to all. But he too became obsessed with the idea of owning this ford, having heard tales of his own kind who, after the curious and restless fashion of white men, find one side of a stream of water superior enough to the other to pay coins of money for the privilege of reaching it. So the affair was arranged as this white man desired it.
Perhaps I did wrong, you will say. But do I need to tell you? I am a simple man and some day I shall be old, I trust, and the continuous interruption of these white men who wish to cross and the collecting and care of the coins of money is only a nuisance. For what can money be to me, whose destiny it apparently is to spend my declining years beneath the shade of familiar trees from whose peaceful shade my great white friend and chief has removed the face of every enemy save death? That was my thought, but when you read farther you will see that it was not to be.
Once more it is this rash and heedless boy. It seems that he challenged this new white man of ours (or the white man challenged him: the truth I will leave to your unerring wisdom to unravel) to a swimming race in the river, the stakes to be this cursed ford against a few miles of land, which (this will amuse you) this wild nephew of mine did not even own. The race took place, but unfortunately our white man failed to emerge from the river until after he was dead. And now your agent has arrived and he seems to feel that perhaps this swimming race should not have taken place at all. And so now there is nothing for me to do save to bestir old bones and bring this rash boy to you for you to reprimand him. We’ll arrive in about…
The President sprang to the bell and pulled it violently.
When his secretary entered, he grasped the man by the shoulders and whirled him toward the door again. “Get me the Secretary of War, and maps of all the country between here and New Orleans!” he cried. “Hurry.”
And so again we see him; the President is absent now and it is the Soldier alone who sits with the Secretary of War behind the map-strewn table, while there face them the officers of a regiment of cavalry. At the table his secretary is writing furiously while the President looks over his shoulder.
“Write it big,” he says, “so that even an Indian cannot mistake it. Know all men by these presents” he quotes. “Francis Weddel his heirs, descendants and assigns from now on in perpetuity… provided Have you got provided? Good provided that neither he nor his do ever again cross to the eastern side of the above described River… And now to that damned agent,” he said. “The sign must be in duplicate, at both ends of the ford: The United States accepts no responsibility for any man, woman or child, black, white, yellow or red, who crosses this ford, and no white man shall buy, lease or accept it as a gift save under the severest penalty of the law. Can I do that?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Excellency,” the Secretary said.
The President mused swiftly. “Damn,” he said. “Strike out The United States, then.” The Secretary did so. The President folded the two papers and handed them to the cavalry colonel. “Ride,” he said. “Your orders are, Stop them.”
“Suppose they refuse to stop,” the colonel said. “Shall I fire then?”
“Yes,” the President said. “Shoot every horse, mule, and ox. I know they won’t walk. Off with you, now.” The officers withdrew. The President turned back to the maps the Soldier still: eager, happy, as though he rode himself with the regiment, or as if in spirit already he deployed it with that shrewd cunning which could discern and choose the place most disadvantageous to the enemy, and get there first.
“It will be here,” he said. He put his finger on the map. “A horse, General, that I may meet him here and turn his flank and drive him.”
“Done, General,” the Secretary said.
IV. THE WASTELAND
Ad Astra
I DON’T KNOW what we were. With the exception of Comyn, we had started out Americans, but after three years, in our British tunics and British wings and here and there a ribbon, I don’t suppose we had even bothered in three years to wonder what we were, to think or to remember.
And on that day, that evening, we were even less than that, or more than that: either beneath or beyond the knowledge that we had not even wondered in three years. The subadar, after a while he was there, in his turban and his trick major’s pips, said that we were like men trying to move in water. “But soon it will clear away,” he said. “The effluvium of hatred and of words. We are like men trying to move in water, with held breath watching our terrific and infinitesimal limbs, watching one another’s terrific stasis without touch, without contact, robbed of all save the impotence and the need.”
We were in the car then, going to Amiens, Sartoris driving and Comyn sitting half a head above him in the front seat like a tackling dummy, the subadar, Bland and I in back, each with a bottle or two in his pockets. Except the subadar, that is. He was squat, small and thick, yet his sobriety was colossal. In that maelstrom of alcohol where the rest of us had fled our inescapable selves he was like a rock, talking quietly in a grave bass four sizes too big for him: “In my country I was prince. But all men are brothers.”
But after twelve years I think of us as bugs in the surface of the water, isolant and aimless and unflagging. Not on the surface; in it, within that line of demarcation not air and not water, sometimes submerged, sometimes not. You have watched an unbreaking groundswell in a cove, the water shallow, the cove quiet, a little sinister with satiate familiarity, while beyond the darkling horizon the dying storm has raged on. That was the water, we the flotsam. Even after twelve years it is no clearer than that. It had no beginning and no ending. Out of nothing we howled, unwitting the storm which we had escaped and the foreign strand which we could not escape; that in the interval between two surges of the swell we died who had been too young to have ever lived.
We stopped in the middle of the road to drink again. The land was dark and empty. And quiet: that was what you noticed, remarked. You could hear the earth breathe, like coming out of ether, like it did not yet know, believe, that it was awake. “But now it is peace,” the subadar said. “All men are brothers.”
“You spoke before the Union once,” Bland said. He was blond and tall. When he passed through a room where women were he left a sighing wake like a ferry boat entering the slip. He was a Southerner, too, like Sartoris; but unlike Sartoris, in the five months he had been out, no one had ever found a bullet hole in his machine. But he had transferred out of an Oxford battalion: he was a Rhodes scholar with a barnacle and a wound-stripe. When he was tight he would talk about his wife, though we all knew that he was not married.
He took the bottle from Sartoris and drank. “I’ve got the sweetest little wife,” he said. “Let me tell you about her.”
“Don’t tell us,” Sartoris said. “Give her to Comyn. He wants a girl.”
“All right,” Bland said. “You can have her, Comyn.”
“Is she blonde?” Comyn said.
“I don’t know,” Bland said. He turned back to the subadar, “You spoke before the Union once. I remember you.”
“Ah,” the subadar said. “Oxford. Yes.”
“He can attend their schools among the gentleborn, the bleach-skinned,” Bland said. “But he cannot hold their commission, because gentility is a matter of color and not lineage or behavior.”
“Fighting is more important than truth,” the subadar said.
“So we must restrict the prestige and privileges of it to the few so that it will not lose popularity with the many who have to die.”
“Why more important?” I said. “I thought this one was being fought to end war forevermore.”
The subadar made a brief gesture, dark, deprecatory, tranquil. “I was a white man also for that moment. It is more important for the Caucasian because he is only what he can do; it is the sum of him.”
“So you see further than we see?”
“A man sees further looking out of the dark upon the light than a man does in the light and looking out upon
