Fable, A - William Faulkner [115]
'The whole regiment,' the old marshal said, repeating in his turn, in a voice inscrutable and pleasant and so void of anything as to seem almost warm, inattentive, almost impersonal. 'Not just this ringleader and his twelve disciples. By all means, the nine of them who are Frenchmen, yet who still permitted themselves to be corrupted,'
'There was no ringleader,' the division commander said, harsh and rigid. 'The regiment mutinied.'
'The regiment mutinied,' the old marshal repeated again. 'And suppose we do. What of the other regiments in your division, when they learn of it?'
'Shoot them,' the division commander said.
'And the other divisions in your corps, and the other corps on either side of you,'
'Shoot them,' the division commander said, and stood again inflexible and composed while the old marshal turned and translated quietly and rapidly to the British general and the American on either side of him, then turned back and said to the chief-of-staff: Thank you, General,' The chief-of-staff saluted. But the division commander did not wait for him, already about-facing, leaving the chief-of-staff once more the split of a second late since he had to perform his own maneuver which even a crack drill-sergeant could not have done smoothly with no more warning than this, having in fact to take two long extra steps to get himself again on the division commander's right hand and failing-or almost-here too, so that it was the old marshal's personal aide who flanked the division commander, the chief-of-staff himself still half a pace behind, as they trod the white rug once more back to the now open door just outside which a provost marshal's officer correct with side-arms waited, though before they reached him, the division commander was even in front of the aide.
So the aide was flanking, not the division commander but the chief-of-staff, pacing him correctly on the left, back to the open door beyond which the provost officer waited while the division commander passed through it.
Whereupon the aide not only effaced from the room the entire significance of the surrendered sabre, he obliterated from it the whole gauche inference of war. As he stepped quickly and lightly and even a little swaggeringly toward the open door beyond which the division commander and the provost officer had vanished, it Wednesday Night was as though, in declining in advance to hold the door for the division commander (even though the division commander had already declined the courtesy in advance by not waiting for it), he had not merely retaliated upon the junior general for the junior's affron'I'ment to the senior general's precedence, he had used the junior as the instrument to postulate both himself and the chief-of-staff as being irrevocably alien and invincibly unconcerned with everything the room and those it contained represented-the very tall elegantly thin captain of twenty-eight or thirty with the face and body of a durable matinee idol, who might have been a creature from another planet, anachronistic and immune, inviolable, so invincibly homeless as to be completely and irnpregnably at home on this or any other planet where he might find himself: not even of tomorrow but of the day before it, projected by reverse avatar back into a world where what remained of lost and finished man struggled feebly for a moment yet among the jumbled ruins of his yesterdays-a creature who had survived intact the fact that he had no place, no business whatever, in war, who for all gain or loss to war's inexorable gambit or that of the frantic crumbling nations cither, might as well have been floating gowned and capped (and with the golden tassel of a lordship too, since he looked more like a scion than any duke's son) across