A Fable

breathing.’

‘Send for me,’ the old Negro said.

‘Oh yes—if I only could.’

‘I know,’ the old Negro said. ‘You aint ready yet neither. But when you are, send for me.’

‘Are what?’ the runner said.

‘When you needs me.’

‘What can I need you for, when it will be over next year? All I’ve got to do is just stay alive.’

‘Send for me,’ the old Negro said.

‘Goodbye,’ the runner said.

Descending, retracing his steps, they were still there in the vast cathedral-like room, not only the original ones but the steady trickle of new arrivals, entering, not even to look at the lettered banner but just to sit for awhile inside the same walls with that innocent and invincible affirmation. And he had been right: it was August now and there were American uniforms in France, not as combat units yet but singly, still learning: they had a captain and two subalterns posted to the battalion, to blood themselves on the old Somme names, preparatory to, qualifying themselves to, lead their own kind into the ancient familiar abbatoir; he thought: Oh yes, three more years and we will have exhausted Europe. Then we—hun and allies together—will transfer the whole business intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage, like a travelling minstrel troupe.

Then it was winter; later, remembering it, it would seem to him that it might actually have been the anniversary of the Son of Man, a gray day and cold, the gray cobbles of that village Place de Ville gleaming and wimpled like the pebbles beneath the surface of a brook when he saw the small augmenting crowd and joined it too, from curiosity then, seeing across the damp khaki shoulders the small clump of battle-stained horizon blue whose obvious or at least apparent leader bore a French corporal’s insigne, the faces alien and strange and bearing an identical lostness, like—some of them at least—those of men who have reached a certain point or place or situation by simple temerity and who no longer have any confidence even in the temerity, and three or four of which were actually foreign faces reminding him of the ones the French Foreign Legion was generally believed to have recruited out of European jails. And if they had been talking once, they stopped as soon as he came up and was recognised, the faces, the heads above the damp khaki shoulders turning to recognise him and assume at once that expression tentative, reserved and alert with which he had become familiar ever since the word seeped down (probably through a corporal-clerk) from the orderly room that he had been an officer once.

So he came away. He learned in the orderly room that they were correctly within military protocol: they had passes, to visit the homes of one or two or three of them in villages inside the British zone. Then from the battalion padre he even began to divine why. Not learn why: divine it. ‘It’s a staff problem,’ the padre said. ‘It’s been going on for a year or two. Even the Americans are probably familiar with them by now. They just appear, with their passes all regularly issued and visa-ed, in troop rest-billets. They are known, and of course watched. The trouble is, they have done no——’ and stopped, the runner watching him.

‘You were about to say, “done no harm yet”,’ the runner said. ‘Harm?’ he said gently. ‘Problem? Is it a problem and harmful for men in front-line trenches to think of peace, that after all, we can stop fighting if enough of us want to?’

‘To think it; not to talk it. That’s mutiny. There are ways to do things, and ways not to do them.’

‘Render under Caesar?’ the runner said.

‘I cannot discuss this subject while I bear this,’ the padre said, his hand flicking for an instant toward the crown on his cuff.

‘But you wear this too,’ the runner said, his hand in its turn indicating the collar and the black V inside the tunic’s lapels.

‘God help us,’ the padre said.

‘Or we, God,’ the runner said. ‘Maybe the time has now come for that’: and went away from there too, the winter following its course too toward the spring and the next final battle which would end the war, during which he would hear of them again, rumored from the back areas of the (now three) army zones, watched still by the (now) three intelligence sections but still at stalemate because still they had caused no real harm, at least not yet; in fact, the runner had now begun to think of them as a formally accepted and even dispatched compromise with the soldier’s natural and inevictable belief that he at least would not be killed, as orderly batches of whores were sent up back areas to compromise with man’s natural and normal sex, thinking (the runner) bitterly and quietly, as he had thought before: His prototype had only man’s natural propensity for evil to contend with; this one faces all the scarlet-and-brazen impregnability of general staffs.

And this time (it was May again, the fourth one he had seen from beneath the brim of a steel helmet, the battalion had gone in again two days ago and he had just emerged from Corps Headquarters at Villeneuve Blanche) when he saw the vast black motor car again there was such a shrilling of N.C.O.s’ whistles and a clashing of presented arms that he thought at first it was full of French and British and American generals until he saw that only one was a general: the French one: then recognised them all: in the rear seat beside the general the pristine blue helmet as unstained and innocent of exposure and travail as an uncut sapphire above the Roman face and the unstained horizon-blue coat with its corporal’s markings, and the youth in the uniform now of an American captain, on the second jump seat beside the British staff-major, the runner half-wheeling without even breaking stride, to the car and halted one pace short then took that pace and clapped his heels and saluted and said to the staff-major in a ringing voice: ‘Sir!’ then in French to the French general—an old man with enough stars on his hat to have been at least an army commander: ‘Monsieur the general.’

‘Good morning, my child,’ the general said.

‘With permission to address monsieur the director your companion?’

‘Certainly, my child,’ the general said.

‘Thank you, my general,’ the runner said, then to the old Negro: ‘You missed him again.’

‘Yes,’ the old Negro said. ‘He aint quite ready yet. And dont forget what I told you last year. Send for me.’

‘And dont you forget what I told you last year too,’ the runner said, and took that pace backward then halted