which if He had faltered or succumbed would have destroyed His Father’s kingdom not only on the earth but in heaven too because that would have destroyed heaven since what value in the scale of man’s hope and aspiration or what tensile hold or claim on man himself could that heaven own which could be gained by that base means—blackmail: man in his turn by no more warrant than one single precedent casting himself from the nearest precipice the moment he wearied of the burden of his free will and decision, the right to the one and the duty of the other, saying to, challenging his Creator: Let me fall—if You dare?’

‘Tell him that,’ the corporal said.

‘Save that other life. Grant that the right of free will is in your own death. But your duty to choose is not yours. It’s his. It’s General Gragnon’s death.’

‘Tell him that,’ the corporal said. They looked at one another. Then the priest seemed to make a terrible faint and convulsive effort, whether to speak or not to speak was still not clear even when he said, like a sort of gesture, a valedictory not to defeat nor despair nor even desperation, but as though to abnegation itself:

‘Remember that bird.’

‘So he did send you here,’ the corporal said.

‘Yes,’ the priest said. ‘He sent for me. To render unto caesar—’ He said: ‘But he came back.’

‘Came back?’ the corporal said. ‘He?’

‘The one who denied you,’ the priest said. ‘That turned his back on you. Freed himself of you. But he came back. And now there are eleven of them again.’ He moved until he was facing the corporal. ‘Save me too,’ he said. Then he was on his knees before the corporal, his hands clasped fist into fist at his breast. ‘Save me,’ he said.

‘Get up, Father,’ the corporal said.

‘No,’ the priest said. He fumbled a moment inside the breast of his coat and produced his prayer-book, dog-eared and stained too from the front lines; it seemed to open automatically on the narrow purple ribbon of its marker as the priest reversed it and extended it upward. ‘Read it to me then,’ he said. The corporal took the book.

‘What?’ he said.

‘The office for the dying,’ the priest said. ‘But you cant read, can you?’ he said. He took the book back and now clasped it closed between his hands at his breast, his head bowed still. ‘Save me then,’ he said.

‘Get up,’ the corporal said, reaching down to grasp the priest’s arm, though the priest had already begun to rise, standing now, fumbling a little clumsily as he put the book back inside his coat; as he turned, stiffly and clumsily still, he seemed to stumble slightly and was apparently about to fall even, though again he had recovered himself before the corporal touched him, going toward the door now, one hand already lifted toward it or toward the wall or perhaps just lifted, as though he were blind too, the corporal watching him, until the corporal said: ‘You’ve forgotten your gear.’

The priest stopped, though he didn’t turn yet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So I did.’ Then he said, ‘So I have.’ Then he turned and went back to the desk and gathered the articles up—basin ewer stole and crucifix—and huddled them clumsily into or onto one arm and extended his hand toward the candles and then stopped again, the corporal watching him.

‘You can send back for them,’ the corporal said.

‘Yes,’ the priest said. ‘I can send back for them,’ and turned and went again to the door and stopped again and after a moment began to raise his hand toward it, though the corporal now had already passed him, to strike two or three rapping blows with his knuckles on the wood, which a moment later swung open and back, revealing the sergeant, the priest standing again for a second or two clasping to his breast the huddled symbols of his mystery. Then he roused. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I can send back for them,’ and passed through the door; and this time he didn’t pause even when the sergeant overtook him and said:

‘Shall I take them to the chapel, Father?’

‘Thank you,’ the priest said, relinquishing them: and now he was free, walking on; and now he was even safe: outside, out of doors with only the spring darkness, the spring night soft and myriad above the blank and lightless walls and between them too, filling the empty topless passage, alley, at the end of which he could see a section of the distant wire fence and the catwalk spaced by the rigid down-glare of the lights, these spaced in their turn by the red eyes of the Senegalese sentries’ cigarettes; and beyond that the dark plain, and beyond the plain in turn the faint unsleeping glow of the sleepless city; and now he could remember when he had seen them first, finally seen them, overtook them at last, two winters ago up near the Chemin des Dames—behind Combles, Souchez, he couldn’t remember—the cobbled Place in the mild evening (no: mild evening, it was only autumn yet, a little while still before there would begin at Verdun that final winter of the doomed and accursed race of man) already empty again because again he had just missed them by minutes, the arms the hands pointing to show him, the helpful and contradictory voices giving him directions, too many of them in fact, too many helpful voices and too many directions, until at last one man walked with him to the edge of the village to show him the exact route and even point out to him the distant huddle of the farm itself—a walled yard enclosing house byre and all, twilight now and he saw them, eight of them at first standing quietly about the kitchen stoop until he saw two more of them, the corporal and another, sitting on the stoop in baize or oilcloth aprons, the corporal cleaning a fowl, a chicken, the other peeling potatoes into a bowl while beside, above them stood the farmwife with a pitcher and a child, a girl of ten or so, with both hands full of mugs and tumblers; then while he watched, the other three came out of the byre with the farmer himself and crossed the yard carrying the pails of milk.

Nor did he approach nor even make his presence known: just watching while the woman and the child exchanged the pitcher and the drinking vessels for the fowl and bowl and the pails of milk and carried the food on into the house and the farmer filled from the pitcher the mugs and tumblers which the corporal held and passed in turn and then they drank in ritual salutation—to peaceful work, to the peaceful end of day, to anticipation of the peaceful lamplit meal, whatever it was—and then it was dark, night, night indeed because the second time was at Verdun which was the freezing night of France and of man too since France was the cradle of the liberty of the human spirit, in the actual ruins of Verdun itself, within actual hearing range of the anguish of Gaud and Valaumont; not approaching this time either but only to stand from a distance watching, walled by the filth- and anguish-stained backs from where the thirteen would be standing in the circle’s center, talking or not, haranguing or not, he would never know, dared not know; thinking Yes, even then I durst not; even if they did not need to talk or harangue since simply to believe was enough; thinking, Yes, there were thirteen then and even now there are still twelve; thinking, Even if there were only one, only he, would be enough, more than enough, thinking Just that one to stand between me and safety, me and security, between me and peace; and although he knew the compound and its environs well, for a moment he was dis-oriented as sometimes happens when you enter a strange building in darkness or by one door and then emerge from it in light or by another even though this was not the case here, thinking in a sort of quiet unamazement Yes, I probably knew from the moment he sent for me what door I should have to emerge from, the only exit left for me. So it only lasted for a moment or two or possibly even less than that: one infinitesimal vertiginous lurch and wall stone and brick resumed once more its ordered and forever repudiated place; one corner, one turn, and the sentry was where he had remembered he would be, not even pacing his beat but just standing at ease with his grounded rifle beside the small iron gate.

‘Good evening, my son,’ the priest said.

‘Good evening, Father,’ the man said.

‘I wonder if I might borrow your bayonet?’ the priest said.

‘My what?’ the man said.

‘Your bayonet,’ the priest said, extending his hand.

‘I cant do that,’ the man said. ‘I’m on parade—on post. The corporal will——The Officer of the Day himself might come along——’

‘Tell them I took it,’ the priest said.

‘Took it?’ the man said.

‘Demanded it,’ the priest said, his hand still steadily out. ‘Come.’ Then the hand moved, not fast, and drew the bayonet from the man’s belt. ‘Tell them I took it,’ the priest said, already turning. ‘Good night.’ Or perhaps the man even answered; perhaps even in the silent and empty alley again one last fading echo of one last warm and human voice speaking in warm and human protest or amazement or simple unquestioning defence of an is simply because it is; and then no more, thinking It was a spear, so I should have taken the rifle too, and then no more: thinking The left side, and I’m right handed, thinking But at least He wasn’t wearing an infantryman’s overcoat and a Magasin du Louvre shirt and so at least I can do that, opening the coat and throwing it back and then opening the shirt until he could feel the blade’s cold minuscule point against his flesh and then the cold sharp whisper of the blade itself entering, beginning to make a sort of thin audible cry as though of astonishment at its own swiftness yet when he looked down at it barely the point itself had disappeared and he said aloud, quietly: ‘Now what?’ But He was not standing either, he thought He was nailed there and He will forgive me and cast himself sideways and downward, steadying the bayonet so that the end of the hilt should strike the bricks first, and turned a little until his cheek lay against the still-warm bricks and now he began to make a thin sweet crying of frustration and despair until the pinch of his hand between the bayonet’s cross guard and his own flesh told him better and so he could stop the crying now—the sweet thick warm murmur of it pouring suddenly from his mouth.

Beeping its horn steadily—not pettishly nor fretfully nor even irritatedly but in fact with a sort of unwearyable blasé Gallic detachment—the French staff-car crept through the Place de Ville as though patting the massed crowd gently and firmly to either side with the horn itself to make room for its passage. It was not a big car. It flew no general’s pennon nor in fact any insignia of any kind; it was just a small indubitable French army motor car driven by a French soldier and containing three more soldiers, three American privates who until they met in the Blois orderly room where the French car had picked them up four hours ago had never laid eyes on one another before, who sat two in the back and one in front with the driver while the car bleated its snaillike passage through the massed spent wan and sleepless faces.

One of the two Americans in the back seat was leaning out of the car, looking eagerly about, not at the faces but at the adjacent buildings which enclosed the Place. He held a big much-folded and -unfolded and -refolded map open between his hands. He was quite young, with brown eyes as trustful and unalarmed as those of a cow, in an open reliant invincibly and incorrigibly bucolic face—a farmer’s face fated to love his peaceful agrarian heritage (his father, as he would after him, raised hogs in Iowa and rich corn to feed and fatten them for market on) for the simple reason that to the end of his eupeptic days (what was going to happen to him inside the next thirty minutes would haunt him of course from time to time but only in dreams, as nightmares haunt) it would never occur to him that he could possibly have found anything more worthy to be loved—leaning eagerly out of the car and completely ignoring the massed faces through which he crept, saying eagerly:

‘Which one is it? Which one is it?’

‘Which one is what?’ the American beside the driver said.

‘The Headquarters,’ he said. ‘The Ho-tel de Villy.’

‘Wait till you get inside,’ the other said. ‘That’s what you volunteered to look at.’

‘I want to see it from the outside too,’ the first said. ‘That’s why I volunteered for this what-ever-it-is. Ask him,’ he said, indicating the driver. ‘You can speak Frog.’

‘Not this time,’ the other said. ‘My French dont use this kind of a house.’ But it wasn’t necessary anyway because at the same moment they both saw the three sentries—American French and British—flanking the door, and in the next one the car turned through the gates and now they saw the whole courtyard cluttered and massed with motorcycles and staff-cars bearing the three different devices. The car didn’t stop there though. Darting its way among the other vehicles at a really headlong speed, now that its gambits were its own durable peers instead of frail untriumphable human flesh, it dashed on around to the extreme rear of the baroque and awesome pile (‘Now what?’ the one in the front seat said to the Iowan who was still leaning out toward the building’s dizzy crenellated wheel. ‘Did you expect them to invite us in by the front?’

‘It’s all right,’ the Iowan said. ‘That’s how I thought it would look.’) to where an American military policeman standing beside a sort of basement areaway was signalling them with a flashlight. The car shot up beside him and stopped. He opened the door, though since the Iowan was now engaged in trying to refold his map, the American private in the front seat was the first to get out. His name was Buchwald. His grandfather had been rabbi of a Minsk synagogue until a Cossack sergeant beat his brains out with the shod hooves of a horse. His father was a tailor; he himself was born on the fourth floor of a walk-up, cold-water Brooklyn tenement. Within two years after the passage of the American prohibition law, with nothing in his bare hands but a converted army-surplus Lewis machine gun, he himself was to become czar of a million-dollar empire covering the entire Atlantic coast from Canada to whatever Florida cove or sandspit they were using that night. He had pale, almost colorless eyes; he was hard and slender too now though one day a few months less than ten years from now, lying in his ten-thousand-dollar casket banked with half that much more in cut flowers, he would look plump, almost fat. The military policeman leaned into the back of the car.

‘Come on, come on,’ he said. The Iowan emerged, carrying the clumsily-folded map in one hand and slapping at his pocket with the other. He feinted past Buchwald like a football half-back and darted to the front of the car and held the map into the light of one of the headlamps, still slapping at his pocket.

‘Durn!’ he said. ‘I’ve lost my pencil.’ The third American private was now out of the car. He was a Negro, of a complete and unrelieved black. He emerged with a sort of ballet dancer elegance, not mincing, not foppish, not maidenly but rather at once masculine and girlish or perhaps better, epicene, and stood not quite studied while the Iowan spun and feinted this time through all three of them—Buchwald, the policeman, and the Negro—and carrying his now rapidly disintegrating map plunged his upper body back into the car, saying to the policeman: ‘Lend me your flashlight. I must have dropped it on the floor.’

‘Sweet crap,’ Buchwald said. ‘Come on.’

‘It’s my pencil,’ the Iowan said. ‘I had it at that last big town we passed—what was the name of it?’

‘I can call a sergeant,’ the policeman said. ‘Am I going to have to?’

‘Nah,’ Buchwald said. He said to the Iowan: ‘Come on. They’ve probably got a pencil inside. They can read and write here too.’ The Iowan backed out of the car and stood up. He began to refold his map. Following the policeman, they crossed to the areaway and descended into it, the Iowan following with his eyes the building’s soaring upward swoop.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It sure does.’ They descended steps, through a door; they were in a narrow stone passage; the policeman opened a door and they entered an anteroom; the policeman closed the door behind them. The room contained a cot, a desk, a telephone, a chair. The Iowan went to the desk and began to shift the papers on it.

‘You can remember you were here without having to check it off, cant you?’ Buchwald said.

‘It aint for me,’ the Iowan said, tumbling the papers through. ‘It’s for the girl I’m engaged to. I promised her——’

‘Does she like pigs too?’ Buchwald said.

‘—what?’ the Iowan said. He stopped and turned his head; still half stooped over the desk, he gave Buchwald his mild open reliant and alarmless look. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with pigs?’

‘Okay,’ Buchwald said. ‘So you promised her.’

‘That’s right,’ the Iowan said. ‘When we found out I was coming to France I promised to take a map and mark off on it all the places I went to, especially the ones you always hear about, like Paris. I got Blois, and Brest, and I’ll get Paris for volunteering for this, and now I’m even going to have Chaulnesmont, the Grand Headquarters of the whole shebang as soon as I can find a pencil.’ He began to search the desk again.

‘What you going to do with it?’ Buchwald said. ‘The map. When you get it back home?’

‘Frame it and hang it on the wall,’ the Iowan said. ‘What did you think I was going to do with it?’

‘Are you sure you’re going to want this one marked on it?’ Buchwald said.

‘What?’ the Iowan said. Then he said, ‘Why?’

‘Dont you know what you volunteered for?’ Buchwald said.

‘Sure,’ the Iowan said. ‘For a chance to visit Chaulnesmont.’

‘I mean, didn’t anybody tell you what you were going to do here?’ Buchwald said.

‘You haven’t been in the army very long, have you?’ the Iowan said. ‘In the army, you dont ask what you are going to do: you just do it. In fact, the way to get along in any army is never even to wonder why they want something done or what they are going to do with it after it’s finished, but just do it and then get out of sight so that they cant just happen to see you by accident and then think up something for you to do, but instead they will have to have thought up something to be done, and then hunt for somebody to do it. Durn it, I dont believe they have a pencil here either.’

‘Maybe Sambo’s got one,’ Buchwald said. He looked at the Negro. ‘What did you volunteer for this for besides a three-day Paris pass? To see Chaulnesmont too?’

‘What did you call me?’ the Negro said.

‘Sambo,’ Buchwald said. ‘You no like?’

‘My name’s Philip Manigault Beauchamp,’ the Negro said.

‘Go on,’ Buchwald said.

‘It’s spelled Manigault but you pronounce it Mannygo,’ the Negro said.

‘Oh hush,’ Buchwald said.

‘You got a pencil, buddy?’ the Iowan said to the Negro.

‘No,’ the Negro said. He didn’t even look at the Iowan. He was still looking at Buchwald. ‘You want to make something of it?’

‘Me?’ Buchwald said. ‘What part of Texas you from?’

‘Texas,’ the Negro said with a sort of bemused contempt. He glanced at the nails of his right hand, then rubbed them briskly against his flank. ‘Mississippi. Going to live in Chicago soon as this crap’s over. Be an undertaker, if you’re interested.’

‘An undertaker?’ Buchwald said. ‘You like dead people, huh?’

‘Hasn’t anybody in this whole durn war got a pencil?’ the Iowan said.

‘Yes,’ the Negro said. He stood, tall, slender, not studied: just poised; suddenly he gave Buchwald a look feminine and defiant. ‘I like the work. So what?’

‘So you know what you volunteered for, do you?’

‘Maybe I do and maybe I dont,’ the Negro said. ‘Why did you volunteer for it? Besides a three-day pass in Paris?’

‘Because I love Wilson,’ Buchwald said.

‘Wilson?’ the Iowan said. ‘Do you know Sergeant Wilson? He’s the best sergeant in the army.’

‘Then I dont know him,’ Buchwald said without looking at the Iowan. ‘All the N.C.O.’s I know are sons of bitches.’ He said to the Negro, ‘Did they tell you, or didn’t they?’ Now the Iowan had begun to look from one to the other of them.

‘What is going on here?’ he said. The door opened. It was an American sergeant-major. He entered rapidly and looked rapidly at them. He was carrying an attaché case.

‘Who’s in charge?’ he said. He looked at Buchwald. ‘You.’ He opened the attaché case and took something from it which he extended to Buchwald. It was a pistol.

‘That’s a German pistol,’ the Iowan said. Buchwald took it. The sergeant-major reached into the attaché case again; this time it was a key, a door key; he extended it to Buchwald.

‘Why?’ Buchwald said.

‘Take it,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You dont want privacy to last forever, do you?’ Buchwald took the key and put it and the pistol into his pocket.

‘Why in hell didn’t you bastards do it yourselves?’ he said.

‘So we had to send all the way to Blois to find somebody for a midnight argument,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get it over with.’ He started to turn. This time the Iowan spoke quite loudly:

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘What is this?’ The sergeant-major paused and looked at the Iowan, then the Negro. He said to Buchwald:

‘So they’re already going coy on you.’

‘Oh, coy,’ Buchwald said. ‘Dont let that worry you. The smoke cant help it, coy is a part of what you might say one of his habits or customs or pastimes. The other one dont even know what coy means yet.’

‘Okay,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘It’s your monkey. You ready?’

‘Wait,’ Buchwald said. He didn’t look back to where the other two stood near the desk, watching him and the sergeant-major. ‘What is it?’

‘I thought they told you,’ the sergeant-major said.

‘Let’s hear yours,’ Buchwald said.

‘They had a little trouble with him,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘It’s got to be done from in front, for his own sake, let alone everybody else’s. But they cant seem to make him see it. He’s got to be killed from in front, by a Kraut bullet—see? You get it now? he was killed in that attack Monday morning; they’re giving him all the benefit: out there that morning where he had no business being—a major general, safe for the rest of his life to stay behind and say Give ’em hell, men. But no. He was out there himself, leading the whole business to victory for France and fatherland. They’re even going to give him a new medal, but he still wont see it.’

‘What’s his gripe?’ Buchwald said. ‘He knows he’s for it, dont he?’

‘Oh sure,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘He knows he’s gone. That aint the question. He aint kicking about that. He just refuses to let them do it that way—swears he’s going to make them shoot him not in the front but in the back, like any top-sergeant or shave-tail that thinks he’s too tough to be scared and too hard to be hurt. You know: make the whole world see that not the enemy but his own men did it.’

‘Why didn’t they just hold him and do it?’ Buchwald said.

‘Now now,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You dont just hold a French major-general and shoot him in the face.’

‘Then how are we supposed to do it?’ Buchwald said. The sergeant-major looked at him. ‘Oh,’ Buchwald said. ‘Maybe I get it now. French soldiers dont. Maybe next time it will be an American general and three Frogs will get a trip to New York.’

‘Yeah,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘If they just let me pick the general. You ready now?’

‘Yes,’ Buchwald said. But he didn’t move. He said: ‘Yeah. Why us, anyway? If he’s a Frog general, why didn’t the Frogs do it? Why did it have to be us?’

‘Maybe because an American doughfoot is the only bastard they could bribe with a trip to Paris,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Come on.’

But still Buchwald didn’t move, his pale hard eyes thoughtful and steady. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Give.’

‘If you’re going to back out, why didn’t you do it before you left Blois?’ the sergeant-major said.

Buchwald said something unprintable. ‘Give,’ he said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

‘Right,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘They rationed it. The Frogs will have to shoot that Frog regiment, because it’s Frog. They had to bring a Kraut general over here Wednesday to explain why they were going to shoot the Frog regiment, and the Limeys won that. Now they got to shoot this Frog general to explain why they brought the Kraut general over here, and we won that. Maybe they drew straws. All right now?’

‘Yes,’ Buchwald said, suddenly and harshly. He cursed. ‘Yes. Let’s get it over with.’

‘Wait!’ the Iowan said. ‘No! I——’

‘Dont forget your map,’ Buchwald said. ‘We wont be back here.’

‘I haven’t,’ the Iowan said. ‘What you think I been holding onto it this long for?’

‘Good,’ Buchwald said. ‘Then when they send you back home to prison for mutiny, you can mark Leavenworth on it too.’ They returned to the corridor and followed it. It was empty, lighted by spaced weak electric bulbs. They had seen no other sign of life and suddenly it was as though they apparently were not going to until they were out of it again. The narrow corridor had not descended, there were no more steps. It was as if the earth it tunnelled through had sunk as an elevator sinks, holding the corridor itself intact, immune, empty of any life or sound save that of their boots, the white-washed stone sweating in furious immobility beneath the whole concentrated weight of history, stratum upon stratum of dead tradition impounded by the Hôtel above them—monarchy revolution empire and republic, duke farmer-general and sans culotte, levee tribunal and guillotine, liberty fraternity equality and death and the people the People always to endure and prevail, the group, the clump, huddled now, going quite fast until the Iowan cried again:

‘No, I tell you! I aint——’ until Buchwald stopped, stopping them all, and turned and said to the Iowan in a calm and furious murmur:

‘Beat it.’

‘What?’ the Iowan cried. ‘I cant! Where would I go?’

‘How the hell do I know?’ Buchwald said. ‘I aint the one that’s dissatisfied here.’

‘Come on,’ the sergeant-major said. They went on. They reached a door; it was locked. The sergeant-major unlocked and opened it.

‘Do we report?’ Buchwald said.

‘Not to me,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You can even keep the pistol for a souvenir. The car’ll be waiting where you got out of it,’ and was about to close the door until Buchwald after one rapid glance into the room turned and put his foot against the door and said again in that harsh calm furious controlled voice:

‘Christ, cant the sons of bitches even get a priest for him?’

‘They’re still trying,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Somebody sent for the priest out at the compound two hours ago and he aint got back yet. They cant seem to find him.’

‘So we’re supposed to wait for him,’ Buchwald said in that tone of harsh calm unbearable outrage.

‘Supposed by who?’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Move your foot.’ Buchwald did, the door closed, the lock clashed behind them and the three of them were in a cell, a cubicle fierce with whitewash and containing the single unshaded electric light and a three-legged stool like a farmer’s milking stool, and the French general. That is, it was a French face and by its expression and cast it had been used to enough rank long enough to be a general’s, besides the insignia and the dense splash of ribbons and the Sam Browne belt and the leather putties, though the uniform which bore them were the plain G.I. tunic and trousers which a cavalry sergeant would have worn, standing now, erect and rigid now and rather as though enclosed by the fading aura of the convulsive movement which had brought him to his feet, who said sharply in French:

‘Attention there!’

‘What?’ Buchwald said to the Negro beside him. ‘What did he say?’

‘How in hell do I know?’ the Negro said. ‘Quick!’ he said in a panting voice. ‘That Ioway bastard. Do something about him quick.’

‘Right,’ Buchwald said, turning. ‘Grab him then,’ and turned on to meet the Iowan.

‘No, I tell you!’ the Iowan cried. ‘I aint going to—’ Buchwald struck him skilfully, the blow seeming not to travel at all before the Iowan catapulted backward into the wall then slid down it to the floor, Buchwald turning again in time to see the Negro grasp at the French general and the French general turn sharply face- to and against the wall, his head turned cheek against it, saying over his shoulder in French as Buchwald snapped the safety off the pistol:

‘Shoot now, you whorehouse scum. I will not turn.’

‘Jerk him around,’ Buchwald said.

‘Put that damn safety back on!’ the Negro panted, glaring back at him. ‘You want to shoot me too? Come on. It will take both of us.’ Buchwald closed the safety though he still held the pistol in his hand while they struggled, all three of them or two of them to drag the French general far enough from the wall to turn him. ‘Hit him a little,’ the Negro panted. ‘We got to knock him out.’

‘How in hell can you knock out a man that’s already dead?’ Buchwald panted.

‘Come on,’ the Negro panted. ‘Just a little. Hurry.’ Buchwald struck, trying to gauge the blow, and he was right: the body collapsed until the Negro was supporting it but not out, the eyes open, looking up at Buchwald then watching the pistol as Buchwald raised it and snapped the safety off again, the eyes not afraid, not even despaired: just incorrigibly alert and rational, so alert in fact as apparently to have seen the squeeze of Buchwald’s hand as it started, so that the sudden and furious movement turned not only the face but the whole body away with the explosion so that the round hole was actually behind the ear when the corpse reached the floor. Buchwald and the Negro stood over it, panting, the barrel of the pistol warm against Buchwald’s leg.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Buchwald said to the Negro. ‘Why didn’t you hold him?’

‘He slipped!’ the Negro panted.

‘Slipped my crap,’ Buchwald said. ‘You didn’t hold him.’

‘Son of a bitch yourself!’ the Negro panted. ‘Me stand there holding him for that bullet to come on through hunting me next?’

‘All right, all right,’ Buchwald said. ‘Now we got to plug that one up and shoot him again.’

‘Plug it up?’ the Negro said.

‘Yes,’ Buchwald said. ‘What the hell sort of undertaker will you make if you dont know how to plug up a hole in a bastard that got shot in the wrong place? Wax will do it. Get a candle.’

‘Where’m I going to get a candle?’ the Negro said.

‘Go out in the hall and yell,’ Buchwald said, swapping hands with the pistol and taking the door key from his pocket and handing it to the Negro. ‘Keep on yelling until you find a Frog. They must have candles. They must have at least one thing in this .… ing country we never had to bring two thousand miles over here and give to them.’