A Fable

‘Will endure,’ the corporal said.

‘They will do more,’ the old general said proudly. ‘They will prevail.—Shall we return?’ They went back to the waiting car and descended; they traversed once more the echoing and empty warrens concentric about the distant crowded Place de Ville. Then the alley again, the car slowing and stopping once more opposite the small locked gate in front of which, above a struggling group of five men the bayoneted rifles of four of them waved and jerked like furious exclamations. The corporal looked once at the struggling group and said quietly:

‘There are eleven now.’

‘There are eleven now,’ the old general said as quietly; again one arresting gesture of the fine and delicate hand from beneath the cloak. ‘Wait. Let us watch this a moment: a man freed of it, now apparently trying to fight his way back into what for all he knows will be his death cell.’ So they sat for a moment yet, watching the fifth man (the same one who two hours ago had been taken from the cell by the same guards who came for Polchek) straining stocky and furious in the hands of his four captors apparently not away from the small gate but toward it, until the old general got out of the car, the corporal following, and said, not raising his voice yet either:

‘What’s wrong here, Sergeant?’ The group paused in their straining attitudes. The prisoner looked back then he wrenched free and turned and ran across the pavement toward the old general and the corporal, the four captors following, grasping him again.

‘Stand still, you!’ the sergeant hissed. ‘Attention! His name is Pierre Bouc. He didn’t belong in that squad at all, though we didn’t discover the mistake until one of them—’ he glanced at the corporal ‘—you—condescended to produce his regimental order. We found him trying to get back in. He denied his name; he wouldn’t even produce the order until we took it away from him.’ Holding the short and furious man with one hand, he produced the dog-eared paper from his pocket. Immediately the prisoner snatched it from him.

‘You lie!’ he said to the sergeant. Before they could prevent him he ripped the order to shreds and whirled and flung the shreds in the old general’s face. ‘You lie!’ he shouted at the old general while the bursting gout drifted like a confetti of windless and weightless snow or feathers about the golden and invincible hat, the calm incurious inscrutable face which had looked at everything and believed none of it. ‘You lie!’ the man shouted again. ‘My name is not Pierre Bouc. I am Piotr—’ adding something in a harsh almost musical middle-eastern tongue so full of consonants as to be almost unintelligible. Then he turned to the corporal, going rapidly onto his knees, grasping the corporal’s hand and saying something else in the incomprehensible tongue, to which the corporal answered in it though the man still crouched, clinging to the corporal’s hand, the corporal speaking again in the tongue, as if he had repeated himself but with a different object, noun perhaps, and then a third time, a third slight alteration in its construction or context or direction, at which the man moved, rose and stood now rigid at attention facing the corporal, who spoke again, and the man turned, a smart military quarter-turn, the four captors moving quickly in again until the corporal said in French:

‘You dont need to hold him. Just unlock the gate.’ But still the old general didn’t move, motionless within the cloak’s dark volume, composed, calm, not even bemused: just inscrutable, saying presently in that voice not even recapitulant: not anything:

‘ “Forgive me, I didn’t know what I was doing”. And you said, “Be a man”, but no move. Then you said “Be a Zsettlani” and no move. Then you said “Be a soldier” and he became one.’ Then he turned and got back into the car, the soft voluminous smother of the coat becoming motionless again about him in the corner of the seat; the sergeant came rapidly back across the pavement and stood again just behind the corporal’s shoulder; now the old general himself spoke in the rapid unvoweled tongue:

‘And became one. No: returned to one. Good night, my child.’

‘Goodbye, Father,’ the corporal answered him.