‘If you please, General,’ the old general said in his mild voice. The German general didn’t even pause. He turned to the American.
‘You also.’
‘Swine?’ the American said.
‘Soldiers,’ the German said. ‘You are no better.’
‘You mean, no worse, dont you?’ the American said. ‘I just got back from St Mihiel last night.’
‘Then perhaps you can visit Amiens tomorrow,’ the German said. ‘I will conduct you.’
‘General,’ the old general said. This time the German general stopped and even looked at the old general. He said:
‘Not yet. I am—how you say?—supplicant.’ He said again: ‘Supplicant.’ Then he began to laugh, that is, up to the dead indomitable unregenerate eye, speaking not even to anyone, not even to himself: only to outraged and unregenerate incredulity: ‘I, a German lieutenant general, come eighty-seven kilometres to request of—ja, insist on—an Englishman and a Frenchman the defeat of my nation. We—I—could have saved it by simply refusing to meet you here. I could save it now simply by walking out. I could have done it at your aerodrome this afternoon by using on myself the pistol which I employed to preserve even in defeat the integrity of what this—’ he made a brief rapid gesture with one hand; with barely a motion of it he indicated his entire uniform—belts brass braid insigne and all ‘—represents, has won the right to stand for, preserves still that for which those of us who have died in it died for. Then this one, this blunder of the priests and politicians and civilian time-servers, would stop now, since in fact it already has, three days ago now. But I did not. I do not, as a result of which inside another year we—not us—’ again without moving he indicated his uniform ‘—but they whose blunder we tried to rectify, will be done, finished; and with them, us too since now we are no longer extricable from them—oh yes, us too, let the Americans annoy our flank as much as they like: they will not pass Verdun either; by tomorrow we will have run you—’ to the Briton ‘—out of Amiens and possibly even into what you call your ditch, and by next month your people—’ to the old general now ‘—in Paris will be cramming your official sacred talismans into brief-cases on the way to Spain or Portugal. But it will be too late, it will be over, finished; twelve months from now and we—not they for this but we, us—will have to plead with you on your terms for their survival since already it is impossible to extricate theirs from ours. Because I am a soldier first, then a German, then—or hope to be—a victorious German. But that is not even second, but only third. Because this—’ again he indicated the uniform ‘—is more important than any German or even any victory.’ Now he was looking at all of them; his voice was quite calm, almost conversational now: ‘That is our sacrifice: the whole German army against your one French regiment. But you are right. We waste time.’ He looked at them, rapidly, erect still but not quite rigid. ‘You are here. I am …’ He looked at them again; he said again, ‘Bah. For a little time anyway we dont need secrets. I am eighty-seven kilometres from here. I must return. As you say—’ he faced the American general; his heels clapped again, a sound very loud in the quiet and insulate room ‘—this is only a recess: not an abrogation.’ Still without moving, he looked rapidly from the American to the Briton then back again. ‘You are admirable. But you are not soldiers—’
‘All young men are brave,’ the American said.
‘Continue,’ the German general said. ‘Say it. Even Germans.’
‘Even Frenchmen,’ the old general said in his mild voice. ‘Wouldn’t we all be more comfortable if you would sit down?’
‘A moment,’ the German general said. He did not even look at the old general. ‘We—’ again without moving he looked rapidly from one to the other ‘—you two and I discussed this business thoroughly while your—what do I say? formal or mutual?—Commander-in-Chief was detained from us. We are agreed on what must be done; that was never any question. Now we need only to agree to do it in this little time we have out of the four years of holding one another off—we, Germans on one side, and you, English and French—’ he turned to the American; again the heels clapped ‘—you Americans too; I have not forgot you.—on the other, engaging each the other with half a hand because the other hand and a half was required to defend our back areas from our own politicians and priests. During that discussion before your Commander-in-Chief joined us, something was said about decision.’ He said again, ‘Decision.’ He didn’t even say bah now. He looked rapidly again from the American to the Briton, to the American again. ‘You,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ the American general said. ‘Decision implies choice.’
The German general looked at the Briton. ‘You,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ the British general said. ‘God help us.’
The German general paused. ‘Pardon?’
‘Sorry,’ the British general said. ‘Let it be just yes then.’
‘He said, God help us,’ the American general said. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’ the German general said. ‘The why is to me?’
‘We’re both right this time,’ the American general said. ‘At least we dont have to cope with that.’
‘So,’ the German general said. ‘That is both of you. Three of us.’ He sat down, picked up the crumpled napkin and drew his chair up, and took up the filled brandy glass and sat back and erect again, into that same rigidity of formal attention as when he had been standing to toast his master, so that even sitting the rigidity had a sort of visible inaudibility like a soundless clap of heels, the filled glass at level with the fixed rigid glare of the opaque monocle; again without moving he seemed to glance rapidly at the other glasses. ‘Be pleased to fill, gentlemen,’ he said. But neither the Briton nor the American moved. They just sat there while across the table from them the German general sat with his lifted and rigid glass; he said, indomitable and composed, not even contemptuous: ‘So then. All that remains is to acquaint your Commander-in-Chief with what part of our earlier discussion he might be inclined to hear. Then the formal ratification of our agreement.’
‘Formal ratification of what agreement?’ the old general said.
‘Mutual ratification then,’ the German general said.
‘Of what?’ the old general said.
‘The agreement,’ the German general said.
‘What agreement?’ the old general said. ‘Do we need an agreement? Has anyone missed one?—The port is with you, General,’ he said to the Briton. ‘Fill, and pass.’
Thursday
Thursday Night
This time it was a bedroom. The grave and noble face was framed by a pillow, looking at him from beneath a flannel nightcap tied under the chin. The nightshirt was flannel too, open at the throat to reveal a small cloth bag, not new and not very clean and apparently containing something which smelled like asafoetida, on a soiled string like a necklace. The youth stood beside the bed in a brocade dressing gown.
‘They were blank shells,’ the runner said in his light dry voice. ‘The aeroplane—all four of them—flew right through the bursts. The German one never even deviated, not even going fast, even when one of ours hung right on its tail from about fifty feet for more than a minute while I could actually see the tracer going into it. The same one—aeroplane—ours—dove at us, at me; I even felt one of whatever it was coming out of the gun hit me on the leg here. It was like when a child blows a garden pea at you through a tube except for the smell, the stink, the burning phosphorus. There was a German general in it, you see. I mean, in the German one. There had to be; either we had to send someone there or they had to send someone here. And since we—or the French—were the ones who started it, thought of it first, obviously it would be our right—privilege—duty to be host. Only it would have to look all right from beneath; they couldn’t—couldn’t dare anyway—issue a synchronised simultaneous order for every man on both sides to shut their eyes and count a hundred so they had to do the next best thing to make it look all regular, all orthodox to anyo
ne they couldn’t hide it from——’
‘What?’ the old Negro said.
‘Dont you see yet? It’s because they cant afford to let it stop like this. I mean, let us stop it. They dont dare. If they ever let us find out that we can stop a war as simply as men tired of digging a ditch decide calmly and quietly to stop digging the ditch——’
‘I mean that suit,’ the old Negro said. ‘That policeman’s suit. You just took it, didn’t you?’
‘I had to,’ the runner said with that peaceful and terrible patience. ‘I had to get out. To get back in too. At least back to where I hid my uniform. It used to be difficult enough to pass either way, in or out. But now it will be almost impossible to get back in. But dont worry about that; all I need——’
‘Is he dead?’ the old Negro said.
‘What?’ the runner said. ‘Oh, the policeman. I dont know. Probably not.’ He said with a sort of amazement: ‘I hope not.’ He said: ‘I knew night before last—two nights ago, Tuesday night—what they were planning to do, though of course I had no proof then. I tried to tell him. But you know him, you’ve probably tried yourself to tell him something you couldn’t prove or that he didn’t want to believe. So I’ll need something else. Not to prove it to him, make him believe it: there’s not time enough left to waste that way. That’s why I came here. I want you to make me a Mason too. Or maybe there’s not even time for that either. So just show me the sign—like this——’ he jerked, flicked his hand low against his flank, as near as he had been able to divine at the time or anyway remember now from the man two years ago on the day he joined the battalion.
‘That will be enough. It will have to be; I’ll bluff the rest of it through——’
‘Wait,’ the old Negro said. ‘Tell me slow.’
‘I’m trying to,’ the runner said with that terrible patience. ‘Every man in the battalion owes him his pay for weeks ahead, provided they live long enough to earn it and he lives long enough to collect it from them. He did it by making them all Masons or anyway making them believe they are Masons. He owns them, you see. They cant refuse him. All he will need to do is——’
‘Wait,’ the old Negro said. ‘Wait.’
‘Dont you see?’ the runner said. ‘If all of us, the whole battalion, at least one battalion, one unit out of the whole line to start it, to lead the way—leave the rifles and grenades and all behind us in the trench: simply climb barehanded out over the parapet and through the wire and then just walk on barehanded, not with our hands up for surrender but just open to show that we had nothing to hurt, harm anyone; not running, stumbling: just walking forward like free men,—just one of us, one man; suppose just one man, then multiply him by a battalion; suppose a whole battalion of us, who want nothing except just to go home and get themselves clean into clean clothes and work and drink a little beer in the evening and talk and then lie down and sleep and not be afraid. And maybe, just maybe that many Germans who dont want anything more too, or maybe just one German who doesn’t want more than that, to put his or their rifles and grenades down and climb out too with their hands empty too not for surrender but just so every man could see there is nothing in them to hurt or harm either——’
‘Suppose they dont,’ the old Negro said. ‘Suppose they shoot at us.’ But the runner didn’t even hear the us. He was still talking.
‘Wont they shoot at us tomorrow anyway, as soon as they have recovered from the fright? as soon as the people at Chaulnesmont and Paris and Poperinghe and whoever it was in that German aeroplane this afternoon have had time to meet and compare notes and decide exactly where the threat, danger is, and eradicate it and then start the war again: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow until the last formal rule of the game has been fulfilled and discharged and the last ruined player removed from sight and the victory immolated like a football trophy in a club-house show-case. That’s all I want. That’s all I’m trying to do. But you may be right. So you tell me.’
The old Negro groaned. He groaned peacefully. One hand came out from beneath the covers and turned them back and he swung his legs toward the edge of the bed and said to the youth in the dressing gown: ‘Hand me my shoes and britches.’
‘Listen to me,’ the runner said. ‘There’s not time. It will be daylight in two hours and I’ve got to get back. Just show me how to make the sign, the signal.’
‘You cant learn it right in that time,’ the old Negro said. ‘And even if you could, I’m going too. Maybe this is what I been hunting for too.’
‘Didn’t you just say the Germans might shoot at us?’ the runner said. ‘Dont you see? That’s it, that’s the risk: if some of the Germans do come out. Then they will shoot at us, both of them, their side and ours too—put a barrage down on all of us. They’ll have to. There wont be anything else for them to do.’
‘So your mind done changed about it,’ the old Negro said.
‘Just show me the sign, the signal,’ the runner said. Again the old Negro groaned, peaceful, almost inattentive, swinging his legs on out of the bed. The innocent and unblemished corporal’s uniform was hanging neatly on a chair, the shoes and the socks were placed neatly beneath it. The youth had picked them up and he now knelt beside the bed, holding one of the socks open for the old Negro’s foot. ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ the runner said.
‘Aint we already got enough ahead of us without bringing that up?’ the old Negro said pettishly. ‘And I know what you’re fixing to say next: How am I going to get up there? And I can answer that: I never had no trouble getting here to France; I reckon I can make them other just sixty miles. And I know what you are fixing to say after that one too: I cant wear this French suit up there neither, without no general with me. Only I dont need to answer that one because you done already answered it.’
‘Kill a British soldier this time?’ the runner said.
‘You said he wasn’t dead.’
‘I said maybe he wasn’t.’
‘You said you hoped he wasn’t. Dont never forget that.’
The runner was the last thing which the sentry would ever see. In fact, he was the first thing the sentry saw that morning except for the relief guard who had brought his breakfast and who now sat, his rifle leaning beside him against the dugout’s opposite earthen shelf.
He had been under arrest for almost thirty hours now. That was all: just under arrest, as though the furious blows of the rifle-butt two nights ago had not simply hushed a voice which he could bear no longer but had somehow separated him from mankind; as if that aghast reversal, that cessation of four years of mud and blood and its accompanying convulsion of silence had cast him up on this buried dirt ledge with no other sign of man at all save the rotation of guards who brought him food and then sat opposite him until the time came for their relief. Yesterday and this morning too in ordained rote the orderly officer’s sergeant satellite had appeared suddenly in the orifice, crying ‘’Shun!’ and he had stood bareheaded while the guard saluted and the orderly officer himself entered and said, rapid and glib out of the glib and routine book: ‘Any complaints?’ and was gone again before he could have made any answer he did not intend to make. But that was all. Yesterday he had tried for a little while to talk to one of the rotated guards and since then some of them had tried to talk to him, but that was all of that too, so that in effect for over thirty hours now he had sat or sprawled and lay asleep on his dirt shelf, morose, sullen, incorrigible, foul-mouthed and snarling, not even waiting but just biding pending whatever it was they would finally decide to do with him or with the silence, both or either, if and when they did make up their minds.
Then he saw the runner. At the same moment he saw the pistol already in motion as the runner struck the guard between the ear and the rim of the helmet and caught him as he toppled and tumbled him onto the ledge and turned and the sentry saw the burlesque of a soldier entering behind him—the travesty of the wrapped putties, the tunic whose lower buttons would not even meet across the paunch not of sedentation but of ag
e and above it, beneath the helmet, the chocolate face which four years ago he had tried to relegate and repudiate into the closed book of his past.
‘That makes five,’ the old Negro said.
‘All right, all right,’ the runner answered, rapidly and harshly. ‘He’s not dead either. Dont you think that by this time I have learned how to do it?’ He said rapidly to the sentry: ‘You dont need to worry either now. All we need from you now is inertia.’ But the sentry was not even looking at him. He was looking at the old Negro.
‘I told you to leave me alone,’ he said. And it was the runner who answered him, in that same rapid and brittle voice:
‘It’s too late for that now. Because I am wrong; we dont want inertia from you: what we want is silence. Come along. Notice, I have the pistol. If I must, I shall use it. I’ve already used it six times, but only the flat of it. This time I’ll use the trigger.’ He said to the old Negro, in the rapid brittle and almost despairing voice: ‘All right, this one will be dead. Then you suggest something.’
‘You cant get away with this,’ the sentry said.
‘Who expects to?’ the runner said. ‘That’s why we have no time to waste. Come along. You’ve got your investments to protect, you know; after a breathing spell like this and the fresh start it will give them, let alone the discovery of what can happen simply by letting the same men hang around in uniforms too long, the whole battalion will probably be wiped out as soon as they can get us up in gun-range again. Which may be this afternoon. They flew a German general over yesterday; without doubt he was at Chaulnesmont by late dinner last night, with our pooh-bahs and the American ones too already waiting for him and the whole affair settled and over with by the time the port passed (if German generals drink port, though why not, since we have had four years to prove to us even if all history had not already done it, that the biped successful enough to become a general had ceased to be a German or British or American or Italian or French one almost as soon as it never was a human one) and without doubt he is already on his way back and both sides are merely waiting until he is out of the way as you hold up a polo game while one of the visiting rajahs rides off the field——’