Fable, A - William Faulkner [101]
So he came away. He learned in the orderly room that they were correctly within military protocol: they had passes, to visit the homes of one or two or three of them in villages inside the British zone. Then from the battalion padre he even began to divine why. Not learn why: divine it. 'It's a staff problem,' the padre said. 'It's been going on for a year or two. Even the Americans are probably familiar with them by now. They just appear, with their passes all regularly issued and visaed, in troop rest-billets. They are known, and of course watched. The trouble is, they have done no-' and stopped, the runner watching him.
'You were about to say, "done no harm yet,"' the runner said. 'Harm?' he said gently. 'Problem? Is it a problem and harmful for men in front-line trenches to think of peace, that after all, we can stop fighting if enough of us want to?'
To think it; not to talk it. That's mutiny. There are ways to do things, and ways not to do them.'
'Render unto Caesar?' the runner said.
'Ican't discuss this subject while I bear this,' the padre said, his hand flicking for an instant toward the crown on his cuff.
'But you wear this too,' the runner said, his hand in its turn indicating the collar and the black V inside the tunic's lapels.
'God help us,' the padre said.
'Or we, God,' the runner said. 'Maybe the time has now come for that': and went away from there too, the winter following its course too toward the spring and the next final battle which would end the war, during which he would hear of them again, rumored from the back areas of the (now three) army zones, watched still by the (now) three intelligence sections but still at stalemate because still they had caused no real harm, at least not yet; in fact, the runner had now begun to think of them as a formally accepted and even dispatched compromise with the soldier's natural undeviable belief that he at least would not be killed, as regimented batches of whores were sent up back areas to compromise with man's natural and normal sex, thinking (the runner) bitterly and quietly, as he had thought before: His prototype had only mans natural propensity for evil to contend with; this one faces all the scarlet-and-brazen impregnability of general staffs.
And this time (it was May again, the fourth one he had seen from beneath the brim of a steel helmet, the battalion had gone in again two days ago and he had just emerged from Corps headquarters at Villcneuve Blanche) when he saw the vast black motorcar again there was such a shrilling of N. C. O. s' whistles and a clashing of presented arms that he thought at first it was full of French and British and American generals until he saw that only one was a general: the French one: then recognised them all: in the rear seat beside the general the pristine blue helmet as unstained and innocent of exposure and travail as an uncut sapphire above the Roman face and the unstained horizon-blue coat with its corporal's markings, and the youth in the uniform now of an American captain, on the second jump seat beside the British staff-major, the runner half-wheeling without even breaking stride, to the car and halted one pace short then took that pace and clapped his heels and saluted and said to the staff-major in a ringing voice: 'Sir!' then in French to the French general-an old man with enough