Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Still,” Labat said, his voice low and persistent, “still, we ought to talk to him.”

“For myself,” Corporal Millet said briskly, standing up, “I am on duty at the observa—”

He let his hands fall gently to his sides as Boullard brought his rifle up and touched his chest lightly with the bayonet.

“You are on duty here, Corporal.” Boullard moved the bayonet tenderly on a breast button. “There is a question before the house that must be decided by a full membership.”

Corporal Millet sat down carefully.

“I don’t care,” Labat was saying, grinning at Corporal Millet, “what you do to the fighting Corporal, but nothing happens to the Lieutenant until we talk to him.” He patted Boullard’s shoulder, in a small, reassuring gesture. Boullard slowly took his eyes off Millet and the Corporal sighed.

Boullard looked around him searchingly at the men caught in this hour on this desert with him. Sergeant Fourier, haunted by dreams of a pension and his masseuse and still troubled by some obscure, painful sense of patriotism and honor, refused to look at him. Jouvet, faced at the age of twenty with the ancient, tangled threads of a bloody and complex century, looked ready to weep. Labat was smiling but stubborn. Corporal Millet was sweating, and was making a great effort to look like a man who did not intend to rush to the nearest officer and announce a mutiny.

“All right,” Boullard said wearily, “if that’s what you want. Although I tell you, two words too many and we are all against a wall, looking at a firing squad.”

Jouvet fumbled with his handkerchief quickly and Boullard looked at him curiously and impersonally.

“It is not necessary to commit ourselves,” said Labat. His long, workman’s arms waved in argument. “We approach the subject, we skirt it, we take soundings like a boat coming into a harbor …”

“Better!” Sergeant Fourier said loudly, happy at all deferment. “Excellent! Much better!”

Boullard stared at him coldly and Sergeant Fourier became quiet and nervously took out a pack of cigarettes.

“It’s possible,” Labat was saying, convincing Boullard, “to judge a man without a direct question.…”

“Possibly,” Boullard said with no enthusiasm. “Possibly.”

“I’ll do the talking,” Labat said. “I’m used to things like this. I have talked at union meetings for seven years and nothing could be more delicate …” He looked around him anxiously, hoping for a little laughter to take some of the deadly tension away, but only little Jouvet, who was always polite, smiled nervously because he realized Labat had meant it as a little joke.

“All right,” Boullard said. He fingered his rifle gently and let it dip almost imperceptibly toward Corporal Millet. “I will judge. And you …” The rifle dipped very clearly toward Corporal Millet. “You will not open your mouth. Is that clear?”

Corporal Millet sat up stiffly at attention, feeling sorrowfully within him that his honor demanded some show of resistance and that his life would not be worth a great deal if he was incorporated in the army of the United States. He looked at Boullard’s huge crushing hands, calm on the rifle. “It is your affair,” he said faintly. “I wash my hands of it.”

Boullard laughed.

Sergeant Fourier lighted his cigarette, gift of his plump wife the masseuse, eating her dinner comfortably, all unknowing, in the curtainy little apartment in Algiers with three exposures. He sighed and stood up and walked between Boullard and the limp Corporal Millet and stood at the edge of the tarpaulin in the full darkness, pulling with small comfort at his cigarette, while behind him, under the tarpaulin, there was no sound from the waiting men.

Lieutenant Dumestre made his way slowly across the rough black ground toward the gun position, turning over in his mind his possible opening sentences to the gun crew. “Men,” he could say, “I am going to be absolutely honest with you. I am putting a white flag up beside this gun and I am delivering this battery over to …” Or he could say, “There is a possibility that tomorrow morning American troops will appear. Hold your fire until I give the word …” while silently swearing to himself that the word would never be given. There was much to be said for this method, as it was indefinite and seemed less dangerous and didn’t tip his hand until the last moment, when it would probably be too late for anyone to do anything about it. Of course there was always the possibility that he could stand up in front of the men and pour his heart out to them, remind them in ringing words of their country’s shame, call upon them with blood and passion to forget themselves, forget their families in France, remember only honor and final victory.… He could see himself, pale and fluent, in the dim light of the moon, roaring, whispering, his voice singing in the quiet night air, the men listening entranced, the tears starting down their cheeks.… He shook himself, smiled wryly at the dream, remembering his harsh, slow way of speaking, plain, indefinite, without the power to move men to the nearest café, much less throw themselves grandly and thoughtlessly upon a doubtful and possibly fatal cause.…

Oh, Lord, he thought, I am the wrong man for this, the wrong man, the wrong man.…

He turned the corner of the tarpaulin, seeing the watchful, hateful shape of the gun outlined stubbornly against the starlit sky.

Sergeant Fourier was smoking pensively in the open and the other men were sitting, strangely quiet, under cover. When Sergeant Fourier saw him he started guiltily and threw his cigarette away as unostentatiously as possible. He stood at attention and saluted and with his right heel tried to douse the glowing speck in the dirt. Somehow, the sight of the small man with the comfortable little pot belly trying to pretend, like a vaudeville comedian, that he hadn’t been smoking, irritated Lieutenant Dumestre, who all morning and all afternoon had been grappling bitterly with war and fratricide and tragic, bloody policy.…

He returned the Sergeant’s salute curtly. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked sharply, his high voice making all the men in the tarpaulin turn their heads coldly and automatically to watch him. “You know there’s to be no smoking.”

“Please, sir,” Sergeant Fourier said stupidly, “I was not smoking.”

“You were smoking,” Lieutenant Dumestre said, weeping inside because inside he knew how ridiculous this charge and countercharge was.

“I was not smoking, sir.” Sergeant Fourier stood very straight and formal and stupid with the problem of the evening, almost happy to have a simple little idiotic argument to worry about at least for ten minutes.…

“You’ve been told, you’ve been told!” Lieutenant Dumestre shrieked in his highest voice, mourning deep within himself for that womanly timbre, for his military insistence upon form and truth at this unmilitary hour, but somehow unable, with the Captain’s departure and the imminence, potent and desperate, of the Americans over the horizon, to stop the high noise of his tongue. “At any moment we may be bombed. A cigarette glows like a lighthouse in a black desert at ten thousand feet! Why don’t you draw a map of the gun position and publish it in the morning newspapers?” He saw Labat look at Boullard and shrug coldly and turn away with an air of dangerous significance and something within him clutched at his throat, but now there was no stopping that high, silly tongue, freed for a moment from the locked agony and doubt of the day’s decision making. Here at least was familiar ground. Troops disobeying orders. Troops endangering security of the post or station. Troops slightly insubordinate, lying.… His weary, ragged mind, terribly grateful to be relieved of its unaccustomed task of painful exploration, relapsed into the formal, years-long grooves of Saint Cyr, of countless garrisons, countless lectures.… “There will be double security tonight, two-hour watches for everyone,” the voice still high, but with the three-thousand-year-old bite of military command. “An extra half day’s ammunition will be drawn up from the battery dump by three this morning.” He saw the men’s faces bleakly collapse and also something else in them, although he couldn’t tell in the rush of his commands what it was. Even as he spoke he hated himself for what he was doing, knowing that a better man would have ignored the cigarette or joked about it.… He hated Sergeant Fourier, standing there, pained and stupid and impassive, but in a way he was grateful to him, because he had given him the opportunity at this late hour once more for postponement.