William Faulkner - A Fable

Then the runner was beside him, grasping his arm and stopping him and turning him about, shouting: ‘Look at them!’ He did so and saw them, watched them, crawling on their hands and knees through the gaps in the wire as though up out of hell itself, faces clothes hands and all stained as though forever one single nameless and identical color from the mud in which they had lived like animals for four years, then rising to their feet as though in that four years they had not stood on earth, but had this moment returned to light and air from purgatory as ghosts stained forever to the nameless single color of purgatory. ‘Over there too!’ the runner cried, turning him again until he saw that also: the distant German wire one faint moil and pulse of motion, indistinguishable until it too broke into men rising erect; whereupon a dreadful haste came over him, along with something else which he had not yet time to assimilate, recognise, knowing, aware of only the haste; and not his haste but one haste, not only the battalion but the German one or regiment or whatever it was, the two of them running toward each other now, empty-handed, approaching until he could see, distinguish the individual faces but still all one face, one expression, and then he knew suddenly that his too looked like that, all of them did: tentative, amazed, defenseless, and then he heard the voices too and knew that his was one also—a thin murmuring sound rising into the incredible silence like a chirping of lost birds, forlorn and defenseless too; and then he knew what the other thing was even before the frantic uprush of the rockets from behind the two wires, German and British too.

‘No!’ he cried, ‘no! Not to us!’ not even realising that he had said ‘we’ and not ‘I’ for the first time in his life probably, certainly for the first time in four years, not even realising that in the next moment he had said ‘I’ again, shouting to the old Negro as he whirled about: ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you to let me alone?’ Only it was not the old Negro, it was the runner, standing facing him as the first ranging burst of shells bracketed in. He never heard them, nor the wailing rumble of the two barrages either, nor saw nor heard little more of anything in that last second except the runner’s voice crying out of the soundless rush of flame which enveloped half his body neatly from heel through navel through chin:

‘They cant kill us! They cant! Not dare not: they cant!’

Except of course that he couldn’t sit here save for a definitely physically limited length of time because after a while it would be daylight. Unless of course the sun really failed to rise tomorrow, which as they taught you in that subsection of philosophy they called dialectics which you were trying to swot through in order to try to swot through that section of being educated they called philosophy, was for the sake of argument possible. Only why shouldn’t he be sitting here after daylight or for the rest of the day itself for that matter, since the only physical limitation to that would be when someone with the authority and compulsion to resist the condition of a young man in a second lieutenant’s uniform sitting on the ground against the wall of a Nissen hut, had his attention called to it by a horn or whistle; and that greater condition which yesterday had sent three fairly expensive aeroplanes jinking up and down the sky with their Vickerses full of blank ammunition, might well abrogate that one too.

Then the first limitation had been discharged, because now it was day and none to know where the night had gone: not a dialectic this time, but he who didn’t know where night had gone this soon, this quick. Or maybe it was a dialectic since as far as he knew only he had watched it out and since only he in waking had watched it out, to all the others still in slumber it still obtained, like the tree in darkness being no longer green, and since he who had watched it out still didn’t know where it had gone, for him it was still night too. Then almost before he had had time to begin to bother to think that out and so have done with it, a bugle blowing reveille confounded him, the sound (that sound: who had never heard it before or even heard of it: a horn blowing at daybreak on a forward aerodrome where people did not even have guns but were armed only with maps and what Monaghan called monkeywrenches) even getting him up onto his feet: that greater condition’s abrogation which had now reabrogated. In fact, if he had been a cadet still, he would even know what crime whoever found him sitting there would charge him with: not shaving: and, standing now, he realised that he had even forgot his problem too, who had sat there all night thinking that he had none evermore, as though sitting so long within that peaceful stink had robbed olfactory of its single sense or perhaps the sidcott of its smell and only getting up restored them both. In fact, for a moment he toyed with the idea of unrolling the sidcott to see how far the burning had spread, except that if he did that and let the air in, the burning might spread faster, thinking, with a sort of peaceful amazement hearing himself: Because it’s got to last; no more: not last until , just last .

At least he wouldn’t take it inside with him so he left it against the wall and went around the hut and inside it—Burk and Hanley and De Marchi had not stirred so the tree was not green for some yet anyway—and got his shaving tackle and then picked up the sidcott again and went to the washroom; nor would the tree be quite green yet here either, and if not here, certainly not in the latrines. Though now it would because the sun was well up now and, once more smooth of face, the sidcott stinking peacefully under his arm, he could see movement about the mess, remembering suddenly that he had not eaten since lunch yesterday. But then there was the sidcott, when suddenly he realised that the sidcott would serve that too, turning and already walking. They—someone—had brought his bus back and rolled it in so he trod his long shadow toward only the petrol tin and put the sidcott into it and stood peaceful and empty while the day incremented, the infinitesimal ineluctable shortening of the shadows. It was going to rain probably, but then it always was anyway; that is, it always did on days-off from patrols, he didn’t know why yet, he was too new. ‘You will though,’ Monaghan told him. ‘Just wait till after the first time you’ve been good and scared’—pronouncing it ‘skeered’.

So it would be all right now, the ones who were going to get up would have already had breakfast and the others would sleep on through till lunch; he could even take his shaving kit on to the mess without going to the hut at all: and stopped, he could not even remember when he had heard it last, that alien and divorced—that thick dense mute furious murmur to the north and east; he knew exactly where it would be because he had flown over the spot yesterday afternoon, thinking peacefully I came home too soon. If I had only sat up there all night instead I could have seen it start again— listening, motionless in midstride, hearing it murmur toward and into its crescendo and sustain a time, a while and then cut short off, murmuring in his ears for a little time still until he discovered that what he was actually listening to was a lark: and he had been right, the sidcott had served even better than it knew even or even perhaps intended, carrying him still intact across lunch too since it was after ten now. Provided he could eat enough of course, the food—the eggs and bacon and the marmalade—having no taste to speak of, so that only in that had he been wrong; then presently he was wrong there too, eating steadily on in the empty mess until at last the orderly told him there was simply no more toast.