A Fable

by William Faulkner

‘And then lost.’

  ‘So did the British lieutenant general who commanded that army in Picardy two months ago.’

  ‘And whatever boche it was who lost contact or mislaid his maps and compass in Belgium three years ago,’ the division commander said. ‘And the one who thought they could come through at Verdun. And the one who thought the Chemin des Dames would be vulnerable, having a female name.’ He said: ‘So it’s not we who conquer each other, because we are not even fighting each other. It’s simple nameless war which decimates our ranks. All of us: captains and colonels, British and American and German and us, shoulder to shoulder, our backs to the long invincible wall of our glorious tradition, giving and asking.… Asking? not even accepting quarter——’

  ‘Bah,’ the corps commander said again. ‘It is man who is our enemy: the vast seething moiling spiritless mass of him. Once to each period of his inglorious history, one of us appears with the stature of a giant, suddenly and without warning in the middle of a nation as a dairymaid enters a buttery, and with his sword for paddle he heaps and pounds and stiffens the malleable mass and even holds it cohered and purposeful for a time. But never for always, nor even for very long: sometimes before he can even turn his back, it has relinquished, dis-cohered, faster and faster flowing and seeking back to its own base anonymity. Like that out there this morning——’ again the corps commander made the brief indicative gesture.

  ‘Like what out there?’ the division commander said; whereupon the corps commander said almost exactly what the group commander would say within the next hour:

  ‘It cannot be that you dont even know what happened.’

  ‘I lost Charles Gragnon.’

  ‘Bah,’ the corps commander said. ‘We have lost nothing. We were merely faced without warning by an occupational hazard. We hauled them up out of their ignominious mud by their bootstraps; in one more little instant they might have changed the world’s face. But they never do. They collapse, as yours did this morning. They always will. But not us. We will even drag them willy-nilly up again, in time, and they will collapse again. But not us. It wont be us.’

  The army commander was waiting too; the car had barely to stop for him. As soon as it was in motion again, the division commander made for the second time his request in the flat, calm, almost dispassionate voice: ‘I shall shoot them, of course.’ The army commander didn’t answer. The division commander had not expected him to. He would not have heard any answer because he was not even listening to the other two voices murmuring to one another in brief, rapid, half-finished phrases as the corps commander briefed, reviewed to the army commander by number and designation, the regiments in the other divisions on either flank of his own, until the two voices had locked block into regimental block the long mosaic of the whole army front.

  And—not only no sound of guns here, but never at any time—they were challenged at the chateau gates and entered the park, a guide on the running board now so that they didn’t even pause at the carved rococo entrance but went on around to the side, across a courtyard bustling with orderlies and couriers and popping motorcycles, passing—and the division commander neither noticed nor cared here either—two cars flying the pennons of two other army commanders, and a third car which was British, and a fourth one which had not even been manufactured on this side of the Atlantic, and on to a porte cochere at the back of the chateau and so directly into the shabby cluttered cubicle not much larger than a clothes press, notched into the chateau’s Italianate bijou like a rusted spur in a bride’s cake, from which the group commander conducted the affairs of his armies.

  They were all there: the commanders of the two other armies which composed the group of armies, their heavy moustaches, already shaped to noon’s spoon, richly luxuriant from the daily ritual of soup; the English chief of staff who could have looked no more indomitably and rigidly youthful if the corset had been laced in full view on the outside of his tunic, with his bright ribbons and wisps of brass and scarlet tabs and his white hair and moustache and his blue eyes the color of icy war; and the American colonel with the face of a Boston shipping magnate (which indeed he was, or at least the entailed scion of one)—or rather, an eighteenth century face: the face of that predecessor or forefather who at twenty-five had retired rich from the quarter deck of a Middle Passage slaver, and at thirty had his name illuminated in colored glass above his Beacon Hill pew. He was the guest, the privileged, since for three years it had not even been his nation’s war, who had brought already into the conclave the privileged guest’s air of prim, faintly spinsterish disapproval—an air, quality, appearance too, almost Victorian in fact, from his comfortable old man’s shoes and the simple leather putties of a Northumberland drover (both—shoes and putties—beautifully polished but obviously purchased at different times and places and so never to match in color, and neither matching the ordnance belt which obviously had been acquired in two places also, making four different tones of leather) and the simple flareless breeches cut from the same bolt as the shorttailed jacket rising unblemished by any brass to the highboned throat with its prim piping of linen collar backside foremost like the dog-collar of a priest. (There was an anecdote about that uniform, or rather about its wearer, the colonel, going the rounds of messes six months ago, about how, shortly after the American headquarters had been set up, a junior officer—no Bostonian, this: a New Yorker—had appeared before the colonel one morning in the Bedford cords of a British officer and a long skirted tunic cut by a London tailor, though it did have the high closed throat; the colonel would meet many duplicates of it later, but not then because that was 1917; the youth appearing a little sheepishly, probably a little fearfully, wishing perhaps, as many another pioneer has done, that he had let someone else be first, before the cold banker’s eyes of his superior, saying presently: ‘You think I shouldn’t have done it? It’s bad form, taste, aping——’; then the colonel, pleasant, immediate: ‘Why not? They taught us the art of war in 1783 by losing one to us; they should not object to lending us the clothes in 1917 to win one for them.’)

  And, cynosure of all, the Mama Bidet, the General Cabinet, the Marshal d’Aisance of the division commander’s calm and icelike implacability not for justice for himself but for vindication of his military record, who—the group commander—had brought twenty-five years ago into the African sunglare not a bent for war (that would reveal later) and not even a simple normal thirst for glory and rank, but a cold, pitiless preoccupation with the mucous membrane buttoned inside his army breeches, which accompanied (even preceded) him from troop to squadron to regiment to brigade, division and corps and army and army group as he advanced and rose, more immune to harm as his stars increased in number and his gift for war found field and scope, but no more pitiless—the short, healthy, pot-bellied little man who looked like a green grocer retired happy and cheerful at fifty, and then ten years later dressed not too willingly for a masquerade in the ill-fitting private’s tunic without a single ribbon on it nor even any insigne of rank, whose real name had been an authority for fifteen years among textbook soldiers on how to keep troops fit, and a byword for four years among field commanders on how to fight them.

  He didn’t ask the division commander to sit down when the army- and corps-commanders did; as far as the division commander could have affirmed, the group commander had not even remarked his presence, leaving him to stand while that unbidden and uncaring part of his attention recorded the tedious recapitulation of regiments and divisions, not merely by their positions in the front but by their past records and the districts of their derivation and their officers’ names and records, the army commander talking, rapid and succinct, nothing still of alarm in the voice and not very much of concern: just alertness, precision, care. Nor did it seem to the division commander watching—or not specifically watching the group commander because he was not really watching anything: just looking steadily at or toward the group commander as he had been doing ever since he entered, aware suddenly that he not o
nly could not remember when he had blinked his eyes last, but that he felt no need to blink them—that the group commander was listening either, though he must have been, quietly and courteously and inattentively; until suddenly the division commander realised that the group commander had been looking at him for several seconds. Then the others seemed to become aware of it too; the army commander stopped talking, then said:

  ‘This is Gragnon. It was his division.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ the group commander said. He spoke directly to the division commander in the same tone, pleasant and inflectionless: ‘Many thanks. You may return to your troops,’ and turned again to the army commander. ‘Yes?’ Then for another half minute, the army commander’s voice; and now the division commander, rigid and unblinking, was looking at nothing at all, rigid and unblinking still until the army commander’s voice stopped again, the division commander not even bothering to bring vision back behind his eyes even after the group commander spoke to him again: ‘Yes?’

  Standing not quite at attention, looking not at anything but merely staring at rigid eyelevel above the group commander’s head, the division commander made his formal request for permission to have the whole regiment executed. The group commander heard him through. There was nothing whatever in the group commander’s face.

  ‘Endorsed as received,’ he said. ‘Return to your troops.’ The division commander did not move. He might not have heard even. The group commander sat back in his chair and spoke to the army commander without even turning his head: ‘Henri. Will you conduct these gentlemen to the little drawing room and have them bring wine, whisky, tea, whatever they fancy?’ He said to the American colonel in quite passable English: ‘I have heard of your United States coca cola. My regrets and apologies that I do not have that for you yet. But soon we hope, eh?’

  ‘Thank you, General,’ the colonel said in better than passable French: ‘The only European terms we decline to accept are German ones.’

  Then they were gone; the door closed behind them. The division commander had not moved. The group commander looked at him. His voice was still merely pleasant, not even quizzical: ‘A general of division. You have come a long way from Africa, Sergeant Gragnon.’

  ‘So have you,’ the division commander said, ‘—Mama Bidet.’—speaking in his cold, flat voice, with no inflection nor emphasis either, the name given not secretly so much as merely when he was out of earshot, or perhaps not even that but simply from the inviolable security of their rankless state, by the men in ranks to the group commander soon after he came out as a subaltern into the African regiment in which the division commander was already a sergeant: ‘A long way, Monsieur the General Cabinet, Monsieur soon-to-be the Marshal d’Aisance.’ And still nothing in the group commander’s face; his voice was still calm, yet there now crept into it a shadow of something else, something speculative and even a little astonished, though the division commander would prove that he at least had not remarked it. Then the group commander said:

  ‘I seem to have been more right than even I knew or hoped. When you came in, I felt that perhaps I owed you an apology. Now I am sure of it.’

  ‘You demean yourself,’ the division commander said. ‘How could a man doubting his own infallibility get that many stars? And how could a man with that many stars retain any doubts about anything?’

  The group commander looked at the division commander for another moment. Then he said: ‘It cant be possible that you dont even see that it has already ceased to matter whether these three thousand men or these four men die or not. That there is already more to this than the execution of twice three thousand men could remedy or even change.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ the division commander said. ‘I have seen ten times three thousand dead Frenchmen.’ He said, ‘You will say, Slain by other Frenchmen?’ He said, repeated, rote-like, cold, unemphasised, almost telegraphic: ‘Comité des Forges. De Ferrovie. S.P.A.D. The people at Billancourt. Not to mention the English and Americans, since they are not French, at least not until they have conquered us. What will it matter to the three thousand or the ten times three thousand, when they are dead? Nor matter to us who killed them, if we are successful?’

  ‘By “successful” you mean “victorious”,’ the group commander said. ‘And by “we” of course, you mean France.’

  In his flat, cold voice the division commander repeated the simple, explicit, soldierly expletive of the Cambronne legend.

  ‘A fact, but not a rejoinder,’ the group commander said.

  The division commander said the word again. ‘For me, a ribbon tomorrow; for you, a baton before you die. Since mine is worth only a regiment, yours will certainly be cheap at that.’

  Presently the group commander said: ‘What you are really asking me for, is to endorse you for a court-martial. You’re offering me the choice between sending you to the commander-in-chief, and compelling you to go yourself.’ The division commander did not move. He was not going to. They both knew it. ‘Return to your headquarters,’ the group commander said. ‘You will be notified there when the Marshal will see you at Chaulnesmont.’

  He returned to Corps Headquarters with the corps commander, and got his own car; he would probably not even remember that the corps commander did not ask him to lunch. He would not have cared. He would have declined anyway. The group commander had told him to return to his own headquarters: an order. He was probably not even aware that he was disobeying it, getting into his car and saying briefly to the driver: ‘The line.’ Though it would be too late. It was nearing two oclock; the regiment would long since have been evacuated and disarmed and replaced; it would be too late to watch it pass now and so see for himself that it was done, just as he had paused in the communication trench to make sure that the artillery was still firing. He was going back as a chef might return two or three hours afterward to the kitchen where a dish he had been preparing had burned or perhaps exploded, not to help nor even advise in tidying up, but merely to see what might remain with some of the litter removed; not to regret it, because that would be a waste of regret, but just to see, to check; not even thinking about it, not thinking about anything, immobile and calm in the moving car, carrying inside him like a liquid sealed in a vacuum bottle that cold, inflexible undeviable determination for justice to his rank at any cost, vindication of his record at all.

  So at first he did not realise what had startled, shocked him. He said sharply: ‘Stop.’ and sat in the halted car in the ringing silence which he hadn’t even heard yet because he had never heard anything here before but guns: no longer a starred, solitary man in a staff car behind a French battle-front, but a solitary boy lying on his stomach on a stone wall outside the Pyrenean village where, for all any records stated or knowledge remembered, he had been born an orphan; listening now to the same cicada chirring and buzzing in a tangle of cordite-blasted weeds beyond the escarpment landmarked since last winter by the skeleton tail of a crashed German aeroplane. Then he heard the lark too, high and invisible, almost liquid but not quite, like four small gold coins dropped without haste into a cup of soft silver, he and the driver staring at one another until he said, loud and harsh: ‘Drive on!’—moving on again; and sure enough, there was the lark again, incredible and serene, and then again the unbearable golden silence, so that he wanted to clap his hands to his ears, bury his head, until at last the lark once more relieved it.

  Though the two batteries at the camouflaged corner were not firing now, they were not only still there, but a section of heavy howitzers was flanked on them, the gunners watching him quietly as he approached, chop-striding, bull-chested, virile, in appearance impervious and indestructible, starred and exalted and, within this particular eye-range of earth, supreme and omnipotent still, yet who, because of those very stars, didn’t dare ask whoever was senior here when he had ceased to fire, let alone where his orders to do so had come from, thinking how he had heard all his military life about the ineradicable mark which war left on a man’s face,
without ever having seen it himself, but at least he had seen now what peace did to men’s faces. Because he knew now that the silence extended much further than one divisional front or even than the two flanking ones; knowing now what the corps commander and the group commander both had meant when they had said in almost the same words: ‘It cannot be that you dont even know what is happening’, thinking I am not even to have a court-martial for incompetence. Now that the war is over, they wont have to allow me a court because nobody will care any longer, nobody compelled by simple military regulations to see that my record receives justice.

  ‘Who commands here?’ he said. But before the captain could answer, a major appeared from beyond the guns. ‘Gragnon here,’ the division commander said. ‘You’re standing to, of course.’

  ‘Yes, General,’ the major said. ‘That was the order which came up with the remand. What is it, General? What’s happening?’—saying the last of it to the division commander’s back, because he had already turned, striding on, rigidly erect and only a little blind; then a battery did fire, two kilometres and perhaps more to the south: a salvo, a ragged thud; and, chop-striding, unhurried, burly and virile and indestructible, there occurred inside him a burst, a giving-away, a flow of something which if he had still been the unfathered unmothered boy secure in the privacy of his abandoned Pyrenean wall, would have been tears, no more visible then than now, no more then than now of grief, but of inflexibility. Then another battery fired, one salvo, less than a kilometre away this time, the division commander not faltering, merely altering direction in midstride and instead of entering the communication trench he rapidly climbed the escarpment, into the pocked field beyond it, not running still but walking so fast that he was a considerable distance away when the next battery fired, this time one of those he had just left, firing its salvo in its turn as if whoever had created the silence were underlining it, calling men’s attention to it with the measured meaningless slams, saying with each burst of puny uproar, ‘Hear it? Hear it?’