A Fable

‘How?’ the colonel said. ‘Try to buy with one file, the man who already owns the battalion?’

‘Perhaps you should assign your own insurance and pay-book over to him.’

‘Yes,’ the colonel said. ‘If he gives me time to.’ And that was all. The colonel spent fourteen hours with his wife. At noon the next day, he was in Boulogne again; at six that afternoon, his car entered the village where the battalion was in rest billets. ‘Stop here,’ the colonel said, and sat for a moment in the car, looking at the queue of men which was moving infinitesimally toward and through the gate into one of those sweating stone courtyards which for a thousand years the French have been dotting about the Picard and Artois and Flanders countryside, apparently for the purpose of housing between battles the troops of the allied nations come to assist in preserving them. No, the colonel thought, not a cinema; the anticipation is not great enough, although the urgency is twice as strong. They are like the parade outside a latrine. ‘Drive on,’ he said.

The other private was a battalion runner. He was sitting on the firestep, his unslung rifle propped beside him, himself half-propped, half-reclining against the trench-wall, his boots and putties not caked with the drying mud of trenches but dusted with the recent powdery dust of roads; even his attitude showed not so much indolence, but fatigue, physical exhaustion. Except that it was not spent exhaustion, but the contrary: with something tense behind it, so that the exhaustion did not seem to possess him, but rather he seemed to wear it as he did the dust, sitting there for five or six minutes now, all of which he had spent talking, and with nothing of exhaustion in his voice either. Back in the old spanking time called peace, he had been not only a successful architect, but a good one, even if (in private life) an aesthete and even a little precious; at this hour of those old dead days, he would have been sitting in a Soho restaurant or studio (or, his luck good, even in a Mayfair drawing room or even—at least once or twice or perhaps three times—boudoir), doing a little more than his share of the talking about art or politics or life or both or all three. He had been among the first London volunteers, a private at Loos; without even a lance corporal’s stripe on his sleeve, he had extricated his platoon and got it back alive across the Canal; he commanded the platoon for five days at Passchendaele and was confirmed in it, posted from the battlefield to officers’ school and had carried his single pip for five months into 1916 on the night when he came off duty and entered the dugout where his company commander was shaving out of a Maconochie tin.

‘I want to resign,’ he said.

Without stopping the razor nor even moving enough to see the other’s reflection in the mirror, the company commander said, ‘Dont we all.’ Then he stopped the razor. ‘You must be serious. All right. Go up the trench and shoot yourself through the foot. Of course, they never really get away with it. But——’

‘I see,’ the other said. ‘No, I dont want to get out.’ He touched the pip on his left shoulder rapidly with his right finger tips and dropped the hand. ‘I just dont want this anymore.’

‘You want to go back to ranks,’ the company commander said. ‘You love man so well you must sleep in the same mud he sleeps in.’

‘That’s it,’ the other said. ‘It’s just backward. I hate man so. Hear him?’ Again the hand moved, an outward motion, gesture, and dropped again. ‘Smell him, too.’ That was already in the dugout also, sixty steps down though it was: not just the rumble and mutter, but the stench too, the smell, the soilure, the stink of simple usage: not the dead bones and flesh rotting in the mud, but because the live bones and flesh had used the same mud so long to sleep and eat in. ‘When I, knowing what I have been, and am now, and will continue to be—assuming of course that I shall continue among the chosen beneath the boon of breathing, which I probably shall, some of us apparently will have to, dont ask me why of that either—, can, by the simple coincidence of wearing this little badge on my coat, have not only the power, with a whole militarised government to back me up, to tell vast herds of man what to do, but the impunitive right to shoot him with my own hand when he doesn’t do it, then I realise how worthy of any fear and abhorrence and hatred he is.’

‘Not just your hatred and fear and abhorrence,’ the company commander said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m merely the one who cant face it.’

‘Wont face it,’ the company commander said.

‘Cant face it,’ he said.

‘Wont face it,’ the company commander said.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘So I must get back into the muck with him. Then maybe I’ll be free.’

‘Free of what?’ the company commander said.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I dont know either. Maybe of having to perform forever at inescapable intervals that sort of masturbation about the human race people call hoping. That would be enough. I had thought of going straight to Brigade. That would save time. But then, the colonel might get his back up for being overslaughed. I’m looking for what K.R. and O. would call channels, I suppose. Only I dont seem to know anybody who ever read that book.’

It was not that easy. The battalion commander refused to endorse him; he found himself in the presence of a brigadier twenty-seven years old, less than four years out of Sandhurst today, in a Mons Star, M.C. and bar, D.S.O. and a French Croix de Guerre and a thing from the Belgian monarch and three wound stripes, who could not—not would not, could not—even believe what he was hearing, let alone understand what his importuner was talking about, who said, ‘I daresay you’ve already thought of shooting yourself in the foot. Raise the pistol about sixty inches first. You might as well get out front of the parapet too, what? Better still, get past the wire while you’re about it.’

But it was quite simple, when he finally thought of the method. He waited until his leave came up. He would have to do that; desertion was exactly what he did not want. In London he found a girl, a young woman, not a professional, not really a good-standing amateur yet, two or three months pregnant from any one of three men, two of whom had been killed inside the same fortnight and mile by Nieppe Forest, and the other now in Mesopotamia, who didn’t understand either and therefore (so he thought at the time) was willing to help him for a price—a price twice what she suggested and which represented his whole balance at Cox’s—in a plot whose meretricity and shabbiness only American moving pictures were to match: the two of them taken in delicto so outrageously flagrante and public, so completely unequivocal and incapable of other than one interpretation, that anyone, even the field-rank moralists in charge of the conduct of Anglo-Saxon-derived junior officers, should have refused point blank to accept or even believe it.

It worked though. The next morning, in a Knightsbridge barracks anteroom, a staff officer spokesman offered, as an alternative to preserve the regiment’s honor, the privilege which he had requested of his company commander and then the battalion commander, and finally of the brigadier himself in France three months ago; and three nights later, passing through Victoria station to file into a coach full of private soldiers in the same returning train which had brought him by officers’ first class up from Dover ten days ago, he found he had been wrong about the girl, whom at first he didn’t even remember after she spoke to him. ‘It didn’t work,’ she said.