A Fable

‘Thanks,’ the runner said. ‘Maybe what I need is to have to meet somebody. To believe. Not in anything: just to believe. To enter that room down there, not to escape from anything but to escape into something, to flee mankind for a little while. Not even to look at that banner because some of them probably cant even read it, but just to sit in the same room for a while with that affirmation, that promise, that hope. If I only could. You only could. Anybody only could. Do you know what the loneliest experience of all is? But of course you do: you just said so. It’s breathing.’

‘Send for me,’ the old Negro said.

‘Oh yes—if I only could.’

‘I know,’ the old Negro said. ‘You aint ready yet neither. But when you are, send for me.’

‘Are what?’ the runner said.

‘When you needs me.’

‘What can I need you for, when it will be over next year? All I’ve got to do is just stay alive.’

‘Send for me,’ the old Negro said.

‘Goodbye,’ the runner said.

Descending, retracing his steps, they were still there in the vast cathedral-like room, not only the original ones but the steady trickle of new arrivals, entering, not even to look at the lettered banner but just to sit for awhile inside the same walls with that innocent and invincible affirmation. And he had been right: it was August now and there were American uniforms in France, not as combat units yet but singly, still learning: they had a captain and two subalterns posted to the battalion, to blood themselves on the old Somme names, preparatory to, qualifying themselves to, lead their own kind into the ancient familiar abbatoir; he thought: Oh yes, three more years and we will have exhausted Europe. Then we—hun and allies together—will transfer the whole business intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage, like a travelling minstrel troupe.

Then it was winter; later, remembering it, it would seem to him that it might actually have been the anniversary of the Son of Man, a gray day and cold, the gray cobbles of that village Place de Ville gleaming and wimpled like the pebbles beneath the surface of a brook when he saw the small augmenting crowd and joined it too, from curiosity then, seeing across the damp khaki shoulders the small clump of battle-stained horizon blue whose obvious or at least apparent leader bore a French corporal’s insigne, the faces alien and strange and bearing an identical lostness, like—some of them at least—those of men who have reached a certain point or place or situation by simple temerity and who no longer have any confidence even in the temerity, and three or four of which were actually foreign faces reminding him of the ones the French Foreign Legion was generally believed to have recruited out of European jails. And if they had been talking once, they stopped as soon as he came up and was recognised, the faces, the heads above the damp khaki shoulders turning to recognise him and assume at once that expression tentative, reserved and alert with which he had become familiar ever since the word seeped down (probably through a corporal-clerk) from the orderly room that he had been an officer once.

So he came away. He learned in the orderly room that they were correctly within military protocol: they had passes, to visit the homes of one or two or three of them in villages inside the British zone. Then from the battalion padre he even began to divine why. Not learn why: divine it. ‘It’s a staff problem,’ the padre said. ‘It’s been going on for a year or two. Even the Americans are probably familiar with them by now. They just appear, with their passes all regularly issued and visa-ed, in troop rest-billets. They are known, and of course watched. The trouble is, they have done no——’ and stopped, the runner watching him.

‘You were about to say, “done no harm yet”,’ the runner said. ‘Harm?’ he said gently. ‘Problem? Is it a problem and harmful for men in front-line trenches to think of peace, that after all, we can stop fighting if enough of us want to?’

‘To think it; not to talk it. That’s mutiny. There are ways to do things, and ways not to do them.’

‘Render under Caesar?’ the runner said.

‘I cannot discuss this subject while I bear this,’ the padre said, his hand flicking for an instant toward the crown on his cuff.

‘But you wear this too,’ the runner said, his hand in its turn indicating the collar and the black V inside the tunic’s lapels.

‘God help us,’ the padre said.