A Fable

‘Keep it,’ the French sergeant said. ‘You wont need it here. It is all arranged.’ Then she saw something else: six French soldiers carrying a cheap wood coffin approaching the rear of the cart and even as she turned on the seat they had already set the coffin down and were drawing the tarpaulin-swaddled body from the cart.

‘Wait,’ Marthe said in her harsh strong tearless voice.

‘It is arranged, I tell you,’ the French sergeant said. ‘You go to St Mihiel by train.’

‘By train?’ Marthe said.

‘Why, Sister!’ Marya said. ‘In the train!’

‘Restrain yourself,’ the French sergeant said to Marthe. ‘You wont have to pay. It’s arranged, I tell you.’

‘This cart is not mine,’ Marthe said. ‘I borrowed it.’

‘We know that,’ the French sergeant said. ‘It will be returned.’

‘But I must still carry him from St Mihiel to Vienne-la-pucelle—You said St Mihiel, didn’t you?’

‘Why do you argue with me?’ the French sergeant said. ‘Have I not told you one million times it is all arranged? Your husband will meet you at St Mihiel with your own cart and horse. Get down. All of you. Just because the war has stopped, do you think the army has nothing else to do but cajole civilians? Come along now. You’re holding up your train; it has a little more to do than this too.’

Then they saw the train. They had not noticed it before though the tracks were almost beside them. It was a locomotive and a single van of the type known as forty-and-eight. They got down from the cart; it was dusk now. The French soldiers finished fastening down the lid of the coffin; they took it up and the three women and the two sergeants followed to the van and stopped again while the soldiers lifted the coffin into the open door, then climbed in themselves and took up the coffin again and carried it forward out of sight and then reappeared and dropped one by one to the ground again.

‘In with you,’ the French sergeant said. ‘And dont complain because you dont have seats. There’s plenty of clean straw. And here.’ It was an army blanket. None of the three of them knew where he had got it from. That is, they had not noticed it before either. Then the American sergeant said something to the French one, in his own language without doubt since it meant nothing to them, not even when the French sergeant said, ‘Attendez’; they just stood in the slow and failing light until the American sergeant returned carrying a wooden packing-case stencilled with the cryptic symbols of ordnance or supply, that didn’t matter either, the American sergeant setting the box in place before the door and now they knew why, with a little of surprise perhaps, climbing in turn onto the box and then into the van, into almost complete darkness with only one pale shapeless gleam from the coffin’s unpainted wood to break it. They found the straw. Marthe spread the blanket on it and they sat down; at that moment someone else sprang, vaulted into the van—a man, a soldier, by his silhouette in the door where there was still a little light, an American soldier, carrying something in both hands they smelled the coffee, the American sergeant looming over them now, saying, very loud:

‘Ici café. Café,’ fumbling the three mugs down until Marthe took them and distributed them, feeling in her turn the man’s hard hand gripping her hand and the mug both while he guided the spout of the coffee pot into the mug; he even seemed to anticipate the jerk, crying ‘Watch it!’ in his own language a second or two before the shrill peanut-parcher whistle which did not presage the lurch but rather accompanied it, bracing himself against the wall as the van seemed to rush from immobility into a sort of frantic celerity with no transition whatever; a gout of burning coffee leapt from the mug in her hand onto her lap. Then the three of them managed to brace themselves back against the wall too, the whistle shrieking again shrill as friction, as though it actually were friction: not a warning of approach but a sound of protest and insensate anguish and indictment of the hard dark earth it rushed over, the vast weight of dark sky it burrowed frantically beneath, the constant and inviolable horizon it steadily clove.

This time the American sergeant knelt, braced still, using both hands again to fill the mugs, but only half full now so that, sitting against the wall, they drank by installments the hot sweet comforting coffee, the van rushing on through darkness, themselves invisible even to one another in darkness, even the gleam of the coffin at the other end of the van gone now and, their own inert bodies now matched and reconciled with the van’s speed, it was as though there were no motion at all if it had not been for the springless vibration and the anguished shrieks from the engine from time to time.