A Fable

Monday

Monday Night

When the attack was first offered him, the general commanding the division which contained the regiment said immediately: ‘Of course. Thanks. What is it?’ Because it seemed to him that here at last was the chance which he had needed and wanted for more years than he cared to remember, so many years in fact that he had, as he realised now, given up hope of ever getting. Because at some moment in his past which even he could not specifically postulate, something had happened to him, or at least to his career.

It seemed to him that he had been intended by fate itself to be the perfect soldier: pastless, unhampered, and complete. His first recollection had been a Pyrenean orphanage run by a Catholic sisterhood, where there was no record of his parentage whatever, even to be concealed. At seventeen, he was an enlisted private; at twenty-four, he had been three years a sergeant and of such destined promise that his regimental commander (himself a self-made man who had risen from the ranks) gave no one any rest until the protégé also had his chance for officers’ school; by 1914 he had established a splendid record as a desert colonel of Spahis, and, immediately in France itself, the beginning of an unimpeachable one as a brigadier, so that to those who believed in him and watched his career (he had no influence either, and no friends too save those, like the obscure colonel of his sergeantcy, whom he had made, earned himself by his own efforts and record) there seemed no limit to his destiny save the premature end of the war itself.

Then something happened. Not to him: he had not changed, he was still competent, still unhampered and complete. He seemed merely to have lost or mislaid somewhere, at some point, the old habit or mantle or aura (or affinity for) of almost monotonous success in which he had seemed to move as in his garments, as if not he but his destiny had slowed down, not changed: just slowed down for the time being: which idea his superiors themselves seemed to hold, since he got in due time (in fact, a little sooner than some) the next star for his hat and not only the division which went with it but the opportunities too, indicating that his superiors still believed that at any moment now he might recover, or rediscover, the secret of the old successfulness.

But that was two years ago now, and for a year now even the opportunities had ceased, as though at last even the superiors had come around to his own belief that the high tide of his hopes and aspirations had fluxed three years ago, three years before the last backwash of his destiny finally ebbed from beneath him, leaving him stranded a mere general of division still in a war already three years defunctive. It—the war—would hang on a while yet, of course; it would take the Americans, the innocent newcomers, another year probably to discover that you cannot really whip Germans: you can only exhaust them. It might even last another ten years or even another twenty, by which time France and Britain would have vanished as military and even political integers and the war would have become a matter of a handful of Americans who didn’t even have ships to go back home in, battling with limbs from shattered trees and the rafters from ruined houses and the stones from fences of weed-choked fields and the broken bayonets and stocks of rotted guns and rusted fragments wrenched from crashed aeroplanes and burned tanks, against the skeletons of German companies stiffened by a few Frenchmen and Britons tough enough like himself to endure still, to endure as he would always, immune to nationality, to exhaustion, even to victory—by which time he hoped he himself would be dead.

Because by ordinary he believed himself incapable of hoping: only of daring, without fear or qualm or regret within the iron and simple framework of the destiny which he believed would never betray him so long as he continued to dare without question or qualm or regret, but which apparently had abandoned him, leaving him only the capacity to dare, until two days ago when his corps commander sent for him. The corps commander was his only friend in France, or anywhere else above earth, for that matter. They had been subalterns together in the same regiment into which he had been commissioned. But Lallemont, though a poor man too, had along with ability just enough of the sort of connections which not only made the difference between division and corps command at the same length of service, but placed Lallemont quite favorably for the next vacant army command. Though when Lallemont said, ‘I’ve something for you, if you want it,’ he realised that what he had thought was the capacity to dare was still soiled just a little with the baseless hoping which is the diet of weaklings. But that was all right too: who, even though apparently abandoned by destiny, still had not been wrong in dedicating his life as he had: even though abandoned, he had never let his chosen vocation down; and sure enough in his need, the vocation had remembered him.

So he said, ‘Thanks. What?’ Lallemont told him. Whereupon for a moment he believed that he had not understood.

But this passed, because in the next one he saw the whole picture. The attack was already doomed in its embryo, and whoever commanded it, delivered it, along with it. It was not that his trained professional judgment told him that the affair, as the corps commander presented it, would be touch-and-go and hence more than doubtful. That would not have stopped him. On the contrary, that would have been a challenge, as if the old destiny had not abandoned him at all. It was because that same trained judgment saw at once that this particular attack was intended to fail: a sacrifice already planned and doomed in some vaster scheme, in which it would not matter either way, whether the attack failed or not: only that the attack must be made: and more than that, since here the whole long twenty-odd years of training and dedication paid him off in clairvoyance; he saw the thing not only from its front and public view, but from behind it too: the cheapest attack would be one which must fail, harmlessly to all if delivered by a man who had neither friends nor influence to make people with five stars on the General Staff, or civilians with red rosettes in the Quai d’Orsay, squirm. He didn’t for even one second think of the old gray man in the Hôtel de Ville at Chaulnesmont. He thought for even less time than that: Lallemont is saving his own neck. He thought—and now he knew that he was indeed lost—It’s Mama Bidet. But he only said:

‘I cant afford a failure.’

‘There will be a ribbon,’ the corps commander said.

‘I dont have enough rank to get the one they give for failures.’

‘Yes,’ the corps commander said. ‘This time.’

‘So it’s that bad,’ the division commander said. ‘That serious. That urgent. All between Bidet and his baton, is one infantry division. And that one, mine.’ They stared at one another. Then the corps commander started to speak. The division commander didn’t permit him to. ‘Stow it,’ the division commander said. That is, that’s what he conveyed. What he spoke was a phrase pithy succinct and obscene out of his life as an N.C.O. in the African regiment recruited from the prison- and gutter-sweepings of Europe before he and the corps commander had ever seen one another. He said: ‘So I have no choice.’

‘You have no choice,’ the corps commander said.

The division commander always watched his attacks from the nearest forward observer’s post; it had been his habit always; that was a part of his record too. This time, he had one especially prepared, on an elevation, revetted and sandbagged behind a steel plate, with one telephone line direct to corps headquarters and another to the artillery commander; here, synchronised watch in hand while the preliminary barrage wailed and screeched overhead onto the German wire, he looked down upon his own front line and on the opposite one which even those who had assigned him the attack didn’t intend to breach, as from a balcony seat at the opera. Or box seat, and not just any box, but the royal one: the victim by regal dispensation watching in solitary splendor the preparations for his execution, watching not the opera’s final scene, but his own before he moved, irrevocable and forever, into some back-area job in that region whose function was to arm and equip the combat divisions who reaped the glorious death and the immortal renown; from now on, his to reap every hope save glory, and every right save the chance to die for it. He could desert, of course, but where? to whom? The only people who would accept a failed French general would be people so far free of the war: the Dutch, who were off the normal course of German invasions, and the Spanish, who were too poor even to make a two-day excursion to it, like the Portuguese did, for excitement and change of scene—in which case—the Spanish one—he would not even be paid for risking his life and what remained of his reputation, until he corrected that: thinking how war and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. His wife and children may be shoeless; someone will always buy him drink or weapons, thinking More than that. The last person a man planning to set up in the wine trade would approach for a loan, would be a rival wine-dealer. A nation preparing for war can borrow from the very nation it aims to destroy.

Then he didn’t even have a failure. He had a mutiny. When the barrage lifted, he was not even watching the scene beneath him, but was already looking at his watch-face. He didn’t need to watch. After watching them from beneath his stars for three years now, he had become an expert, not merely in forecasting failure, but in predicting almost exactly when, where, at what point in time and terrain, they would become void and harmless;—this, even when he was not familiar with the troops making the attack, which in the present case he was, having selected this particular regiment the day before because he knew, on the one hand, not only the condition of the regiment but its colonel’s belief in it and the record of his success with it; and on the other, its value as measured against each of the other three in the division; he knew it would deliver the attack near enough to the maximum demanded of him, yet if the foreordained failure meant its temporary wreckage or even permanent ruin, this would weigh less in the strength and morale of the division than that of any of the other three; he could never, breathing, have been convinced or even told that he had chosen the regiment out of his division exactly as the group commander had chosen the division out of his armies.

So he simply followed the jerking watch-hand, waiting for it to establish the point when all the men who were to get through the wire, would be beyond it. Then he looked up and saw nothing, nothing at all in the space beyond the wire which by now should have been filled with running and falling men; he saw only a few figures crouching along his own parapet, not advancing at all but apparently yelling, screaming and gesticulating, downward into the trench—the officers and N.C.O.’s, the company and section leaders who obviously had been betrayed as he had been. Because he knew at once what had happened. He was quite calm; he thought without passion or even astonishment: So this was reserved for me too as he dropped the binocular back into its case on his chest and snapped the cover down and spoke to the aide beside him, indicating the line to Corps Headquarters: ‘Say that the attack failed to leave the trench. Tell them to ratify me to Artillery. Say I’m on my way out now,’ and took the other telephone himself and spoke down it: ‘Gragnon. I want two barrages. Re-range one on the enemy wire. Range the other on the communication trenches behind the —th Regiment and continue until you have a remand from Corps,’ and put the telephone down and turned toward the exit.

‘Sir!’ the aide at the other telephone cried. ‘Here’s General Lallemont himself!’ But the division commander didn’t even pause, not until the tunnel broached at last into light, and then only long enough to listen for a moment to the screeching crescendo of shells overhead, listening with a sort of impersonal detached attentiveness, as if he were a messenger, a runner, sent there to ascertain whether or not the guns were still firing, and to return and report. It had been twenty years now, the first scrap of braid not even tarnished on his sleeve, since he had accepted, established as the first stone in the edifice of his career: A commander must be so hated, or at least feared by his troops that, immunised by that fury, they will attempt any odds, any time, anywhere. He stood, not stopped, just paused, his face lifted too, like the runner taking that simple precaution against the possibility that those to whom he would report might demand the authority of his eyes too, or order him to walk the whole distance back again to rectify the oversight, thinking: Except that I didn’t intend that they should hate me so much they would refuse to attack at all because I didn’t think then that a commander could be hated that much, apparently didn’t know even this morning that soldiers could hate that much, being soldiers; thinking quietly: Of course. Countermand the barrage, stop it, let them come over; the whole thing will be obliterated then, effaced, and I need only say that they were ready for me before my attack ever started, with none to refute me since those who could will no longer be alive; thinking with what he considered not even sardonicism nor even wittiness, but just humor: With a regiment which has already mutinied holding the line, they will overrun and destroy the whole division in ten or fifteen minutes. Then even those who are giving him the baton will appreciate the value of their gift;—already walking again, on for another thousand metres, almost to the end of the communication trench where his car would be waiting; and this time he did stop, utterly; he didn’t know how long it had been going on nor even how long he had been hearing it: no puny concentration now of guns behind one single regimental front; it seemed to him that he could hear the fury spreading battery to battery in both directions along the whole front until every piece in the entire sector must be in frantic action. They did come over, he thought. They did. The whole line has collapsed; not just one mutinied regiment, but the whole line of us; already turned to run back up the trench before he could catch himself, telling himself, It’s too late; you cant get back in time now,—catching himself back into sanity, or at least into trained military logic and reason, even if he did have to use what he thought was humor (and this time called wittiness too, the wit perhaps of despair) in order to do it: Nonsense. What reason could they have had for an assault at this moment? How could the boche have known even before I did, that one of my regiments was going to mutiny? And even if they did know it, how could they afford to give Bidet his German marshalcy at the rate of just one regiment at a time?—walking on again, saying quietly aloud this time: ‘That’s the clatter a falling general makes.’

Two field howitzers were firing almost over his waiting car. They had not been there at dawn when he left it, and his driver could not have heard him if he had spoken, which he did not: one peremptory gesture as he got in, sitting rigid and calm and parallel now for a while to the pandemonium of guns stretching further than hearing did; still quite calm when he got out of the car at Corps Headquarters, not even seeing at first that the corps commander was already waiting for him at the door, then reversing in midstride and returning to the car, still striding rigidly on when the corps commander overtook him and put one hand on his arm and began to draw him aside toward where the corps car waited. The corps commander spoke the army commander’s name. ‘He’s waiting for us,’ he said.

‘And then, Bidet,’ the division commander said. ‘I want authority from Bidet’s own lips to shoot them.’

‘In with you,’ the corps commander said, touching him again, almost shoving him into the car, then following, closing the door himself, the car already in motion, so that the orderly had to leap for the running board; soon they were running fast too beside, beneath the horizon’s loud parallel, the division commander rigid, erect, immobile, staring ahead, while the corps commander, leaning back, watched him, or what was visible of the calm and invincible face. ‘And suppose he refuses,’ the corps commander said.

‘I hope he does,’ the division commander said. ‘All I ask is to be sent under arrest to Chaulnesmont.’

‘Listen to me,’ the corps commander said. ‘Cant you see that it will not matter to Bidet whether it failed or not or how it failed or even whether it was made or not? that he will get his baton just the same, anyway?’

‘Even if the boche destroys us?’

‘Destroys us?’ the corps commander said. ‘Listen.’ He jerked his hand toward the east where, fast though they were moving, the division commander might have realised now that the uproar still reached further and faster than hearing moved. ‘The boche doesn’t want to destroy us, any more than we would want, could afford, to destroy him. Cant you understand? either of us, without the other, couldn’t exist? that even if nobody was left in France to confer Bidet’s baton, some boche would be selected, even if there remained only one private, and elevated high enough in French rank to do it? That Bidet didn’t choose you for this because you were Charles Gragnon, but because you were General of Division Gragnon at this time, this day, this hour?’

‘Us?’ the division commander repeated.

‘Us!’ the corps commander said.

‘So I failed, not in a front line at six this morning, but the day before yesterday in your headquarters—or maybe ten years ago, or maybe forty-seven years ago.’

‘You did not fail at all,’ the corps commander said.

‘I lost a whole regiment. And not even by an attack: by a provost marshal’s machinegun squad.’

‘Does it matter how they will die?’

‘It does to me. How it dies is the reason it died. That’s my record.’

‘Bah,’ the corps commander said.

‘Since what I lost was merely Charles Gragnon. While what I saved was France——’

‘You saved us,’ the corps commander said.

‘Us?’ the division commander repeated again.

‘Us,’ the corps commander said in that voice harsh and strong with pride: ‘the lieutenants, the captains, the majors and colonels and sergeants all with the same privilege: the opportunity to lie someday in the casket of a general or a marshal among the flags of our nation’s glory in the palace of the Invalides——’

‘Except that the Americans and British and Germans dont call theirs “Invalides”.’

‘All right, all right,’ the corps commander said. ‘—merely in return for fidelity and devotion and accepting a little risk, gambling a petty stake which, lacking glory, was no better than any vegetable’s to begin with, and deserved no less of obscurity for its fate. Failed,’ he said. ‘Failed. Charles Gragnon, from sergeant to general of division before he was forty-five years old—that is, forty-seven——’

‘And then lost.’

‘So did the British lieutenant general who commanded that army in Picardy two months ago.’

‘And whatever boche it was who lost contact or mislaid his maps and compass in Belgium three years ago,’ the division commander said. ‘And the one who thought they could come through at Verdun. And the one who thought the Chemin des Dames would be vulnerable, having a female name.’ He said: ‘So it’s not we who conquer each other, because we are not even fighting each other. It’s simple nameless war which decimates our ranks. All of us: captains and colonels, British and American and German and us, shoulder to shoulder, our backs to the long invincible wall of our glorious tradition, giving and asking.… Asking? not even accepting quarter——’

‘Bah,’ the corps commander said again. ‘It is man who is our enemy: the vast seething moiling spiritless mass of him. Once to each period of his inglorious history, one of us appears with the stature of a giant, suddenly and without warning in the middle of a nation as a dairymaid enters a buttery, and with his sword for paddle he heaps and pounds and stiffens the malleable mass and even holds it cohered and purposeful for a time. But never for always, nor even for very long: sometimes before he can even turn his back, it has relinquished, dis-cohered, faster and faster flowing and seeking back to its own base anonymity. Like that out there this morning——’ again the corps commander made the brief indicative gesture.

‘Like what out there?’ the division commander said; whereupon the corps commander said almost exactly what the group commander would say within the next hour:

‘It cannot be that you dont even know what happened.’

‘I lost Charles Gragnon.’

‘Bah,’ the corps commander said. ‘We have lost nothing. We were merely faced without warning by an occupational hazard. We hauled them up out of their ignominious mud by their bootstraps; in one more little instant they might have changed the world’s face. But they never do. They collapse, as yours did this morning. They always will. But not us. We will even drag them willy-nilly up again, in time, and they will collapse again. But not us. It wont be us.’

The army commander was waiting too; the car had barely to stop for him. As soon as it was in motion again, the division commander made for the second time his request in the flat, calm, almost dispassionate voice: ‘I shall shoot them, of course.’ The army commander didn’t answer. The division commander had not expected him to. He would not have heard any answer because he was not even listening to the other two voices murmuring to one another in brief, rapid, half-finished phrases as the corps commander briefed, reviewed to the army commander by number and designation, the regiments in the other divisions on either flank of his own, until the two voices had locked block into regimental block the long mosaic of the whole army front.

And—not only no sound of guns here, but never at any time—they were challenged at the chateau gates and entered the park, a guide on the running board now so that they didn’t even pause at the carved rococo entrance but went on around to the side, across a courtyard bustling with orderlies and couriers and popping motorcycles, passing—and the division commander neither noticed nor cared here either—two cars flying the pennons of two other army commanders, and a third car which was British, and a fourth one which had not even been manufactured on this side of the Atlantic, and on to a porte cochere at the back of the chateau and so directly into the shabby cluttered cubicle not much larger than a clothes press, notched into the chateau’s Italianate bijou like a rusted spur in a bride’s cake, from which the group commander conducted the affairs of his armies.

They were all there: the commanders of the two other armies which composed the group of armies, their heavy moustaches, already shaped to noon’s spoon, richly luxuriant from the daily ritual of soup; the English chief of staff who could have looked no more indomitably and rigidly youthful if the corset had been laced in full view on the outside of his tunic, with his bright ribbons and wisps of brass and scarlet tabs and his white hair and moustache and his blue eyes the color of icy war; and the American colonel with the face of a Boston shipping magnate (which indeed he was, or at least the entailed scion of one)—or rather, an eighteenth century face: the face of that predecessor or forefather who at twenty-five had retired rich from the quarter deck of a Middle Passage slaver, and at thirty had his name illuminated in colored glass above his Beacon Hill pew. He was the guest, the privileged, since for three years it had not even been his nation’s war, who had brought already into the conclave the privileged guest’s air of prim, faintly spinsterish disapproval—an air, quality, appearance too, almost Victorian in fact, from his comfortable old man’s shoes and the simple leather putties of a Northumberland drover (both—shoes and putties—beautifully polished but obviously purchased at different times and places and so never to match in color, and neither matching the ordnance belt which obviously had been acquired in two places also, making four different tones of leather) and the simple flareless breeches cut from the same bolt as the shorttailed jacket rising unblemished by any brass to the highboned throat with its prim piping of linen collar backside foremost like the dog-collar of a priest. (There was an anecdote about that uniform, or rather about its wearer, the colonel, going the rounds of messes six months ago, about how, shortly after the American headquarters had been set up, a junior officer—no Bostonian, this: a New Yorker—had appeared before the colonel one morning in the Bedford cords of a British officer and a long skirted tunic cut by a London tailor, though it did have the high closed throat; the colonel would meet many duplicates of it later, but not then because that was 1917; the youth appearing a little sheepishly, probably a little fearfully, wishing perhaps, as many another pioneer has done, that he had let someone else be first, before the cold banker’s eyes of his superior, saying presently: ‘You think I shouldn’t have done it? It’s bad form, taste, aping——’; then the colonel, pleasant, immediate: ‘Why not? They taught us the art of war in 1783 by losing one to us; they should not object to lending us the clothes in 1917 to win one for them.’)

And, cynosure of all, the Mama Bidet, the General Cabinet, the Marshal d’Aisance of the division commander’s calm and icelike implacability not for justice for himself but for vindication of his military record, who—the group commander—had brought twenty-five years ago into the African sunglare not a bent for war (that would reveal later) and not even a simple normal thirst for glory and rank, but a cold, pitiless preoccupation with the mucous membrane buttoned inside his army breeches, which accompanied (even preceded) him from troop to squadron to regiment to brigade, division and corps and army and army group as he advanced and rose, more immune to harm as his stars increased in number and his gift for war found field and scope, but no more pitiless—the short, healthy, pot-bellied little man who looked like a green grocer retired happy and cheerful at fifty, and then ten years later dressed not too willingly for a masquerade in the ill-fitting private’s tunic without a single ribbon on it nor even any insigne of rank, whose real name had been an authority for fifteen years among textbook soldiers on how to keep troops fit, and a byword for four years among field commanders on how to fight them.

He didn’t ask the division commander to sit down when the army- and corps-commanders did; as far as the division commander could have affirmed, the group commander had not even remarked his presence, leaving him to stand while that unbidden and uncaring part of his attention recorded the tedious recapitulation of regiments and divisions, not merely by their positions in the front but by their past records and the districts of their derivation and their officers’ names and records, the army commander talking, rapid and succinct, nothing still of alarm in the voice and not very much of concern: just alertness, precision, care. Nor did it seem to the division commander watching—or not specifically watching the group commander because he was not really watching anything: just looking steadily at or toward the group commander as he had been doing ever since he entered, aware suddenly that he not only could not remember when he had blinked his eyes last, but that he felt no need to blink them—that the group commander was listening either, though he must have been, quietly and courteously and inattentively; until suddenly the division commander realised that the group commander had been looking at him for several seconds. Then the others seemed to become aware of it too; the army commander stopped talking, then said:

‘This is Gragnon. It was his division.’

‘Ah yes,’ the group commander said. He spoke directly to the division commander in the same tone, pleasant and inflectionless: ‘Many thanks. You may return to your troops,’ and turned again to the army commander. ‘Yes?’ Then for another half minute, the army commander’s voice; and now the division commander, rigid and unblinking, was looking at nothing at all, rigid and unblinking still until the army commander’s voice stopped again, the division commander not even bothering to bring vision back behind his eyes even after the group commander spoke to him again: ‘Yes?’

Standing not quite at attention, looking not at anything but merely staring at rigid eyelevel above the group commander’s head, the division commander made his formal request for permission to have the whole regiment executed. The group commander heard him through. There was nothing whatever in the group commander’s face.

‘Endorsed as received,’ he said. ‘Return to your troops.’ The division commander did not move. He might not have heard even. The group commander sat back in his chair and spoke to the army commander without even turning his head: ‘Henri. Will you conduct these gentlemen to the little drawing room and have them bring wine, whisky, tea, whatever they fancy?’ He said to the American colonel in quite passable English: ‘I have heard of your United States coca cola. My regrets and apologies that I do not have that for you yet. But soon we hope, eh?’

‘Thank you, General,’ the colonel said in better than passable French: ‘The only European terms we decline to accept are German ones.’

Then they were gone; the door closed behind them. The division commander had not moved. The group commander looked at him. His voice was still merely pleasant, not even quizzical: ‘A general of division. You have come a long way from Africa, Sergeant Gragnon.’

‘So have you,’ the division commander said, ‘—Mama Bidet.’—speaking in his cold, flat voice, with no inflection nor emphasis either, the name given not secretly so much as merely when he was out of earshot, or perhaps not even that but simply from the inviolable security of their rankless state, by the men in ranks to the group commander soon after he came out as a subaltern into the African regiment in which the division commander was already a sergeant: ‘A long way, Monsieur the General Cabinet, Monsieur soon-to-be the Marshal d’Aisance.’ And still nothing in the group commander’s face; his voice was still calm, yet there now crept into it a shadow of something else, something speculative and even a little astonished, though the division commander would prove that he at least had not remarked it. Then the group commander said:

‘I seem to have been more right than even I knew or hoped. When you came in, I felt that perhaps I owed you an apology. Now I am sure of it.’

‘You demean yourself,’ the division commander said. ‘How could a man doubting his own infallibility get that many stars? And how could a man with that many stars retain any doubts about anything?’

The group commander looked at the division commander for another moment. Then he said: ‘It cant be possible that you dont even see that it has already ceased to matter whether these three thousand men or these four men die or not. That there is already more to this than the execution of twice three thousand men could remedy or even change.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ the division commander said. ‘I have seen ten times three thousand dead Frenchmen.’ He said, ‘You will say, Slain by other Frenchmen?’ He said, repeated, rote-like, cold, unemphasised, almost telegraphic: ‘Comité des Forges. De Ferrovie. S.P.A.D. The people at Billancourt. Not to mention the English and Americans, since they are not French, at least not until they have conquered us. What will it matter to the three thousand or the ten times three thousand, when they are dead? Nor matter to us who killed them, if we are successful?’

‘By “successful” you mean “victorious”,’ the group commander said. ‘And by “we” of course, you mean France.’

In his flat, cold voice the division commander repeated the simple, explicit, soldierly expletive of the Cambronne legend.

‘A fact, but not a rejoinder,’ the group commander said.

The division commander said the word again. ‘For me, a ribbon tomorrow; for you, a baton before you die. Since mine is worth only a regiment, yours will certainly be cheap at that.’

Presently the group commander said: ‘What you are really asking me for, is to endorse you for a court-martial. You’re offering me the choice between sending you to the commander-in-chief, and compelling you to go yourself.’ The division commander did not move. He was not going to. They both knew it. ‘Return to your headquarters,’ the group commander said. ‘You will be notified there when the Marshal will see you at Chaulnesmont.’

He returned to Corps Headquarters with the corps commander, and got his own car; he would probably not even remember that the corps commander did not ask him to lunch. He would not have cared. He would have declined anyway. The group commander had told him to return to his own headquarters: an order. He was probably not even aware that he was disobeying it, getting into his car and saying briefly to the driver: ‘The line.’ Though it would be too late. It was nearing two oclock; the regiment would long since have been evacuated and disarmed and replaced; it would be too late to watch it pass now and so see for himself that it was done, just as he had paused in the communication trench to make sure that the artillery was still firing. He was going back as a chef might return two or three hours afterward to the kitchen where a dish he had been preparing had burned or perhaps exploded, not to help nor even advise in tidying up, but merely to see what might remain with some of the litter removed; not to regret it, because that would be a waste of regret, but just to see, to check; not even thinking about it, not thinking about anything, immobile and calm in the moving car, carrying inside him like a liquid sealed in a vacuum bottle that cold, inflexible undeviable determination for justice to his rank at any cost, vindication of his record at all.

So at first he did not realise what had startled, shocked him. He said sharply: ‘Stop.’ and sat in the halted car in the ringing silence which he hadn’t even heard yet because he had never heard anything here before but guns: no longer a starred, solitary man in a staff car behind a French battle-front, but a solitary boy lying on his stomach on a stone wall outside the Pyrenean village where, for all any records stated or knowledge remembered, he had been born an orphan; listening now to the same cicada chirring and buzzing in a tangle of cordite-blasted weeds beyond the escarpment landmarked since last winter by the skeleton tail of a crashed German aeroplane. Then he heard the lark too, high and invisible, almost liquid but not quite, like four small gold coins dropped without haste into a cup of soft silver, he and the driver staring at one another until he said, loud and harsh: ‘Drive on!’—moving on again; and sure enough, there was the lark again, incredible and serene, and then again the unbearable golden silence, so that he wanted to clap his hands to his ears, bury his head, until at last the lark once more relieved it.

Though the two batteries at the camouflaged corner were not firing now, they were not only still there, but a section of heavy howitzers was flanked on them, the gunners watching him quietly as he approached, chop-striding, bull-chested, virile, in appearance impervious and indestructible, starred and exalted and, within this particular eye-range of earth, supreme and omnipotent still, yet who, because of those very stars, didn’t dare ask whoever was senior here when he had ceased to fire, let alone where his orders to do so had come from, thinking how he had heard all his military life about the ineradicable mark which war left on a man’s face, without ever having seen it himself, but at least he had seen now what peace did to men’s faces. Because he knew now that the silence extended much further than one divisional front or even than the two flanking ones; knowing now what the corps commander and the group commander both had meant when they had said in almost the same words: ‘It cannot be that you dont even know what is happening’, thinking I am not even to have a court-martial for incompetence. Now that the war is over, they wont have to allow me a court because nobody will care any longer, nobody compelled by simple military regulations to see that my record receives justice.

‘Who commands here?’ he said. But before the captain could answer, a major appeared from beyond the guns. ‘Gragnon here,’ the division commander said. ‘You’re standing to, of course.’

‘Yes, General,’ the major said. ‘That was the order which came up with the remand. What is it, General? What’s happening?’—saying the last of it to the division commander’s back, because he had already turned, striding on, rigidly erect and only a little blind; then a battery did fire, two kilometres and perhaps more to the south: a salvo, a ragged thud; and, chop-striding, unhurried, burly and virile and indestructible, there occurred inside him a burst, a giving-away, a flow of something which if he had still been the unfathered unmothered boy secure in the privacy of his abandoned Pyrenean wall, would have been tears, no more visible then than now, no more then than now of grief, but of inflexibility. Then another battery fired, one salvo, less than a kilometre away this time, the division commander not faltering, merely altering direction in midstride and instead of entering the communication trench he rapidly climbed the escarpment, into the pocked field beyond it, not running still but walking so fast that he was a considerable distance away when the next battery fired, this time one of those he had just left, firing its salvo in its turn as if whoever had created the silence were underlining it, calling men’s attention to it with the measured meaningless slams, saying with each burst of puny uproar, ‘Hear it? Hear it?’

His first brigade’s headquarters was the cellar of a ruined farm. There were several people there, but he was not inside long enough to have recognised any of them, even if he had wanted to or tried. Almost immediately, he was outside again, wrenching his arm from the hand of the aide who had been with him in the observation post when the attack failed. But he did take the flask, the brandy insentient as stale water in his throat, slightly warm from the aide’s body-heat, tasteless. Because here at last was one of the rare moments in the solitude and pride of command when he could be General Gragnon without being General of Division Gragnon too. ‘What——’ he said.

‘Come,’ the aide said rapidly. But the division commander jerked his arm from the aide’s hand again, not following but preceding the aide for a short distance into the farmyard, then stopping and turning.

‘Now,’ he said.

‘They didn’t even tell you?’ the aide said. He didn’t answer, immobile, bull-like and indestructible; and, bull-like and indestructible, quite calm. The aide told him. ‘They are stopping it. Our whole front—I dont mean just our division and corps, but the whole French front—remanded at noon except for air patrols and artillery like that yonder at the corner. And the air people are not crossing: just patrolling up and down our front, and the orders to the artillery were to range, not on the boche, but between us and them, on what the Americans call no-man’s land. And the boche is doing the same thing with his artillery and air; and the order is out for the British and Americans to remand at fifteen hours, to see if the boche will do the same thing in front of them.’ The division commander stared at him. ‘It’s not just our division: it’s all of them: us and the boche too.’ Then the aide saw that even now the division commander did not understand. ‘It’s the men,’ the aide said. ‘The ranks. Not just that regiment, nor even our division, but all the private soldiers in our whole front, the boche too, since he remanded too as soon as our barrage lifted, which would have been his chance to attack since he must have seen that our regiment had refused, mutinied; he went further than we have, because he is not even using artillery: only his air people, not crossing either, just patrolling up and down his front. Though of course they wont know for sure about the British and the Americans and the boche in front of them until fifteen hours. It’s the men; not even the sergeants knew, suspected anything, had any warning. And nobody knows if they just happened to set a date in advance which coincided with our attack, or if they had a pre-arranged signal which our regiment put up when it knew for certain that it was going over this morning——’

‘You lie,’ the division commander said. ‘The men?’

‘Yes. Everybody in the line below sergeant——’

‘You lie,’ the division commander said. He said with a vast, a spent, an indomitable patience: ‘Cant you understand? Cant you see the difference between a single regiment getting the wind up—a thing which can and might happen to any regiment, at any time; to the same regiment which took a trench yesterday and which tomorrow, simply because it turned tail today, will take a village or even a walled town? And you try to tell me this (using again the succinct soldierly noun). The men,’ he said. ‘Officers—marshals and generals—decreed that business this morning and decreed it as a preordained failure; staff officers and experts made the plans for it within the specifications of failure; I supplied the failure with a mutinying regiment, and still more officers and generals and marshals will collect the cost of it out of my reputation. But the men. I have led them in battle all my life. I was always under the same fire they were under. I got them killed: yes; but I was there too, leading them, right up to the day when they gave me so many stars that they could forbid me to anymore. But not the men. They understand even if you cannot. Even that regiment would have understood; they knew the risk they took when they refused to leave the trench. Risk? Certainty. Because I could have done nothing else. Not for my reputation, not even for my own record or the record of the division I command, but for the future safety of the men, the rank and file of all the other regiments and divisions whose lives might be thrown away tomorrow or next year by another regiment shirking, revolting, refusing, that I was going to have them executed——’ thinking, Was. I’m already saying was; not is: was, while the aide stared at him in incredulous amazement.

‘Is it possible?’ the aide said. ‘Do you really contend that they are stopping the war just to deprive you of your right, as commander of the division, to execute that regiment?’

‘Not my reputation,’ the division commander said quickly, ‘not even my own record. But the division’s record and good name. What else could it be? What other reason could they have——’ blinking rapidly and painfully while the aide took the flask from his pocket and uncapped it and nudged it against the division commander’s hand. ‘The men,’ the division commander said.

‘Here,’ the aide said. The division commander took the flask.

‘Thanks,’ he said; he even started to raise the flask to his lips. ‘The men,’ he said. ‘The troops. All of them. Defying, revolting, not against the enemy, but against us, the officers, who not only went where they went, but led them, went first, in front, who desired for them nothing but glory, demanded of them nothing but courage.…’

‘Drink, General,’ the aide said. ‘Come now.’

‘Ah yes,’ the division commander said. He drank and returned the flask; he said, ‘Thanks,’ and made a motion, but before he could complete it the aide, who had been in his military family since he got his first brigadier’s star, had already produced a handkerchief, immaculate and laundered, still folded as the iron pressed it. ‘Thanks,’ the division commander said again, taking the handkerchief and wiping his moustache, and then stood again, the handerchief open now in his hand, blinking rapidly and painfully. Then he said, simply and distinctly: ‘Enough of this.’

‘General?’ the aide said.

‘Eh? What?’ the division commander said. Then he was blinking again, steadily though not painfully now, not really fast. ‘Well——’ he said. He turned.

‘Shall I come too?’ the aide said.

‘No no,’ the division commander said, already walking on. ‘You stay here. They may need you. There might be something else.…’ his voice not fading but simply ceasing, already chop-striding again, virile and impregnable, the gunners now standing along the crest of the opposite escarpment as he approached, carrying the loose handkerchief in his hand as though bearing under orders a flag of truce of which he himself was inflexibly ashamed and grieved. The major saluted him. He returned it and got into the car. It moved at once; the driver had already turned it around. The boche crash was not far; soon they reached it. ‘Stop here,’ he said. He got out. ‘Drive on. I’ll overtake you in a moment;’ not even waiting for the car to move but already climbing the bank into the cordite-blasted weeds, still carrying the handkerchief. This was the place; he had marked it, though naturally his sudden advent would have alarmed the tiny beast. But it would still be here; by squatting and hunting patiently enough, parting the weed-stems gently enough, he could probably see it in the Pyrenean grass, crouching and unterrified, merely waiting for him to become still, resume the solitude which was his origin and his ancestry and his birthright, the Sisters—the Father himself when he would arrive with his inconsolable dedicated eyes and his hands gentle enough but sonless, which had never caressed nor struck in anger and love and fear and hope and pride, boy’s flesh sprung from his flesh and bearing his immortality in the same intolerant love and hope and pride, wiser perhaps than the Sisters were, less tender than they were tender, but no less compassionate, knowing nothing as the Sisters knew nothing too—saying: ‘The Mother of Christ, the Mother of all, is your mother;’ not enough, because he didn’t want the mother of all nor the mother of Christ either: he wanted the mother of One; only necessary to become still and wait until the tiny creature was accustomed to his sudden advent, then the first sound would come, tentative, brief: a rising, almost an interrogative inflection, almost a test as if to learn if he were really there and ready; then he would whisper the one word against the noon-fierce stone under his face: and he had been right: not the Pyrenean cicada of course, but certainly its northern sister, the miniature sound insistent and impersonal and constant and unobtrusive, steadfast somewhere among the jumble of rusted engine and guns and blackened wires and charred sticks—a purring sound such as he imagined might be made by the sleeping untoothed mouth itself around the sleeping nipple.

His divisional headquarters was what its owner called his country house, built by a man who had made several millions on the Paris Bourse and returned to the district of his birth to install an Argentine mistress, establishing not only the symbol and monument, but bringing the proof of his success back to the scene of his childhood and youth, his I-told-you-so to the elders, mayor and doctor and advocate and judge, who had said he would never amount to anything; and who was well served not only in his patriotism but in his devotion too when the military demanded the use of it, since the Argentine had quitted Paris only under pressure in the first place.

The message from Corps Headquarters was waiting for him: Chaulnesmont. Tomorrow 15 hours. You are expected. You will confine yourself to quarters until the motor car calls for you, crumpling the message and the aide’s handkerchief into his tunic pocket; and, home again (what home he had ever had since when, at eighteen, he had first donned the uniform which from then on would be his home as the turtle’s shell is its domicile), there opened before him an attenuation, an emptiness, of the next five or six or seven hours until it would be dark. He thought of drink. He was not a drinking man; he not only never thought of it until he saw it, it was as though he had forgot it existed until someone actually put it into his hand, as the aide had done the flask. But he dismissed the idea as immediately and completely and for exactly the same reason as if he had been a drinking man: although he had officially ceased to be General of Division Gragnon the moment he received the corps commander’s order for him to put himself under arrest, General of Division Gragnon would have to continue to exist for another five or six or seven hours, perhaps even for another day or two yet.

Then suddenly he knew what he would do, quitting the official quarters for his private ones, passing his own bedroom—a small, panelled closet called by the millionaire the gunroom and containing a shotgun which had never been fired and a mounted stag’s head (not a very good one) and a stuffed trout, both bought in the same shop with the gun—and went on to the room in which three of his aides slept—the lovenest itself, which seemed to retain even yet something of the Argentine, though none could have said what it was, since nothing remained of her, unless it was some inconsolable ghost perhaps of what northerners conceived, believed, to be antipodal libidinous frenzy—and found the volume in the battered chest in which it was the duty of one of the aides to transport about with them the unofficial effects of the headquarters entourage. And now the book’s dead owner was present again too: a former member of his staff, a thin, overtall, delicately- and even languidly-made man regarding whose sexual proclivities the division commander had had his doubts (very likely wrong) without really caring one way or the other, who had entered the (then) brigadier’s military family shortly before he received his division, who, the general discovered, was the nameless product of an orphanage too—which fact, not the book, the reading itself, the division commander would admit to himself with a sort of savage self-contempt in his secret moments, was what caused him to be so constantly aware of the other not quite sipping and not quite snatching and certainly not buried in the book because he was a satisfactory aide, until at last it seemed to the division commander that the battered and dogeared volume was the aide and the man himself merely that aide’s orderly: until one evening while they were waiting for a runner from the front lines with a return concerning some prisoners which a brigadier had neglected to sign (the aide was his divisional JAG), he asked and then listened in cold, inattentive amazement to the answer he got:

‘I was a couturier. In Paris——’

‘A what?’ the division commander said.

‘I made women’s clothes. I was good at it. I was going to be better some day. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be brave.’

‘Be what?’ the division commander said.

‘You know: a hero. Instead, I made women’s clothes. So I thought of becoming an actor—Henry V—Tartuffe better than nothing—even Cyrano. But that would be just acting, pretence—somebody else, not me. Then I knew what to do. Write it.’

‘Write it?’

‘Yes. The plays. Myself write the plays, rather than just act out somebody else’s idea of what is brave. Invent myself the glorious deeds and situations, create myself the people brave enough to perform and face and endure them.’

‘And that wouldn’t have been make-believe too?’ the general said.

‘It would have been me that wrote them, invented them, created them.’ Nor did the general discern humility either: a quality humble yet dogged too, even if it was sheep-like. ‘I would at least have done that.’

‘Oh,’ the general said. ‘And this is the book.’

‘No no,’ the aide said. ‘Another man wrote this one. I haven’t written mine yet.’

‘Haven’t written it yet? You have had time here’; not even knowing that he had expressed the contempt nor even that he had tried to conceal it, or that perhaps he might have tried. And now the aide was not humble, not even dogged; certainly the general would not have recognised despair, though he might indomitability:

‘I dont know enough yet. I had to wait to stop the books to find out——’

‘In books? What in books?’

‘About being brave. About glory, and how men got it, and how they bore it after they got it, and how other people managed to live with them after they got it; and honor and sacrifice, and the pity and compassion you have to have to be worthy of honor and sacrifice, and the courage it takes to pity, and the pride it takes to deserve the courage——’

‘Courage, to pity?’ the general said.

‘Yes. Courage. When you stop to pity, the world runs over you. It takes pride to be that brave.’

‘Pride in what?’ the general said.

‘I dont know yet. That’s what I’m trying to find out.’ Nor did the general recognise serenity then, since he probably called it something else. ‘And I will find it. It’s in the books.’

‘In this book?’ the general said.

‘Yes,’ the aide said, and he died, or that is, the general found him missing one morning, or rather failed to find him at all one morning. It was two hours before he found where the aide was, and another three or four hours before he learned exactly what the aide had done, and he never did learn why and how the aide had come to be there, inside the lines, where a general of division’s Assistant Judge Advocate General had no right nor business whatever, sitting—this was how the runner told it—beside a regimental runner behind a wall near a corner much used by staff cars, on which, so the runner claimed he had told the aide, the enemy had registered a gun only that morning. And everybody had been warned of it, yet the car came on anyway, still coming on even after the aide sprang to his feet and began to wave his arms to stop the car. But it refused to stop, still coming on even after the aide ran out into the open road, still trying to wave the car off even after the runner said that he could hear the shell coming, and that the aide himself must have heard it also; and how the aide could not possibly have known that the car contained not only a wealthy American expatriate, a widow whose only son was in a French air squadron a few kilometres away and who was supporting near Paris an asylum for war-orphaned children, but a well-connected Paris staff-major too. And there had been nothing to pin the medal on when it came through, and nothing to identify to bury it with either, so that the medal also was still in the battered chest which the aide’s successors in their succession superintended from post to post; and the division commander took the book out and read the title and then read it again in mounting exasperation, reading it aloud, saying aloud almost, All right. Blas wrote it. But what’s the name of the book? until he realised that the word he was looking at was the name of the book and therefore the book would have to be about a man, thinking Yes, remembering scraps, fragments, echoes from that night two years ago, saying the name aloud this time: ‘Gil Blas,’ listening, concentrated, if perhaps there might come out of the closed pages, through the cover itself and into the simple name, something, some echo of the thunder, the clanging crash, the ringing bugles and the horns, the——What was it? he thought. The glory, the honor and the courage and the pride——

He returned to his bedroom, carrying the book. Save for his field cot and chest and desk, the furniture still belonged to the owner of the house and of the Argentine. It had the look of having been bought all in one shop too, probably over the telephone. He drew the single chair into the light from the window beside the stuffed fish and sat down and began to read, slowly, rigidly, not moving his lips even, inflexible in fortitude and suffering as if he were sitting fifty years ago for his portrait. After a while it was dusk. The door opened, hesitated, opened more and quietly and a batman entered and came to the table and prepared to light the lamp on it, the division commander not even looking up to say ‘Yes’, even when the soft gout of light plopped and burst soundless and brilliant on the open page in his hands, still reading when the batman went out, still reading until the tray was on the table beside the lamp and the batman had gone again. Then he put the book carefully down and turned to the tray, immobile again for a second, facing, somewhat as he had faced the book before opening it, the tray bearing the covered dish and the loaf and plate and cutlery and glass, and the bottle of wine and one of rum and one of cassis which he had been looking at on this tray for three years now—the same bottles which he had never touched, the same corks started each day and then driven home again and even dusted freshly over, the same liquid level in each as when vintner and distiller had bottled them. Nor did he use the knife and fork when he ate alone from the tray like this, eating not with voracity, nothing at all really gross about the feeding: simply putting the food rapidly and efficiently into himself with his fingers and sops of the bread. Then with only the slightest pause, not of indecision but simply to remember which pocket, he drew out the aide’s handkerchief and carefully wiped his moustache and fingers and tossed the handkerchief onto the tray and thrust the chair away from the table and took up the book and paused again, immobile, the book half raised, though none could have said whether he was looking at the open page or out the open window which he now faced, looking at or listening to the spring-filled darkness, the myriad peaceful silence, which it framed. Then he raised the book further and entered, strode into it as a patient enters a dentist’s office for the last petty adjustment before paying the bill, and read again, rigid and inflexible above the pages’ slow increment in which he missed, skipped, elided, no single word, with a cold, incredulous, respectful amazement, not at the shadows of men and women, because they were inventions and naturally he didn’t believe them—besides being in another country and long ago and therefore even if they had been real, they could never impinge, affect, the course of his life and its destruction—but at the capacity and industry and (he admitted it) the competence of the man who could remember all this and write it down.

He waked immediately, completely prescient. He even picked up the fallen book before looking at his watch; no start of concern nor dismay, as though he knew beforehand that he would be able to reach the chateau in plenty of time before dawn. Not that it would make any difference; he had simply planned to see the group commander tonight, and slept without intending to sleep and waked without needing to be waked, in plenty of time to see the group commander while technically at least it was still tonight.

So it was not dawn yet when the sentry at the lodge passed him (he was alone in the car, driving himself) through the gates and into the drive running straight and over-arched now through the spring darkness loud with predawn nightingales, up to the chateau. A successful highwayman had established its site and the park it sat in, a distant connection of a French queen had restored it in the Italian style of his native land; his marquis descendants had owned it: then the Republic: then a marshal of Napoleon: then a Levantine millionaire; for the last four years now, for all practical purposes, it had been the property of the general commanding the circumambient group of French armies. And the division commander had not noticed the nightingales until he was inside the park and it may have been at this moment that he realised that he himself would never own either: army command or chateau, or nightingales for doomed division commanders, coming to resign their pasts and their futures both, to listen to. And still not dawn when he slammed the car to a stop before the dark pile less of Louis than Florentine and more of baroque than either, jerking it up exactly as he would the over-ridden horse and getting out and flinging the door backward behind him against the night’s silence as he would have flung the reins to a groom without even pausing to see if the animal’s head were secure or not, then mounting the broad shallow steps to the stone terrace with its carved balustrade and urns garlanded in carven stone. Nor was even all the old gothic quite absent either: a pile of horse-droppings two or three days old on the terrace beside the door, as if the old princely highwayman himself had returned, or perhaps had only left day before yesterday, which the division commander glanced at in passing, thinking how forage grown from this northern chalkloam soil merely gave a horse windy size, distending the animal simply by its worthless passing bulk: nothing of speed and bottom like the hard, lean, light desert-bred ones bone- and flesh-bred to endure on almost nothing, contemptuous even of that. And not just horses: man too, thinking Able was I ere I saw France again, thinking how always a man’s simple longevity outlives his life and we are all our own paupers, derelict; thinking, as men had thought and said before him, that no soldier should be permitted to survive his first engagement under fire and then not thinking at all, chop-striding to the door and rapping on it, deliberate, peremptory, and loud.

He saw the candle, heard the feet. The door opened: no dishevelled Faubourg Saint Germain aide, this, but a private soldier: a middle-aged man in unlaced infantry boots and dangling braces, holding his trousers up with the other candleless hand over a soiled lavender civilian shirt whose collarless neckband was clasped by a tarnished brass button the size and shape of a wolf’s fang. Even the man appeared no different; certainly the shirt was not: he (the division commander) might have been looking at both that day fifteen years ago when Bidet got his captaincy at last and an instructorship at the École Militaire, and he and the wife, who had followed him a subaltern to Africa even though she herself got no further than a loft in the Oran native town, could sleep every night under the same roof again at last, the same soldier but with a baize apron over the soiled violet shirt, scrubbing the stoop or the staircase while the wife stood over him like a sergeant herself, with a vast bunch of keys at her waist to jangle at each of his convulsive starts when she would murmur at him, and in the same baize apron waiting on table at meals; and apparently the same soldier (or at least one as large) but certainly the same shirt eight years later when Bidet was a colonel with enough pay to keep a horse too, waiting on table with a white apron now over the collarless shirt and the vast bunch of keys jangling against authentic satin now or even the true funereal silk at each of his convulsive starts, the same heavy boots under the apron bringing amid the viands the smell of stable manure now, the same giant thumb in the bowls of soup.

He followed the candle into the same bedroom at which the knightly highwayman, along with the shade of the imperial marshal, would have looked in contemptuous unbelief, in which the marquis descendants of the Florentine might or might not have slept, but in which the Levantine without doubt did, and saw something else which, he realised now, he had not expected to find changed either, though the man who wore them had. Standing at the foot of the bed, he faced across the fretted garlanded painted footboard the group commander sitting against the piled pillows in the same flannel nightcap and nightshirt which he too had brought to Africa that day twenty-five years ago when he had had to leave his wife under the broiling eaves of the Oran native house because they had no money then (he the only child of the widow living—or trying to—on the pension of her husband, a Savoyard schoolmaster, she one of the six daughters of a retired sergeant-major of marines) while the husband was absent for almost two years on his first subaltern’s tour of outpost duty;—facing the man who even now did not look like even a French soldier and who on that first day twenty-five years ago seemed to have been completely and even criminally miscast, looking then himself like a consumptive school teacher, condemned not just to simple failure but to destitution and suicide too, who weighed then less than a hundred pounds (he was stouter now, almost plump in fact, and somewhere in his career like that of a delayed rocket, the glasses had vanished too) and wearing spectacles of such fierce magnification that he was almost blind without them, and even with them too since for a third of the time the lenses were sweated to opaqueness and he spent another third wiping them dry with the end of his burnous in order to see at all before sweating them blind again, and who had brought into the field life of that regiment of desert cavalry something of the monastery, something of the cold fierce blinkless intolerant glare which burns at midnight in the dedicated asepsis of clinical or research laboratories: that pitiless preoccupation with man, not as an imperial implement, least of all as that gallant and puny creature bearing undismayed on his frail bones and flesh the vast burden of his long inexplicable incomprehensible tradition and journey, not even in fact as a functioning animal but as a functioning machine in the same sense that the earthworm is: alive purely and simply for the purpose of transporting, without itself actually moving, for the distance of its corporeal length, the medium in which it lives, which, given time, would shift the whole earth that infinitesimal inch, leaving at last its own blind insatiate jaws chewing nothing above the spinning abyss: that cold, scathing, contemptuous preoccupation with body vents and orifices and mucous membrane as though he himself owned neither, who declared that no army was better than its anus, since even without feet it could still crawl forward and fight, and so earned his nickname because of his inflexible belief in his doctrine—a nickname spoken at first in contempt and derision, then in alarm and anger and then rage and then concerned and impotent fury since his inflexible efforts to prove his doctrine soon extended beyond his own platoon, into troops and squadrons where, still a simple junior lieutenant of cavalry and not even a medical officer, he had no right nor business at all; and then spoken no longer in ridicule nor even contumely and anger anywhere, because presently the whole African establishment knew how, sitting in a tent, he had told his regimental commander how to recover two scouts captured one night by a band of mounted tribesmen who vanished afterward like antelope; and it worked, and later, still sitting in a tent, told the general himself how to avail to a hitherto dry outpost a constant supply of drinking water, and that worked too; and moved from the classroom colonelcy to the command of a field division in 1914 and three years later was the competent and successful commander of an army group and already unofficially next but one to a marshal’s baton while still less than fifty-five years old, sitting in his flannel nightshirt and cap in the gaudy bed in the rococo room lighted by the cheap candle in its tin candlestick which the batman had set on the bedside table, like an ex-grocer alderman surprised, but neither alarmed nor even concerned, in a sumptuous bordello.

‘You were right,’ the division commander said. ‘I wont go to Chaulnesmont.’

‘You have wrestled all night,’ the group commander said. ‘With what angel?’

‘What?’ the division commander said. He blinked for only a second. Then he said, firmly and calmly, like a man stepping firmly forward into complete darkness, drawing a folded paper from his tunic as he did so and dropping it onto the group commander’s covered knees: ‘It didn’t take that long.’

The group commander didn’t touch the paper. He merely looked at it. He said pleasantly: ‘Yes?’

‘It’s my resignation,’ the division commander said.

‘You think it’s over, then?’

‘What?’ the division commander said. ‘Oh. The war. No, it’s not over. They’ll have something I can do as a civilian. I was even a fair veterinary in the old days, Farrier, too. Or maybe I could even run a production line (that’s what they call it, isn’t it?) in a munitions plant.’

‘And then?’ the group commander said.

The division commander looked at him, though only for a second. ‘Oh. When it is over, you mean. I’m leaving France then. Maybe to the south Pacific. An island.…’

‘Like Gauguin,’ the group commander said gently.

‘Who?’

‘Another man who one day discovered that he had had enough of France too and went to the south Pacific and became a painter.’

‘This is another place,’ the division commander said immediately. ‘There wont be enough people on this one to need their houses painted.’

The group commander reached his hand and took up the folded paper and turned and, the paper still folded, held the corner of it to the candle-flame until it took fire and then burst blazing, the group commander holding it for a second longer before he dropped it hissing into the chamberpot beside the bed and in the same motion slid himself down the pillows until he was reclining again, already drawing the covers up. ‘Chaulnesmont,’ he said. ‘At three tomorrow—— Bah, it’s already tomorrow.’ And then the division commander was aware of it too: the alteration, day, the invincible oblivious tomorrow which follows always, undeviable by man and to man immune; no longer ago than yesterday saw him and his fury, the first tomorrow will have forgotten both. It was even a second or so before he realised that the group commander was still talking to him: ‘—if the world thinks it wishes to stop fighting for twenty-five or thirty years, let it. But not this way. Not like a group of peasants in a half-mown field suddenly shouldering their scythes and lunch-pails and walking off. Chaulnesmont this afternoon.’

‘Because there are rules,’ the division commander said harshly. ‘Our rules. We shall enforce them, or we shall die—the captains and the colonels—no matter what the cost——’

‘It wasn’t we who invented war,’ the group commander said. ‘It was war which created us. From the loins of man’s furious ineradicable greed sprang the captains and the colonels to his necessity. We are his responsibility; he shall not shirk it.’

‘But not me,’ the division commander said.

‘You,’ the group commander said. ‘We can permit even our own rank and file to let us down on occasion; that’s one of the prerequisites of their doom and fate as rank and file forever. They may even stop the wars, as they have done before and will again; ours merely to guard them from the knowledge that it was actually they who accomplished that act. Let the whole vast moil and seethe of man confederate in stopping wars if they wish, so long as we can prevent them learning that they have done so. A moment ago you said that we must enforce our rules, or die. It’s no abrogation of a rule that will destroy us. It’s less. The simple effacement from man’s memory of a single word will be enough. But we are safe. Do you know what that word is?’

The division commander looked at him for a moment. He said: ‘Yes?’

‘Fatherland,’ the group commander said. Now he raised the top of the covers, preparatory to drawing them back over his head and face. ‘Yes, let them believe they can stop it, so long as they dont suspect that they have.’ The covers were already moving; now only the group commander’s nose and eyes and the nightcap remained in sight. ‘Let them believe that tomorrow they will end it; then they wont begin to ponder if perhaps today they can. Tomorrow. And still tomorrow. And again tomorrow. That’s the hope you will vest them in. The three stars that Sergeant Gragnon won by his own strength, with help from man nor God neither, have damned you, General. Call yours martyrdom for the world; you will have saved it. Chaulnesmont this afternoon.’

And now the division commander was no longer a general, still less the sergeant of twenty-five years ago whose inflexible pride it had been to accept odds from no man. ‘But to me,’ he said. ‘What will happen to me?’

And now even the nightcap had vanished and only the muffled voice came from beneath the covers. ‘I dont know,’ it said. ‘It will be glorious.’