‘Do we report?’ Buchwald said.
‘Not to me,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You can even keep the pistol for a souvenir. The car’ll be waiting where you got out of it,’ and was about to close the door until Buchwald after one rapid glance into the room turned and put his foot against the door and said again in that harsh calm furious controlled voice:
‘Christ, cant the sons of bitches even get a priest for him?’
‘They’re still trying,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Somebody sent for the priest out at the compound two hours ago and he aint got back yet. They cant seem to find him.’
‘So we’re supposed to wait for him,’ Buchwald said in that tone of harsh calm unbearable outrage.
‘Supposed by who?’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Move your foot.’ Buchwald did, the door closed, the lock clashed behind them and the three of them were in a cell, a cubicle fierce with whitewash and containing the single unshaded electric light and a three-legged stool like a farmer’s milking stool, and the French general. That is, it was a French face and by its expression and cast it had been used to enough rank long enough to be a general’s, besides the insignia and the dense splash of ribbons and the Sam Browne belt and the leather putties, though the uniform which bore them were the plain G.I. tunic and trousers which a cavalry sergeant would have worn, standing now, erect and rigid now and rather as though enclosed by the fading aura of the convulsive movement which had brought him to his feet, who said sharply in French:
‘Attention there!’
‘What?’ Buchwald said to the Negro beside him. ‘What did he say?’
‘How in hell do I know?’ the Negro said. ‘Quick!’ he said in a panting voice. ‘That Ioway bastard. Do something about him quick.’
‘Right,’ Buchwald said, turning. ‘Grab him then,’ and turned on to meet the Iowan.
‘No, I tell you!’ the Iowan cried. ‘I aint going to—’ Buchwald struck him skilfully, the blow seeming not to travel at all before the Iowan catapulted backward into the wall then slid down it to the floor, Buchwald turning again in time to see the Negro grasp at the French general and the French general turn sharply face- to and against the wall, his head turned cheek against it, saying over his shoulder in French as Buchwald snapped the safety off the pistol:
‘Shoot now, you whorehouse scum. I will not turn.’
‘Jerk him around,’ Buchwald said.
‘Put that damn safety back on!’ the Negro panted, glaring back at him. ‘You want to shoot me too? Come on. It will take both of us.’ Buchwald closed the safety though he still held the pistol in his hand while they struggled, all three of them or two of them to drag the French general far enough from the wall to turn him. ‘Hit him a little,’ the Negro panted. ‘We got to knock him out.’
‘How in hell can you knock out a man that’s already dead?’ Buchwald panted.
‘Come on,’ the Negro panted. ‘Just a little. Hurry.’ Buchwald struck, trying to gauge the blow, and he was right: the body collapsed until the Negro was supporting it but not out, the eyes open, looking up at Buchwald then watching the pistol as Buchwald raised it and snapped the safety off again, the eyes not afraid, not even despaired: just incorrigibly alert and rational, so alert in fact as apparently to have seen the squeeze of Buchwald’s hand as it started, so that the sudden and furious movement turned not only the face but the whole body away with the explosion so that the round hole was actually behind the ear when the corpse reached the floor. Buchwald and the Negro stood over it, panting, the barrel of the pistol warm against Buchwald’s leg.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Buchwald said to the Negro. ‘Why didn’t you hold him?’
‘He slipped!’ the Negro panted.
‘Slipped my crap,’ Buchwald said. ‘You didn’t hold him.’
‘Son of a bitch yourself!’ the Negro panted. ‘Me stand there holding him for that bullet to come on through hunting me next?’
‘All right, all right,’ Buchwald said. ‘Now we got to plug that one up and shoot him again.’
‘Plug it up?’ the Negro said.
‘Yes,’ Buchwald said. ‘What the hell sort of undertaker will you make if you dont know how to plug up a hole in a bastard that got shot in the wrong place? Wax will do it. Get a candle.’
‘Where’m I going to get a candle?’ the Negro said.
‘Go out in the hall and yell,’ Buchwald said, swapping hands with the pistol and taking the door key from his pocket and handing it to the Negro. ‘Keep on yelling until you find a Frog. They must have candles. They must have at least one thing in this .… ing country we never had to bring two thousand miles over here and give to them.’
It bade fair to be another bright and perennial lark-filled vernal morning; the gaudy uniforms and arms and jangling accoutrements and even the ebon faces too of the Senegalese regiment seemed to gleam in it as, to the cryptic tribal equatorial cries of its noncoms, it filed onto the parade ground and formed three sides of a hollow square facing the three freshly-planted posts set in a symmetric row on the edge of a long pit or ditch, almost filled and obliterated now by four years of war’s refuse—tin cans, bottles, old messkits, worn-out cooking utensils, boots, inextricable coils of rusting and useless wire—from which the dirt had been excavated to form the railroad embankment running across the end of the parade, which would serve as a backstop for what bullets neither flesh nor wood absorbed. They came into position then at rest and grounded arms and stood at ease and then easy, whereupon there rose a steady unemphatic gabble, not festive: just gregarious, like people waiting for the opening of a marketplace; the pallid perennial almost invisible lighters winked and flared from perennial cigarette to cigarette among the babble of voices, the ebon and gleaming faces not even watching the working party of white soldiers while they tamped the last earth about the posts and took up their tools and departed in a disorderly straggle like a company of reapers leaving a field of hay.
