A Fable

‘Their souls, obviously,’ the major said. ‘Since their deaths are already pledged.’ And that was all. In the whole King’s Regulations, through which had been winnowed and tested and proved every conceivable khaki or blue activity and posture and intention, with a rule provided for it and a penalty provided for the rule, there was nothing to cover it: who (the man) had infringed no discipline, trafficked with no enemy, failed to shine no brass nor wrap properly any puttie nor salute any officer. Yet still the colonel sat there, until the major, a little more than curious now, said, ‘What? Say it.’

‘I cant,’ the colonel said. ‘Because the only word I can think of is love,’—explaining that: the stupid, surly, dirty, unsocial, really unpleasant man, who apparently neither gambled nor drank (during the last two months, the battalion sergeant-major and the colonel’s orderly sergeant had sacrificed—unofficially, of course—no little of their own free time and slumber too, walking suddenly into dugouts and rest billets and estaminets, ascertaining that), who, in the light of day, seemed to have no friends at all, yet each time the sergeant-major or the orderly sergeant entered one of the dugouts or billets, they would find it jammed with men. And not the same men either, but each time there would be a new set of faces, so that in each period between two pay-days, the entire battalion roll could have been called by anyone detailed to sit beside the man’s bunk; indeed, on pay-day itself, or for a day or two days after it, the line, queue, had been known to extend into the street, as when people wait to enter a cinema, while the dugout, the room, itself would be jammed to the door with men standing or sitting or squatting about the bunk or corner in which the man himself lay quite often asleep, morose and resigned and not even talking, like people waiting in a dentist’s anteroom;—waiting, that was it, as both the sergeant-major and the sergeant realised, if for nothing else except for them—the sergeant-major and the sergeant—to leave.

‘Why dont you give him a stripe?’ the major said. ‘If it’s devotion, why not employ it for the greater glory of English arms?’

‘How?’ the colonel said. ‘Try to buy with one file, the man who already owns the battalion?’

‘Perhaps you should assign your own insurance and pay-book over to him.’

‘Yes,’ the colonel said. ‘If he gives me time to.’ And that was all. The colonel spent fourteen hours with his wife. At noon the next day, he was in Boulogne again; at six that afternoon, his car entered the village where the battalion was in rest billets. ‘Stop here,’ the colonel said, and sat for a moment in the car, looking at the queue of men which was moving infinitesimally toward and through the gate into one of those sweating stone courtyards which for a thousand years the French have been dotting about the Picard and Artois and Flanders countryside, apparently for the purpose of housing between battles the troops of the allied nations come to assist in preserving them. No, the colonel thought, not a cinema; the anticipation is not great enough, although the urgency is twice as strong. They are like the parade outside a latrine. ‘Drive on,’ he said.