A Fable

He followed the candle into the same bedroom at which the knightly highwayman, along with the shade of the imperial marshal, would have looked in contemptuous unbelief, in which the marquis descendants of the Florentine might or might not have slept, but in which the Levantine without doubt did, and saw something else which, he realised now, he had not expected to find changed either, though the man who wore them had. Standing at the foot of the bed, he faced across the fretted garlanded painted footboard the group commander sitting against the piled pillows in the same flannel nightcap and nightshirt which he too had brought to Africa that day twenty-five years ago when he had had to leave his wife under the broiling eaves of the Oran native house because they had no money then (he the only child of the widow living—or trying to—on the pension of her husband, a Savoyard schoolmaster, she one of the six daughters of a retired sergeant-major of marines) while the husband was absent for almost two years on his first subaltern’s tour of outpost duty;—facing the man who even now did not look like even a French soldier and who on that first day twenty-five years ago seemed to have been completely and even criminally miscast, looking then himself like a consumptive school teacher, condemned not just to simple failure but to destitution and suicide too, who weighed then less than a hundred pounds (he was stouter now, almost plump in fact, and somewhere in his career like that of a delayed rocket, the glasses had vanished too) and wearing spectacles of such fierce magnification that he was almost blind without them, and even with them too since for a third of the time the lenses were sweated to opaqueness and he spent another third wiping them dry with the end of his burnous in order to see at all before sweating them blind again, and who had brought into the field life of that regiment of desert cavalry something of the monastery, something of the cold fierce blinkless intolerant glare which burns at midnight in the dedicated asepsis of clinical or research laboratories: that pitiless preoccupation with man, not as an imperial implement, least of all as that gallant and puny creature bearing undismayed on his frail bones and flesh the vast burden of his long inexplicable incomprehensible tradition and journey, not even in fact as a functioning animal but as a functioning machine in the same sense that the earthworm is: alive purely and simply for the purpose of transporting, without itself actually moving, for the distance of its corporeal length, the medium in which it lives, which, given time, would shift the whole earth that infinitesimal inch, leaving at last its own blind insatiate jaws chewing nothing above the spinning abyss: that cold, scathing, contemptuous preoccupation with body vents and orifices and mucous membrane as though he himself owned neither, who declared that no army was better than its anus, since even without feet it could still crawl forward and fight, and so earned his nickname because of his inflexible belief in his doctrine—a nickname spoken at first in contempt and derision, then in alarm and anger and then rage and then concerned and impotent fury since his inflexible efforts to prove his doctrine soon extended beyond his own platoon, into troops and squadrons where, still a simple junior lieutenant of cavalry and not even a medical officer, he had no right nor business at all; and then spoken no longer in ridicule nor even contumely and anger anywhere, because presently the whole African establishment knew how, sitting in a tent, he had told his regimental commander how to recover two scouts captured one night by a band of mounted tribesmen who vanished afterward like antelope; and it worked, and later, still sitting in a tent, told the general himself how to avail to a hitherto dry outpost a constant supply of drinking water, and that worked too; and moved from the classroom colonelcy to the command of a field division in 1914 and three years later was the competent and successful commander of an army group and already unofficially next but one to a marshal’s baton while still less than fifty-five years old, sitting in his flannel nightshirt and cap in the gaudy bed in the rococo room lighted by the cheap candle in its tin candlestick which the batman had set on the bedside table, like an ex-grocer alderman surprised, but neither alarmed nor even concerned, in a sumptuous bordello.

‘You were right,’ the division commander said. ‘I wont go to Chaulnesmont.’

‘You have wrestled all night,’ the group commander said. ‘With what angel?’

‘What?’ the division commander said. He blinked for only a second. Then he said, firmly and calmly, like a man stepping firmly forward into complete darkness, drawing a folded paper from his tunic as he did so and dropping it onto the group commander’s covered knees: ‘It didn’t take that long.’