A Fable

Then a distant bugle cried once or twice, the Senegalese N.C.O.’s shouted, the gaudy ranks doused the cigarettes without haste and with a sort of negligent, almost inattentive deliberation came to alert and at ease as the sergeant-major of the city garrison, a holstered pistol strapped outside his long buttoned-back coat, came into the vacant side of the square before the three posts and stopped and stood as, to the harsh abrupt ejaculations of the new N.C.O.’s, the mutinied regiment filed into the empty rectangle and huddled, pariahs still, hatless and unarmed, still unshaven, alien, stained still with Aisne and Oise and Marne mud so that against the gaudy arras of the Senegalese they looked like harassed and harried and homeless refugees from another planet, moiling a little though quiet and even orderly or at least decorous until suddenly a handful of them, eleven it was, broke suddenly out and ran in a ragged clump toward the three posts and had knelt facing the posts in the same ragged clump by the time the sergeant-major had shouted something and an N.C.O.’s voice took it up and a file of Senegalese came rapidly out and around and across the empty parade and surrounded the kneeling men and pulled them, not at all roughly, back onto their feet and turned them and herded them back among their companions like drovers behind a small band of temporarily strayed sheep.

Now a small party of horsemen rode rapidly up from the rear and stopped just outside the square, behind it; they were the town major, his adjutant, the provost marshal adjutant and three orderlies. The sergeant-major shouted, the parade (save for the pariah regiment) came to attention in one long metallic clash, the sergeant-major wheeled and saluted the town major across the rigid palisade of Senegalese heads, the town major accepted the parade and stood it at ease then back to attention again and returned it to the sergeant-major who in his turn stood it at ease again and turned to face the three posts as, abruptly and apparently from nowhere, a sergeant and file came up with the three hatless prisoners interspersed among them, whom they bound quickly to the three posts— the man who had called himself Lapin, then the corporal, then the simian-like creature whom Lapin had called Cassetete or Horse—leaving them facing in to the hollow of the square though they couldn’t see it now because at the moment there filed between them and it another squad of some twenty men with a sergeant, who halted and quarter-turned and stood them at ease with their backs to the three doomed ones, whom the sergeant-major now approached in turn, to examine rapidly the cord which bound Lapin to his post, then on to the corporal, already extending his (the sergeant-major’s) hand to the Medaille Militaire on the corporal’s coat, saying in a rapid murmur:

‘You dont want to keep this.’

‘No,’ the corporal said. ‘No use to spoil it.’ The sergeant-major wrenched it off the coat, not savagely: just rapidly, already moving on.

‘I know who to give it to,’ he said, moving on to the third man, who said, drooling a little, not alarmed, not even urgent: just diffident and promptive, as you address someone, a stranger, on whom your urgent need depends but who may have temporarily forgotten your need or forgotten you:

‘Paris.’

‘Right,’ the sergeant-major said. Then he was gone too; now the three bound men could have seen nothing save the backs of the twenty men in front of them though they could still have heard the sergeant-major’s voice as he brought the parade to attention again and drew from somewhere inside his coat a folded paper and a worn leather spectacle case and unfolded the paper and put the spectacles on and read aloud from the paper, holding it now in both hands against the light flutter of the morning breeze, his voice sounding clear and thin and curiously forlorn in the sunny lark-filled emptiness among the dead redundant forensic verbiage talking in pompous and airy delusion of an end of man. ‘By order of the president of the court,’ the sergeant-major chanted wanly and refolded the paper and removed the spectacles and folded them back into the case and stowed them both away; command, the twenty men about-turned to face the three posts; Lapin was now straining outward against his cord, trying to see past the corporal to the third man.

‘Look,’ Lapin said anxiously to the corporal.

Load!

‘Paris,’ the third man said, hoarse and wet and urgent.

‘Say something to him,’ Lapin said. ‘Quick.’

Aim!

‘Paris,’ the third man said again.

‘It’s all right,’ the corporal said. ‘We’re going to wait. We wont go without you.’

The corporal’s post may have been flawed or even rotten because, although the volley merely cut cleanly the cords binding Lapin and the third man to theirs, so that their bodies slumped at the foot of each post, the corporal’s body, post bonds and all, went over backward as one intact unit, onto the edge of the rubbish-filled trench behind it; when the sergeant-major, the pistol still smoking faintly in his hand, moved from Lapin to the corporal, he found that the plunge of the post had jammed it and its burden too into a tangled mass of old barbed wire, a strand of which had looped up and around the top of the post and the man’s head as though to assoil them both on in one unbroken continuation of the fall, into the anonymity of the earth. The wire was rusted and pitted and would not have deflected the bullet anyway, nevertheless the sergeant-major flicked it carefully away with his toe before setting the pistol’s muzzle against the ear.

As soon as the parade ground was empty (before in fact; the end of the Senegalese column had not yet vanished into the company street) the fatigue party came up with a hand-drawn barrow containing their tools and a folded tarpaulin. The corporal in charge took a wire-cutter from the barrow and approached the sergeant-major, who had already cut the corporal’s body free from the broken post. ‘Here,’ he said, handing the sergeant-major the wire-cutter. ‘You’re not going to waste a ground-sheet on one of them, are you?’

‘Get those posts out,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Let me have two men and the ground sheet.’

‘Right,’ the corporal said. The corporal went away. The sergeant-major cut off a section about six feet long of the rusted wire. When he rose, the two men with the folded tarpaulin were standing behind him, watching him.

‘Spread it out,’ he said, pointing. They did so. ‘Put him in it,’ he said. They took up the dead corporal’s body, the one at the head a little finicking because of the blood, and laid it on the tarpaulin. ‘Go on,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Roll it up. Then put it in the barrow,’ and followed them, the fatigue-party corporal suddenly not watching him too, the other men suddenly immersed again in freeing the planted posts from the earth. Nor did the sergeant-major speak again. He simply gestured the two men to take up the handles and, himself at the rear, established the direction by holding one corner as a pivot and pushing against the other and then pushing ahead on both, the laden barrow now crossing the parade ground at a long slant toward the point where the wire fence died in a sharp right angle against the old factory wall. Nor did he (the sergeant-major) look back either, the two men carrying the handles almost trotting now to keep the barrow from running over them, on toward the corner where at some point they too must have seen beyond the fence the high two-wheeled farm cart with a heavy farm horse in the shafts and the two women and the three men beside it, the sergeant-major stopping the barrow just as he had started it: by stopping himself and pivoting the barrow by its two rear corners into the angle of the fence, then himself went