Nor could even the aviator stationed and motionless in the hard blue wind, have said exactly where among them the facing-about began as, like the blind headless earth-brute which, apparently without any organ either to perceive alarm or select a course to evade it, can move at instantaneous notice and instantaneous speed in either direction, the crowd began to flow back to the city, turning and beginning to move all at one instant as birds do, hurrying again, weary and indefatigable, indomitable in their capacity not alone for endurance but for frenzy as well, streaming immediately once more between two files of troops stretching the whole distance back to the city—(apparently a whole brigade of cavalry this time, drawn up and facing, across the cleared path, a like number of infantry, without packs again but with bayonets still fixed and with grenades too now, with at one point, the nozzle and looped hose of a flame thrower, and at the far, the city, end of the cleared path, the tank again, half-seen beyond the arch of the gate like a surly, not-too-courageous dog peering from its kennel) without seeming to have remarked either the arrival of the troops nor to notice, let alone have any curiosity about, their presence now. Nor did the troops pay any attention to the people, alerted of course, but actually almost lounging on the horses and the grounded rifles while the crowd poured between them, as though to the troops themselves and to those who had ordered them here, the crowd was like the herd of western cattle which, once got into motion about its own vortex, is its own warrant both of its own security and of the public’s peace.
They recrossed the city, back into the Place de Ville, filling it again, right up to the spear-tipped iron fence beyond which the three sentries flanked the blank door beneath the three morning-windy flags. They still crowded into the Place long after there was no more room, still convinced that, no matter how fast they had come back from the compound, they would be too late, knowing that no courier carrying the order for the execution could possibly have passed them on the road, yet convinced that one must indubitably have done so. Yet they still crowded in, as if the last belated ones could not accept the back-passed word, but must see, or try to see, for themselves that they had missed the courier and were too late; until even if they had wished to stream, stumble, pant back to the compound and at least be where they could hear the volley which would bereave them, there would have been no room to turn around in and begin to run; immobilised and fixed by their own density in that stone sink whose walls were older than Clovis and Charlemagne—until suddenly it occurred to them that they could not be late, it was impossible for them to be late; that, no matter what errors and mistakes of time or direction or geography they might make, they could no more be late for the execution than they could prevent it, since the only reason for the whole vast frantic and anguished influx to the city was, to be there when the regiment’s division commander arrived to ask the old gray general behind the closed stone door facing them, to allow him to have the regiment shot, and the division general was not even due there until three oclock this afternoon.
So all they needed to do now, was just to wait. It was a little after nine oclock now. At ten, three corporals, an American, a Briton, and a Frenchman, flanked each by an armed soldier of his nation, came out of the archway from the rear of the Hôtel, and exchanged each the sentry of his nation and marched the relieved man back through the archway. Then it was noon. Their shadows crept in from the west and centered; the same three corporals came with three fresh sentries and relieved the three posts and went away; it was the hour when, in the old dead time called peace, men went home to eat and rest a little perhaps, but none stirred; their shadows crept eastward, lengthening again; at two oclock, the three corporals came for the third time; the three sets of three paced and stamped for the third time through the two-hourly ritual, and departed.
This time, the car came so fast up the boulevard that it outstripped its own heralding. The crowd had only time to press frantically back and let it enter the Place and then anneal behind it as it shot across the Place and stopped before the Hôtel in a bursting puff of dust from its clapped- to brakes. It was a staff car also, but stained with dust and caked with dried mud too, since it had come not only from the army zone, but out of the lines themselves, even if its pennon did bear the five stars of an army commander. Though, after these four years, even the children read that much, and if it had flown no pennon at all, even the children would have recognised two of the men in it—the squat, bull-chested man who commanded the regiment’s division, who was already beginning to stand up before the car stopped, and the tall, scholarly-looking man who would be the division commander’s army-group commander’s chief-of-staff, the division commander springing out of the car before the orderly beside the driver in the front seat had time to get down and open the tonneau door, and already chop-striding his short stiff cavalry legs toward the blank, sentry-flanked entrance to the Hôtel before the staff officer had even begun to move.
Then the staff officer rose too, taking up a longish object from the seat beside him, and in the next second they—the crowd—had recognised it, swaying forward out of their immobilised recoil and making a sound now, not of execration, because it was not even directed at the division commander; even before they learned about the foreign corporal, they had never really blamed him, and even with the corporal, although they could still dread the division commander as the postulate of their fear and the instrument of their anguish, they had not blamed him: not only a French soldier, but a brave and faithful one, he could have done nothing else but what he was doing, believed nothing else except what he believed, since it was because of such as he that France had endured this long, surrounded and embattled by jealousy and envy—a soldier: that not only his own honor and that of his division, but the honor of the entire profession of command, from files and squads to armies and groups of them, had been compromised; a Frenchman: that the security of the motherland itself had been jeopardised or at least threatened. Later, afterward, it would seem to them, some of them, that, during the four or five seconds before they recognised the significance of what the staff officer had taken up from the seat of the car, there had been a moment when they had felt for him something almost like pity: not only a Frenchman and a soldier, but a Frenchman and a soldier who had to be a man first, to have been a Frenchman and become a soldier, yet who, to gain the high privilege of being a brave and faithful Frenchman and soldier, had had to forfeit and abdicate his right in the estate of man,—where theirs would be only to suffer and grieve, his would be to decree it; he could share only in the bereaving, never in the grief; victim, like they, of his own rank and high estate.
Then they saw what the staff officer had in his hand. It was a sabre. He—the staff officer—had two: wearing one buckled to his ordnance belt, and carrying one, its harness furled about the hilt and sheath, which he was tucking under his arm as he too descended from the car. And even the children knew what that meant: that the division commander too was under arrest, and now they made the sound; it was as though only now, for the first time, had they actually realised that the regiment was going to die,—a sound not even of simple agony, but of relinquishment, acceptance almost, so that the division commander himself paused and turned and they seemed to look at, see him too for the first time—victim not even of his rank and high estate, but like them, of that same instant in geography and in time which had destroyed the regiment, but with no rights in its fate; solitary, kinless, alone, pariah and orphan both from them whose decree of orphanage he would carry out, and from them whom he would orphan; repudiated in advance by them from whom he had bought the high privilege of endurance and fidelity and abnegation with the forfeiture of his birthright in humanity, in compassion and pity and even in the right to die;—standing for a moment yet, looking back at them, then turned, already chop-striding again toward the stone steps and the blank door, the staff officer with the furled sabre under his arm following, the three sentries clashing to present arms as the division commander strode up the steps and past them and himself jerked open the
door’s black yawn before anyone else could have moved to do it, and entered—the squat, short figure kinless, indomitable, and doomed, vanishing rigidly and without a backward look, across that black threshold as though (to the massed faces and eyes watching) into Abyss or into Hell.
And now it was too late. If they could have moved, they might at least have reached the compound wire in time to hear the knell; now, because of their own immobilisation, they would have only the privilege of watching the executioner prepare the empty rope. In a moment now, the armed couriers and outriders would appear and kick into life the motorcycles waiting in the areaway; the cars would draw up to the door, and the officers themselves would emerge—not the old supreme general, not the two lesser ones, not even the division commander, compelled to that last full measure of expiation by watching the doom whose mouthpiece he had been,—not any of these, but the provost-marshals, the specialists: they who by avocation and affinity had been called and as by bishops selected and trained and dedicated into the immutable hierarchy of War to be major-domos to such as this, to preside with all the impunity and authority of civilised usage over the formal orderly shooting of one set of men by another wearing the same uniform, lest there be flaw or violation in the right; trained for this moment and this end as race-horses are brought delicately, with all man’s skill and knowledge and care, up to the instant of the springing barrier and the grandstands’ roar, of St Leger or Derby; the pennoned staff cars would roar away, rapid and distancing, feeding them fading dust once more back to the compound which they knew now they should never have left; even if they could have moved, only by the most frantic speed could they more than reach the compound fence in time merely to hear and see the clapping away of echoes and the wisping away of smoke which made them orphaned and childless and relict, but now they could not even move enough to face about: the whole Place one aspic of gaped faces from which rose that sound not yelling but half murmuring and half wailing, while they stared at the gray, tomblike pile into which the two generals in their panoply and regalia and tools of glory, had vanished as into a tomb for heroes, and from which, when something did emerge, it would now be Death,—glaring at it, anguished and aghast, unable to move anywhere, unless the ones in front might perhaps fling themselves upon and beneath the cavalcade before it could start, and so destroy it, and, dying themselves with it, bequeath to the doomed regiment at least that further span of breathing comprised in the time necessary to form a new one.
But nothing happened. A courier did appear after a while from the archway, but he was only an ordinary dispatch-rider, and alone; his whole manner declared that he had no concern whatever in anything regarding them or their trouble. He didn’t even look at them, so that the sound, never too loud, ceased while he straddled one of the waiting motorcycles and kicked it to life and moved away, not even in the direction of the compound but toward the boulevard, pushing the popping mechanism along between his straddled legs since, in the crowd, there was no chance whatever of running it fast enough to establish its balance, the crowd parting just enough to let him through and then closing behind him again, his urgent, constant adjurations for passage marking his progress, lonely, urgent and irritable, like the crying of a lost wildfowl; after a while two more came out, identical, even to the air of private and leisurely independence, and departed on two more of the machines, their cries too marking their infinitesimal and invisible progress: ‘Give way, you bastards.… offspring of sheep and camels …’
And that was all. Then it was sunset. As they stood in the turning flood of night, the ebb of day rang abruptly with an orderly discordant diapason of bugles, orderly because they all sounded at once, discordant because they sounded not one call, but three: the Battre aux Champs of the French, the Last Post of the English, the Retreat of the Americans, beginning inside the city and spreading from cantonment and depot to cantonment and depot, rising and falling within its own measured bruit as the bronze throat of orderly and regulated War proclaimed and affirmed the end of day, clarion and sombre above the parade rite of Mount and Stand Down as the old guards, custodians of today, relinquished to tomorrow’s, the six sergeants themselves appearing this time, each with his old guard or his new, the six files in ordered tramp and wheel facing each its rigid counterpart juxtaposed, the barked commands in the three different tongues ringing in the same discordant unison as the bugles, in staccato poste and riposte as the guards exchanged and the three sentries of the new ones assumed the posts. Then the sunset gun went from the old citadel, deliberate and profound, as if a single muffled drumstick had been dropped once against the inverted bowl of hollow and resonant air, the sound fading slowly and deliberately, until at last, with no suture to mark its annealment, it was lost in the murmur of bunting with which the flags, bright blooms of glory myriad across the embattled continent, sank, windless again, down.
They were able to move now. The fading whisper of the gun and the descending flags might have been the draining away of what had been holding them gelid; there would even be time to hasten home and eat, and then return. So they were almost running, walking only when they had to and running again when they could, wan, indomitable and indefatigable, as the morning’s ebb flowed back through the twilight, the darkling, the night-annealing city, toward the warrens and tenements where it had risen. They were like the recessed shift out of a factory furiously abridging the ordered retinue of day and dark producing shells say, for a retreating yet unconquered army, their eyes bloodshot from the fumes, their hair and garments stinking with the reek, hurrying to eat and then return, already eating the waiting food while they still ran toward it, and already back at the clanking flashing unstopping machines while still chewing and swallowing the food they would not taste.
Tuesday
Wednesday
Wednesday Night
It was late spring of 1916 when the runner joined the battalion. The whole brigade had been moved from Flanders down into Picardy, in billets near Amiens, resting and refitting and receiving replacements to be an integer in what would be known afterward as the First Battle of the Somme—an affair which would give even those who had survived to remember Loos and the Canal, not only something to blench for but the discovery that something even remained to blench with.
He had debarked that same dawn from the Dover leave packet. A lorry had given him a lift from Boulogne; he got directions from the first man he met and in time entered the brigade office with his posting order already in his hand, expecting to find a corporal or a sergeant or at most the brigade adjutant, but found instead the brigadier himself sitting at the desk with an open letter, who said:
‘Afternoon. As you were a moment, will you?’ The runner did so and watched enter a captain whom he was to know as commander of one of the companies in the battalion to which he would be assigned, followed by a thin wiry surly-looking private who, even to the runner’s first glance, seemed to have between his bowed legs and his hands the shape of a horse, the brigadier saying pettishly, ‘Stand at ease; stand at ease,’ then opened the folded letter and glanced at it, then looked at the private and said: ‘This came by special courier this morning. From Paris. Someone from America is trying to find you. Someone important enough for the French government to have located you through channels and then send a special courier up from Paris. Someone named—’ and glanced at the letter again: ‘—Reverend Tobe Sutterfield.’
And now the runner was watching the private too, already looking at him in time not only to hear but to see him say, quick and harsh and immediately final: ‘No.’
‘Sir,’ the captain prompted.
‘No what?’ the brigadier said. ‘An American. A blackamoor minister. You dont know who it is?’
‘No,’ the private said.
‘He seemed to think you might say that. He said to remind you of Missouri.’
‘No,’ the private said, rigid and harsh and final. ‘I was never in Missouri. I dont know anything about him.’
‘Say sir,’ the
captain said.
‘That’s your last word?’ the brigadier said.
‘Yes sir,’ the private said.
‘All right,’ the brigadier said. ‘Carry on.’ Then they were gone and, rigid at attention, he (the runner) felt rather than saw the brigadier open the brigade order and begin to read it and then look up at him—no movement of the head at all: merely an upward flick of the eyes, steady for a moment, then down to the order again: thinking (the runner) quietly: Not this time. There’s too much rank: thinking: It wont even be the colonel, but the adjutant. Which by ordinary could have been as much as two weeks later since, a runner formally assigned to a combat battalion, his status was the same as any other member of it and he too would be officially ‘resting’ until they went back up the lines; and, except for coincidence, probably would have been: reporting (the runner) not to the battalion sergeant-major but to Coincidence, entering his assigned billet two hours later, and in the act of stowing his kit into a vacant corner, saw again the man he had seen two hours ago in the brigadier’s office—the surly, almost insubordinate stable-aura-ed private who by his appearance would have pined and died one day after he was removed further from Whitechapel than a Newmarket paddock perhaps, yet who was not only important enough to be approached through official channels by some American individual or agent or agency himself or itself important enough to use the French government for messenger, but important enough to repudiate the approach—seated this time on a bunk with a thick leather money-belt open on one knee and a small dirty dogeared notebook on the other, and three or four other privates facing him in turn, to each of which he counted out a few French notes from the money-belt and then made a notation with the stub of a pencil in the notebook.
And the next day, the same scene; and the day after that, and the one after that, directly after the morning parade for roll-call and inspection; the faces different faces and varying in number: two, or three, sometimes only one: but always one, the worn money-belt getting a little thinner but apparently inexhaustible, anyway bottomless, the pencil stub making the tedious entries in the grimed notebook; then the fifth day, after noon mess; it was payday and, approaching the billet, for a moment the runner thought wildly that part of the pay parade was taking place there: a line, a queue of men extending out into the street, waiting to creep one by one inside, so that the runner had trouble entering his own domicile, to stand now and watch the whole affair in reverse: the customers, clients, patients—whatever they were—now paying the grimed frayed wads of French notes back into the money-belt, the tedious pencil stub still making the tedious entries; and still standing there watching when the orderly whom he had seen that first morning in the brigade anteroom, entered and broke through the line, saying to the man on the bunk: ‘Come on. You’re for it this time. It’s a bleeding f … ing motorcar from Paris with a bleeding f … ing prime minister in it,’—watching (the runner) the man on the bunk without haste stow the notebook and the pencil-stub into the money-belt and strap it up and turn and roll the belt into the blanket behind him and rise and follow the orderly, the runner speaking to the nearest of the now broken and dispersing line: