A Fable

‘So it’s that bad,’ the division commander said. ‘That serious. That urgent. All between Bidet and his baton, is one infantry division. And that one, mine.’ They stared at one another. Then the corps commander started to speak. The division commander didn’t permit him to. ‘Stow it,’ the division commander said. That is, that’s what he conveyed. What he spoke was a phrase pithy succinct and obscene out of his life as an N.C.O. in the African regiment recruited from the prison- and gutter-sweepings of Europe before he and the corps commander had ever seen one another. He said: ‘So I have no choice.’

‘You have no choice,’ the corps commander said.

The division commander always watched his attacks from the nearest forward observer’s post; it had been his habit always; that was a part of his record too. This time, he had one especially prepared, on an elevation, revetted and sandbagged behind a steel plate, with one telephone line direct to corps headquarters and another to the artillery commander; here, synchronised watch in hand while the preliminary barrage wailed and screeched overhead onto the German wire, he looked down upon his own front line and on the opposite one which even those who had assigned him the attack didn’t intend to breach, as from a balcony seat at the opera. Or box seat, and not just any box, but the royal one: the victim by regal dispensation watching in solitary splendor the preparations for his execution, watching not the opera’s final scene, but his own before he moved, irrevocable and forever, into some back-area job in that region whose function was to arm and equip the combat divisions who reaped the glorious death and the immortal renown; from now on, his to reap every hope save glory, and every right save the chance to die for it. He could desert, of course, but where? to whom? The only people who would accept a failed French general would be people so far free of the war: the Dutch, who were off the normal course of German invasions, and the Spanish, who were too poor even to make a two-day excursion to it, like the Portuguese did, for excitement and change of scene—in which case—the Spanish one—he would not even be paid for risking his life and what remained of his reputation, until he corrected that: thinking how war and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. His wife and children may be shoeless; someone will always buy him drink or weapons, thinking More than that. The last person a man planning to set up in the wine trade would approach for a loan, would be a rival wine-dealer. A nation preparing for war can borrow from the very nation it aims to destroy.

Then he didn’t even have a failure. He had a mutiny. When the barrage lifted, he was not even watching the scene beneath him, but was already looking at his watch-face. He didn’t need to watch. After watching them from beneath his stars for three years now, he had become an expert, not merely in forecasting failure, but in predicting almost exactly when, where, at what point in time and terrain, they would become void and harmless;—this, even when he was not familiar with the troops making the attack, which in the present case he was, having selected this particular regiment the day before because he knew, on the one hand, not only the condition of the regiment but its colonel’s belief in it and the record of his success with it; and on the other, its value as measured against each of the other three in the division; he knew it would deliver the attack near enough to the maximum demanded of him, yet if the foreordained failure meant its temporary wreckage or even permanent ruin, this would weigh less in the strength and morale of the division than that of any of the other three; he could never, breathing, have been convinced or even told that he had chosen the regiment out of his division exactly as the group commander had chosen the division out of his armies.