William Faulkner - A Fable

‘You were right,’ the division commander said. ‘I wont go to Chaulnesmont.’

‘You have wrestled all night,’ the group commander said. ‘With what angel?’

‘What?’ the division commander said. He blinked for only a second. Then he said, firmly and calmly, like a man stepping firmly forward into complete darkness, drawing a folded paper from his tunic as he did so and dropping it onto the group commander’s covered knees: ‘It didn’t take that long.’

The group commander didn’t touch the paper. He merely looked at it. He said pleasantly: ‘Yes?’

‘It’s my resignation,’ the division commander said.

‘You think it’s over, then?’

‘What?’ the division commander said. ‘Oh. The war. No, it’s not over. They’ll have something I can do as a civilian. I was even a fair veterinary in the old days, Farrier, too. Or maybe I could even run a production line (that’s what they call it, isn’t it?) in a munitions plant.’

‘And then?’ the group commander said.

The division commander looked at him, though only for a second. ‘Oh. When it is over, you mean. I’m leaving France then. Maybe to the south Pacific. An island.…’

‘Like Gauguin,’ the group commander said gently.

‘Who?’

‘Another man who one day discovered that he had had enough of France too and went to the south Pacific and became a painter.’

‘This is another place,’ the division commander said immediately. ‘There wont be enough people on this one to need their houses painted.’

The group commander reached his hand and took up the folded paper and turned and, the paper still folded, held the corner of it to the candle-flame until it took fire and then burst blazing, the group commander holding it for a second longer before he dropped it hissing into the chamberpot beside the bed and in the same motion slid himself down the pillows until he was reclining again, already drawing the covers up. ‘Chaulnesmont,’ he said. ‘At three tomorrow—— Bah, it’s already tomorrow.’ And then the division commander was aware of it too: the alteration, day, the invincible oblivious tomorrow which follows always, undeviable by man and to man immune; no longer ago than yesterday saw him and his fury, the first tomorrow will have forgotten both. It was even a second or so before he realised that the group commander was still talking to him: ‘—if the world thinks it wishes to stop fighting for twenty-five or thirty years, let it. But not this way. Not like a group of peasants in a half-mown field suddenly shouldering their scythes and lunch-pails and walking off. Chaulnesmont this afternoon.’

‘Because there are rules,’ the division commander said harshly. ‘Our rules. We shall enforce them, or we shall die—the captains and the colonels—no matter what the cost——’

‘It wasn’t we who invented war,’ the group commander said. ‘It was war which created us. From the loins of man’s furious ineradicable greed sprang the captains and the colonels to his necessity. We are his responsibility; he shall not shirk it.’

‘But not me,’ the division commander said.

‘You,’ the group commander said. ‘We can permit even our own rank and file to let us down on occasion; that’s one of the prerequisites of their doom and fate as rank and file forever. They may even stop the wars, as they have done before and will again; ours merely to guard them from the knowledge that it was actually they who accomplished that act. Let the whole vast moil and seethe of man confederate in stopping wars if they wish, so long as we can prevent them learning that they have done so. A moment ago you said that we must enforce our rules, or die. It’s no abrogation of a rule that will destroy us. It’s less. The simple effacement from man’s memory of a single word will be enough. But we are safe. Do you know what that word is?’

The division commander looked at him for a moment. He said: ‘Yes?’

‘Fatherland,’ the group commander said. Now he raised the top of the covers, preparatory to drawing them back over his head and face. ‘Yes, let them believe they can stop it, so long as they dont suspect that they have.’ The covers were already moving; now only the group commander’s nose and eyes and the nightcap remained in sight. ‘Let them believe that tomorrow they will end it; then they wont begin to ponder if perhaps today they can. Tomorrow. And still tomorrow. And again tomorrow. That’s the hope you will vest them in. The three stars that Sergeant Gragnon won by his own strength, with help from man nor God neither, have damned you, General. Call yours martyrdom for the world; you will have saved it. Chaulnesmont this afternoon.’

And now the division commander was no longer a general, still less the sergeant of twenty-five years ago whose inflexible pride it had been to accept odds from no man. ‘But to me,’ he said. ‘What will happen to me?’

And now even the nightcap had vanished and only the muffled voice came from beneath the covers. ‘I dont know,’ it said. ‘It will be glorious.’

Tuesday Night

Some time after midnight that Tuesday (it was Wednesday now) two British privates were resting on the firestep of a front-line trench below the Bethune slag-heap. Two months ago they were looking at it not only from another angle but from another direction; until then, the line’s relation to it seemed fixed to a longer life than memory’s. But since the breakthrough there had been no fixed line at all. The old corridor had still remained of course, roofed over with the shriek and stink of cordite, but attached to the earth only at the two ends: the one somewhere on the Channel and the other somewhere up the roof of France, so that it seemed to belly before the Teutonic gale like a clothesline about to carry away in a wind. And since three oclock yesterday afternoon (yesterday morning rather, noon when the French quit) it had merely hung in its spent bulge against the arrested weight of the Germanic air, even roofless now since with dark the last patrolling aircraft had gone to roost and there remained only the flares arching up from behind the flickerless wire with a faint hiss, a prolonged whispered sniff, to bloom and parachute and hang against the dark with the cold thick texture and color of the working lights in a police morgue, then sliding silently down the black air like drops of grease on a window-pane, and far away to the North the spaced blink and thump of a single gun, a big one, with no following burst at all, as though it were firing at the Channel, the North Sea itself fifty miles away, or perhaps at some target even vaster and more immune than that: at Cosmos, space, infinity, lifting its voice against the Absolute, the ultimate I-Am, harmless: the iron maw of Dis, toothless, unwearyable, incapable, bellowing.

One of the privates was a sentry. He stood on the firestep, leaning slightly against the wall beside the sand-bagged aperture in which his rifle lay loaded and cocked and with the safety off. In civil life he had indubitably been a horse-groom, because even in khaki and even after four years of infantryman’s war he still moved, stood in an aura, effluvium of stalls and tack-rooms—a hard-faced jockey-sized man who seemed to have brought on his warped legs even into the French and Flemish mud something of hard, light, razor-edge horses and betting-rings, who even wore the steel helmet at the same vicious rake of the filthy heavy-checked cap which would have been the badge of his old dead calling and dedication. But this was only inference, from his appearance and general air, not from anything he ever told anyone; even his mates in the battalion who had stayed alive long enough to have known him four years knew nothing about his past, as if he did not have one, had not even been born until the fourth of August 1914—a paradox who had no business in an infantry battalion at all, and an enigma to the extent that six months after he entered the battalion (this was about Christmas, 1914) the colonel commanding it had been summoned to Whitehall to make a specific report on him. Because the authorities had discovered that eleven privates in the battalion had made the man beneficiary of their soldiers’ life assurance policies; by the time the colonel reached the war ministry, the number had increased to twenty, and although the colonel had made an intensive two-days’ investigation of his own before leaving the battalion, he knew little more than they in London did. Because the company officers knew nothing about it, and from the N.C.O.’s he got only rumor and hearsay, and from the men themselves, only a blank and respectful surprised innocence as to the man’s very existence, the sum of which was, that the (eleven when the war office got its first report, and twenty by the time the colonel reached London, and—the colonel had been absent from the battalion twelve hours now—nobody knew how many more by this time) men had approached the battalion sergeant-major all decorously and regularly and apparently of their own free will and desire, and made the request which, since none of them had legal heirs, was their right to make, and the Empire’s duty to acquiesce to. As for the man himself——