‘You were about to say, “done no harm yet”,’ the runner said. ‘Harm?’ he said gently. ‘Problem? Is it a problem and harmful for men in front-line trenches to think of peace, that after all, we can stop fighting if enough of us want to?’
‘To think it; not to talk it. That’s mutiny. There are ways to do things, and ways not to do them.’
‘Render under Caesar?’ the runner said.
‘I cannot discuss this subject while I bear this,’ the padre said, his hand flicking for an instant toward the crown on his cuff.
‘But you wear this too,’ the runner said, his hand in its turn indicating the collar and the black V inside the tunic’s lapels.
‘God help us,’ the padre said.
‘Or we, God,’ the runner said. ‘Maybe the time has now come for that’: and went away from there too, the winter following its course too toward the spring and the next final battle which would end the war, during which he would hear of them again, rumored from the back areas of the (now three) army zones, watched still by the (now) three intelligence sections but still at stalemate because still they had caused no real harm, at least not yet; in fact, the runner had now begun to think of them as a formally accepted and even dispatched compromise with the soldier’s natural and inevictable belief that he at least would not be killed, as orderly batches of whores were sent up back areas to compromise with man’s natural and normal sex, thinking (the runner) bitterly and quietly, as he had thought before: His prototype had only man’s natural propensity for evil to contend with; this one faces all the scarlet-and-brazen impregnability of general staffs.
And this time (it was May again, the fourth one he had seen from beneath the brim of a steel helmet, the battalion had gone in again two days ago and he had just emerged from Corps Headquarters at Villeneuve Blanche) when he saw the vast black motor car again there was such a shrilling of N.C.O.s’ whistles and a clashing of presented arms that he thought at first it was full of French and British and American generals until he saw that only one was a general: the French one: then recognised them all: in the rear seat beside the general the pristine blue helmet as unstained and innocent of exposure and travail as an uncut sapphire above the Roman face and the unstained horizon-blue coat with its corporal’s markings, and the youth in the uniform now of an American captain, on the second jump seat beside the British staff-major, the runner half-wheeling without even breaking stride, to the car and halted one pace short then took that pace and clapped his heels and saluted and said to the staff-major in a ringing voice: ‘Sir!’ then in French to the French general—an old man with enough stars on his hat to have been at least an army commander: ‘Monsieur the general.’
‘Good morning, my child,’ the general said.
‘With permission to address monsieur the director your companion?’
‘Certainly, my child,’ the general said.
‘Thank you, my general,’ the runner said, then to the old Negro: ‘You missed him again.’
‘Yes,’ the old Negro said. ‘He aint quite ready yet. And dont forget what I told you last year. Send for me.’
‘And dont you forget what I told you last year too,’ the runner said, and took that pace backward then halted again. ‘But good luck to you, anyway; he doesn’t need it,’ he said and clapped his heels again and saluted and said again to the staff-major or perhaps to no one at all in the ringing and empty voice: ‘Sir!’
And that was all, he thought; he would never see either of them again—that grave and noble face, the grave and fantastic child. But he was wrong. It was not three days until he stood in the ditch beside the dark road and watched the lorries moving up toward the lines laden with what the old St Omer watchman told him were blank anti-aircraft shells, and not four when he waked, groaning and choking on his own blood until he could turn his head and spit (his lip was cut and he was going to lose two teeth—spitting again, he had already lost them—and now he even remembered the rifle-butt in his face), hearing already (that was what had waked, roused him) the terror of that silence.
He knew at once where he was: where he always was asleep or on duty either: lying (someone had even spread his blanket over him) on the dirt ledge hacked out of the wall of the tiny cave which was the ante-room to the battalion dugout. And he was alone: no armed guard sitting across from him as he realised now he had expected, nor was he even manacled: nothing save himself lying apparently free on his familiar ledge in that silence which was not only above ground but down here too: no telephonist at the switchboard opposite, none of the sounds—voices, movement, the coming and going of orderlies and company commanders and N.C.O.’s—all the orderly disorder of a battalion p.c. functioning normally in a cramped space dug forty feet down into the earth—which should have been coming from the dugout itself;—only the soundless roar of the massed weight of shored and poised dirt with which all subterrene animals—badgers and miners and moles—are deafened until they no longer hear it. His watch (curiously it was not broken) said 10:19, whether Ack Emma or Pip Emma he could not tell down here, except that it could not be, it must not be Pip Emma; he could not, he must not have been here going on twenty hours; the seven which Ack Emma would signify would already be too many. So he knew at least where they would be, the whole p.c. of them—colonel, adjutant, sergeant-major and the telephonist with his temporarily spliced and extended line—topside too, crouching behind the parapet, staring through periscopes across that ruined and silent emptiness at the opposite line, where their opposite German numbers would be crouching also behind a parapet, gazing too through periscopes across that vernal desolation, that silence, expectant too, alerted and amazed.
But he did not move yet. It was not that it might already be too late; he had already refused to believe that and so dismissed it. It was because the armed man might be in the dugout itself, guarding the only exit there. He even thought of making a sound, a groan, something to draw the man in; he even thought of what he would say to him: Dont you see? We dont know what they are up to, and only I seem to have any fears or alarms. If I am wrong, we will all die sooner or later anyway. If I am right and you shoot me here, we will all surely die. Or better still: Shoot me. I shall be the one man out of this whole four years who died calmly and peacefully and reposed in dry clothing instead of panting, gasping, befouled with mud to the waist or drenched completely in the sweat of exertion and anguish. But he didn’t do it. He didn’t need to. The dugout was empty also. The armed man might be at the top of the stairs instead of the foot of them but then there or thereabouts would be where the colonel and his orderly room and periscope were too; besides, he would have to face, risk the rifle somewhere and it wouldn’t matter where since it contained only (for him) one bullet while what he was armed with was capable of containing all of time, all of man.
He found his helmet at once. He would have no rifle, of course, but even as he dismissed this he had one: leaning against the wall behind the sergeant-major’s desk (oh yes, what he was armed with even equipped him at need with that which his own armament was even superior to) and yes, there it still was in the sergeant-major’s desk: the pass issued to him Monday to pass him out to Corps Headquarters and then back, so that he didn’t even expect to find a guard at the top of the fifty-two steps leading up and debouching into the trench: only the transubstantiated orderly room as he had foreknown—colonel, adjutant, sergeant-major, telephone periscopes and all, his speech all ready on his tongue when the sergeant-major turned and looked back at him.
‘Latrine,’ he said.
‘Right,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Be smart about it. Then report back here.’
‘Yessir,’ he said and two hours later he was again among the trees from which he had watched the torches moving about the archie battery two nights ago; three hours after that he saw the three aeroplanes—they were S.E.5’s—in the sky which had been empty of aircraft for forty-eight hours now, and saw and heard the frantic uproar of shells above where the enemy front would be. Th
en he saw the German aeroplane too, watched it fly arrow-straight and apparently not very fast, enclosed by the pocking of white British archie which paced it, back across No-man’s Land, the three S.E.’s in their pocking of black hun archie zooming and climbing and diving at the German; he watched one of them hang on the German’s tail for what must have been a minute or two, the two aircraft apparently fastened rigidly together by the thin threads of tracer. And still the German flew steadily and sedately on, descending, descending now even as it passed over him and the battery behind—near—which he lurked opened on it in that frenzy of frantic hysterical frustration common to archie batteries; descending, vanishing just above the trees, and suddenly he knew where: the aerodrome just outside Villeneuve Blanche, vanishing sedately and without haste downward, enclosed to the last in that empty similitude of fury, the three S.E.5’s pulling up and away in one final zoom; and, as if that were not enough to tell him what he had to do, he saw one of them roll over at the top of its loop and, frozen and immobile, watched it in its plan as it dove, rushed straight down at the battery itself, its nose flicking and winking with the tracer which was now going straight into the battery and the group of gunners standing quietly about it, down and down past what he would have thought was the instant already too late to save itself from crashing in one last inextricable jumble into the battery, then levelling, himself watching the rapid pattering walk of the tracer across the intervening ground toward him until now he was looking directly into the flicking wink and the airman’s helmeted and goggled face behind and above it, so near that they would probably recognise one another if they ever saw each other again—the two of them locked in their turn for a moment, an instant by the thin fiery thread of a similitude of death (afterward he would even remember the light rapid blow against his leg as if he had been tapped rapidly and lightly once by a finger), the aeroplane pulling level and with a single hard snarling downward blast of air, zooming, climbing on until the roaring whine died away, he not moving yet, immobile and still frozen in the ravelling fading snarl and the faint thin sulphur-stink of burning wool from the skirt of his tunic.
It was enough. He didn’t even expect to get nearer the Villeneuve aerodrome than the first road-block, himself speaking to the corporal not even across a rifle but across a machine gun: ‘I’m a runner from the —th Battalion.’
‘I cant help that,’ the corporal said. ‘You dont pass here.’ Nor did he really want to. He knew enough now. Ten hours later in the Villeneuve Blanche gendarme’s uniform, he was in Paris, traversing again the dark and silent streets of the aghast and suspended city dense not only with French civil police but the military ones of the three nations patrolling the streets in armed motorcars, until he passed again beneath the lettered banner above the arched gateway.
Wednesday Night
To the young woman waiting just inside the old eastern city gate, that dispersal in the Place de Ville made a long faint hollow faraway rushing sound as remote and impersonal as a pouring of water or the wings of a tremendous migratory flock. With her head turned and arrested and one thin hand clutching the crossing of the shabby shawl on her breast, she seemed to listen to it almost inattentively while it filled the saffron sunset between the violet city and the cobalt-green firmament, and died away.
Then she turned back to where the road entered the city beneath the old arch. It was almost empty now, only a trickle approached and entered, the last of them, the dregs; when she turned back to it her face, though still wan and strained, was almost peaceful now, as if even the morning’s anguish had been exhausted and even at last obliterated by the day of watching and waiting.
Then she was not even watching the road as her hand, releasing the shawl, brushed past the front of her dress and stopped, her whole body motionless while her hand fumbled at something through the cloth, fumbling at whatever it was as if even the hand didn’t know yet what it was about to find. Then she thrust her hand inside the dress and brought the object out—the crust of the bread which the man had given her in the boulevard almost twelve hours ago, warm from her body and which by her expression she had completely forgotten, even the putting it there. Then she even forgot the bread again, clutching it to her mouth in one thin voracious fist, tearing at it with quick darting birdlike snatches as she once more watched the gate which those entering now approached with creeping and painful slowness. Because these were the dregs, the residue—the very old and the very young, belated not because they had had further to come but because some of them had been so long in life as long ago to have outlived the kin and friends who would have owned carts to lend or share with them, and the others had been too brief in it yet to have friends capable of owning carts and who had already been orphaned of kin by the regiment at Bethune and Souchez and the Chemin des Dames three years ago—all creeping cityward now at the pace of the smallest and weakest.
When she began suddenly to run, she was still chewing the bread, still chewing when she darted under the old twilit arch, running around an old woman and a child who were entering it without breaking stride but merely changing feet like a running horse at a jump, flinging the crust behind her, spurning it with her palm against the hollow purchaseless air as she ran toward a group of people coming up the now almost empty road—an old man and three women, one of them carrying a child. The woman carrying the child saw her and stopped. The second woman stopped too, though the others—an old man on a single crutch and carrying a small cloth-knotted bundle and leaning on the arm of an old woman who appeared to be blind—were still walking on when the young woman ran past them and up to the woman carrying the child and stopped facing her, her wan face urgent and frantic again.
‘Marthe!’ she said. ‘Marthe!’
The woman answered, something rapid and immediate, not in French but in a staccato tongue full of harsh rapid consonants, which went with her face—a dark high calm ugly direct competent peasant’s face out of the ancient mountainous central-European cradle, which, though a moment later she spoke in French and with no accent, was no kin whatever to the face of the child she carried, with its blue eyes and florid coloring filtered westward from Flanders. She spoke French at once, as if, having looked at the girl, she realised that, whether or not the girl had ever once understood the other tongue, she was past comprehending or remembering it now. Now the blind woman leading the crippled old man had stopped and turned and was coming back; and now you would have noticed for the first time the face of the second woman, the one who had stopped when the one carrying the child did. It was almost identical with the other’s; they were indubitably sisters. At first glance, the second face was the older of the two. Then you saw that it was much younger. Then you realised that it had no age at all, it had all ages or none; it was the peaceful face of the witless.
‘Hush now,’ the woman carrying the child said. ‘They wont shoot him without the others.’ Then the blind woman dragged the old man up. She faced them all, but none in particular, motionless while she listened for the sound of the girl’s breathing until she located it and turned quickly toward the girl her fierce cataracted stare.
‘Have they got him?’ she said.
‘As we all know,’ the woman with the child said quickly. She started to move again. ‘Let’s get on.’
But the blind woman didn’t move, square and sightless in the road, blocking it, still facing the girl. ‘You,’ she said. ‘I dont mean the fools who listened to him and who deserve to die for it. I mean that foreigner, that anarchist who murdered them. Have they got him? Answer me.’
‘He’s there too,’ the woman carrying the child said, moving again. ‘Come on.’
But still the blind woman didn’t move, except to turn her face toward the woman with the child when she spoke. ‘That’s not what I asked,’ she said.
‘You heard me say they will shoot him too,’ the woman carrying the child said. She moved again, as though to touch the blind woman with her hand and turn her. But before the hand touched her, the woman who
could not even see had jerked her own up and struck it down.
‘Let her answer me,’ she said. She faced the girl again. ‘They haven’t shot him yet? Where’s your tongue? You were full enough of something to say when you came up.’ But the girl just stared at her.
‘Answer her,’ the woman carrying the child said.
‘No,’ the girl whispered.
‘So,’ the blind woman said. She had nothing to blink for or from, yet there was nothing else to call it but blinking. Then her face began to turn rapidly between the girl’s and the woman’s carrying the child. Even before she spoke, the girl seemed to shrink, staring at the blind woman in terrified anticipation. Now the blind woman’s voice was silken, smooth. ‘You too have kin in the regiment, eh? Husband—brother—a sweetheart?’
‘Yes,’ the woman carrying the child said.
‘Which one of you?’ the blind woman said.
‘All three of us,’ the woman carrying the child said. ‘A brother.’
‘A sweetheart too, maybe?’ the blind woman said. ‘Come, now.’
‘Yes,’ the woman carrying the child said.
‘So, then,’ the blind woman said. She jerked her face back to the girl. ‘You,’ she said. ‘You may pretend you’re from this district, but you dont fool me. You talk wrong. And you—’ she jerked back to face the woman carrying the child again ‘—you’re not even French. I knew that the minute the two of you came up from nowhere back yonder, talking about having given your cart to a pregnant woman. Maybe you can fool them that dont have anything but eyes, and nothing to do but believe everything they look at. But not me.’