Fable, A - William Faulkner [192]
As soon as the parade ground was empty (before in fact; the end of the Senegalese column had not yet vanished into the company street) the fatigue party came up with a hand-drawn barrow containing their tools and a folded tarpaulin. The corporal in charge took a wire-cutter from the barrow and approached the sergeant-major, who had already cut the corporal's body free from the broken post. 'Here,' he said, handing the sergeant-major the wire-cutter. 'You're not going to waste a ground-sheet on one of them, are you?'
'Get those posts out,' the sergeant-major said. 'Let me have two men and the ground sheet,'
'Right,' the corporal said. The corporal went away. The sergeant-major cut off a section about six feet long of the rusted wire. When he rose, the two men with the folded tarpaulin were standing be-hind him, watching him.
'Spread it out,' he said, pointing. They did so. 'Put him in it,' he said. They took up the dead corporal's body, the one at the head a little gingerly because of the blood, and laid it on the tarpaulin. 'Go on,' the sergeant-major said. 'Roll it up. Then put it in the barrow,' and followed them, the fatigue-party corporal suddenly not watching him too, the other men suddenly immersed again in freeing the planted posts from the earth. Nor did the sergeant-major speak again. He simply gestured the two men to take up the handles and, himself at the rear, established the direction by holding one corner as a pivot and pushing against the other and then pushing ahead on both, the laden barrow now crossing the parade ground at a long slant toward the point where the wire fence died in a sharp right angle against the old factory wall. Nor did he (the sergeant-major) look back either, the two men carrying the handles almost trotting now to keep the barrow from running over them, on Friday toward the corner where at some point they too must have seen beyond the fence the high two-wheeled farm cart with a heavy farm horse in the shafts and the two women and the three men beside it, the sergeant-major stopping the barrow just as he had started it: by stopping himself and pivoting the barrow by its two rear corners into the angle of the fence, then himself went and stood at the fence-a man of more than fifty and now looking all of it-until the taller of the two women-the one with the high dark strong and handsome face as a man's face is handsome-ap-proached the other side of the wire. The second woman had not moved, the shorter, dumpier, softer one. But she was watching the two at the fence and listening, her face quite empty for the moment but with something incipient and tranquilly promising about it like a clean though not-yet-lighted lamp on a kitchen bureau.
'Where did you say your husband's farm is?' the sergeant-major said.
'I told you,' the woman said.
'Tell me again,' the sergeant-major said.
'Beyond Chalons,' the woman said.
How far beyond Chalons?' the sergeant-major said. 'All right,' he said. 'How far from Verdun?'
'It's near Vienne-la-pucelle,' the woman said. 'Beyond St. Mihiel,' she said.
'St. Mihiel,' the sergeant-major said. 'In the army zone. Worse. In the battle zone. With Germans on one side of it and American? on the other. Americans.'
'Should American soldiers be more terrible than other soldiers?' the woman said. 'Because they are fresher at it? Is that it?'
'No, sister,' the other woman said. "That's wrong. It's because the Americans have been here so young. It will be easy for them.' The two at the fence paid no attention to her. They looked at each other through the wire. Then the woman said: The war is over.'