A Fable

‘Now turn and look at it,’ the old general said. But he already had, was—down the declivity’s black pitch to where the city lay trembling and myriad with lights in its bowl of night like a scatter of smoldering autumn leaves in the windy darkness, thicker and denser than the stars in its concentration of anguish and unrepose, as if all of darkness and terror had poured down in one wash, one wave, to lie palpitant and unassuageable in the Place de Ville. ‘Look at it. Listen to it. Remember it. A moment: then close the window on it. Disregard that anguish. You caused them to fear and suffer but tomorrow you will have discharged them of both and they will only hate you: once for the rage they owe you for giving them the terror, once for the gratitude they will owe you for taking it away, and once for the fact that you are beyond the range of either. So close the window on that, and be yourself discharged. Now look beyond it. The earth, or half of it, full half the earth as far as horizon bounds it. It is dark of course, but only dark from here; its darkness is only that anonymity which a man can close behind him like a curtain on his past, not even when he must in his desperation but when he will for his comfort and simple privacy. Of course he can go only in one direction in it now: west; only one hemisphere of it—the Western—is available to him now. But that is large enough for his privacy for a year because this condition will only last another year, then all earth will be free to him. They will ask for a formal meeting, for terms, sometime this winter; by next year we will even have what we will call peace—for a little while. Not we will request it: they will—the Germans, the best soldiers on earth today or in two thousand years for that matter since even the Romans could not conquer them—the one people out of all the earth who have a passion and dedication not even for glory but for war, who make war not even for conquest and aggrandisement but as an occupation, an avocation, and who will lose this one for that very reason: that they are the best soldiers on earth; not we French and British, who accept war only as a last gambit when everything else has failed, and even enter that final one with no confidence in it either; but they, the Germans, who have not receded one foot since they crossed the Belgian frontier almost four years ago and every decision since has been either nil or theirs and who will not stop now even though they themselves know that one more victory will destroy them; who will win perhaps two or even three more (the number will not matter) and then will have to surrender because the phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on: a vice only the more terrible and fatal because there is no intervening breast or division between to frustrate them into health by simple normal distance and lack of opportunity for the copulation from which even orgasm cannot free them; the most expensive and fatal vice which man has invented yet, to which the normal ones of lechery and drink and gambling which man fatuously believes are capable of destroying him, stand as does the child’s lollypop to the bottle the courtesan and the playing-card. A vice so long ingrained in man as to have become an honorable tenet of his behavior and the national altar for his love of bloodshed and glorious sacrifice. More than that even: a pillar not of his nation’s supremacy but of his national survival; you and I have seen war as the last resort of politics; I shant of course but you will—can—see it become the last refuge from bankruptcy; you will—can, provided you will—see the day when a nation insolvent from overpopulation will declare war on whatever richest and most sentimental opponent it can persuade to defeat it quickest, in order to feed its people out of the conqueror’s quartermaster stores. But that is not our problem today; and even if it were, by simply being in alliance with the ultimate victor, we—France and Britain—would find ourselves in the happy situation of gaining almost as much from our victory as the German will through his defeat. Our—call it mine if you like—problem is more immediate. There is the earth. You will have half of it now; by New Year’s you will very probably have all of it, all the vast scope of it except this minuscule suppuration which men call Europe—and who knows? in time and with a little discretion and care, even that again if you like. Take my car—you can drive one, cant you?’

‘Yes,’ the corporal said. ‘Go?’