A Fable

  That was all they knew now as they hurried toward the city—old people and women and children, parents and wives and children and kin and mistresses of the three thousand men whom the old generalissimo at Chaulnesmont could destroy tomorrow by merely lifting his finger,—a whole converging countryside flowing toward the city, panting and stumbling, aghast and frantic, torn not even between terror and hope, but only by anguish and terror; destinationless even, since they had no hope: not quitting their homes and fields and shops to hurry to the city, but hoicked by anguish and terror, out of their huts and hovels and ditches, and drawn to the city whether they would or not: out of the villages and farms and into the city by simple grief to grief, since grief and anxiety, like poverty, take care of their own; to crowd into the already crowded city with no other will and desire except to relinquish their grief and anxiety into the city’s vast conglomerate of all the passions and forces—fear, and grief, and despair, and impotence, and unchallengeable power and terror and invincible will; to partake of and share in all by breathing the same air breathed by all, and therefore both: by the grieving and the begrieved on one hand, and on the other the lone gray man supreme, omnipotent and inaccessible behind the carved stone door and the sentries and the three symbolical flags of the Hôtel de Ville, who dealt wholesale in death and who could condemn the whole regiment and miss its three thousand men no more from the myriads he dealt in, than he would miss the nod of his head or the reverse of the lifted hand which would save them. Because they did not believe that the war was over. It had gone on too long to cease, finish, overnight, at a moment’s notice, like this. It had merely arrested itself; not the men engaged in it, but the war itself, War, impervious and even inattentive to the anguish, the torn flesh, the whole petty surge and resurge of victories and defeats like the ephemeral repetitive swarm and swirl of insects on a dung-heap, saying, ‘Hush. Be quiet a moment’ to the guns and the cries of the wounded too,—that whole ruined band of irredeemable earth from the Alps to the sea, studded with faces watching in lipless and lidless detachment, for a moment, a day or two days, for the old gray man at Chaulnesmont to lift that hand. Besides, it did not matter. They had got used to the war now, after four years. In four years, they had even learned how to live with it, beside it; or rather, beneath it as beneath a fact or condition of nature, of physical laws—the privations and deprivations, the terror and the threat like the loom of an arrested tornado or a tidal wave beyond a single frail dyke; the maiming and dying too of husbands and fathers and sweethearts and sons, as though bereavement by war were a simple occupational hazard of marriage and parenthood and childbearing and love. And not only just while the war lasted, but after it was officially over too, as if the only broom War knew or had to redd up its vacated room with, was Death; as though every man touched by even one second’s flick of its mud and filth and physical fear, had been discharged only under condition of a capital sentence like a fatal disease;—so does War ignore its own recessment until it has ground also to dust the last cold and worthless cinder of its satiety and the tag-ends of its unfinished business; whether the war had ceased or not, the men of the regiment would still have had to die individually before their time, but since the regiment as a unit had been responsible for its cessation, the regiment would surely have to die, as a unit, by the old obsolete methods of war, if for no other reason than to enable its executioners to check their rifles back into the quartermasters’ stores in order to be disbanded and demobilised. In fact, the only thing that could save the regiment would be the resumption of the war: which was their paradox, their bereavement: that, by mutinying, the regiment had stopped the war; it had saved France (France? England too; the whole West, since nothing else apparently had been able to stop the Germans since the March breakthrough in front of Amiens) and this was to be its reward; the three thousand men who had saved France and the world, would lose their lives, not in the act of it, but only after the fact, so that, to the men who had saved the world, the world they saved would not be worth the price they paid for it,—not to them, of course, the three thousand men in the regiment; they would be dead: the world, the West, France, all, would not matter to them; but to the wives and parents and children and brothers and sisters and sweethearts who would have lost all in order to save France and the world; they saw themselves no longer as one unit integrated into one resistance, one nation, mutual in suffering and dread and deprivation, against the German threat, but solitary, one small district, one clan, one family almost, embattled against all that Western Europe whom their sons and fathers and husbands and lovers were having to save. Because, no matter how much longer the threat of the war might have continued, some at least of the lovers and sons and fathers and husbands might have escaped with no more than an injury, while, now that the terror and the threat were past, all of their fathers and lovers and husbands and sons would have to die.

  But when they reached the city, they found no placid lake of grieving resignation. Rather, it was a cauldron of rage and consternation, because now they learned that the regiment had not mutinied by mutual concord and design, either planned or spontaneous, but instead had been led, cajoled, betrayed into revolt by a single squad of twelve soldiers and their corporal; that the entire three thousand men had been corrupted into capital crime and through it, right up into the shadow of the rifles which would be its punishment, by thirteen men, four of whom, including the corporal-leader, were not only not Frenchmen by birth, but not even naturalised Frenchmen. In fact, only one of them—the corporal—could even speak French. Even the army records did not seem to know what their nationality was; their very presence in a French regiment or the French army in France was contradictory and obfuscated, though indubitably they had, must have, got there through or by means of some carelessly reported or recorded Foreign Legion draft, since armies never really lost anything for good, once it was described and numbered and dated and countersigned onto a scrap of paper; the boot, bayonet, camel or even regiment, might vanish and leave no physical trace, but not the record of it and the name and rank and designation of whoever had it last, or anyway signed for it last. The other nine of the squad were Frenchmen, but only three of them were less than thirty years old, and two of them were over fifty. But all nine of them had unimpeachable service records extending back not only to August 1914, but on to the day when the oldest of them turned eighteen and was drafted thirty-five years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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