A Fable

Some time after midnight that Tuesday (it was Wednesday now) two British privates were resting on the firestep of a front-line trench below the Bethune slag-heap. Two months ago they were looking at it not only from another angle but from another direction; until then, the line’s relation to it seemed fixed to a longer life than memory’s. But since the breakthrough there had been no fixed line at all. The old corridor had still remained of course, roofed over with the shriek and stink of cordite, but attached to the earth only at the two ends: the one somewhere on the Channel and the other somewhere up the roof of France, so that it seemed to belly before the Teutonic gale like a clothesline about to carry away in a wind. And since three oclock yesterday afternoon (yesterday morning rather, noon when the French quit) it had merely hung in its spent bulge against the arrested weight of the Germanic air, even roofless now since with dark the last patrolling aircraft had gone to roost and there remained only the flares arching up from behind the flickerless wire with a faint hiss, a prolonged whispered sniff, to bloom and parachute and hang against the dark with the cold thick texture and color of the working lights in a police morgue, then sliding silently down the black air like drops of grease on a window-pane, and far away to the North the spaced blink and thump of a single gun, a big one, with no following burst at all, as though it were firing at the Channel, the North Sea itself fifty miles away, or perhaps at some target even vaster and more immune than that: at Cosmos, space, infinity, lifting its voice against the Absolute, the ultimate I-Am, harmless: the iron maw of Dis, toothless, unwearyable, incapable, bellowing.

One of the privates was a sentry. He stood on the firestep, leaning slightly against the wall beside the sand-bagged aperture in which his rifle lay loaded and cocked and with the safety off. In civil life he had indubitably been a horse-groom, because even in khaki and even after four years of infantryman’s war he still moved, stood in an aura, effluvium of stalls and tack-rooms—a hard-faced jockey-sized man who seemed to have brought on his warped legs even into the French and Flemish mud something of hard, light, razor-edge horses and betting-rings, who even wore the steel helmet at the same vicious rake of the filthy heavy-checked cap which would have been the badge of his old dead calling and dedication. But this was only inference, from his appearance and general air, not from anything he ever told anyone; even his mates in the battalion who had stayed alive long enough to have known him four years knew nothing about his past, as if he did not have one, had not even been born until the fourth of August 1914—a paradox who had no business in an infantry battalion at all, and an enigma to the extent that six months after he entered the battalion (this was about Christmas, 1914) the colonel commanding it had been summoned to Whitehall to make a specific report on him. Because the authorities had discovered that eleven privates in the battalion had made the man beneficiary of their soldiers’ life assurance policies; by the time the colonel reached the war ministry, the number had increased to twenty, and although the colonel had made an intensive two-days’ investigation of his own before leaving the battalion, he knew little more than they in London did. Because the company officers knew nothing about it, and from the N.C.O.’s he got only rumor and hearsay, and from the men themselves, only a blank and respectful surprised innocence as to the man’s very existence, the sum of which was, that the (eleven when the war office got its first report, and twenty by the time the colonel reached London, and—the colonel had been absent from the battalion twelve hours now—nobody knew how many more by this time) men had approached the battalion sergeant-major all decorously and regularly and apparently of their own free will and desire, and made the request which, since none of them had legal heirs, was their right to make, and the Empire’s duty to acquiesce to. As for the man himself——

‘Yes,’ the staff-major who was doing the informal questioning, said. ‘What did he say about it?’ and then, after a moment: ‘You didn’t even question him?’

This time, the colonel did shrug. ‘Why?’ he said.

‘Quite,’ the major said. ‘Though I should have been tempted—if only to learn what he can be selling them.’

‘I should rather know what the ones who have legal heirs and cant make over the insurance, are paying him instead,’ the colonel said.