Then he didn’t even have a failure. He had a mutiny. When the barrage lifted, he was not even watching the scene beneath him, but was already looking at his watch-face. He didn’t need to watch. After watching them from beneath his stars for three years now, he had become an expert, not merely in forecasting failure, but in predicting almost exactly when, where, at what point in time and terrain, they would become void and harmless;—this, even when he was not familiar with the troops making the attack, which in the present case he was, having selected this particular regiment the day before because he knew, on the one hand, not only the condition of the regiment but its colonel’s belief in it and the record of his success with it; and on the other, its value as measured against each of the other three in the division; he knew it would deliver the attack near enough to the maximum demanded of him, yet if the foreordained failure meant its temporary wreckage or even permanent ruin, this would weigh less in the strength and morale of the division than that of any of the other three; he could never, breathing, have been convinced or even told that he had chosen the regiment out of his division exactly as the group commander had chosen the division out of his armies.
So he simply followed the jerking watch-hand, waiting for it to establish the point when all the men who were to get through the wire, would be beyond it. Then he looked up and saw nothing, nothing at all in the space beyond the wire which by now should have been filled with running and falling men; he saw only a few figures crouching along his own parapet, not advancing at all but apparently yelling, screaming and gesticulating, downward into the trench—the officers and N.C.O.’s, the company and section leaders who obviously had been betrayed as he had been. Because he knew at once what had happened. He was quite calm; he thought without passion or even astonishment: So this was reserved for me too as he dropped the binocular back into its case on his chest and snapped the cover down and spoke to the aide beside him, indicating the line to Corps Headquarters: ‘Say that the attack failed to leave the trench. Tell them to ratify me to Artillery. Say I’m on my way out now,’ and took the other telephone himself and spoke down it: ‘Gragnon. I want two barrages. Re-range one on the enemy wire. Range the other on the communication trenches behind the —th Regiment and continue until you have a remand from Corps,’ and put the telephone down and turned toward the exit.
‘Sir!’ the aide at the other telephone cried. ‘Here’s General Lallemont himself!’ But the division commander didn’t even pause, not until the tunnel broached at last into light, and then only long enough to listen for a moment to the screeching crescendo of shells overhead, listening with a sort of impersonal detached attentiveness, as if he were a messenger, a runner, sent there to ascertain whether or not the guns were still firing, and to return and report. It had been twenty years now, the first scrap of braid not even tarnished on his sleeve, since he had accepted, established as the first stone in the edifice of his career: A commander must be so hated, or at least feared by his troops that, immunised by that fury, they will attempt any odds, any time, anywhere. He stood, not stopped, just paused, his face lifted too, like the runner taking that simple precaution against the possibility that those to whom he would report might demand the authority of his eyes too, or order him to walk the whole distance back again to rectify the oversight, thinking: Except that I didn’t intend that they should hate me so much they would refuse to attack at all because I didn’t think then that a commander could be hated that much, apparently didn’t know even this morning that soldiers could hate that much, being soldiers; thinking quietly: Of course. Countermand the barrage, stop it, let them come over; the whole thing will be obliterated then, effaced, and I need only say that they were ready for me before my attack ever started, with none to refute me since those who could will no longer be alive; thinking with what he considered not even sardonicism nor even wittiness, but just humor: With a regiment which has already mutinied holding the line, they will overrun and destroy the whole division in ten or fifteen minutes. Then even those who are giving him the baton will appreciate the value of their gift;—already walking again, on for another thousand metres, almost to the end of the communication trench where his car would be waiting; and this time he did stop, utterly; he didn’t know how long it had been going on nor even how long he had been hearing it: no puny concentration now of guns behind one single regimental front; it seemed to him that he could hear the fury spreading battery to battery in both directions along the whole front until every piece in the entire sector must be in frantic action. They did come over, he thought. They did. The whole line has collapsed; not just one mutinied regiment, but the whole line of us; already turned to run back up the trench before he could catch himself, telling himself, It’s too late; you cant get back in time now,—catching himself back into sanity, or at least into trained military logic and reason, even if he did have to use what he thought was humor (and this time called wittiness too, the wit perhaps of despair) in order to do it: Nonsense. What reason could they have had for an assault at this moment? How could the boche have known even before I did, that one of my regiments was going to mutiny? And even if they did know it, how could they afford to give Bidet his German marshalcy at the rate of just one regiment at a time?—walking on again, saying quietly aloud this time: ‘That’s the clatter a falling general makes.’
Two field howitzers were firing almost over his waiting car. They had not been there at dawn when he left it, and his driver could not have heard him if he had spoken, which he did not: one peremptory gesture as he got in, sitting rigid and calm and parallel now for a while to the pandemonium of guns stretching further than hearing did; still quite calm when he got out of the car at Corps Headquarters, not even seeing at first that the corps commander was already waiting for him at the door, then reversing in midstride and returning to the car, still striding rigidly on when the corps commander overtook him and put one hand on his arm and began to draw him aside toward where the corps car waited. The corps commander spoke the army commander’s name. ‘He’s waiting for us,’ he said.
‘And then, Bidet,’ the division commander said. ‘I want authority from Bidet’s own lips to shoot them.’
‘In with you,’ the corps commander said, touching him again, almost shoving him into the car, then following, closing the door himself, the car already in motion, so that the orderly had to leap for the running board; soon they were running fast too beside, beneath the horizon’s loud parallel, the division commander rigid, erect, immobile, staring ahead, while the corps commander, leaning back, watched him, or what was visible of the calm and invincible face. ‘And suppose he refuses,’ the corps commander said.
‘I hope he does,’ the division commander said. ‘All I ask is to be sent under arrest to Chaulnesmont.’
‘Listen to me,’ the corps commander said. ‘Cant you see that it will not matter to Bidet whether it failed or not or how it failed or even whether it was made or not? that he will get his baton just the same, anyway?’
‘Even if the boche destroys us?’
‘Destroys us?’ the corps commander said. ‘Listen.’ He jerked his hand toward the east where, fast though they were moving, the division commander might have realised now that the uproar still reached further and faster than hearing moved. ‘The boche doesn’t want to destroy us, any more than we would want, could afford, to destroy him. Cant you understand? either of us, without the other, couldn’t exist? that even if nobody was left in France to confer Bidet’s baton, some boche would be selected, even if there remained only one private, and elevated high enough in French rank to do it? That Bidet didn’t choose you for this because you were Charles Gragnon, but because you were General of Division Gragnon at this time, this day, this hour?’
‘Us?’ the division commander repeated.
‘Us!’ the corps commander said.
‘So I failed, not in a front line at six this morning, but the day before yesterday in your headquarters—or maybe ten years ago, or maybe forty-seven years ago.’
‘You did not fail at all,’ the corps commander said.
‘I lost a whole regiment. And not even by an attack: by a provost marshal’s machinegun squad.’
‘Does it matter how they will die?’
‘It does to me. How it dies is the reason it died. That’s my record.’
‘Bah,’ the corps commander said.
‘Since what I lost was merely Charles Gragnon. While what I saved was France——’
‘You saved us,’ the corps commander said.
‘Us?’ the division commander repeated again.
‘Us,’ the corps commander said in that voice harsh and strong with pride: ‘the lieutenants, the captains, the majors and colonels and sergeants all with the same privilege: the opportunity to lie someday in the casket of a general or a marshal among the flags of our nation’s glory in the palace of the Invalides——’
‘Except that the Americans and British and Germans dont call theirs “Invalides”.’
‘All right, all right,’ the corps commander said. ‘—merely in return for fidelity and devotion and accepting a little risk, gambling a petty stake which, lacking glory, was no better than any vegetable’s to begin with, and deserved no less of obscurity for its fate. Failed,’ he said. ‘Failed. Charles Gragnon, from sergeant to general of division before he was forty-five years old—that is, forty-seven——’
‘And then lost.’
‘So did the British lieutenant general who commanded that army in Picardy two months ago.’
‘And whatever boche it was who lost contact or mislaid his maps and compass in Belgium three years ago,’ the division commander said. ‘And the one who thought they could come through at Verdun. And the one who thought the Chemin des Dames would be vulnerable, having a female name.’ He said: ‘So it’s not we who conquer each other, because we are not even fighting each other. It’s simple nameless war which decimates our ranks. All of us: captains and colonels, British and American and German and us, shoulder to shoulder, our backs to the long invincible wall of our glorious tradition, giving and asking.… Asking? not even accepting quarter——’
‘Bah,’ the corps commander said again. ‘It is man who is our enemy: the vast seething moiling spiritless mass of him. Once to each period of his inglorious history, one of us appears with the stature of a giant, suddenly and without warning in the middle of a nation as a dairymaid enters a buttery, and with his sword for paddle he heaps and pounds and stiffens the malleable mass and even holds it cohered and purposeful for a time. But never for always, nor even for very long: sometimes before he can even turn his back, it has relinquished, dis-cohered, faster and faster flowing and seeking back to its own base anonymity. Like that out there this morning——’ again the corps commander made the brief indicative gesture.
‘Like what out there?’ the division commander said; whereupon the corps commander said almost exactly what the group commander would say within the next hour:
‘It cannot be that you dont even know what happened.’
‘I lost Charles Gragnon.’
‘Bah,’ the corps commander said. ‘We have lost nothing. We were merely faced without warning by an occupational hazard. We hauled them up out of their ignominious mud by their bootstraps; in one more little instant they might have changed the world’s face. But they never do. They collapse, as yours did this morning. They always will. But not us. We will even drag them willy-nilly up again, in time, and they will collapse again. But not us. It wont be us.’
The army commander was waiting too; the car had barely to stop for him. As soon as it was in motion again, the division commander made for the second time his request in the flat, calm, almost dispassionate voice: ‘I shall shoot them, of course.’ The army commander didn’t answer. The division commander had not expected him to. He would not have heard any answer because he was not even listening to the other two voices murmuring to one another in brief, rapid, half-finished phrases as the corps commander briefed, reviewed to the army commander by number and designation, the regiments in the other divisions on either flank of his own, until the two voices had locked block into regimental block the long mosaic of the whole army front.
And—not only no sound of guns here, but never at any time—they were challenged at the chateau gates and entered the park, a guide on the running board now so that they didn’t even pause at the carved rococo entrance but went on around to the side, across a courtyard bustling with orderlies and couriers and popping motorcycles, passing—and the division commander neither noticed nor cared here either—two cars flying the pennons of two other army commanders, and a third car which was British, and a fourth one which had not even been manufactured on this side of the Atlantic, and on to a porte cochere at the back of the chateau and so directly into the shabby cluttered cubicle not much larger than a clothes press, notched into the chateau’s Italianate bijou like a rusted spur in a bride’s cake, from which the group commander conducted the affairs of his armies.
They were all there: the commanders of the two other armies which composed the group of armies, their heavy moustaches, already shaped to noon’s spoon, richly luxuriant from the daily ritual of soup; the English chief of staff who could have looked no more indomitably and rigidly youthful if the corset had been laced in full view on the outside of his tunic, with his bright ribbons and wisps of brass and scarlet tabs and his white hair and moustache and his blue eyes the color of icy war; and the American colonel with the face of a Boston shipping magnate (which indeed he was, or at least the entailed scion of one)—or rather, an eighteenth century face: the face of that predecessor or forefather who at twenty-five had retired rich from the quarter deck of a Middle Passage slaver, and at thirty had his name illuminated in colored glass above his Beacon Hill pew. He was the guest, the privileged, since for three years it had not even been his nation’s war, who had brought already into the conclave the privileged guest’s air of prim, faintly spinsterish disapproval—an air, quality, appearance too, almost Victorian in fact, from his comfortable old man’s shoes and the simple leather putties of a Northumberland drover (both—shoes and putties—beautifully polished but obviously purchased at different times and places and so never to match in color, and neither matching the ordnance belt which obviously had been acquired in two places also, making four different tones of leather) and the simple flareless breeches cut from the same bolt as the shorttailed jacket rising unblemished by any brass to the highboned throat with its prim piping of linen collar backside foremost like the dog-collar of a priest. (There was an anecdote about that uniform, or rather about its wearer, the colonel, going the rounds of messes six months ago, about how, shortly after the American headquarters had been set up, a junior officer—no Bostonian, this: a New Yorker—had appeared before the colonel one morning in the Bedford cords of a British officer and a long skirted tunic cut by a London tailor, though it did have the high closed throat; the colonel would meet many duplicates of it later, but not then because that was 1917; the youth appearing a little sheepishly, probably a little fearfully, wishing perhaps, as many another pioneer has done, that he had let someone else be first, before the cold banker’s eyes of his superior, saying presently: ‘You think I shouldn’t have done it? It’s bad form, taste, aping——’; then the colonel, pleasant, immediate: ‘Why not? They taught us the art of war in 1783 by losing one to us; they should not object to lending us the clothes in 1917 to win one for them.’)
