William Faulkner - A Fable

The sentry would remember it, incorrigible still, merely acquiescent, believing still that he was waiting, biding the moment when he or perhaps two or three of them at once would take the runner off guard and smother him, listening to the glib staccato voice, watching the turned faces listening to it too, believing still that he saw in them only astonishment, surprise, presently to fade into one incorrigible concert which he would match: ‘And neither of us would have got back in if it had not been for his pass from the Ministry of War in Paris. So you dont even know yet what they have done to you. They’ve sealed you up in here—the whole front from the Channel to Switzerland. Though from what I saw in Paris last night—not only military police, the French and American and ours too, but the civilian police too—I wouldn’t have thought they’d have enough left to seal anything with. But they have; the colonel himself could not have got back in this morning unless the pass bore the signature of that old man in the castle at Chaulnesmont. It’s like another front, manned by all the troops in the three forces who cant speak the language belonging to the coat they came up from under the equator and half around the world to die in, in the cold and the wet—Senegalese and Moroccans and Kurds and Chinese and Malays and Indians—Polynesian Melanesian Mongol and Negro who couldn’t understand the password nor read the pass either: only to recognise perhaps by memorised rote that one cryptic hieroglyph. But not you. You cant even get out now, to try to come back in. No-man’s Land is no longer in front of us. It’s behind us now. Before, the faces behind the machine guns and the rifles at least thought Caucasian thoughts even if they didn’t speak English or French or American; now they dont even think Caucasian thoughts. They’re alien. They dont even have to care. They have tried for four years to get out of the white man’s cold and mud and rain just by killing Germans, and failed. Who knows? by killing off the Frenchmen and Englishmen and Americans which they have bottled up here, they might all be on the way home tomorrow. So there is nowhere for us to go now but east——’

Now the sentry moved. That is, he did not move yet, he dared not yet: he simply made a single infinitesimal transition into a more convulsive rigidity, speaking now, harsh and obscene, cursing the rapt immobilised faces: ‘Are you going to let them get away with this? Dont you know we’re all going to be for it? They have already killed Lieutenant Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe——’

‘Nonsense,’ the runner said. ‘They aren’t dead. Didn’t I just tell you I have learned how to use the flat of a pistol? It’s his money. That’s all. Everyone in the battalion owes him. He wants us to sit here and do nothing until he has earned his month’s profit. Then he wants them to start it up again so we will be willing to bet him twenty shillings a month that we will be dead in thirty days. Which is what they are going to do—start it up again. You all saw those four aeroplanes yesterday, and all that archie. The archie were blank shells. There was a German general in the hun aeroplane. Last night he was at Chaulnesmont. He would have to have been; else, why did he come at all? why else wafted across on a cloud of blank archie shell, with three S.E.5’s going through the motion of shooting him down with blank ammunition? Oh yes, I was there; I saw the lorries fetching up the shells night before last, and yesterday I stood behind one of the batteries firing them when one of the S.E.’s—that pilot would have been a child of course, too young for them to have dared inform him in advance, too young to be risked with the knowledge that fact and truth are not the same—dived and put a burst right into the battery and shot me in the skirt of my tunic with something—whatever it was—which actually stung a little for a moment. What else, except to allow a German general to visit the French and the British and the American ones in the Allied Commandery-in-Chief without alarming the rest of us bipeds who were not born generals but simply human beings? And since they—all four of them—would speak the same language, no matter what clumsy isolated national tongues they were compelled by circumstance to do it in, the matter probably took them no time at all and very likely the German one is already on his way back home at this moment, not even needing the blank shells now because the guns will be already loaded with live ones, merely waiting for him to get out of the way in order to resume, efface, obliterate forever this ghastly and incredible contretemps. So we have no time, you see. We may not even have an hour. But an hour will be enough, if only it is all of us, the whole battalion. Not to kill the officers; they themselves have abolished killing for a recess of three days. Besides, we wont need to, with all of us. If we had time, we could even draw lots: one man to each officer, to simply hold his hands while the rest of us go over. But the flat of a pistol is quicker and no more harmful really, as Mr Smith and Sergeant Bledsoe and Horn will tell you when they awake. Then never to touch pistol or rifle or grenade or machine gun again, to climb out of ditches forever and pass through the wire and then advance with nothing but our bare hands, to dare, defy the Germans not to come out too and meet us.’ He said quickly, in the desperate and calmly despairing voice: ‘All right: meet us with machine-gun fire, you will say. But the hun archie yesterday was blank too.’ He said to the old Negro: ‘Now, make them the sign. Have not you already proved that, if anything, it means brotherhood and peace?’

‘You fools!’ the sentry cried, except that he did not say fools: virulent and obscene out of his almost inarticulate paucity, struggling now, having defied the pistol in one outraged revulsion of repudiation before he realized that the hard little iron ring was gone from his spine and that the runner was merely holding him, he (the sentry) watching, glaring at the faces which he had thought were merely fixed in a surprise precursive to outrage too, looming, bearing down on him, identical and alien and concerted, until so many hard hands held him that he could not even struggle, the runner facing him now, the pistol poised flat on one raised palm, shouting at him:

‘Stop it! Stop it! Make your choice, but hurry. You can come with us, or you can have the pistol. But decide.’

He would remember; they were topside now, in the trench, he could see a silent and moiling group within which or beneath which the major and two company commanders and three or four sergeants had vanished (they had taken the adjutant and the sergeant-major and the corporal signalman in the orderly dugout and the colonel still in bed) and in both directions along the trench he could see men coming up out of their holes and warrens, blinking in the light, dazed still yet already wearing on their faces that look of amazed incredulity fading with one amazed concert into dawning and incredulous hope. The hard hands still grasped him; as they lifted, flung him up onto the firestep and then over the lip of the parapet, he already saw the runner spring up and turn and reach down and pull the old Negro up beside him while other hands boosted from beneath, the two of them now standing on the parapet facing the trench, the runner’s voice thin and high now with that desperate and indomitable despair:

‘The sign! The sign! Give it us! Come on, men! If this is what they call staying alive, do you want that on these terms forever either?’

Then he was struggling again. He didn’t even know he was about to, when he found himself jerking and thrashing, cursing, flinging, beating away the hands, not even realising then why, for what, until he found himself in the wire, striking, hitting backward at the crowding bodies at the entrance to the labyrinthine passageway which the night patrols used, hearing his own voice in one last invincible repudiation: ‘F … them all! Bugger all of you!’ crawling now, not the first one through because when he rose to his feet, running, the old Negro was panting beside him, while he shouted at the old Negro: ‘Serve you f … ing well right! Didn’t I warn you two years ago to stay away from me? Didn’t I?’