• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4641 0

the old general's veined and mottled hands lay faintly curled at rest. 'Back to you by hand, as I received it from you. I will have no more of it. I know: by my own token I am too late in returning what I should never have accepted to begin with because even at first I would have known myself incapable of coping with what it was going to entail, if I had only Thursday Night known then what that entailment was going to be. I am responsible. I am responsible, mine is the blame and solely mine; without me and this warrant which you gave me that day three years ago, you could not have done this. By this authority I could have prevented you then, and even afterward I could have stopped it, remanded it. As you-the Commander-in-Chief of all the Allied Armies in France-as Quartermaster General over all embattled Europe west of our and the British and the American wire, I could have decreed that whole zone containing Villeneuve Blanche (or arbitrarily any other point which you might have threatened) at one hundred point one of saturation and forbidden whatever num-ber of men it took to drive those lorries of blank anti-aircraft shells to enter it and even at one hundred absolute of saturation and so forbidden that single supernumerary German one to come out of it. But I didn't. So I was responsible even more than you because you had no choice. You didn't even do what you would but only what you could, since you were incapable of else, born and doomed incapable of else. While I did have a choice between could and would, between shall and must and cannot, between must and dare not, between mil do and I am afraid to do: had that choice, and found myself afraid. Oh yes, afraid. But then why shouldn't I be afraid of you, since you are afraid of man?'

'I am not afraid of man,' the old general said. Tear implies ignorance. Where ignorance is not, you do not need to fear: only respect. I dont fear man's capacities, I merely respect them,'

'And use them,' the Quartermaster General said.

'Beware of them,' the old general said.

'Which, fear them or not, you should. You some day will. Not I, of course. I'm an old man, finished; I had my chance and failed; who-what-wants or needs me further now? What midden or rubbish heap, least of all that one beside the Seine yonder with its gold hemisphere ravaged from across all of Europe by a lesser one than you, since he embroiled himself with all the armies of Europe in order to lose a petty political empire, where you have allied all the armies of both hemispheres and finally even the German one too, to lose the world to man.'

Will you let me speak a moment?' the old general said.

'Of course,' the other said. 'Didn't I tell you I loved you once? Who can control that? All you dare assume mandate over is oath, contract,'

'You say they do not need me to save themselves from me and us since they themselves will save themselves if they are only let alone, only defended and preserved that long from me and us. How do you think we coped with this in time at time and place-at this particular moment in four whole years of moments, at this particular point in that thousand kilometres of regimental fronts between the Alps and the Channel? Just by being alert? Not only alert at this specific spot and moment but prepared to cope and concentrate and nullify at this specific spot and moment with that which every trained soldier has been trained and taught to accept as a factor in war and battle as he must logistics and climate and failure of ammunition; this, in four long years of fateful and vulnerable moments and ten hundred kilometres of fateful and vulnerable spots-spots and moments fateful and vulnerable because as yet we have found nothing better to man them with than man? How do you think we knew in time? Dont you know how? Who, since you believe in man's capacities, must certainly know them?'

Now the other had stopped, immobile, looming, vast, his sick and hungry face as though sick anew with foreknowledge and despair. Though his voice was quiet, almost gentle. 'How?' he said.

'One of them told us.