Fable, A - William Faulkner [163]
'Have you dined?' the old general said.
The other didn't even answer. 'I know what happened,' he said. 'I authorised it, permitted it, otherwise it couldn't have. But I want you to tell me. Not admit, confess: affirm it, tell me to my face that we did this. Yesterday afternoon a German general was brought across the lines and here, to this house, into this house,'
'yes es,' the old general said. But the other still waited, inexorable. 'We did it then,' the old general said.
'Then this morning an unarmed British battalion met an unarmed German force between the lines until artillery from both sides was able to destroy them both,'
'We did it then,' the old general said.
'We did it,' the Quartermaster General said. 'We. Not British and American and French we against German them nor German they against American and British and French us, but We against all because we no longer belong to us. A subterfuge not of ours to confuse and mislead the enemy nor of the enemy to mislead and confuse us, but of We to betray all, since all has had to repudiate us in simple defensive horror; no barrage by us or vice versa to prevent an enemy running over us with bayonets and hand grenades or vice versa, but a barrage by both of We to prevent naked and weaponless hand touching opposite naked and weaponless hand. We, you and I and our whole unregenerate and unregenerable kind; not only you and I and our tight close jealous unchallengeable hierarchy behind this wire and our opposite German one behind that one, but more, worse: our whole small repudiated and homeless species about the earth who not only no longer belong to man, but even to earth itself, since wehave had to make this last base desperate cast in order to hold our last desperate and precarious place on it,'
'Sit down,' the old general said.
'No,' the other said. 'I was standing when I accepted this ap-poin'I'ment. I can stand to divest myself of it,' He thrust one big fleshless hand rapidly inside his tunic then out again, though once more he stood just holding the folded paper in it, looking down at the old general. 'Because I didn't just believe in you. I loved you. I believed from that first moment when I saw you in that gate that day forty-seven years ago that you had been destined to save us. That you were chosen by destiny out of the paradox of your background, to be a paradox to your past in order to be free of human past to be the one out of all earth to be free of the compulsions of fear and weakness and doubt which render the rest of us incapable of what you were competent for; that you in your strength would even absolve us of our failure due to our weakness and fears. I dont mean the men out there tonight-' This time the vast hand holding the folded paper made a single rapid clumsy gesture which indicated, seemed to shape somehow in the brilliant insulate room the whole scope of the murmurous and anguished darkness outside and even as far away as the lines themselves-the wire, the ditches dense and, for this time anyway, silent with dormant guns and amazed and incredulous men, waiting, alerted, confused and incredulous with hope '-they dont need you, they are capable of saving themselves, as three thousand of them proved four days ago. They only needed to be defended, protected from you. Not expected to be nor even hope to be: just should have been, except that we failed them. Not you this time, who did not even what you would but what you must, since you are you. But I and my few kind, who had rank enough and authority and position enough, as if God Himself had put this warrant in my hand that day against this one three years later, until I failed them and Him and brought it back,' His hand also jerked, flicked, and tossed the folded paper onto the desk in front of the bowl and jug and the still intact mor-sel, on either side of winch