A Fable

regiment failed—burked—mutinied, we dont know what and are not going to know what because they aren’t going to tell us. Besides, it doesn’t matter what happened. What matters is, what happened afterward. At dawn yesterday a French regiment did something—did or failed to do something which a regiment in a front line is not supposed to do or fail to do, and as a result of it, the entire war in western Europe took a recess at three oclock yesterday afternoon. Dont you see? When you are in battle and one of your units fails, the last thing you do, dare do, is quit. Instead, you snatch up everything else you’ve got and fling it in as quick and hard as you can, because you know that that’s exactly what the enemy is going to do as soon as he discovers or even suspects you have trouble on your side. Of course you’re going to be one unit short of him when you meet; your hope, your only hope, is that if you can only start first and be going the fastest, momentum and surprise might make up a little of it.

‘But they didn’t. Instead, they took a recess, remanded, the French at noon, us and the Americans three hours later. And not only us, but jerry too. Dont you see? How can you remand in war, unless your enemy agrees too? And why should jerry have agreed, after squatting under the sort of barrage which four years had trained him to know meant that an attack was coming, then no attack came or failed or whatever it was it did, and four years had certainly trained him to the right assumption for that; when the message, signal, request—whatever it was—came over suggesting a remand, why should he have agreed to it, unless he had a reason as good as the one we had, maybe the same reason we had? The same reason; those thirteen French soldiers apparently had no difficulty whatever going anywhere they liked in our back-areas for three years, why weren’t they across yonder in jerry’s too, since we all know that, unless you’ve got the right properly signed paper in your hand, it’s a good deal more difficult to go to Paris from here than to Berlin; any time you want to go east from here, all you need is a British or French or American uniform. Or perhaps they didn’t even need to go themselves, perhaps just wind, moving air, carried it. Or perhaps not even moving air but just air, spreading by attrition from invisible and weightless molecule to molecule as disease, smallpox spreads, or fear, or hope—just enough of us, all of us in the mud here saying together, Enough of this, let’s have done with this.

‘Because dont you see? they cant have this. They cant permit this, to stop it at all yet, let alone allow it to stop itself this way—the two shells in the river and the race already underway and both crews without warning simply unshipping the oars from the locks and saying in unison: We’re not going to pull anymore. They cant yet. It’s not finished yet, like an unfinished cricket or rugger match which started according to a set of mutually accepted rules formally and peaceably agreed on, and must finish by them, else the whole theory of arbitration, the whole tried and proven step-by-step edifice of politics and economy on which the civilised concord of nations is based, becomes so much wind. More than that: that thin and tensioned girder of steel and human blood which carries its national edifice soaring glorious and threatful among the stars, in dedication to which young men are transported free of charge and even with pay, to die violently in places that even the map-makers and -dividers never saw, that a pilgrim stumbling on it a hundred or a thousand years afterward may still be able to say Here is a spot that is (anyway was once) forever England or France or America. And not only cant, dare not: they wont. They have already started not to. Because listen. On the way back up tonight, I got a lift in a lorry. It was carrying AA shells. It was in a column almost three miles long, all chock full of AA shells. Think of it: three miles of AA shells; think of having enough shells to measure it in miles, which apparently they did not have in front of Amiens two months ago. But then, naturally it takes more ammunition to recess a war for ten minutes than to stop a mere offensive. The lorry was in charge of an old man I knew who had been waiting for three years at an ammo dump at St Omer for his application to go through for leave and permission to go to Mons and search for his son who hadn’t or didn’t or couldn’t or didn’t want to—anyway, failed to—come back that afternoon four years ago. He showed me one of the shells. It was blank. Not dud: blank, complete and intact except that there was no shrapnel in it; it would fire and even burst, harmless. It looked all right on the outside; I doubt if its father in his West End club (or Birmingham or Leeds or Manchester or wherever people live who make shells) would have known the difference, and only a dyed- in-the-wool archie bloke could. It was amazing, really; they must have worked like beaver all last night and today too there at the dump, altering, gelding three miles of shells—or maybe they had them all ready beforehand, in advance; maybe after four years, even Anglo-Saxons can learn to calculate ahead in war——’ talking, the voice not dreamy now: just glib and rapid, he (the runner) in the moving lorry now, the three of them, himself, the old man and the driver, crowded into the close and lightless cab so that he could feel the whole frail length of the old man’s body tense and exultant against him, remembering how at first his voice had sounded as cracked and amazed as the old man’s, but soon no more: the two voices running along side by side as logical in unreason, rational and inconsequent as those of two children:

‘Perhaps you’d better tell me again. Maybe I have forgot.’

‘For the signal!’ the old man cried. ‘The announcement! To let the whole world know that He has risen!’

‘A signal of AA shells? Three miles of AA shells? Wouldn’t one gun be enough to herald Him? And if one gun, why hold His resurrection up long enough to run three miles of shells through it? Or if one shell to each gun, why only three miles of guns? Why not enough for every gun between Switzerland and the Channel? Aren’t the rest of us to be notified too? To welcome Him too? Why not just bugles, horns? He would recognise horns; they wouldn’t frighten Him.’

‘Dont the Book itself say he will return in thunder and lightning?’

‘But not gunpowder,’ the runner said.

‘Then let man make the noise!’ the cracked voice cried. ‘Let man shout hallelujah and jubilee with the very things he has been killing with!’—rational and fantastic, like children, and as cruel too:

‘And fetch your son along with Him?’ the runner said.

‘My son?’ the old man said. ‘My son is dead.’

‘Yes,’ the runner said. ‘That’s what I meant. Isn’t that what you mean too?’

‘Pah,’ the old man said; it sounded almost like spitting. ‘What does it matter, whether or not He brings my son back with Him? my son, or yours, or any other man’s? My son? Even the whole million of them we have lost since that day four years ago, the billion since that day eighteen hundred and eighty-five years ago. The ones He will restore to life are the ones that would have died since eight oclock this morning My son? My son?’—then (the runner) out of the lorry again (The column had stopped. It was near the lines, just under them in fact, or what had been the front line until three oclock this afternoon; the runner knew that at once, although he had never been here before. But he had not only been an infantryman going in and out of them for twenty-odd months, for seven months he had been a runner going in and out of them every night, so he had no more doubt of where he was than would the old wolf or lynx when he was near a trap-line.), walking up the column toward the halted head of it, and stopped in shadow and watched M.P.’s and armed sentries splitting the column into sections with a guide for each leading lorry, each section as it was detached turning from the road into the fields and woods beyond which lay the front; and not long to watch this either, because almost at once a corporal with his bayonet fixed came quickly around the lorry in whose shadow he stood.

‘Get back to your lorry,’ the corporal ordered.

He identified himself, naming his battalion and its vector.

‘What the bleeding .… are you doing down here?’ the corporal said.

‘Trying to get a lift.’