William Faulkner - A Fable

Now they were out of the city, the long straight roads diverging away, radiating away like spokes from a hub; above them slowly crawled the intermittent small clouds of dust within which, singly, in groups, sometimes in carts also, the city emptied itself; the parents and kin of the revolted regiment who had hurried toward it in amazement and terror, to compound between the old walls vituperation and anguish, now fled it almost as though in something not quite of relief but shame.

They didn’t look back at it though for a while yet it remained, squatting above the flat plain, supreme still, gray and crowned by the ancient Roman citadel and slowly fading until in time it was gone though they still had not looked once back to know it, going on themselves behind the strong slow heavy deliberate unhurryable farm-horse. They had food with them so they didn’t need to stop save for a little while at noon in a wood to feed and water the horse. So they only passed through the villages—the silent arrested faces, that same faint visible soundless rustling as the hats and caps came off, almost as though they had an outrider or courier to presage them, the girl crouching in her shawl between the two older women, Marthe iron-faced, looking straight ahead and only the other sister, Marya, to look about them, serene and tranquil, never astonished, never surprised while the heavy shaggy feet of the horse rang the slow cobbles until that one too was behind.

Just before dark they reached Chalons. They were in an army zone now and approaching what five days ago had been a battle zone though there was peace now or at least quiet; still an army zone anyway because suddenly a French and an American sergeant stood at the horse’s head, stopping him. ‘I have the paper,’ Marthe said, producing and extending it. ‘Here.’

‘Keep it,’ the French sergeant said. ‘You wont need it here. It is all arranged.’ Then she saw something else: six French soldiers carrying a cheap wood coffin approaching the rear of the cart and even as she turned on the seat they had already set the coffin down and were drawing the tarpaulin-swaddled body from the cart.

‘Wait,’ Marthe said in her harsh strong tearless voice.

‘It is arranged, I tell you,’ the French sergeant said. ‘You go to St Mihiel by train.’

‘By train?’ Marthe said.

‘Why, Sister!’ Marya said. ‘In the train!’

‘Restrain yourself,’ the French sergeant said to Marthe. ‘You wont have to pay. It’s arranged, I tell you.’

‘This cart is not mine,’ Marthe said. ‘I borrowed it.’

‘We know that,’ the French sergeant said. ‘It will be returned.’

‘But I must still carry him from St Mihiel to Vienne-la-pucelle—You said St Mihiel, didn’t you?’

‘Why do you argue with me?’ the French sergeant said. ‘Have I not told you one million times it is all arranged? Your husband will meet you at St Mihiel with your own cart and horse. Get down. All of you. Just because the war has stopped, do you think the army has nothing else to do but cajole civilians? Come along now. You’re holding up your train; it has a little more to do than this too.’

Then they saw the train. They had not noticed it before though the tracks were almost beside them. It was a locomotive and a single van of the type known as forty-and-eight. They got down from the cart; it was dusk now. The French soldiers finished fastening down the lid of the coffin; they took it up and the three women and the two sergeants followed to the van and stopped again while the soldiers lifted the coffin into the open door, then climbed in themselves and took up the coffin again and carried it forward out of sight and then reappeared and dropped one by one to the ground again.

‘In with you,’ the French sergeant said. ‘And dont complain because you dont have seats. There’s plenty of clean straw. And here.’ It was an army blanket. None of the three of them knew where he had got it from. That is, they had not noticed it before either. Then the American sergeant said something to the French one, in his own language without doubt since it meant nothing to them, not even when the French sergeant said, ‘Attendez’; they just stood in the slow and failing light until the American sergeant returned carrying a wooden packing-case stencilled with the cryptic symbols of ordnance or supply, that didn’t matter either, the American sergeant setting the box in place before the door and now they knew why, with a little of surprise perhaps, climbing in turn onto the box and then into the van, into almost complete darkness with only one pale shapeless gleam from the coffin’s unpainted wood to break it. They found the straw. Marthe spread the blanket on it and they sat down; at that moment someone else sprang, vaulted into the van—a man, a soldier, by his silhouette in the door where there was still a little light, an American soldier, carrying something in both hands they smelled the coffee, the American sergeant looming over them now, saying, very loud:

‘Ici café. Café,’ fumbling the three mugs down until Marthe took them and distributed them, feeling in her turn the man’s hard hand gripping her hand and the mug both while he guided the spout of the coffee pot into the mug; he even seemed to anticipate the jerk, crying ‘Watch it!’ in his own language a second or two before the shrill peanut-parcher whistle which did not presage the lurch but rather accompanied it, bracing himself against the wall as the van seemed to rush from immobility into a sort of frantic celerity with no transition whatever; a gout of burning coffee leapt from the mug in her hand onto her lap. Then the three of them managed to brace themselves back against the wall too, the whistle shrieking again shrill as friction, as though it actually were friction: not a warning of approach but a sound of protest and insensate anguish and indictment of the hard dark earth it rushed over, the vast weight of dark sky it burrowed frantically beneath, the constant and inviolable horizon it steadily clove.

This time the American sergeant knelt, braced still, using both hands again to fill the mugs, but only half full now so that, sitting against the wall, they drank by installments the hot sweet comforting coffee, the van rushing on through darkness, themselves invisible even to one another in darkness, even the gleam of the coffin at the other end of the van gone now and, their own inert bodies now matched and reconciled with the van’s speed, it was as though there were no motion at all if it had not been for the springless vibration and the anguished shrieks from the engine from time to time.

When light returned, the van had stopped. It would be St Mihiel; they had told her St Mihiel and this would be it, even if there had not been that sixth sense, even after almost four years, that tells people when they are nearing home. So as soon as the van stopped, she had started to get up, saying to the American sergeant: ‘St Mihiel?’ because at least he should understand that, then in a sort of despair of urgency she even said, began, ‘Mon homme à moi—mon mari’ before she stopped, the sergeant speaking himself now, using one or two more of the few other words which were his French vocabulary:

‘No no no. Attention. Attention,’ even in the van’s darkness motioning downward at her with his hands as a trainer commands a dog to sit. Then he was gone, silhouetted for another instant against the paler door, and they waited, huddled together now for warmth in the cold spring dawn, the girl between them, whether asleep or not, whether she had ever slept during the night or not, Marthe could not tell though by her breathing Marya, the other sister, was. It was full light when the sergeant returned; they were all three awake now, who had slept or not slept; they could see the first of Saturday’s sun and hear the eternal and perennial larks. He had more coffee, the pot filled again, and this time he had bread too, saying, very loud: ‘Monjay. Monjay’ and they—she—could see him now—a young man with a hard drafted face and with something else in it—impatience or commiseration, she anyway could not tell which. Nor did she care, thinking again to try once more to communicate with him except that the French sergeant at Chalons had said that it was all arranged, and suddenly it was not that she could trust the American sergeant because he must know what he was doing since he had obviously come along with them under orders, but because she—they—could do little else.