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By Root 4491 0

the commanders of divisions and brigades and their staffs, and regimental and battalion and company officers and their orderlies and ba'I'men and runners, and the privates whom he had decorated or reprimanded or condemned, and the N. C. O. leaders and degreeless file-closers of sections and platoons and squads whose inspection-opened ranks he had merely walked rapidly through once thirty and forty years ago, calling them all 'my child' just as he did his own handsome young personal aide and his ancient ba'I'man and his chauffeur: a six-and-a-half-foot Basque with the face of a murderer of female children. He (the division commander) had seen no movement; his recollection on entering was that the old marshal had been holding the sheaf of papers open in his hand. Yet it was not only closed now, it was pushed slightly aside and the old marshal had removed the spectacles, holding them lightly in a mottled old man's hand almost completely hidden inside the round tremendous orifice of an immaculately laundered cuff detachable from an old-fashioned starched white civilian shirt, and looking for just a second into the spectacleless eyes, the division commander remembered something Lallemont had said once: If I were evil, I would hate and fear him. If I were a saint, I would weep. If I were wise, and both or either, I would despair.

'Yes, General Gragnon?' the old general said.

Staring again not at anything but at simple eye-level above the old general's head, the division commander repeated orally the report which he had already recognised as soon as he entered the room-the verbatim typescripts signed by himself and endorsed by the corps commander, lying now in mimeographed triplicate be-fore the three generals, and finished and stopped for a moment as the lecturer pauses to turn a page or sip from the glass of water, then repeated for the fourth time his official request for the regiment's execution; inflexible and composed before the table on which lay the triumvirate markers of his career's sepulture, the triplicate monument of what the group commander had called his glory, he discharged for the fourth time the regiment from the rolls of his division as though it had vanished two mornings ago in the face of a machine-gun battery or a single mine explosion. He hadn't changed it. It had been right thirty-six hours ago when Wednesday Night his honor and integrity as its (or any regiment's) division commander compelled him to anticipate having to make it; it was still right the second after when he discovered that the quality in him which had given him the chance to become commander of a division, in exchange for the dedication of his honor and life, was compelling him to deliver it. So it was still right now for the very reason that it was the same honor and integrity which the beneficence had found worthy to be conferred with the three stars of his major general's rank, rather than the beneficence itself, which was making the demand, the compulsion.

Because the beneficence itself didn't need the gesture. As the group commander himself had practically told him this morning, what he was saying now had no connection at all beyond mere coincidence with what lay on the table. The speech was much older than that moment two days ago in the observation post when he discovered that he was going to have to make it. Its conception was the moment he found he was to be posted to officers' school, its birth the day he received the commission, so that it had become, along with the pistol and sabre and the sublieutenant's badges, a part of the equipment with which he would follow and serve his destiny with his life as long as life lasted; its analogous coeval was that one of the live cartridges constant through the pistol's revolving cylinder, against the moment when he would discharge the voluntary lien he had given on his honor by expiating what a civilian would call bad luck and only a soldier disgrace, the bad luck in it being merely this moment now, when the need compelled the speech yet at the same time denied the bullet. In fact, it