and why. No no: close the window upon that baseless dream. Open this other one; perhaps you will—can—see nothing but gray beyond it—except for that bough, always; that one single bough which will be there always waiting and ready for that weightless and ephemeral burden. Take that bird.’
‘Dont be afraid,’ the corporal said. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing worth it.’
For a moment the old general didn’t seem to have heard the corporal at all, standing a head below the other’s high mountain one, beneath the seemingly insuperable weight of the blue-and-scarlet hat cross-barred and dappled with gold braid and heavy golden leaves. Then he said, ‘Afraid? No no, it’s not I but you who are afraid of man; not I but you who believe that nothing but a death can save him. I know better. I know that he has that in him which will enable him to outlast even his wars; that in him more durable than all his vices, even that last and most fearsome one; to outlast even this next avatar of his servitude which he now faces: his enslavement to the demonic progeny of his own mechanical curiosity, from which he will emancipate himself by that one ancient tried and true method by which slaves have always freed themselves: by inculcating their masters with the slaves’ own vices—in this case the vice of war and that other one which is no vice at all but instead is the quality-mark and warrant of man’s immortality: his invincible and deathless folly. He has already begun to put wheels under his patio his terrace and his front veranda; even at my age I may see the day when what was once his house has become a storage-place for his bed and stove and razor and spare clothing; you with your youth could (remember that bird) see the day when he will have invented his own private climate and moved it stove bathroom bed clothing kitchen and all into his automobile and what he once called home will have vanished from human lexicon: so that he wont dismount from his automobile at all because he wont need to: the entire earth one unbroken machined de-mountained dis- rivered expanse of concrete paving protuberanceless by tree or bush or house or anything which might constitute a corner or a threat to visibility, and man in his terrapin myriads enclosed clothesless from birth in his individual wheeled and glovelike envelope, with pipes and hoses leading upward from underground reservoirs to charge him with one composite squirt which at one mutual instant will fuel his mobility, pander his lusts, sate his appetites and fire his dreams; peripatetic, unceasing and long since no longer countable, to die at last at the click of an automatic circuit-breaker on a speedometer dial, and, long since freed of bone and organ and gut, leaving nothing for communal scavenging but a rusting and odorless shell—the shell which he does not get out of because he does not need to but which presently for a time he will not emerge from because he does not dare because the shell will be his only protection from the hail-like iron refuse from his wars. Because by that time his wars will have dispossessed him by simple out-distance; his simple frail physique will be no longer able to keep up, bear them, attend them, be present. He will try of course and for a little while he will even hold his own; he will build tanks bigger and faster and more impervious and with more firepower than any before, he will build aircraft bigger and faster and capable of more load and more destruction than any yet; for a little while he will accompany, direct, as he thinks control them, even after he has finally realised that it is not another frail and mortal dissident to his politics or his notions of national boundaries that he is contending with, but the very monster itself which he inhabits. It will not be someone firing bullets at him who for the moment doesn’t like him. It will be his own frankenstein which roasts him alive with heat, asphyxiates him with speed, wrenches loose his still living-entrails in the ferocity of its prey-seeking stoop. So he will not be able to go along with it at all, though for a little while longer it will permit him the harmless delusion that he controls it from the ground with buttons. Then that will be gone too; years, decades then centuries will have elapsed since it last answered his voice; he will have even forgotten the very location of its breeding-grounds and his last contact with it will be a day when he will crawl shivering out of his cooling burrow to crouch among the delicate stalks of his dead antennae like a fairy geometry, beneath a clangorous rain of dials and meters and switches and bloodless fragments of metal epidermis, to watch the final two of them engaged in the last gigantic wrestling against the final and dying sky robbed even of darkness and filled with the inflectionless uproar of the two mechanical voices bellowing at each other polysyllabic and verbless patriotic nonsense. Oh yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will be already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible and immortal voice still talking, still planning; and there too after the last ding dong of doom has rung and died there will still be one sound more: his voice, planning still to build something higher and faster and louder; more efficient and louder and faster than ever before, yet it too inherent with the same old primordial fault since it too in the end will fail to eradicate him from the earth. I dont fear man. I do better: I respect and admire him. And pride: I am ten times prouder of that immortality which he does possess than ever he of that heavenly one of his delusion. Because man and his folly—’
‘Will endure,’ the corporal said.
‘They will do more,’ the old general said proudly. ‘They will prevail.—Shall we return?’ They went back to the waiting car and descended; they traversed once more the echoing and empty warrens concentric about the distant crowded
‘There are eleven now.’
‘There are eleven now,’ the old general said as quietly; again one arresting gesture of the fine and delicate hand from beneath the cloak. ‘Wait. Let us watch this a moment: a man freed of it, now apparently trying to fight his way back into what for all he knows will be his death cell.’ So they sat for a moment yet, watching the fifth man (the same one who two hours ago had been taken from the cell by the same guards who came for Polchek) straining stocky and furious in the hands of his four captors apparently not away from the small gate but toward it, until the old general got out of the car, the corporal following, and said, not raising his voice yet either:
‘What’s wrong here, Sergeant?’ The group paused in their straining attitudes. The prisoner looked back then he wrenched free and turned and ran across the pavement toward the old general and the corporal, the four captors following, grasping him again.
‘Stand still, you!’ the sergeant hissed. ‘Attention! His name is Pierre Bouc. He didn’t belong in that squad at all, though we didn’t discover the mistake until one of them—’ he glanced at the corporal ‘—you—condescended to produce his regimental order. We found him trying to get back in. He denied his name; he wouldn’t even produce the order until we took it away from him.’ Holding the short and furious man with one hand, he produced the dog- eared paper from his pocket. Immediately the prisoner snatched it from him.
‘You lie!’ he said to the sergeant. Before they could prevent him he ripped the order to shreds and whirled and flung the shreds in the old general’s face. ‘You lie!’ he shouted at the old general while the bursting gout drifted like a confetti of windless and weightless snow or feathers about the golden and invincible hat, the calm incurious inscrutable face which had looked at everything and believed none of it. ‘You lie!’ the man shouted again. ‘My name is not Pierre Bouc. I am Piotr—’ adding something in a harsh almost musical middle-eastern tongue so full of consonants as to be almost unintelligible. Then he turned to the corporal, going rapidly onto his knees, grasping the corporal’s hand and saying something else in the incomprehensible tongue, to which the corporal answered in it though the man still crouched, clinging to the corporal’s hand, the corporal speaking again in the tongue, as if he had repeated himself but with a different object, noun perhaps, and then a third time, a third slight alteration in its construction or context or direction, at which the man moved, rose and stood now rigid at attention facing the corporal, who spoke again, and the man turned, a smart military quarter-turn, the four captors moving quickly in again until the corporal said in French:
‘You dont need to hold him. Just unlock the gate.’ But still the old general didn’t move, motionless within the cloak’s dark volume, composed, calm, not even bemused: just inscrutable, saying presently in that voice not even
