Fable, A - William Faulkner [13]
'And whatever Bosche 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 Ver-dun. 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 Hat, calm, al-most 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 each other 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