viands the smell of stable manure now, the same giant thumb in the bowls of soup.
He followed the candle into the same bedroom at which the knightly highwayman, along with the shade of the imperial marshal, would have looked in contemptuous unbelief, in which the marquis descendants of the Florentine might or might not have slept, but in which the Levantine without doubt did, and saw something else which, he realised now, he had not expected to find changed either, though the man who wore them had. Standing at the foot of the bed, he faced across the fretted garlanded painted footboard the group commander sitting against the piled pillows in the same flannel nightcap and nightshirt which he too had brought to Africa that day twenty-five years ago when he had had to leave his wife under the broiling eaves of the Oran native house because they had no money then (he the only child of the widow living—or trying to—on the pension of her husband, a Savoyard schoolmaster, she one of the six daughters of a retired sergeant-major of marines) while the husband was absent for almost two years on his first subaltern’s tour of outpost duty;—facing the man who even now did not look like even a French soldier and who on that first day twenty-five years ago seemed to have been completely and even criminally miscast, looking then himself like a consumptive school teacher, condemned not just to simple failure but to destitution and suicide too, who weighed then less than a hundred pounds (he was stouter now, almost plump in fact, and somewhere in his career like that of a delayed rocket, the glasses had vanished too) and wearing spectacles of such fierce magnification that he was almost blind without them, and even with them too since for a third of the time the lenses were sweated to opaqueness and he spent another third wiping them dry with the end of his burnous in order to see at all before sweating them blind again, and who had brought into the field life of that regiment of desert cavalry something of the monastery, something of the cold fierce blinkless intolerant glare which burns at midnight in the dedicated asepsis of clinical or research laboratories: that pitiless preoccupation with man, not as an imperial implement, least of all as that gallant and puny creature bearing undismayed on his frail bones and flesh the vast burden of his long inexplicable incomprehensible tradition and journey, not even in fact as a functioning animal but as a functioning machine in the same sense that the earthworm is: alive purely and simply for the purpose of transporting, without itself actually moving, for the distance of its corporeal length, the medium in which it lives, which, given time, would shift the whole earth that infinitesimal inch, leaving at last its own blind insatiate jaws chewing nothing above the spinning abyss: that cold, scathing, contemptuous preoccupation with body vents and orifices and mucous membrane as though he himself owned neither, who declared that no army was better than its anus, since even without feet it could still crawl forward and fight, and so earned his nickname because of his inflexible belief in his doctrine—a nickname spoken at first in contempt and derision, then in alarm and anger and then rage and then concerned and impotent fury since his inflexible efforts to prove his doctrine soon extended beyond his own platoon, into troops and squadrons where, still a simple junior lieutenant of cavalry and not even a medical officer, he had no right nor business at all; and then spoken no longer in ridicule nor even contumely and anger anywhere, because presently the whole African establishment knew how, sitting in a tent, he had told his regimental commander how to recover two scouts captured one night by a band of mounted tribesmen who vanished afterward like antelope; and it worked, and later, still sitting in a tent, told the general himself how to avail to a hitherto dry outpost a constant supply of drinking water, and that worked too; and moved from the classroom colonelcy to the command of a field division in 1914 and three years later was the competent and successful commander of an army group and already unofficially next but one to a marshal’s baton while still less than fifty-five years old, sitting in his flannel nightshirt and cap in the gaudy bed in the rococo room lighted by the cheap candle in its tin candlestick which the batman had set on the bedside table, like an ex-grocer alderman surprised, but neither alarmed nor even concerned, in a sumptuous bordello.
‘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
