A Fable

Three hours after midnight he was sitting on the firestep where the sentry leaned at the aperture while the spaced starshells sniffed and plopped and whispered down the greasy dark and the remote gun winked and thudded and after a while winked and thudded again. He was talking in a voice which, whatever else it contained, it was not exhaustion—a voice dreamy and glib, apparently not only inattentive to itself but seemingly incapable of compelling attention anywhere. Yet each time he spoke, the sentry without even removing his face from the aperture would give a start, a motion convulsive and intolerable, like someone goaded almost beyond endurance.

‘One regiment,’ the runner said. ‘One French regiment. Only a fool would look on war as a condition; it’s too expensive. War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war. We’ve known that for six thousand years. The trouble was, it took us six thousand years to learn how to do it. For six thousand years we labored under the delusion that the only way to stop a war was to get together more regiments and battalions than the enemy could, or vice versa, and hurl them upon each other until one lot was destroyed and, the one having nothing left to fight with, the other could stop fighting. We were wrong, because yesterday morning, by simply declining to make an attack, one single French regiment stopped us all.’

This time the sentry didn’t move, leaning—braced rather—against the trench-wall beneath the vicious rake of his motionless helmet, peering apparently almost idly through the aperture save for that rigidity about his back and shoulders—a kind of immobility on top of immobility—as though he were braced not against the dirt wall but rather against the quiet and empty air behind him. Nor had the runner moved either, though from his speech it was almost as if he had turned his face to look directly at the back of the sentry’s head. ‘What do you see?’ he said. ‘No novelty, you think?—the same stinking strip of ownerless valueless frantic dirt between our wire and theirs, which you have been peering at through a hole in a sandbag for four years now? the same war which we had come to believe did not know how to end itself, like the amateur orator searching desperately for a definitive preposition? You’re wrong. You can go out there now, at least during the next fifteen minutes say, and not die probably. Yes, that may be the novelty: you can go out there now and stand erect and look about you—granted of course that any of us really ever can stand erect again. But we will learn how. Who knows? in four or five years we may even have got our neck-muscles supple enough simply to duck our heads again in place of merely bowing them to await the stroke, as we have been doing for four years now; in ten years, certainly.’ The sentry didn’t move, like a blind man suddenly within range of a threat, the first warning of which he must translate through some remaining secondary sense, already too late to fend with. ‘Come,’ the runner said. ‘You’re a man of the world. Indeed, you have been a man of this world since noon yesterday, even if they didn’t bother to tell you so until fifteen oclock. In fact, we are all men of this world now, all of us who died on the fourth day of August four years ago——’

The sentry moved again with that convulsive start; he said in a harsh thick furious murmur: ‘For the last time. I warned you.’

‘—all the fear and the doubt, the agony and the grief and the lice—Because it’s over. Isn’t it over?’

‘Yes!’ the sentry said.

‘Of course it’s over. You came out in … fifteen, wasn’t it? You’ve seen a lot of war too. Of course you know when one is over.’

‘It is over!’ the sentry said. ‘Didn’t you hear the.… ing guns stop right out there in front of you?’

‘Then why dont we go home?’

‘Can they draw the whole.… ing line out at once? Leave the whole.… ing front empty at one time?’

‘Why not?’ the runner said. ‘Isn’t it over?’ It was as if he had fixed the sentry as the matador does the bull, leaving the animal capable only of watching him. ‘Over. Finished. Done. No more parades. Tomorrow we shall go home; by this time tomorrow night we shall have hoicked from the beds of our wives and sweethearts the manufacturers of walking-out shoepegs and Enfield primers——’ He thought rapidly He’s going to kick me. He said, ‘All right. Sorry. I didn’t know you had a wife.’

‘No more I have,’ the sentry said in his shaking whisper. ‘So will you stow it now? Will you for bleeding Christ?’

‘Of course you haven’t. How wise you are. A girl in a High Street pub, of course. Or perhaps a city girl—a Greater City girl, Houndsditch or Bermondsey, towarding forty but not looking within five years of it, and’s had her troubles too—who hasn’t?—but suppose she does, who wouldn’t choose her and lucky, who can appreciate a man, to one of these young tarts swapping cove for cove with each leave train——’