A Fable

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

It bade fair to be another bright and perennial lark-filled vernal morning; the gaudy uniforms and arms and jangling accoutrements and even the ebon faces too of the Senegalese regiment seemed to gleam in it as, to the cryptic tribal equatorial cries of its noncoms, it filed onto the parade ground and formed three sides of a hollow square facing the three freshly-planted posts set in a symmetric row on the edge of a long pit or ditch, almost filled and obliterated now by four years of war’s refuse—tin cans, bottles, old messkits, worn-out cooking utensils, boots, inextricable coils of rusting and useless wire—from which the dirt had been excavated to form the railroad embankment running across the end of the parade, which would serve as a backstop for what bullets neither flesh nor wood absorbed. They came into position then at rest and grounded arms and stood at ease and then easy, whereupon there rose a steady unemphatic gabble, not festive: just gregarious, like people waiting for the opening of a marketplace; the pallid perennial almost invisible lighters winked and flared from perennial cigarette to cigarette among the babble of voices, the ebon and gleaming faces not even watching the working party of white soldiers while they tamped the last earth about the posts and took up their tools and departed in a disorderly straggle like a company of reapers leaving a field of hay.

Then a distant bugle cried once or twice, the Senegalese N.C.O.’s shouted, the gaudy ranks doused the cigarettes without haste and with a sort of negligent, almost inattentive deliberation came to alert and at ease as the sergeant-major of the city garrison, a holstered pistol strapped outside his long buttoned-back coat, came into the vacant side of the square before the three posts and stopped and stood as, to the harsh abrupt ejaculations of the new N.C.O.’s, the mutinied regiment filed into the empty rectangle and huddled, pariahs still, hatless and unarmed, still unshaven, alien, stained still with Aisne and Oise and Marne mud so that against the gaudy arras of the Senegalese they looked like harassed and harried and homeless refugees from another planet, moiling a little though quiet and even orderly or at least decorous until suddenly a handful of them, eleven it was, broke suddenly out and ran in a ragged clump toward the three posts and had knelt facing the posts in the same ragged clump by the time the sergeant-major had shouted something and an N.C.O.’s voice took it up and a file of Senegalese came rapidly out and around and across the empty parade and surrounded the kneeling men and pulled them, not at all roughly, back onto their feet and turned them and herded them back among their companions like drovers behind a small band of temporarily strayed sheep.

Now a small party of horsemen rode rapidly up from the rear and stopped just outside the square, behind it; they were the town major, his adjutant, the provost marshal adjutant and three orderlies. The sergeant-major shouted, the parade (save for the pariah regiment) came to attention in one long metallic clash, the sergeant-major wheeled and saluted the town major across the rigid palisade of Senegalese heads, the town major accepted the parade and stood it at ease then back to attention again and returned it to the sergeant-major who in his turn stood it at ease again and turned to face the three posts as, abruptly and apparently from nowhere, a sergeant and file came up with the three hatless prisoners interspersed among them, whom they bound quickly to the three posts—the man who had called himself Lapin, then the corporal, then the simian-like creature whom Lapin had called Cassetête or Horse—leaving them facing in to the hollow of the square though they couldn’t see it now because at the moment there filed between them and it another squad of some twenty men with a sergeant, who halted and quarter-turned and stood them at ease with their backs to the three doomed ones, whom the sergeant-major now approached in turn, to examine rapidly the cord which bound Lapin to his post, then on to the corporal, already extending his (the sergeant-major’s) hand to the Médaille Militaire on the corporal’s coat, saying in a rapid murmur:

‘You dont want to keep this.’

‘No,’ the corporal said. ‘No use to spoil it.’ The sergeant-major wrenched it off the coat, not savagely: just rapidly, already moving on.

‘I know who to give it to,’ he said, moving on to the third man, who said, drooling a little, not alarmed, not even urgent: just diffident and promptive, as you address someone, a stranger, on whom your urgent need depends but who may have temporarily forgotten your need or forgotten you:

‘Paris.’

‘Right,’ the sergeant-major said. Then he was gone too; now the three bound men could have seen nothing save the backs of the twenty men in front of them though they could still have heard the sergeant-major’s voice as he brought the parade to attention again and drew from somewhere inside his coat a folded paper and a worn leather spectacle case and unfolded the paper and put the spectacles on and read aloud from the paper, holding it now in both hands against the light flutter of the morning breeze, his voice sounding clear and thin and curiously forlorn in the sunny lark-filled emptiness among the dead redundant forensic verbiage talking in pompous and airy delusion of an end of man. ‘By order of the president of the court,’ the sergeant-major chanted wanly and refolded the paper and removed the spectacles and folded them back into the case and stowed them both away; command, the twenty men about-turned to face the three posts; Lapin was now straining outward against his cord, trying to see past the corporal to the third man.

‘Look,’ Lapin said anxiously to the corporal.

Load!

‘Paris,’ the third man said, hoarse and wet and urgent.

‘Say something to him,’ Lapin said. ‘Quick.’

Aim!

‘Paris,’ the third man said again.

‘It’s all right,’ the corporal said. ‘We’re going to wait. We wont go without you.’

The corporal’s post may have been flawed or even rotten because, although the volley merely cut cleanly the cords binding Lapin and the third man to theirs, so that their bodies slumped at the foot of each post, the corporal’s body, post bonds and all, went over backward as one intact unit, onto the edge of the rubbish-filled trench behind it; when the sergeant-major, the pistol still smoking faintly in his hand, moved from Lapin to the corporal, he found that the plunge of the post had jammed it and its burden too into a tangled mass of old barbed wire, a strand of which had looped up and around the top of the post and the man’s head as though to assoil them both on in one unbroken continuation of the fall, into the anonymity of the earth. The wire was rusted and pitted and would not have deflected the bullet anyway, nevertheless the sergeant-major flicked it carefully away with his toe before setting the pistol’s muzzle against the ear.

As soon as the parade ground was empty (before in fact; the end of the Senegalese column had not yet vanished into the company street) the fatigue party came up with a hand-drawn barrow containing their tools and a folded tarpaulin. The corporal in charge took a wire-cutter from the barrow and approached the sergeant-major, who had already cut the corporal’s body free from the broken post. ‘Here,’ he said, handing the sergeant-major the wire-cutter. ‘You’re not going to waste a ground-sheet on one of them, are you?’

‘Get those posts out,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Let me have two men and the ground sheet.’

‘Right,’ the corporal said. The corporal went away. The sergeant-major cut off a section about six feet long of the rusted wire. When he rose, the two men with the folded tarpaulin were standing behind him, watching him.

‘Spread it out,’ he said, pointing. They did so. ‘Put him in it,’ he said. They took up the dead corporal’s body, the one at the head a little finicking because of the blood, and laid it on the tarpaulin. ‘Go on,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Roll it up. Then put it in the barrow,’ and followed them, the fatigue-party corporal suddenly not watching him too, the other men suddenly immersed again in freeing the planted posts from the earth. Nor did the sergeant-major speak again. He simply gestured the two men to take up the handles and, himself at the rear, established the direction by holding one corner as a pivot and pushing against the other and then pushing ahead on both, the laden barrow now crossing the parade ground at a long slant toward the point where the wire fence died in a sharp right angle against the old factory wall. Nor did he (the sergeant-major) look back either, the two men carrying the handles almost trotting now to keep the barrow from running over them, on toward the corner where at some point they too must have seen beyond the fence the high two-wheeled farm cart with a heavy farm horse in the shafts and the two women and the three men beside it, the sergeant-major stopping the barrow just as he had started it: by stopping himself and pivoting the barrow by its two rear corners into the angle of the fence, then himself went and stood at the fence—a man of more than fifty and now looking all of it—until the taller of the two women—the one with the high dark strong and handsome face as a man’s face is handsome—approached the other side of the wire. The second woman had not moved, the shorter, dumpier, softer one. But she was watching the two at the fence and listening, her face quite empty for the moment but with something incipient and tranquilly promising about it like a clean though not-yet-lighted lamp on a kitchen bureau.

‘Where did you say your husband’s farm is?’ the sergeant-major said.

‘I told you,’ the woman said.

‘Tell me again,’ the sergeant-major said.

‘Beyond Chalons,’ the woman said.

‘How far beyond Chalons?’ the sergeant-major said. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘How far from Verdun?’

‘It’s near Vienne-la-pucelle,’ the woman said. ‘Beyond St Mihiel,’ she said.

‘St Mihiel,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘In the army zone. Worse. In the battle zone. With Germans on one side of it and Americans on the other. Americans.’

‘Should American soldiers be more terrible than other soldiers?’ the woman said. ‘Because they are fresher at it? Is that it?’

‘No, Sister,’ the other woman said. ‘That’s wrong. It’s because the Americans have been here so young. It will be easy for them.’ The two at the fence paid no attention to her. They looked at one another through the wire. Then the woman said:

‘The war is over.’

‘Ah,’ the sergeant-major said.

The woman made no movement, no gesture. ‘What else can this mean? What else explain it? justify it? No, not even justify it: plead compassion, plead pity, plead despair for it?’ She looked at the sergeant-major, cold, griefless, impersonal. ‘Plead exculpation for it?’

‘Bah,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Did I ask you? Did anyone?’ He gestured behind him with the wire-cutter. One of the men released the handle of the barrow and came and took it. ‘Cut the bottom strand,’ the sergeant-major said.

‘Cut?’ the man said.

‘It, species of a species!’ the sergeant-major said. The man started to stoop but the sergeant-major had already snatched the wire-cutter back from him and stooped himself; the taut bottom-most strand sprang with a thin almost musical sound, recoiling. ‘Get it out of the barrow,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Lively.’ They understood now. They lifted the long tarpaulin-wrapped object from the barrow and lowered it to the ground. The woman had moved aside and the three men now waited at the fence, to draw, drag the long object along the ground and through the wire’s vacancy, then up and into the cart. ‘Wait,’ the sergeant-major said. The woman paused. The sergeant-major fumbled inside his coat and produced a folded paper which he passed through the fence to her. She opened it and looked at it for a moment, with no expression whatever.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It must be over, since you receive a diploma now with your execution. What shall I do with it? frame it on the parlor wall?’ The sergeant-major reached through the wire and snatched the paper from between her hands, his other hand fumbling out the worn spectacle case again, then with both hands, still holding the opened paper, he got the spectacle on his nose and glanced at the paper a moment then with a violent gesture crumpled the paper into his side pocket and produced another folded one from inside his coat and extended it through the wire, shaking it violently open before the woman could touch it, saying in a repressed and seething voice: ‘Say you dont need this one then. Look at the signature on it.’ The woman did so. She had never seen it before, the thin delicate faint cryptic indecipherable scrawl which few other people had ever seen either but which anyone in that half of Europe on that day competent to challenge a signature would have recognised at once.

‘So he knows where his son’s half-sister’s husband’s farm is too,’ she said.

‘Pah,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Further than St Mihiel even. If at any place on the way you should be faced with a pearled and golden gate, that will pass you through it too.—This too,’ he said, his hand coming out of his pocket and through the wire again, opening on the dull bronze of the small emblem and the bright splash of its ribbon, the woman immobile again, not touching it yet, tall, looking down at the sergeant-major’s open palm, until he felt the other woman looking at him and met the tranquil and incipient gaze; whereupon she said:

‘He’s really quite handsome, Sister. He’s not so old either.’

‘Pah!’ the sergeant-major said again. ‘Here!’ he said, thrusting, fumbling the medal into the taller woman’s hand until she had to take it, then snatching his own hand quickly back through the wire. ‘Begone!’ he said. ‘Get on with you! Get out of here!’ breathing a little hard now, irascible, almost raging, who was too old for this, feeling the second woman’s eyes again though he did not meet them yet, flinging his head up to shout at the taller one’s back: ‘There were three of you. Where is the other one—his poule, whatever she is—was?’ Then he had to meet the second woman’s eyes, the face no longer incipient now but boundless with promise, giving him a sweet and tender smile, saying:

‘It’s all right. Dont be afraid. Goodbye.’ Then they were gone, the five of them, the horse and the cart: rapidly; he turned and took the section of rusted wire from the barrow and flung it down beside the severed bottom strand.

‘Tie it back,’ he said.

‘Isn’t the war over?’ one of the men said. The sergeant-major turned almost savagely.

‘But not the army,’ he said. ‘How do you expect peace to put an end to an army when even war cant?’

When they passed through the old eastern city gate this time they were all riding, Marthe with the lines at one end of the high seat and the sister opposite with the girl between them. They were quite high, not in the city’s dense and creeping outflux but above it, not a part of it but on it like a boat, the three of them riding out of the city as on a float in a carnival procession, fluxed out of the anguished city on the fading diffusion on the anguish as on a leg-less and wheel-less effigy of a horse and cart as though borne on the massed shoulders in a kind of triumph; borne along so high in fact that they had almost reached the old gate before the owners of the shoulders even appeared or thought to raise their eyes or their attention high enough to remark what they carried and to assume, divine or simply recoil from, what the cart contained.

It was not a recoil, a shrinking, but rather an effacement, a recession: a suddenly widening ring of empty space beginning to enclose the moving cart as water recedes from a float, leaving the float to realise, discover only then that it was not maritime but terrestrial and not supported by a medium but attached to earth by legs and wheels; a recession, as though the shoulders which for a time had borne it were effacing not only the support but the cognizance too of the weight and presence of the burden, the crowd pressing steadily away from the cart and even transmitting on ahead as though by osmosis the warning of its coming, until presently the path was already opening before the cart itself ever reached it, the cart now moving faster than the crowd, the faces in the crowd not even looking toward it until the second sister, Marya, began to call down to them from her end of the high seat, not peremptory, not admonitory: just insistent and serene as if she were speaking to children: ‘Come. You owe him no obligation; you dont need to hate. You haven’t injured him; why should you be afraid?’

‘Marya,’ the other sister said.

‘Nor ashamed either,’ Marya said.

‘Hush, Marya,’ the other sister said. Marya sat back into the seat.

‘All right, Sister,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten them: only to comfort them.’ But she continued to watch them, bright and serene, the cart going on, the cleared space moving steadily before it as if the emptiness itself cleared its own advancing vacancy, so that when they came to the old gate the archway was completely vacant, the crowd now halted and banked on either side of it for the cart to pass; when suddenly a man in the crowd removed his hat, then one or two more, so that when the cart passed beneath the arch it was as though it had quit the city enclosed in a faint visible soundless rustling. ‘You see, Sister?’ Marya said with serene and peaceful triumph: ‘Only to comfort them.’

Now they were out of the city, the long straight roads diverging away, radiating away like spokes from a hub; above them slowly crawled the intermittent small clouds of dust within which, singly, in groups, sometimes in carts also, the city emptied itself; the parents and kin of the revolted regiment who had hurried toward it in amazement and terror, to compound between the old walls vituperation and anguish, now fled it almost as though in something not quite of relief but shame.

They didn’t look back at it though for a while yet it remained, squatting above the flat plain, supreme still, gray and crowned by the ancient Roman citadel and slowly fading until in time it was gone though they still had not looked once back to know it, going on themselves behind the strong slow heavy deliberate unhurryable farm-horse. They had food with them so they didn’t need to stop save for a little while at noon in a wood to feed and water the horse. So they only passed through the villages—the silent arrested faces, that same faint visible soundless rustling as the hats and caps came off, almost as though they had an outrider or courier to presage them, the girl crouching in her shawl between the two older women, Marthe iron-faced, looking straight ahead and only the other sister, Marya, to look about them, serene and tranquil, never astonished, never surprised while the heavy shaggy feet of the horse rang the slow cobbles until that one too was behind.

Just before dark they reached Chalons. They were in an army zone now and approaching what five days ago had been a battle zone though there was peace now or at least quiet; still an army zone anyway because suddenly a French and an American sergeant stood at the horse’s head, stopping him. ‘I have the paper,’ Marthe said, producing and extending it. ‘Here.’

‘Keep it,’ the French sergeant said. ‘You wont need it here. It is all arranged.’ Then she saw something else: six French soldiers carrying a cheap wood coffin approaching the rear of the cart and even as she turned on the seat they had already set the coffin down and were drawing the tarpaulin-swaddled body from the cart.

‘Wait,’ Marthe said in her harsh strong tearless voice.

‘It is arranged, I tell you,’ the French sergeant said. ‘You go to St Mihiel by train.’

‘By train?’ Marthe said.

‘Why, Sister!’ Marya said. ‘In the train!’

‘Restrain yourself,’ the French sergeant said to Marthe. ‘You wont have to pay. It’s arranged, I tell you.’

‘This cart is not mine,’ Marthe said. ‘I borrowed it.’

‘We know that,’ the French sergeant said. ‘It will be returned.’

‘But I must still carry him from St Mihiel to Vienne-la-pucelle—You said St Mihiel, didn’t you?’

‘Why do you argue with me?’ the French sergeant said. ‘Have I not told you one million times it is all arranged? Your husband will meet you at St Mihiel with your own cart and horse. Get down. All of you. Just because the war has stopped, do you think the army has nothing else to do but cajole civilians? Come along now. You’re holding up your train; it has a little more to do than this too.’

Then they saw the train. They had not noticed it before though the tracks were almost beside them. It was a locomotive and a single van of the type known as forty-and-eight. They got down from the cart; it was dusk now. The French soldiers finished fastening down the lid of the coffin; they took it up and the three women and the two sergeants followed to the van and stopped again while the soldiers lifted the coffin into the open door, then climbed in themselves and took up the coffin again and carried it forward out of sight and then reappeared and dropped one by one to the ground again.

‘In with you,’ the French sergeant said. ‘And dont complain because you dont have seats. There’s plenty of clean straw. And here.’ It was an army blanket. None of the three of them knew where he had got it from. That is, they had not noticed it before either. Then the American sergeant said something to the French one, in his own language without doubt since it meant nothing to them, not even when the French sergeant said, ‘Attendez’; they just stood in the slow and failing light until the American sergeant returned carrying a wooden packing-case stencilled with the cryptic symbols of ordnance or supply, that didn’t matter either, the American sergeant setting the box in place before the door and now they knew why, with a little of surprise perhaps, climbing in turn onto the box and then into the van, into almost complete darkness with only one pale shapeless gleam from the coffin’s unpainted wood to break it. They found the straw. Marthe spread the blanket on it and they sat down; at that moment someone else sprang, vaulted into the van—a man, a soldier, by his silhouette in the door where there was still a little light, an American soldier, carrying something in both hands they smelled the coffee, the American sergeant looming over them now, saying, very loud:

‘Ici café. Café,’ fumbling the three mugs down until Marthe took them and distributed them, feeling in her turn the man’s hard hand gripping her hand and the mug both while he guided the spout of the coffee pot into the mug; he even seemed to anticipate the jerk, crying ‘Watch it!’ in his own language a second or two before the shrill peanut-parcher whistle which did not presage the lurch but rather accompanied it, bracing himself against the wall as the van seemed to rush from immobility into a sort of frantic celerity with no transition whatever; a gout of burning coffee leapt from the mug in her hand onto her lap. Then the three of them managed to brace themselves back against the wall too, the whistle shrieking again shrill as friction, as though it actually were friction: not a warning of approach but a sound of protest and insensate anguish and indictment of the hard dark earth it rushed over, the vast weight of dark sky it burrowed frantically beneath, the constant and inviolable horizon it steadily clove.

This time the American sergeant knelt, braced still, using both hands again to fill the mugs, but only half full now so that, sitting against the wall, they drank by installments the hot sweet comforting coffee, the van rushing on through darkness, themselves invisible even to one another in darkness, even the gleam of the coffin at the other end of the van gone now and, their own inert bodies now matched and reconciled with the van’s speed, it was as though there were no motion at all if it had not been for the springless vibration and the anguished shrieks from the engine from time to time.

When light returned, the van had stopped. It would be St Mihiel; they had told her St Mihiel and this would be it, even if there had not been that sixth sense, even after almost four years, that tells people when they are nearing home. So as soon as the van stopped, she had started to get up, saying to the American sergeant: ‘St Mihiel?’ because at least he should understand that, then in a sort of despair of urgency she even said, began, ‘Mon homme à moi—mon mari’ before she stopped, the sergeant speaking himself now, using one or two more of the few other words which were his French vocabulary:

‘No no no. Attention. Attention,’ even in the van’s darkness motioning downward at her with his hands as a trainer commands a dog to sit. Then he was gone, silhouetted for another instant against the paler door, and they waited, huddled together now for warmth in the cold spring dawn, the girl between them, whether asleep or not, whether she had ever slept during the night or not, Marthe could not tell though by her breathing Marya, the other sister, was. It was full light when the sergeant returned; they were all three awake now, who had slept or not slept; they could see the first of Saturday’s sun and hear the eternal and perennial larks. He had more coffee, the pot filled again, and this time he had bread too, saying, very loud: ‘Monjay. Monjay’ and they—she—could see him now—a young man with a hard drafted face and with something else in it—impatience or commiseration, she anyway could not tell which. Nor did she care, thinking again to try once more to communicate with him except that the French sergeant at Chalons had said that it was all arranged, and suddenly it was not that she could trust the American sergeant because he must know what he was doing since he had obviously come along with them under orders, but because she—they—could do little else.

So they ate the bread and drank the hot sweet coffee again. The sergeant was gone again and they waited; she had no way to mark or gauge how long. Then the sergeant sprang or vaulted into the van again and she knew that the moment was here. This time the six soldiers who followed him were Americans; the three of them rose and stood and waited again while the six soldiers slid the coffin to the door then dropped to the ground, invisible to them now, so that the coffin itself seemed to flee suddenly through the door and vanish, the three of them following to the door while the sergeant dropped through the door; there was another box beneath the door for them to descend by, into another bright morning, blinking a little after the darkness in the sixth bright morning of that week during which there had been no rain nor adumbration at all. Then she saw the cart, her own or theirs, her husband standing beside the horse’s head while the six American soldiers slid the coffin into the cart, and she turned to the American sergeant and said ‘Thank you’ in French and suddenly and a little awkwardly he removed his hat and shook her hand, quick and hard, then the other sister’s and put his hat back on without once looking at or offering to touch the girl, and she went on around the cart to where her husband stood—a broad strong man in corduroy, not as tall as she and definitely older. They embraced, then all four of them turned to the cart, huddling for a moment in that indecision, as people will. But not for long; there would not be room for all four of them on the seat but the girl had already solved that, climbing up over the shafts and the seat and into the body of the cart, to crouch, huddle beside the coffin, huddled into the shawl, her face worn and sleepless and definitely needing soap and water now.

‘Why, yes, Sister,’ Marya, the older sister said in her voice of happy astonishment, almost of pleasure as though at so simple a solution: ‘I’ll ride back there too.’ So the husband helped her up onto the shaft then over the seat, where she sat also on the opposite side of the coffin. Then Marthe mounted strongly and without assistance to the seat, the husband following with the lines.

They were already on the edge of the city, so they did not need to pass through it, merely around it. Though actually there was no city, no boundaries enclosing and postulating a city from a countryside because this was not even a war zone: it was a battle zone, city and countryside annealed and indistinguishable one from the other beneath one vast concentration of troops, American and French, not poised but rather as though transfixed, suspended beneath, within that vast silence and cessation—all the clutter of battle in a state of arrestment like hypnosis: motionless and silent transport, dumps of ammunition and supplies, and soon they began to pass the guns squatting in batteries, facing eastward, still manned but not poised either, not waiting: just silent, following the now silent line of the old stubborn four-year salient so that now they were seeing war or what six days ago had been war—the shell-pocked fields, the topless trees some of which this spring had put out a few green and stubborn shoots from the blasted trunks—the familiar land which they had not seen in almost four years but which was familiar still, as though even war had failed to efface completely that old verity of peaceful human occupation. But they were skirting the rubble of what had been Vienne-la-pucelle before it seemed to occur to her that there still might be dread and fear; it was only then that she said to the husband in a voice that did not even reach the two others in the body of the cart: ‘The house.’

‘The house was not damaged,’ the husband said. ‘I dont know why. But the fields, the land. Ruined. Ruined. It will take years. And they wont even let me start now. When they gave me permission to come back yesterday, they forbade me to work them until they have gone over them to locate the shells which might not have exploded.’

And the husband was right because here was the farm, the land pitted (not too severely; some of the trees had not even been topped) with shell craters where she herself had worked beside her husband in the tense seasons and which had been the life of the brother in the cheap coffin behind her in the cart and which was to have been his some day whom she had brought back to sleep in it. Then the house; the husband had been right; it was unmarked save for a pock a ragged gout of small holes in one wall which was probably a machine-gun burst, the husband not even looking at the house but getting down from the cart (a little stiffly; she remarked for the first time how his arthritis seemed to have increased) to go and stand looking out over his ruined land. Nor did she enter the house either, calling him by name; then she said:

‘Come now. Let’s finish this first.’ So he returned and entered the house; apparently he had brought some of the tools back with him yesterday too because he reappeared at once with a spade and mounted the cart again. Though this time she had the lines, as though she knew exactly where she wanted to go, the cart moving again, crossing the field now rank with weeds and wild poppies, skirting the occasional craters, on for perhaps half a kilometre to a bank beneath an ancient beech tree which also had escaped the shells.

The digging was easier here, into the bank, all of them taking turns, the girl too though Marthe tried once to dissuade her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Let me. Let me be doing something.’ Though even then it took them a long time until the excavation was deep enough into the bank to contain the coffin, the four of them now shoving and sliding the box back into the cave they had made.

‘The medal,’ the husband said. ‘You dont want to put that in too? I can open the box.’ But Marthe didn’t even answer, taking the shovel herself first until the husband relieved her of it and at last the bank was smooth again save for the shovel marks; afternoon then and almost evening when they returned to the house and (the three women) entered it while the husband went on to the stable to put the horse up for the night. She had not seen it in almost four years, nor did she pause to examine it now. She crossed the room and dropped, almost tossed, the medal onto the vacant mantel and then turned, not really examining the room now. The house had not been damaged: merely eviscerated. They had moved out what the cart would carry that day in 1914, and the husband had fetched that back with him yesterday—enough dishes and bedding, the objects of no value which she had insisted on saving at the expense of things they would actually need when they returned; she could not even remember now what she had felt, thought, then: whether they would ever return or not, if perhaps that anguished day had not been the actual end of home and hope. Nor did she try to remember now, going on to the kitchen; the husband had brought food and fuel for the stove and Marya and the girl were already starting a fire in the stove; again she said to the girl:

‘Why dont you rest?’

‘No,’ the girl said again. ‘Let me be doing something.’ The lamp was lighted now; it was that near to darkness before she noticed that the husband had not yet come in from the stable. She knew at once where he would be: motionless, almost invisible in the faint last of light, looking at his ruined land. This time she approached and touched him.

‘Come now,’ she said. ‘Supper is ready,’ checking him again with her hand at the open lamplit door until he had seen the older sister and the girl moving between the stove and the table. ‘Look at her,’ she said. ‘She has nothing left. She was not even kin to him. She only loved him.’

But he seemed incapable of remembering or grieving over anything but his land; they had eaten the meal and he and she lay again in the familiar bed between the familiar walls beneath the familiar rafters; he had gone to sleep at once though even as she lay rigid and sleepless beside him he flung his head suddenly and muttered, cried, ‘The farm. The land:’ waking himself. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep.’ Because suddenly she knew that he was right. Stefan was gone; all that was over, done, finished, never to be recalled. He had been her brother but she had been his mother too, who knew now that she would have no children of her own and who had raised him from infancy; France, England, America too by now probably, were full of women who had given the lives of their sons to defend their countries and preserve justice and right; who was she to demand uniqueness for grieving? He was right: it was the farm, the land which was immune even to the blast and sear of war. It would take work of course, it might even take years of work, but the four of them were capable of work. More: their palliation and their luck was the work they faced, since work is the only anesthetic to which grief is vulnerable. More still: restoring the land would not only palliate the grief, the minuscule integer of the farm would affirm that he had not died for nothing and that it was not for an outrage that they grieved, but for simple grief: the only alternative to which was nothing, and between grief and nothing only the coward takes nothing.

So she even slept at last, dreamless; so dreamless that she did not know she had been asleep until someone was shaking her. It was the older sister; behind her the girl stood with her worn dirty sleepwalker’s face which might be pretty again with a little soap and water and a week of proper food. It was dawn and then she, Marthe, heard the sound too even before the older sister cried: ‘Listen, Sister!’, the husband waking too, to lie for an instant, then surging upright among the tumbled bedclothing.

‘The guns!’ he cried, ‘the guns!’ the four of them transfixed for another ten or fifteen seconds like a tableau while the uproar of the barrage seemed to be rolling directly toward them; transfixed still even after they began to hear above or beneath the steady roar of explosions, the whistle of the shells passing over the house itself. Then the husband moved. ‘We must get out of here,’ he said, lurching, plunging out of the bed, where he would have fallen if she had not caught and held him up, the four of them in their night clothing running across the room and then out of the house, quitting one roof, one ceiling only to run stumbling on their bare feet beneath that other one filled with thunder and demonic whistling, not realising yet that the barrage was missing the house by two or three hundred metres, the three women following the husband, who seemed to know where he was going.

He did know: a tremendous crater in the field which must have been from a big howitzer, the four of them running, stumbling among the dew-heavy weeds and blood-red poppies, down into the crater, the husband pressing the three women against the wall beneath the lip facing the barrage where they crouched, their heads bowed almost as though in prayer, the husband crying steadily in a voice as thin and constant as a cicada’s: ‘The land. The land. The land.’

That is, all of them except Marthe. She had not even stooped, erect, tall, watching across the lip of the crater the barrage as it missed the house, skirting the house and the farm buildings as neatly and apparently as intentionally as a scythe skirts a rosebush, rolling on eastward across the field in one vast pall of dust filled with red flashes, the dust still hanging in the air after the flashes of the shell-bursts had winked and blinked rapidly on, to disappear beyond the field’s edge like a furious migration of gigantic daylight-haunting fireflies, leaving behind only the thunder of their passing, it too already beginning to diminish.

Then Marthe began to climb out of the crater. She climbed rapid and strong, agile as a goat, kicking backward at the husband as he grasped at the hem of her nightdress and then at her bare feet, up and out of the crater, running strongly through the weeds and poppies, dodging the sparse old craters until she reached the swathe of the barrage, where the three still crouched in the crater could see her actually leaping across and among the thick new ones. Then the field was full of running men—a ragged line of French and American troops which overtook and passed her; they saw one, either an officer or a sergeant, pause and gesticulate at her, his mouth open and soundless with yelling for a moment before he too turned and ran on with the rest of the charge, the three of them out of the crater too now, running and stumbling into the new craters and the fading dust and the fierce and fading stink of cordite.

At first they couldn’t even find the bank. And when they did at last, the beech tree had vanished: no mark, nothing remained to orient by. ‘It was here, Sister!’ the older sister cried, but Marthe didn’t answer, running strongly on, they following until they too saw what she had apparently seen—the splinters and fragments, whole limbs still intact with leaves, scattered for a hundred metres; when they overtook her, she was holding in her hand a shard of the pale new unpainted wood which had been the coffin; she spoke to the husband by name, quite gently:

‘You’ll have to go back and get the shovel.’ But before he could turn, the girl had already passed him, running, frantic yet unerring, deer-light among the craters and what remained of the weeds and the quenchless poppies, getting smaller and smaller yet still running, back toward the house. That was Sunday. When the girl returned with the shovel, still running, they took turns with it, all that day until it was too dark to see. They found a few more shards and fragments of the coffin, but the body itself was gone.