A Fable

He didn’t ask the division commander to sit down when the army- and corps-commanders did; as far as the division commander could have affirmed, the group commander had not even remarked his presence, leaving him to stand while that unbidden and uncaring part of his attention recorded the tedious recapitulation of regiments and divisions, not merely by their positions in the front but by their past records and the districts of their derivation and their officers’ names and records, the army commander talking, rapid and succinct, nothing still of alarm in the voice and not very much of concern: just alertness, precision, care. Nor did it seem to the division commander watching—or not specifically watching the group commander because he was not really watching anything: just looking steadily at or toward the group commander as he had been doing ever since he entered, aware suddenly that he not only could not remember when he had blinked his eyes last, but that he felt no need to blink them—that the group commander was listening either, though he must have been, quietly and courteously and inattentively; until suddenly the division commander realised that the group commander had been looking at him for several seconds. Then the others seemed to become aware of it too; the army commander stopped talking, then said:

‘This is Gragnon. It was his division.’

‘Ah yes,’ the group commander said. He spoke directly to the division commander in the same tone, pleasant and inflectionless: ‘Many thanks. You may return to your troops,’ and turned again to the army commander. ‘Yes?’ Then for another half minute, the army commander’s voice; and now the division commander, rigid and unblinking, was looking at nothing at all, rigid and unblinking still until the army commander’s voice stopped again, the division commander not even bothering to bring vision back behind his eyes even after the group commander spoke to him again: ‘Yes?’

Standing not quite at attention, looking not at anything but merely staring at rigid eyelevel above the group commander’s head, the division commander made his formal request for permission to have the whole regiment executed. The group commander heard him through. There was nothing whatever in the group commander’s face.

‘Endorsed as received,’ he said. ‘Return to your troops.’ The division commander did not move. He might not have heard even. The group commander sat back in his chair and spoke to the army commander without even turning his head: ‘Henri. Will you conduct these gentlemen to the little drawing room and have them bring wine, whisky, tea, whatever they fancy?’ He said to the American colonel in quite passable English: ‘I have heard of your United States coca cola. My regrets and apologies that I do not have that for you yet. But soon we hope, eh?’

‘Thank you, General,’ the colonel said in better than passable French: ‘The only European terms we decline to accept are German ones.’

Then they were gone; the door closed behind them. The division commander had not moved. The group commander looked at him. His voice was still merely pleasant, not even quizzical: ‘A general of division. You have come a long way from Africa, Sergeant Gragnon.’

‘So have you,’ the division commander said, ‘—Mama Bidet.’—speaking in his cold, flat voice, with no inflection nor emphasis either, the name given not secretly so much as merely when he was out of earshot, or perhaps not even that but simply from the inviolable security of their rankless state, by the men in ranks to the group commander soon after he came out as a subaltern into the African regiment in which the division commander was already a sergeant: ‘A long way, Monsieur the General Cabinet, Monsieur soon-to-be the Marshal d’Aisance.’ And still nothing in the group commander’s face; his voice was still calm, yet there now crept into it a shadow of something else, something speculative and even a little astonished, though the division commander would prove that he at least had not remarked it. Then the group commander said:

‘I seem to have been more right than even I knew or hoped. When you came in, I felt that perhaps I owed you an apology. Now I am sure of it.’

‘You demean yourself,’ the division commander said. ‘How could a man doubting his own infallibility get that many stars? And how could a man with that many stars retain any doubts about anything?’

The group commander looked at the division commander for another moment. Then he said: ‘It cant be possible that you dont even see that it has already ceased to matter whether these three thousand men or these four men die or not. That there is already more to this than the execution of twice three thousand men could remedy or even change.’