commander looked at him. His voice was still merely pleasant, not even quizzical: ‘A general of division. You have come a long way from Africa, Sergeant Gragnon.’
‘So have you,’ the division commander said, ‘—Mama Bidet.’—speaking in his cold, flat voice, with no inflection nor emphasis either, the name given not secretly so much as merely when he was out of earshot, or perhaps not even that but simply from the inviolable security of their rankless state, by the men in ranks to the group commander soon after he came out as a subaltern into the African regiment in which the division commander was already a sergeant: ‘A long way, Monsieur the General Cabinet, Monsieur soon-to-be the Marshal d’Aisance.’ And still nothing in the group commander’s face; his voice was still calm, yet there now crept into it a shadow of something else, something speculative and even a little astonished, though the division commander would prove that he at least had not remarked it. Then the group commander said:
‘I seem to have been more right than even I knew or hoped. When you came in, I felt that perhaps I owed you an apology. Now I am sure of it.’
‘You demean yourself,’ the division commander said. ‘How could a man doubting his own infallibility get that many stars? And how could a man with that many stars retain any doubts about anything?’
The group commander looked at the division commander for another moment. Then he said: ‘It cant be possible that you dont even see that it has already ceased to matter whether these three thousand men or these four men die or not. That there is already more to this than the execution of twice three thousand men could remedy or even change.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ the division commander said. ‘I have seen ten times three thousand dead Frenchmen.’ He said, ‘You will say, Slain by other Frenchmen?’ He said, repeated, rote-like, cold, unemphasised, almost telegraphic:
‘By “successful” you mean “victorious”,’ the group commander said. ‘And by “we” of course, you mean France.’
In his flat, cold voice the division commander repeated the simple, explicit, soldierly expletive of the Cambronne legend.
‘A fact, but not a rejoinder,’ the group commander said.
The division commander said the word again. ‘For me, a ribbon tomorrow; for you, a baton before you die. Since mine is worth only a regiment, yours will certainly be cheap at that.’
Presently the group commander said: ‘What you are really asking me for, is to endorse you for a court-martial. You’re offering me the choice between sending you to the commander-in-chief, and compelling you to go yourself.’ The division commander did not move. He was not going to. They both knew it. ‘Return to your headquarters,’ the group commander said. ‘You will be notified there when the Marshal will see you at Chaulnesmont.’
He returned to Corps Headquarters with the corps commander, and got his own car; he would probably not even remember that the corps commander did not ask him to lunch. He would not have cared. He would have declined anyway. The group commander had told him to return to his own headquarters: an order. He was probably not even aware that he was disobeying it, getting into his car and saying briefly to the driver: ‘The line.’ Though it would be too late. It was nearing two oclock; the regiment would long since have been evacuated and disarmed and replaced; it would be too late to watch it pass now and so see for himself that it was done, just as he had paused in the communication trench to make sure that the artillery was still firing. He was going back as a chef might return two or three hours afterward to the kitchen where a dish he had been preparing had burned or perhaps exploded, not to help nor even advise in tidying up, but merely to see what might remain with some of the litter removed; not to regret it, because that would be a waste of regret, but just to see, to check; not even thinking about it, not thinking about anything, immobile and calm in the moving car, carrying inside him like a liquid sealed in a vacuum bottle that cold, inflexible undeviable determination for justice to his rank at any cost, vindication of his record at all.
So at first he did not realise what had startled, shocked him. He said sharply: ‘Stop.’ and sat in the halted car in the ringing silence which he hadn’t even heard yet because he had never heard anything here before but guns: no longer a starred, solitary man in a staff car behind a French battle-front, but a solitary boy lying on his stomach on a stone wall outside the Pyrenean village where, for all any records stated or knowledge remembered, he had been born an orphan; listening now to the same cicada chirring and buzzing in a tangle of cordite-blasted weeds beyond the escarpment landmarked since last winter by the skeleton tail of a crashed German aeroplane. Then he heard the lark too, high and invisible, almost liquid but not quite, like four small gold coins dropped without haste into a cup of soft silver, he and the driver staring at one another until he said, loud and harsh: ‘Drive on!’—moving on again; and sure enough, there was the lark again, incredible and serene, and then again the unbearable golden silence, so that he wanted to clap his hands to his ears, bury his head, until at last the lark once more relieved it.
Though the two batteries at the camouflaged corner were not firing now, they were not only still there, but a section of heavy howitzers was flanked on them, the gunners watching him quietly as he approached, chop-striding, bull-chested, virile, in appearance impervious and indestructible, starred and exalted and, within this particular eye- range of earth, supreme and omnipotent still, yet who, because of those very stars, didn’t dare ask whoever was senior here when he had ceased to fire, let alone where his orders to do so had come from, thinking how he had heard all his military life about the ineradicable mark which war left on a man’s face, without ever having seen it himself, but at least he had seen now what peace did to men’s faces. Because he knew now that the silence extended much further than one divisional front or even than the two flanking ones; knowing now what the corps commander and the group commander both had meant when they had said in almost the same words: ‘It cannot be that you dont even know what is happening’, thinking
‘Who commands here?’ he said. But before the captain could answer, a major appeared from beyond the guns. ‘Gragnon here,’ the division commander said. ‘You’re standing to, of course.’
‘Yes, General,’ the major said. ‘That was the order which came up with the remand. What is it, General? What’s happening?’—saying the last of it to the division commander’s back, because he had already turned, striding on, rigidly erect and only a little blind; then a battery did fire, two kilometres and perhaps more to the south: a salvo, a ragged thud; and, chop-striding, unhurried, burly and virile and indestructible, there occurred inside him a burst, a giving-away, a flow of something which if he had still been the unfathered unmothered boy secure in the privacy of his abandoned Pyrenean wall, would have been tears, no more visible then than now, no more then than now of grief, but of inflexibility. Then another battery fired, one salvo, less than a kilometre away this time, the division commander not faltering, merely altering direction in midstride and instead of entering the communication trench he rapidly climbed the escarpment, into the pocked field beyond it, not running still but walking so fast that he was a considerable distance away when the next battery fired, this time one of those he had just left, firing its salvo in its turn as if whoever had created the silence were underlining it, calling men’s attention to it with the
