A Fable

  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 inte
rrogative 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 divi
sion 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.