A Fable

laterally one canteen.

‘Dont apologise, garcon,’ the wit said. ‘Just so it’s got a bottom at one end and a hole at the other.’ Then the one who had brought the wine scuttled back to the door after the two others, and out of it; the private with the bayonet dodged his seven-foot-long implement through it again and turned, holding the door half closed for the sergeant.

‘All right, you bastards,’ the sergeant said. ‘Be pigs.’

‘Speak for yourself, maitre,’ the wit said. ‘If we must dine in stink, we prefer it to be our own.’ Then suddenly, in unpremeditated concert as though they had not even planned it or instigated it, they had not even been warned of it but instead had been overtaken from behind by it like wind, they had all turned on the sergeant, or perhaps not even the sergeant, the human guards, but just the rifles and the bayonets and the steel lockable door, not moving, rushing toward them but just yelling at them—a sound hoarse, loud, without language, not of threat or indictment either: just a hoarse concerted affirmation of invincible repudiation which continued for another moment or so even after the sergeant had passed through the door and it had clashed shut again. Then they stopped. Yet they still didn’t rush at the table, still hovering, semicircular, almost diffidently, merely enclosing it, their noses trembling questing like those of rabbits at the odors from it, grimed, filthy, reeking still of the front lines and uncertainty and perhaps despair; unshaven, faces not alarming nor even embittered but harassed—faces of men who had already borne not only more than they expected but than they believed they could and who knew that it was still not over and—with a sort of amazement, even terror—that no matter how much more there would be, they would still bear that too.

‘Come on, Corp,’ a voice said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘O.K.,’ the corporal said. ‘Watch it now.’ But still there was no stampede, rush. It was just a crowding, a concentration, a jostling itself almost inattentive, not of famishment, hunger but rather of the watchful noncommittance of people still—so far at least—keeping pace with, holding their own still within the fringe of a fading fairy-tale, the cursing itself inattentive and impersonal, not eager: just pressed as they crowded in onto both the fixed benches, five on one side and six on the other facing them until the twelfth man dragged up the cell’s one stool to the head of the table for the corporal and then himself took the remaining place at the foot end of the unfilled bench like the Vice to the Chair in a Dickensian tavern’s back room—a squat powerful weathered man with the blue eyes and reddish hair and beard of a Breton fisherman, captain say of his own small tough and dauntless boat—laden doubtless with contraband. The corporal filled the bowls while they passed them hand to hand. But still there was no voracity. A leashed quality, but even, almost unimpatient as they sat holding each his upended unsoiled spoon like a boat-crew or a parade.

‘This looks bad,’ one said.

‘It’s worse,’ another said. ‘It’s serious.’

‘It’s a reprieve,’ a third said. ‘Somebody besides a garage mechanic cooked this. So if they went to all that trouble——’ a third began.

‘Hold it,’ the Breton said. The man opposite him was short and very dark, his jaw wrenched by an old healed wound. He was saying something rapidly in an almost unintelligible Mediterranean dialect—Midi or perhaps Basque. They looked at one another. Suddenly still another spoke. He looked like a scholar, almost like a professor.

‘He wants someone to say grace,’ he said.

The corporal looked at the Midian. ‘Say it then.’ Again the other said something rapid and incomprehensible. Again the one who resembled a scholar translated.

‘He says he doesn’t know one.’

‘Does anybody know one?’ the corporal said. Again they looked at one another. Then one said to the fourth one:

‘You’ve been to school. Say one.’

‘Maybe he went too fast and passed it,’ another said.

‘Say it then,’ the corporal said to the fourth one. The other said rapidly:

‘Benedictus. Benedicte. Benedictissimus. Will that do?’

‘Will that do, Luluque?’ the corporal said to the Midian.

‘Yes yes,’ the Midian said. They began to eat now. The Breton lifted one of the bottles slightly toward the corporal.

‘Okay?’ he said.

‘Okay,’ the corporal said. Six other hands took up the other bottles; they ate and poured and passed the bottles too.

‘A reprieve,’ the third said. ‘They wouldn’t dare execute us until we have finished eating this cooking. Our whole nation would rise at that insult to what we consider the first of the arts. How’s this for an idea? We stagger this, eat one at a time, one man to each hour, thirteen hours; we’ll still be alive at … almost noon tomorrow——’

‘—when they’ll serve us another meal,’ another said, ‘and we’ll stagger that one into dinner and then stagger dinner on through tomorrow night——’

‘—and in the end eat ourselves into old age when we cant eat anymore——’

‘Let them shoot us then. Who cares?’ the third said. ‘No. That bastard sergeant will be in here with his firing squad right after the coffee. You watch.’

‘Not that quick,’ the first said. ‘You have forgot what we consider the first of the virtues too. Thrift. They will wait until we have digested this and defecated it.’

‘What will they want with that?’ the fourth said.

‘Fertiliser,’ the first said. ‘Imagine that corner, that garden-plot manured with the concentrate of this meal ——’

‘The manure of traitors,’ the fourth said. He had the dreamy and furious face of a martyr.

‘In that case, wouldn’t the maize, the bean, the potato grow upside down, or anyway hide its head even if it