‘Go and listen to them,’ the old porter said. ‘You can speak foreign; you can understand them.’
‘I thought you said that the nine who should have spoken French, didn’t, and that the other four couldn’t speak anything at all.’
‘They dont need to talk,’ the old porter said. ‘You dont need to understand. Just go and look at him.’
‘Him?’ the runner said. ‘So it’s just one now?’
‘Wasn’t it just one before?’ the old porter said. ‘Wasn’t one enough then to tell us the same thing all them two thousand years ago: that all we ever needed to do was just to say, Enough of this;—us, not even the sergeants and corporals, but just us, all of us, Germans and Colonials and Frenchmen and all the other foreigners in the mud here, saying together: Enough. Let them that’s already dead and maimed and missing be enough of this;—a thing so easy and simple that even human man, as full of evil and sin and folly as he is, can understand and believe it this time. Go and look at him.’
But he didn’t see them, not yet. Not that he couldn’t have found them; at any time they would be in the British zone, against that khaki monotone that clump of thirteen men in horizon blue, even battle-stained, would have stood out like a cluster of hyacinths in a Scottish moat. He didn’t even try yet. He didn’t dare; he had been an officer himself, even though for only eight months, and even though he had repudiated it something ineradicable of it still remained, as the unfrocked priest or repentant murderer, even though unfrocked at heart and reformed at heart, carries forever about him like a catalyst the indelible effluvium of the old condition; it seemed to him that he durst not be present even on the fringe of whatever surrounding crowd, even to walk, pass through, let alone stop, within the same air of that small blue clump of hope; this, even while telling himself that he did not believe it, that it couldn’t be true, possible, since if it were possible, it would not need to be hidden from Authority; that it would not matter whether Authority knew about it or not, since even ruthless and all-powerful and unchallengeable Authority would be impotent before that massed unresisting undemanding passivity. He thought: They could execute only so many of us before they will have worn out the last rifle and pistol and expended the last live shell, visualising it: first, the anonymous fringe of subalterns and junior clerks to which he had once belonged, relegated to the lathes and wheels to keep them in motion rifling barrels and filling shell-cases; then, the frenzy and the terror mounting, the next layer: the captains and majors and secretaries and attachés with their martial harness and ribbons and striped trousers and brief-cases among the oilcans and the flying shafts; then the field officers: colonels and senators and Members; then, last and ultimate, the ambassadors and ministers and lesser generals themselves frantic and inept among the slowing wheels and melting bearings, while the old men, the last handful of kings and presidents and field marshals and spoiled-beef and shoe-peg barons, their backs to the last crumbling rampart of their real, their credible, their believable world, wearied, spent, not with blood-glut at all but with the eye-strain of aiming and the muscle-tension of pointing and the finger-cramp of squeezing, fired the last puny scattered and markless fusillade as into the face of the sea itself. It’s not that I dont believe it, he said. It’s because it cant be true. We cant be saved now; even He doesn’t want us anymore now.
So he believed that he was not even waiting: just watching. It was winter again now, the long unbroken line from Alps to sea lying almost quiescent in mud’s foul menopause; this would be the time for them, with even front-line troops free for a little while to remember when they were warm and dry and clean; for him and the other twelve—(thinking, almost impatiently, All right, all right, they are thirteen too),—a soil not only unfallow now but already tumescent even, having a little space to think now, to remember and to dread, thinking (the runner) how it was not the dying but the indignity of the method: even the condemned murderer is better off, with an hour set and fixed far enough in the future to allow time to summon fortitude to face it well, and privacy to hide the lack in case the fortitude failed; not to receive both the sentence and its execution all in one unprepared flash, not even at rest but running, stumbling, laden with jangling iron like a pack-mule in the midst of death which can take him from any angle, front rear or above, panting, vermin-covered, stinking with his own reek, without even privacy in which to drop the dung and water he carried. He even knew what he was watching for: for the moment in the stagnancy when Authority would finally become aware of the clump of alien incongruous blue in its moat. Which would be at any time now; what he was watching was a race. Winter was almost over; they—the thirteen—had had time, but it was running out. It would be spring soon: the jocund bright time beginning to be mobile and dry underfoot; and even before that they in the Whitehalls and Quai d’Orsays and Unter den Somethings and Gargleplatzes would have thought of something anew, even if it had to be something which had already failed before. And suddenly he knew why it would not matter to Authority whether they knew about the thirteen men or not. They didn’t need to, having not only authority but time too on their side; no need for them to hunt down and hoick out and execute a mere thirteen men: their very avocation was its own defender and emollient.
And it had run out. It was already spring; the Americans (1918 now) were in it now, rushing frantically across the Atlantic ocean before it was too late and the scraps were all gone, and the break-through had come: the old stale Germanic tide washing again over the Somme and Picard towns which you might have thought had served their apprenticeship, washing along the Aisne a month later so that clerks in Paris bureaus were once more snapping the locks on the worn and homeless attaché-cases; May and even the Marne again, American troops counter-attacking this time among the ruined towns which you would think might have had absolution too. Except that he was not thinking now, he was too busy; for two weeks now he and his heretofore unfired rifle had been in an actual platoon, part of a rearguard, too busy remembering how to walk backward to think, using in place of the harassing ordeal of thought, a fragment out of the old time before he had become incapable of believing, out of Oxford probably (he could even see the page) though now it seemed much younger than that, too young to have endured this far at all:
lo, I have committed
fornication. But that was in another country; and
besides, the wench is dead
So when it finally happened, he had no warning. The wave had stopped, and he was a runner again; he had got back from Division Headquarters at dawn and two hours later he was asleep in the bunk of a man on a fatigue party, when an orderly summoned him to the office. ‘You can drive a motorbike,’ the colonel said.
He thought You should know. He said: ‘Yes sir.’
‘You’re going to Corps Headquarters. They want couriers. A lorry will pick you up and the others at Division.’
He didn’t even think Other what? He just thought They have killed the serpent, and now they have got to get rid of the fragments, and returned to Division Headquarters, where eight more runners from the other battalions and a lorry waited, the nine of them by that special transport to serve as special couriers out of Corps Headquarters which by ordinary bristled with couriers, not warned still, knowing no more yet, not even wondering, not even caring; fixed behind a faint wry grimace which was almost smiling in the midst of what was not ruin at all because he had known it of old too long, too long of old: Yes he thought a bigger snake than even they had anticipated having to destroy and efface. Nor did he learn anymore at Corps Headquarters, nor during the next two hours while at top speed now he delivered and exchanged and received dispatches from and to people whom even his travels had never touched before—not to orderly room N.C.O.’s but in person to majors and colonels and sometimes even generals, at transport and artillery parks, with columns of transport and artillery camouflaged beside roads and waiting for darkness to move, at batteries in position and Flying Corps wing offices and forward aerodromes—no longer even
wondering now behind that fixed thin grimace which might have been smiling: who had not for nothing been a soldier in France for twenty-one months and an officer for five of them, and so knew what he was looking at when he saw it: the vast cumbrous machinery of war grinding to its clumsy halt in order to reverse itself to grind and rumble in a new direction,—the proprietorless wave of victory exhausted by its own ebb and returned by its own concomitant flux, spent not by its own faded momentum but as though bogged down in the refuse of its own success; afterward, it seemed to him that he had been speeding along those back-area roads for days before he realised what he had been travelling through; he would not even recall afterward at what moment, where, what anonymous voice from a passing lorry or another motorbike or perhaps in some orderly room where he lay one dispatch down in the act of taking up another, which said: ‘The French quit this morning——’ merely riding on, speeding on into the full burst of sun before he realised what he had heard.
It was an hour after noon before he finally found a face: that of a corporal standing before a cafe in a village street—a face which had been in the anteroom of the old battalion when he was an officer in it: and slowed the machine in and stopped, still straddling it; it was the first time.
‘Nah,’ the corporal said. ‘It was just one regiment. Fact is, they’re putting one of the biggest shoots yet in jerry’s support and communications along the whole front right this minute. Been at it ever since dawn——’
‘But one regiment quit,’ the runner said. ‘One did.’ Now the corporal was not looking at him at all.
‘Have a wet,’ the corporal said.
‘Besides,’ the runner said gently, ‘you’re wrong. The whole French front quit at noon.’
‘But not ours,’ the corporal said.
‘Not yet,’ the runner said. ‘That may take a little time.’ The corporal was not looking at him. Now the corporal said nothing whatever. With a light, rapid gesture the runner touched one shoulder with the opposite hand. ‘There’s nothing up here now,’ he said.
‘Have a wet,’ the corporal said, not looking at him.
And an hour later he was close enough to the lines to see the smoke-and-dust pall as well as hear the frantic uproar of the concentrated guns along the horizon; at three oclock, though twelve miles away at another point, he heard the barrage ravel away into the spaced orderly harmless-seeming poppings as of salutes or signals, and it seemed to him that he could see the whole long line from the sea-beaches up the long slant of France to old tired Europe’s rooftree, squatted and crouched with filthy and noisome men who had forgot four years ago how to stand erect anymore, amazed and bewildered and unable to believe it either, forewarned and filled with hope though (he knew it now) they must have been; he thought, said aloud almost: Yes, that’s it. It’s not that we didn’t believe: it’s that we couldn’t, didn’t know how anymore. That’s the most terrible thing they have done to us. That’s the most terrible.
That was all, then. For almost twenty-four hours in fact, though he didn’t know it then. A sergeant-major was waiting for them as they returned, gathered again at Corps Headquarters that night—the nine from his Division and perhaps two dozen others from other units in the Corps. ‘Who’s senior here?’ the sergeant-major said. But he didn’t even wait on himself: he glanced rapidly about at them again and with the unerring instinct of his vocation chose a man in the middle thirties who looked exactly like what he probably was—a demoted lance corporal out of a 1912 Northwest Frontier garrison. ‘You’re acting sergeant,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You will indent for suppers and bedding here.’ He looked at them again. ‘I suppose it’s no use to tell you not to talk.’
‘Talk about what?’ one said. ‘What do we know to talk about.’
‘Talk about that then,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You are relieved until reveille. Carry on.’ And that was all then. They slept on a stone floor in a corridor; they were given breakfast (a good one; this was a Corps Headquarters) before reveille went even; what bugles they—he, the runner—heard were at other Division and Corps Headquarters and parks and depots where the motorcycle took him during another day like yesterday in his minuscule walking-on (riding-on) part in bringing war to a pause, a halt, a stop; morning noon and afternoon up and down back areas not beneath a pall of peace but a thrall of dreamlike bustling for a holiday. The night again, the same sergeant-major was waiting for them—the nine from his Division and the two dozen others. ‘That’s all,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Lorries are waiting to take you back in.’ That’s all, he thought. All you have to do, all you need to do, all He ever asked and died for eighteen hundred and eighty-five years ago, in the lorry now with his group of the thirty-odd others, the afterglow of sunset fading out of the sky like the tideless shoreless sea of despair itself ebbing away, leaving only the peaceful grief and the hope; when the lorry stopped and presently he leaned out to see what was wrong—a road which it was unable to cross because of transport on it, a road which he remembered as running southeast from up near Boulogne somewhere, now so dense with hooded and lightless lorries moving nose to tail like a line of elephants that their own lorry had to put them down here, to find their ways home as best they might, his companions dispersing, leaving him standing there in the last of afterglow while the vans crawled endless past him, until a head, a voice called his name from one of them, saying, ‘Hurry, get up quick.… something to show you,’ so that he had to run to overtake it and had already begun to swing himself up before he recognised it: the old watchman from the St Omer ammunition dump, who had come to France four years ago to search for his son and who had been the first to tell him about the thirteen French soldiers.
Three hours after midnight he was sitting on the firestep where the sentry leaned at the aperture while the spaced starshells sniffed and plopped and whispered down the greasy dark and the remote gun winked and thudded and after a while winked and thudded again. He was talking in a voice which, whatever else it contained, it was not exhaustion—a voice dreamy and glib, apparently not only inattentive to itself but seemingly incapable of compelling attention anywhere. Yet each time he spoke, the sentry without even removing his face from the aperture would give a start, a motion convulsive and intolerable, like someone goaded almost beyond endurance.
‘One regiment,’ the runner said. ‘One French regiment. Only a fool would look on war as a condition; it’s too expensive. War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war. We’ve known that for six thousand years. The trouble was, it took us six thousand years to learn how to do it. For six thousand years we labored under the delusion that the only way to stop a war was to get together more regiments and battalions than the enemy could, or vice versa, and hurl them upon each other until one lot was destroyed and, the one having nothing left to fight with, the other could stop fighting. We were wrong, because yesterday morning, by simply declining to make an attack, one single French regiment stopped us all.’
This time the sentry didn’t move, leaning—braced rather—against the trench-wall beneath the vicious rake of his motionless helmet, peering apparently almost idly through the aperture save for that rigidity about his back and shoulders—a kind of immobility on top of immobility—as though he were braced not against the dirt wall but rather against the quiet and empty air behind him. Nor had the runner moved either, though from his speech it was almost as if he had turned his face to look directly at the back of the sentry’s head. ‘What do you see?’ he said. ‘No novelty, you think?—the same stinking strip of ownerless valueless frantic dirt between our wire and theirs, which you have been peering at through a hole in a sandbag for four years now? the same war which we had come to believe did not know how to end itself, like the amateur orator searching desperately for a definitive preposition? You’re wrong. You can go out there now, at least during the next fifteen minutes say, and not die probably. Yes, that may be the novelty: you can go out ther
e now and stand erect and look about you—granted of course that any of us really ever can stand erect again. But we will learn how. Who knows? in four or five years we may even have got our neck-muscles supple enough simply to duck our heads again in place of merely bowing them to await the stroke, as we have been doing for four years now; in ten years, certainly.’ The sentry didn’t move, like a blind man suddenly within range of a threat, the first warning of which he must translate through some remaining secondary sense, already too late to fend with. ‘Come,’ the runner said. ‘You’re a man of the world. Indeed, you have been a man of this world since noon yesterday, even if they didn’t bother to tell you so until fifteen oclock. In fact, we are all men of this world now, all of us who died on the fourth day of August four years ago——’
The sentry moved again with that convulsive start; he said in a harsh thick furious murmur: ‘For the last time. I warned you.’
‘—all the fear and the doubt, the agony and the grief and the lice—Because it’s over. Isn’t it over?’
‘Yes!’ the sentry said.
‘Of course it’s over. You came out in … fifteen, wasn’t it? You’ve seen a lot of war too. Of course you know when one is over.’