But she went no further than the group she had emerged from, to turn and stand again, watching, the worn sleepless face still eager, unconvinced, indomitable, while the sergeant turned back to his squad and stopped and gave them another scathing and introverted look. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘All of you that aint seeing double, let’s go. Because I dont want to mess around out there long enough to get one stinking carcass, let alone two.’
‘How about a drink first?’ one said.
‘Try and get it.’
‘Want me to carry your grip, Sarge?’ another said. The sergeant’s answer was simple, brief and obscene. He turned, they followed raggedly. A lorry, a closed van, was waiting for them, with a driver and a corporal. They drew the empty coffin from its compartment and carried it to the van and slid it inside and got in themselves. There was straw for them to sit on; the sergeant himself sat on the coffin, the valise in his lap and one hand still gripping the handle as if he expected one or maybe all of them to try to snatch it from him. The lorry moved.
‘Dont we get any breakfast?’ one said.
‘You drank yours,’ the sergeant said. ‘After you stole it first.’ But there was breakfast: bread and coffee at a zinc bar in a tiny bistro for some inscrutable reason untouched by the shelling except that it had a new American-made sheet-iron roof, which stuck upward from the tumbled masses of collapsed walls surrounding and enclosing it. That was arranged too; the meal was already paid for from Paris.
‘Christ,’ one said. ‘The army sure wants this corpse bad if they have started buying grub from civilians.’ The sergeant ate with the valise on the bar before him, between his arms. Then they were in the lorry again, the sergeant gripping the valise on his lap; now, through the open rear door of the lorry as it crept between the piles of rubble and the old craters, they were able to see something of the ruined city—the mountains and hills of shattered masonry which men were already at work clearing away and out of which there rose already an astonishing number of the American-made iron roofs to glint like silver in the morning sun; maybe the Americans had not fought all the war but at least they were paying for the restoration of its devastation.
That is, the sergeant could have seen it because almost at once his men had entered a state resembling coma, even before they had crossed the Meuse bridge and reached the corner, where in time the five heroic-sized figures would stare steadily and indomitably eastward in bas-relief from the symbolical section of stone bastion which would frame and contain them. Or rather, the sergeant could have been able to, sitting with the valise huddled between his arms on his lap like a mother with a sick baby, watching them intently for perhaps another ten minutes where they lay sprawled against one another in the straw, the lorry well out of the city now. Then he rose, still carrying the valise; there was a small sliding panel in the lorry’s front wall. He opened it and spoke rapidly and quietly for a moment with the corporal beside the driver, then he unlocked the valise and took all the bottles save one of brandy out of it and passed them to the corporal and locked the valise on the single remaining bottle and returned and sat on the coffin again, the valise huddled again on his lap.
So now, as the lorry climbed the repaired road to follow the curve of the Meuse Heights, the sergeant at least could watch beyond the open door the ruined and slain land unfold—the corpse of earth, some of which, its soil soured forever with cordite and human blood and anguish, would never live again, as though not only abandoned by man but repudiated forever by God Himself: the craters, the old trenches and rusted wire, the stripped and blasted trees, the little villages and farms like shattered skulls no longer even recognisable as skulls, already beginning to vanish beneath a fierce rank colorless growth of nourishmentless grass coming not tenderly out of the earth’s surface but as though miles and leagues up from Hell itself, as if the Devil himself were trying to hide what man had done to the earth which was his mother.
Then the battered fort which nevertheless had endured, steadfast still even though France, civilization no longer needed it; steadfast still even if only to taint the air not only more than two years after the battle had ended and the mass rotting should have annealed itself, but more than twice that many months after the war itself had stopped. Because as soon as the sergeant, standing now and clasping the valise to his breast, roused them with the side of his boot, they were already smelling it: who had not thought they would have to begin that until they were actually inside the fort; though once the sergeant had kicked and cursed the last of them out of the lorry, they saw why—a midden of white bones and skulls and some still partly covered with strips and patches of what looked like brown or black leather, and boots and stained uniforms and now and then what would be an intact body wrapped in a fragment of tarpaulin, beside one of the low entrances in the stone wall; while they watched two more soldiers in butchers’ aprons and with pieces of cloth bound over their nostrils and lower faces, emerged from the low entrance carrying between them a two-man wheel-less barrow heaped with more scraps and fragments of the fort’s old 1916 defenders. In time there would be a vast towered chapel, an ossuary, visible for miles across the Heights like the faintly futuristic effigy of a gigantic gray goose or an iguanodon created out of gray stone not by a sculptor but by expert masons—a long tremendous nave enclosed by niches in each of which a light would burn always, the entrance to each arched with the carven names taken not from identity discs but from regimental lists since there would be nothing to match them with—squatting over the vast deep pit into which the now clean inextricable anonymous bones of what had been man, men, would be shoveled and sealed; facing it would be the slope white with the orderly parade of Christian crosses bearing the names and regimental designations of the bones which could be identified; and beyond it, that other slope ranked not with crosses but with rounded headstones set faintly but intractably oblique to face where Mecca was, set with a consistent and almost formal awryness and carved in cryptic and indecipherable hieroglyph because the bones here had been identifiable too which had once been men come this far from their hot sun and sand, this far from home and all familiar things, to make this last sacrifice in the northern rain and mud and cold, for what cause unless their leaders, ignorant too, could have explained some of it, a little of it to them in their own tongue. But now there only the dun-colored battered and enduring walls of the fortress, flanked by the rounded sunken concrete domes of machine-gun placements like giant mushrooms, and the midden and the two soldiers in butchers’ aprons dumping their barrow onto it then turning with the empty barrow to look at them for a moment above the taut rags over their nostrils and mouths with the fixed exhaustless unseeing unrecognising glares of sleepwalkers in nightmares before descending the steps again; and over all, permeant and invincible, the odor, the smell, as though, victims of man and therefore quit of him, they had bequeathed him that which had already been invulnerable to him for three years and would still be for thirty more or even three hundred more, so that all that remained to him was to abandon it, flee it.
They looked at the midden, then at the low orifice in the dun stone through which the two soldiers with the barrow had seemed to plunge, drop as though into the bowels of the earth; they did not know yet that in their eyes too now was that fixed assuageless glare of nightmares. ‘Christ,’ one said. ‘Let’s grab one off that dump there and get the hell out of here.’
‘No,’ the sergeant said; there was something behind his voice not vindictiveness so much as repressed gleeful anticipation—if they had known it. He had worn his uniform ever since September 1914 without ever having become a soldier; he could remain in it for another decade and still would not be one. He was an office man, meticulous and reliable; his files were never out of order, his returns never late. He neither drank nor smoked; he had never heard a gun fired in his life save the amateur sportsmen banging away at whatever moved on Sunday morning around the little Loire village where he had been born and lived until his motherland demanded him. Perhaps all this was why he had been given this assignment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The order says, Proceed to Verdun and thence with expedition and despatch to the catacombs beneath the Fort of Valaumont and extricate therefrom one complete cadaver of one French soldier unidentified and unidentifiable either by name regiment or rank, and return with it. And that’s what we’re going to do. Get on with you: forward.’
‘Let’s have a drink first,’ one said.
‘No,’ the sergeant said. ‘Afterward. Get it loaded into the lorry first.’
‘Come on, Sarge,’ another said. ‘Think what that stink will be down that hole.’
‘No, I tell you!’ the sergeant said. ‘Get on there! Forward!’ He didn’t lead them; he drove, herded them, to bow their heads one by one into the stone tunnel, to drop, plunge in their turn down the steep pitch of the stone stairs as though into the bowels of the earth, into damp and darkness, though presently, from beyond where the stairs flattened at last into a tunnel, they could see a faint unsteady red gleam not of electricity, it was too red and unsteady, but from torches. They were torches; there was one fastened to the wall beside the first doorless opening in the wall and now they could see one another binding across their nostrils and lower faces what soiled handkerchiefs and filthy scraps of rag which they found on themselves (one who apparently had neither was holding the collar of his coat across his face), huddling and then halting here because an officer, his face swatched to the eyes in a silk one, had emerged from the opening; huddling back against the wall of the narrow tunnel while the sergeant with his valise came forward and saluted and presented his order to the officer, who opened it and glanced briefly at it, then turned his head and spoke back into the room behind him, and a corporal carrying an electric torch and a folded stretcher came out; he had a gas-mask slung about his neck.
Then, the corporal with his torch leading now and the foremost man carrying the stretcher, they went on again between the sweating walls, the floor itself beneath the feet viscous and greasy so that there was a tendency to slip, passing the doorless orifices in the walls beyond which they could see the tiered bunks in which in time during those five months in 1916 men had actually learned to sleep beneath the muted thunder and the trembling of the earth, the smell which above ground had had a sort of vividness, as though even yet partaking invincibly still of something of that motion which is life, not increasing so much as becoming familiar—an old stale dead and worn accustomedness which man would never eradicate and so in time would even get used to and even cease to smell it—a smell subterrene and claustrophobe and doomed to darkness, not alone of putrefaction but of fear and old sweat and old excrement and endurance; fear attenuated to that point where it must choose between coma and madness and in the intermittent coma no longer feared but merely stank.
More soldiers in pairs with masked faces and heaped barrows or stretchers passed them; suddenly more sweating and viscid stairs plunged away beneath them; at the foot of the stairs the tunnel made a sharp angle, no longer floored and walled and roofed with concrete; and, turning the corner behind the corporal, it was no longer a tunnel even but an excavation a cavern a cave a great niche dug out of one wall in which during the height of the battle, when there had been no other way to dispose of them, the bodies which had merely been killed and the ones which had been killed and dismembered too in the fort or the connecting machine-gun pits had been tumbled and covered with earth, the tunnel itself continuing on beyond it: a timber-shored burrow not even high enough for a man to stand erect in, through or beyond which they now saw a steady white glare which would have to be electricity, from which as they watched two more hooded and aproned soldiers emerged, carrying a stretcher with what would be an intact body this time.
‘Wait here,’ the corporal said.
‘My orders say——’ the sergeant said.
‘.… your orders,’ the corporal said. ‘We got a system here. We do things our way. Down here, you’re on active service, pal. Just give me two of your men and the stretcher. Though you can come too, if you think nothing less will keep your nose clean.’
‘That’s what I intend to do,’ the sergeant said. ‘My orders say——’ But the corporal didn’t wait, going on, the two with the stretcher, the sergeant stooping last to enter the further tunnel, the valise still clasped against his breast like a sick child. It did not take them long, as if there were plenty in the next traverse to choose from; almost at once, it seemed to the remaining ten, they saw the sergeant come stooping out of the burrow, still clasping the valise, followed by the two men with the burdened stretcher at a sort of stumbling run, then last the corporal who didn’t even pause, walking around the stretcher where the two bearers had dropped it, already going on toward the stairs until the sergeant stopped him. ‘Wait,’ the sergeant said, the valise now clasped under one arm while he produced his order and a pencil from inside his coat and shook the folded order open. ‘We got systems in Paris too. It’s a Frenchman.’
‘Right,’ the corporal said.
‘It’s all here. Nothing missing.’
‘Right,’ the corporal said.
‘No identification of name regiment or rank.’
‘Right,’ the corporal said.
‘Then sign it,’ the sergeant said, holding out the pencil as the corporal approached. ‘You,’ he said to the nearest man. ‘About face and bend over.’ Which the man did, the sergeant holding the paper flat on his bowed back while the corporal signed. ‘Your lieutenant will have to sign too,’ the sergeant said, taking the pencil from the corporal. ‘You might go on ahead and tell him.’
‘Right,’ the corporal said, going on again.
‘All right,’ the sergeant said to the stretcher bearers. ‘Get it out of here.’
‘Not yet,’ the first stretcher bearer said. ‘We’re going to have that drink first.’
‘No,’ the sergeant said. ‘When we get it into the lorry.’ He had not wanted the assignment and indeed he did not belong here because this time they simply took the valise away from him in one concerted move of the whole twelve of them, not viciously, savagely, just rapidly: with no heat at all but almost impersonal, almost inattentive, as you might rip a last year’s calendar from the wall to kindle a fire with it; the ex-picklock didn’t even pretend to conceal his action this time, producing his instrument in plain view, the others crowding around him as he opened the valise. Or they thought the rapidity and ease of the valise’s rape had been because they were too many for the sergeant, staring down at the single bottle it contained with shock then outrage and then with something like terror while the sergeant stood back and over them, laughing steadily down at them with a sort of vindictive and triumphant pleasure.
