‘Nah,’ the corporal said. ‘It was just one regiment. Fact is, they’re putting one of the biggest shoots yet in jerry’s support and communications along the whole front right this minute. Been at it ever since dawn——’
‘But one regiment quit,’ the runner said. ‘One did.’ Now the corporal was not looking at him at all.
‘Have a wet,’ the corporal said.
‘Besides,’ the runner said gently, ‘you’re wrong. The whole French front quit at noon.’
‘But not ours,’ the corporal said.
‘Not yet,’ the runner said. ‘That may take a little time.’ The corporal was not looking at him. Now the corporal said nothing whatever. With a light, rapid gesture the runner touched one shoulder with the opposite hand. ‘There’s nothing up here now,’ he said.
‘Have a wet,’ the corporal said, not looking at him.
And an hour later he was close enough to the lines to see the smoke-and-dust pall as well as hear the frantic uproar of the concentrated guns along the horizon; at three oclock, though twelve miles away at another point, he heard the barrage ravel away into the spaced orderly harmless-seeming poppings as of salutes or signals, and it seemed to him that he could see the whole long line from the sea-beaches up the long slant of France to old tired Europe’s rooftree, squatted and crouched with filthy and noisome men who had forgot four years ago how to stand erect anymore, amazed and bewildered and unable to believe it either, forewarned and filled with hope though (he knew it now) they must have been; he thought, said aloud almost: Yes, that’s it. It’s not that we didn’t believe: it’s that we couldn’t, didn’t know how anymore. That’s the most terrible thing they have done to us. That’s the most terrible.
That was all, then. For almost twenty-four hours in fact, though he didn’t know it then. A sergeant-major was waiting for them as they returned, gathered again at Corps Headquarters that night—the nine from his Division and perhaps two dozen others from other units in the Corps. ‘Who’s senior here?’ the sergeant-major said. But he didn’t even wait on himself: he glanced rapidly about at them again and with the unerring instinct of his vocation chose a man in the middle thirties who looked exactly like what he probably was—a demoted lance corporal out of a 1912 Northwest Frontier garrison. ‘You’re acting sergeant,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You will indent for suppers and bedding here.’ He looked at them again. ‘I suppose it’s no use to tell you not to talk.’
‘Talk about what?’ one said. ‘What do we know to talk about.’
‘Talk about that then,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘You are relieved until reveille. Carry on.’ And that was all then. They slept on a stone floor in a corridor; they were given breakfast (a good one; this was a Corps Headquarters) before reveille went even; what bugles they—he, the runner—heard were at other Division and Corps Headquarters and parks and depots where the motorcycle took him during another day like yesterday in his minuscule walking-on (riding-on) part in bringing war to a pause, a halt, a stop; morning noon and afternoon up and down back areas not beneath a pall of peace but a thrall of dreamlike bustling for a holiday. The night again, the same sergeant-major was waiting for them—the nine from his Division and the two dozen others. ‘That’s all,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Lorries are waiting to take you back in.’ That’s all, he thought. All you have to do, all you need to do, all He ever asked and died for eighteen hundred and eighty-five years ago, in the lorry now with his group of the thirty-odd others, the afterglow of sunset fading out of the sky like the tideless shoreless sea of despair itself ebbing away, leaving only the peaceful grief and the hope; when the lorry stopped and presently he leaned out to see what was wrong—a road which it was unable to cross because of transport on it, a road which he remembered as running southeast from up near Boulogne somewhere, now so dense with hooded and lightless lorries moving nose to tail like a line of elephants that their own lorry had to put them down here, to find their ways home as best they might, his companions dispersing, leaving him standing there in the last of afterglow while the vans crawled endless past him, until a head, a voice called his name from one of them, saying, ‘Hurry, get up quick.… something to show you,’ so that he had to run to overtake it and had already begun to swing himself up before he recognised it: the old watchman from the St Omer ammunition dump, who had come to France four years ago to search for his son and who had been the first to tell him about the thirteen French soldiers.
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——’
The sentry began to curse, in the same harsh spent furious monotone, cursing the runner with obscene and dull unimagination out of the stalls and tack-rooms and all the other hinder purlieus of what must have been his old vocation, until at the same moment the runner sat quickly and lightly up and the sentry began to turn back to the aperture in a series of jerks like a mechanical toy running down, murmuring again in his shaking furious voice: ‘Remember. I told you’ as two men came around the traverse and up the trench in single file, indistinguishable in their privates’ uniforms save for the officer’s stick and the sergeant’s chevrons.
‘Post?’ the officer said.
‘Two-nine,’ the sentry said. The officer had lifted his foot to the firestep when he saw, seemed to see, the runner.
‘Who’s that?’ he said. The runner began to stand up, promptly enough but without haste. The sergeant pronounced his name.
‘He was in that special draft of runners Corps drew out yesterday morning. They were dismissed to dugouts as soon as they reported back tonight, and told to stop there. This man was, anyway.’
‘Oh,’ the officer said. That was when the sergeant pronounced the name. ‘Why aren’t you there?’
‘Yes sir,’ the runner said, picking up the rifle and turning quite smartly, moving back down the trench until he had vanished beyond the traverse. The officer completed his stride onto the firestep; now both the helmets slanted motionless and twinlike between the sandbags while the two of them peered through the aperture. Then the sentry said, murmured so quietly that it seemed impossible that the sergeant six feet away could have heard him:
‘Nothing more’s come up I suppose, sir?’ For another half minute the officer peered through the aperture. Then he turned and stepped down to the duckboards, the sentry turning with him, the sergeant moving again into file behind him, the officer himself already beginning to move when he spoke:
‘When you are relieved, go down your dugout and stay there.’ Then they were gone. The sentry began to turn back toward the aperture. Then he stopped. The runner was now standing on the duckboards below him; while they looked at one another the star-shell sniffed and traced its sneering arc and plopped into parachute, the faint glare washing over the runner’s lifted face and then, even after the light itself had died, seeming to linger still on it as if the glow had not been refraction at all but water or perhaps grease; he spoke in a tense furious murmur not much louder than a whisper:
‘Do you see now? Not for us to ask what nor why but just go down a hole in the ground and stay there until they decide what to do. No: just how to do it because they already know what. Of course they wont tell us. They wouldn’t have told us anything at all if they hadn’t had to, hadn’t had to tell us something, tell the rest of you something before the ones of us who were drawn out yesterday for special couriers out of Corps would get back in tonight and tell you what we had heard. And even then, they told you just enough to keep you in the proper frame of mind so that, when they said Go down the dugouts and stay there you would do it. And even I wouldn’t have known any more in time if on the way back in tonight I hadn’t blundered onto that lorry train.
‘No: that’s wrong too; just known in time that they are already up to something. Because all of us know by now that something is wrong. Dont you see? something happened down there yesterday morning in the French front, a regiment failed—burked—mutinied, we dont know what and are not going to know what because they aren’t going to tell us. Besides, it doesn’t matter what happened. What matters is, what happened afterward. At dawn yesterday a French regiment did something—did or failed to do something which a regiment in a front line is not supposed to do or fail to do, and as a result of it, the entire war in western Europe took a recess at three oclock yesterday afternoon. Dont you see? When you are in battle and one of your units fails, the last thing you do, dare do, is quit. Instead, you snatch up everything else you’ve got and fling it in as quick and hard as you can, because you know that that’s exactly what the enemy is going to do as soon as he discovers or even suspects you have trouble on your side. Of course you’re going to be one unit short of him when you meet; your hope, your only hope, is that if you can only start first and be going the fastest, momentum and surprise might make up a little of it.
‘But they didn’t. Instead, they took a recess, remanded, the French at noon, us and the Americans three hours later. And not only us, but jerry too. Dont you see? How can you remand in war, unless your enemy agrees too? And why should jerry have agreed, after squatting under the sort of barrage which four years had trained him to know meant that an attack was coming, then no attack came or failed or whatever it was it did, and four years had certainly trained him to the right assumption for that; when the message, signal, request—whatever it was—came over suggesting a remand, why should he have agreed to it, unless he had a reason as good as the one we had, maybe the same reason we had? The same reason; those thirteen French soldiers apparently had no difficulty whatever going anywhere they liked in our back-areas for three years, why weren’t they across yonder in jerry’s too, since we all know that, unless you’ve got the right properly signed paper in your hand, it’s a good deal more difficult to go to Paris from here than to Berlin; any time you want to go east from here, all you need is a British or French or American uniform. Or perhaps they didn’t even need to go themselves, perhaps just wind, moving air, carried it. Or perhaps not even moving air but just air, spreading by attrition from invisible and weightless molecule to molecule as disease, smallpox spreads, or fear, or hope—just enough of us, all of us in the mud here saying together, Enough of this, let’s have done with this.
