A Fable

It bade fair to be another bright and perennial lark-filled vernal morning; the gaudy uniforms and arms and jangling accoutrements and even the ebon faces too of the Senegalese regiment seemed to gleam in it as, to the cryptic tribal equatorial cries of its noncoms, it filed onto the parade ground and formed three sides of a hollow square facing the three freshly-planted posts set in a symmetric row on the edge of a long pit or ditch, almost filled and obliterated now by four years of war’s refuse—tin cans, bottles, old messkits, worn-out cooking utensils, boots, inextricable coils of rusting and useless wire—from which the dirt had been excavated to form the railroad embankment running across the end of the parade, which would serve as a backstop for what bullets neither flesh nor wood absorbed. They came into position then at rest and grounded arms and stood at ease and then easy, whereupon there rose a steady unemphatic gabble, not festive: just gregarious, like people waiting for the opening of a marketplace; the pallid perennial almost invisible lighters winked and flared from perennial cigarette to cigarette among the babble of voices, the ebon and gleaming faces not even watching the working party of white soldiers while they tamped the last earth about the posts and took up their tools and departed in a disorderly straggle like a company of reapers leaving a field of hay.

Then a distant bugle cried once or twice, the Senegalese N.C.O.’s shouted, the gaudy ranks doused the cigarettes without haste and with a sort of negligent, almost inattentive deliberation came to alert and at ease as the sergeant-major of the city garrison, a holstered pistol strapped outside his long buttoned-back coat, came into the vacant side of the square before the three posts and stopped and stood as, to the harsh abrupt ejaculations of the new N.C.O.’s, the mutinied regiment filed into the empty rectangle and huddled, pariahs still, hatless and unarmed, still unshaven, alien, stained still with Aisne and Oise and Marne mud so that against the gaudy arras of the Senegalese they looked like harassed and harried and homeless refugees from another planet, moiling a little though quiet and even orderly or at least decorous until suddenly a handful of them, eleven it was, broke suddenly out and ran in a ragged clump toward the three posts and had knelt facing the posts in the same ragged clump by the time the sergeant-major had shouted something and an N.C.O.’s voice took it up and a file of Senegalese came rapidly out and around and across the empty parade and surrounded the kneeling men and pulled them, not at all roughly, back onto their feet and turned them and herded them back among their companions like drovers behind a small band of temporarily strayed sheep.

Now a small party of horsemen rode rapidly up from the rear and stopped just outside the square, behind it; they were the town major, his adjutant, the provost marshal adjutant and three orderlies. The sergeant-major shouted, the parade (save for the pariah regiment) came to attention in one long metallic clash, the sergeant-major wheeled and saluted the town major across the rigid palisade of Senegalese heads, the town major accepted the parade and stood it at ease then back to attention again and returned it to the sergeant-major who in his turn stood it at ease again and turned to face the three posts as, abruptly and apparently from nowhere, a sergeant and file came up with the three hatless prisoners interspersed among them, whom they bound quickly to the three posts—the man who had called himself Lapin, then the corporal, then the simian-like creature whom Lapin had called Cassetête or Horse—leaving them facing in to the hollow of the square though they couldn’t see it now because at the moment there filed between them and it another squad of some twenty men with a sergeant, who halted and quarter-turned and stood them at ease with their backs to the three doomed ones, whom the sergeant-major now approached in turn, to examine rapidly the cord which bound Lapin to his post, then on to the corporal, already extending his (the sergeant-major’s) hand to the Médaille Militaire on the corporal’s coat, saying in a rapid murmur:

‘You dont want to keep this.’

‘No,’ the corporal said. ‘No use to spoil it.’ The sergeant-major wrenched it off the coat, not savagely: just rapidly, already moving on.

‘I know who to give it to,’ he said, moving on to the third man, who said, drooling a little, not alarmed, not even urgent: just diffident and promptive, as you address someone, a stranger, on whom your urgent need depends but who may have temporarily forgotten your need or forgotten you:

‘Paris.’