General from the Jungle

by B. TRAVEN

  “And so that there should be no mistake,” continued Colonel, “as regards the identity of the person who was told by us that a return visit would be unwelcome, our chief thought it necessary to give that person a certificate of identity which, unfortunately, entailed the loss of two beautiful ears and the end of his nose.”

  “That was obviously done with the expectation,” replied the lieutenant calmly, “that I might pay my second visit to your camp as a swineherd instead of a peon, and in order to be quite certain that it was I, you made me leave behind my ears and my nose.”

  “Correct.” Colonel drank a gulp of hot coffee he had poured out of a tin can into an earthenware mug. “You weren’t invited then, Lieutenant, and you were equally, and even more, uninvited today. Instead, you sent several hundred of your people here so that we might take from them their rifles, ammunition, and their precious lives. But that was not what you intended, of course. And in the event that we had received the thrashing and you had won the fight, what would you have done with us then?”

  The lieutenant looked at his general and said, “We would have buried you all up to your necks and then marched our soldiers over your heads. Wasn’t that so, General?”

  “I never gave such an order, Lieutenant,” replied the general, with a choke in his voice.

  “That’s true, General. On this occasion you never gave such an order. But we’ve always done that when dealing with rebels, mutineers, and refractory peons. Only highway robbers were treated differently. They were simply shot. But all these swine who gabble about freedom and justice, their heads were stamped to splinters so that nothing should survive of their miserable brains.”

  The general made a worried face. He said not a word. Just shrugged his shoulders.

  “This time, of course,” continued the lieutenant in a loud voice so that all around the fire should hear him, “this time, of course, General, you gave us different orders. You said that prisoners were to be dealt with leniently. None was to be killed. As many as possible were to be taken captive and brought to Balun Canan in order to be tried before a proper court, where each could defend himself in his own way and have a chance of convincing his judges that he joined the rebels against the government out of desperation and misery and not with treasonable intent.”

  The general nodded, as if he wished to confirm these words. However, he did not look at the lieutenant. It seemed that, under the influence of these beautiful lies, he had grown years younger than he had looked during the past two hours.

  Celso shouted, “Do you hear that, muchachos? We were only to be taken prisoner, just a little matter of being made prisoners, and nothing else. How lovely this world is, how gentle and tender are the soldiers.”

  Laughter welled up. Professor called across the group, “Pity we didn’t know that sooner, muchachos, then we would have marched toward the Federals, Rurales, and finqueros with bunches of flowers in our hands and our machetes wreathed with greenery; and instead of our rebel songs and marching choruses, we would have sung ‘Praise to our almighty ruler, who reigns so wisely over us!’ ”

  “Hey, General, why didn’t you send the happy news to us by your envoy, Lieutenant Bailleres? Only don’t imagine we’d have fallen for it. Not us. But it would have made a lovely impression on all who like to scratch their hair without disturbing the lice. We can invent our own beautiful speeches about peace and humanity. We don’t need generals for that.”

  “It was well spoken, Lieutenant Bailleres,” said General, now joining in. “But fine speeches won’t help you now. It’s too late for that. How far have you gotten with your cigar? It’ll last another ten minutes. You had been warned not to show yourself among us again. Is that true or not?”

  “Don’t address me so familiarly, you impertinent son of a whore.”

  General grinned at the insult. “You shouldn’t get so excited about familiarity. We’ve always been addressed familiarly. And as far as you are concerned, Lieutenant Bailleres, in an hour’s time even the worms will be familiar with you, and the sad thing about that is that you won’t even be able to resent it.”

  He looked around, beckoned to a muchacho. “Bring me three Salvajes, Pablo.”

  The fellow ran off to fetch the men.

  When the three natives whom he had sent for approached, General turned again to Lieutenant Bailleres. “I cannot let you go a second time, Lieutenant. It might cost us another thirty or even more of our muchachos. You had your chance from me, and you made ill use of it.”

  The lieutenant grew scarlet with rage. The crusted stump of his nose began to crack as he now opened wide his mouth to inject into his words all the contempt of which he was capable. In any other place and circumstances he would have looked clownish, with the bandages wound tightly over his head and under his chin. The bandages had become dirty, and wet filth had mingled with the blood that had soaked through the dressings and was now dried. On his head he had squeezed a service cap that, because of the bandages, looked far too small for him. His face was unshaven and also spattered with mud, some of which had dropped off, leaving grayish-white patches. But no one took any notice of the fact that, with his stump nose and his bandages, he looked like a sad Auguste from some seedy circus.

  He bared his teeth wide and hideously. Then he burst out with a short laugh. And simultaneously with the laugh he yelled, “You abominable swine of a traitor and deserter, son of a pimp and a mangy bitch, you, you gave me a chance of which I made ill use? And I did because from you, you stinking swine of a rebel, I wouldn’t accept anything, not even a chance to save my life, and that’s why I made such use of my release as pleased me and not you, you dirty, lousy dog of an Indian.”

  “Traitor and deserter? I? Very well spoken, Lieutenant Bailleres. It is, so everyone says, the highest honor to serve in the army. It was an honor for me, too, when I joined it. But which of you, the officers, allowed me and my comrades to have any honor? I was beaten and kicked as a recruit, and even later, when I became corporal. And not only beaten, but spat at in the face. And not only that. When one of you officers felt in a bad mood or was blind drunk, then he made us crawl over the parade ground on our bellies or our knees, or clean out the latrines with a toothbrush, or the senior men were incited to attack the recruits on their mats at night and beat them mercilessly, and the next morning the victims had to pretend that they had fallen out of a window or down from the roof, where they had no reason to be. I tell you, Lieutenant Bailleres, the deserter who ran away from this hell, where every trace of honor was thrashed, tortured, and tongue-lashed out of him, and who deserted this army, had ten times more honor in his body than those whose backsides were bursting with abject fear and who carried on obediently without revolting. Such a deserter had a thousand times more honor than the officers and N.C.O.’s who strutted and reveled in their authority. I, a traitor? The real and mighty traitors are those who beat every feeling of honor out of their soldiers and so degraded them that at last they no longer knew what army they were serving in or to which country they should show their allegiance. Traitors are the ones who have so long bludgeoned the people, so long humiliated them, so long robbed them of their honest rights, that the people could finally bear it no longer and preferred to unleash a civil war rather than to suffer such indignity any longer. Those are the traitors, the true, actual, and only traitors, who create and cause rebellions and revolutions by their thirst for power, their greedy ambitions, their swindlings, betrayals, and murders. Perhaps in ten years’ time, perhaps in fifty years, it will be said that we, the lousy, filthy Indian swine, rebels, mutineers, bandits, plunderers—and whatever else you call us—were the real saviors of this country. You don’t understand that, Lieutenant Bailleres. And that’s why you came here a second time although I warned you.”

  “What right have you crawling lice to warn me?” shouted the lieutenant angrily and threw the remains of his cigar into the fire. “You have no right to warn. I come and go as I please. Let me tell you that.”
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br />   “I knew it already. That’s why we marked you, so that you couldn’t come back again to our camp, spying around dressed up in women’s skirts or some such. You didn’t come here today to serve your general or your government: I know that, too. You came this time to catch me, to catch me alive and to take revenge on me for your missing ears and your worm-eaten nose.”

  “Right, you swine,” yelled the lieutenant, working himself up more and more into a frenzy. “I wanted to catch you alive. And my failure to do that will be the only pain I shall feel when I pay for my burned-out cigar. So that you may know what I would have done with you had I caught you, I’ll tell you before it’s too late and my mouth’s stopped up. I would have had you stretched out full length on the ground and then I would have had a wooden stake driven through your stomach, slowly, inch by inch, and so nailed you firmly to the earth because you shout so long and so ardently about land and liberty. I would have had you pumped full of earth until you burst, and then you would have had the liberty to rot slowly.”

  “I already had an idea, Lieutenant, that that was almost precisely what you would do,” replied General, with a gurgling laugh. “And because I knew that, I didn’t send for some of my ordinary muchachos; instead, I’ve got these Salvajes for our evening’s amusement. These Salvajes are familiar with such little entertainments because they were once the performers. We’ve now nothing more to say to each other, Lieutenant.”

  “Certainly not, you mongrel.”

  General called to the Salvajes: “Have you understood the sort of stroll to Hell this caballero has chosen for himself?”

  “Seguro,” answered the three muchachos simultaneously. “Of course, General, we heard every word. Tierra y Libertad! Salud, General!”

  “Tierra y Libertad, muchachos,” answered General.

  One of the three men walked up to the lieutenant, jabbed him on the ribs with the handle of his machete, and told him, “Come on, my friend. I’m going to sing you a lullaby out there, outside the camp.”

  The lieutenant jumped up as if unwilling to be driven by these people. He turned to the general, who during the long conversation had remained squatting on his tree stump without contributing a word.

  “Have you by any chance a decent drink in your hip flask, mi general?” asked the lieutenant.

  The general drew out an elegant crystal flask, slim and slightly curved so that it could be carried comfortably in the pocket. It held about half a pint, and it was still full.

  “Drink half of it, Lieutenant,” said the general, as he handed him the flask. “Leave the rest for me. Probably I shall need a drink later, just as much as you do now.”

  The lieutenant held a finger against the flask so that he could measure the amount correctly. Then he took a long pull, lowered the flask, looked at his finger, and when he saw that another drink was due to him for his fair share, he took a second, smaller swallow.

  “There, General, I think I’ve divided it fairly.” He laughed with one side of his mouth as he handed the flask back.

  The general screwed the cap on pensively. Then he looked up straight into General’s face. “But, muchacho, you wouldn’t really do anything so cruel with my lieutenant?”

  “At first, admittedly, that wasn’t my intention, General. But you heard, just as I and all of us here heard, what your lieutenant proposed to do with me had I fallen into his hands.”

  “That was only a soldier’s joke,” the general assured him.

  “Then perhaps it was only a soldier’s joke, too, when a number of our comrades fell into the hands of the Rurales a few weeks ago at the Santa Cecilia finca, and they were then buried up to their necks and galloped over until all their heads had been stamped into the ground. Excellent soldier’s jokes, General.”

  The general shrugged his shoulders. “Brutalities happen in wartime. And we are at war with one another. But such cruelties are exceptional. I have never ordered such acts, and had I been at the finca, I would not have permitted such abuses.”

  “Lieutenant,” said General, “have you any comment to make on the soldiers’ jokes that your general has been telling us about?”

  “Not to you, you son of a bitch,” said the lieutenant and contorted his face into a hideous mask.

  “I will now tell you something, Lieutenant. You’re a brave fellow. That’s what you certainly think. I’ll make you a proposition. You needn’t think I’m afraid of such a miserable specimen of a despicable spy as you are.”

  General drew a knife from a sheath on his belt. As he did this, he turned to the muchachos who stood around and said, “Give this spy and son of a stinking coyote a knife of the same length as mine.”

  One of the men drew a knife and looked at General as if he didn’t know whether he had rightly understood or not.

  “Give it to him.” General made a gesture with his head.

  The lieutenant took the knife uncertainly.

  “Just so you don’t think I have to attack defenseless men. Neither I, nor any of us here who have some say and authority. Come on, take your knife. I’ll take mine, and whichever of us wins will do to the other what you intended to do to me had I fallen into your hands.”

  “Are you mad, General?” shouted one of the muchachos.

  “Why mad, Sebio? I’m in a good humor. We mustn’t let these mangy officers think that we’re afraid of them in equal fight. In the barracks they open their mouths wide and behave as if they could swallow any one of us as soon as look at us, and kick anyone in the guts when he passes by. That’s us, the soldiers, the defenseless ones, and if any of us gave one of them a crack on the jaw such as he deserved twenty times a day, he’d get shot.”

  General turned to the lieutenant and smiled at him. “Come, come, my little lamb—you, a dog of a lieutenant, and me a sergeant deserter. You have a knife like mine; and there’s no one here who’ll shoot me if I slap your chops. If you like, I’ll do without my knife. I don’t even need it against a wet rag of an officer like you.” He hurled his knife behind him in a wide arc. “You can keep your knife.” General grinned again. “You may use a knife, I’ll use only my two fists, nothing else, and if you win you can depart unhindered, back to your snot-nosed horde and dragging me behind you on a lasso.”

  The lieutenant looked around him.

  A huge crowd of muchachos had collected in the last few seconds to see the duel. For a brief moment he was quite prepared to accept the proffered challenge. But when General threw away his knife and made ready to fight him, who was graciously permitted to keep his knife, with bare hands and with the presumable intention of twisting his neck with those dirty, knotty hands, like an old hen for the pot, the lieutenant felt so insulted in the face of that crowd of grinning, laughing, and jeering muchachos that he had to refuse the fight. Only by refusing to deal with General on such unequal terms could he save the remnants of his honor and take them with him to the other side. For even if he should win, he could never have borne the indignity of having entered into an unequal hand-to-hand fight with a ragged, lousy, half-Indian rebel in order to save his own skin. All who heard of it would have attributed it to cowardice unworthy of an officer. No deeper humiliation could have been inflicted on him than that given by General in the simple gesture of flinging away his own knife and allowing him his. He could have scratched his face for fury at not having thrown away his own knife first and at having allowed General to anticipate him in this gesture. Without a knife, of course, he could never have won against the sturdy, work-hardened proletarian, not even if it came to bare fists. But his comrades would have spoken of a hero’s death.

  So nothing remained for him but to reply in a manner that he conceived to be alone worthy of an officer.

  He took a step forward. Filled with rage, he stared at General for a moment, baring his teeth as if desirous of devouring him, then he lifted up his arm and with a violent movement flung his knife to the ground so that it dug in up to the haft. Then he spat, hawking up thickly from his throat and landing
the gob on the ground immediately in front of his opponent’s feet, and he screamed as he pointed at the spittle, “There, you filthy, stinking dog of the lousy litter of an Indian bitch, you lick that up! You don’t seriously believe that an officer would fight with a dung-heap maggot like you! I’d give a creature like you half-a-dozen slaps, but I wouldn’t fight with you, you dirty swine.”

  As he bellowed, the lieutenant grew purple in the face. Blood trickled out of the scabs on his wounds. But the impression that he had expected to make, revealing himself as a hero to his general and the surrounding crowd of muchachos, failed completely. He had hoped that, in the face of this torrent of insults, General would fall into an indescribable fury and strike him down, thus quickly ending this tragi-comedy.

  But instead of the anticipated outburst of wrath, there ensued only a mocking laugh from all sides. General roared indeed, but not with anger, only with amusement. Such explosions he had already experienced only too often from officers, when he was a soldier and sergeant, for them to make the slightest impression upon him. In the present situation the lieutenant’s insults could only seem ridiculous to those present, for to all who stood around and rightly appreciated the position, the bawling of the lieutenant, who was powerless in the circumstances, was nothing else than the panting, yapping, and gnashing of a helpless coyote who has been caught fast in a trap and now sees the hunter standing before him with a laughing face. And since these jungle workers were only too familiar with the panting, yapping, and gnashing of captured wild animals, the lieutenant’s behavior seemed only uncommonly ridiculous because he reminded them of a trapped coyote.

  The lieutenant, of course, could not know why his abuse and his behavior, which had been calculated to create an heroic impression, so utterly failed and merely evoked laughter that made him for a second feel like a comedian.

  When the effect for which he had hoped and which was to sweeten his departure from the world not only was not achieved but manifested itself in a form he had never expected, not even believed possible, he was overcome for the first time since his capture by an immensely sad feeling of helplessness and loneliness. He looked at his commanding general with wide, bewildered eyes that begged for help. He hoped that in him he might at least find some understanding of what was happening here. He would have been glad had the general come over to him and embraced him in a friendly manner. But the general was just as helpless in the face of this situation as his lieutenant, for he, too, had expected an outburst of rage from General and his muchachos, and he was perhaps even more astonished at the unexpected result than the man who now sought moral support from him.