Fable, A - William Faulkner [216]
It lifted toward the gray and grieving sky, invincible and impervious, to endure forever not because it was stone nor even because of its rhythm and symmetry but because of its symbolism, crowning the city; on the marble floor, exactly beneath the Arch's soaring center, the small perpetual flame burned above the eternal sleep of the nameless bones brought down five years ago from the Verdun battlefield, the cortege moving on to the Arch, the crowd dividing quietly and humbly behind it to flow away on either side until it had surrounded and enclosed that sacred and dedicated monument, the cortege itself stopping now, shifting, moiling a little until at last hushed protocol once more was discharged and Tomorrow only the caisson moving on until it halted directly before the Arch and the flame, and now there remained only silence and the grieving day and that minute's thud of the distant gun.
Then a single man stepped forward from among the princes and prelates and generals and statesmen, in full dress and medalled too; the first man in France: poet, philosopher, statesman, patriot and orator, to stand bareheaded facing the caisson while the distant gun thudded another minute into eternity. Then he spoke: 'Marshal,'
But only the day answered, and the distant gun to mark another interval of its ordered dirge. Then the man spoke again, louder this time, urgent; not peremptory: a cry: 'Marshal!'
But still there was only the dirge of day, the dirge of victorious and grieving France, the dirge of Europe and from beyond the seas too where men had doffed the uniforms in which they had been led through suffering to peace by him who lay now beneath the draped flag on the caisson, and even further than that where people who had never heard his name did not even know that they were still free because of him, the orator's voice ringing now into the grieving circumambience for men everywhere to hear it: 'That's right, great general! Lie always with your face to the east, that the enemies of France shall always see it and beware!'
At which moment there was a sudden movement, surge, in the crowd to one side; the hats and capes and lifted batons of police men could be seen struggling toward the disturbance. But before they could reach it, something burst suddenly out of the crowd-not a man but a mobile and upright scar, on crutches, he had one arm and one leg, one entire side of his hatless head was one hairless eyeless and earless sear, he wore a filthy dinner jacket from the left breast of which depended on their barbor-pole ribbons a British Military. Cross and Distinguished Conduct Medal, and a French Medaille Militaire: which (the French one) was probably why the French crowd itself had not dared prevent him emerging from it and even now did not dare grasp him and jerk him back as he swung himself with that dreadful animal-like lurch and heave with which men move on crutches, out into the empty space enclosing the Arch, and on until he too faced the caisson. Then he stopped and braced the crutches into his armpits and with his single hand grasped the French decoration on his breast, he too crying in a loud and ringing voice: 'Listen to me too, Marshal! This is yours: take it!' and snatched, ripped from his filthy jacket the medal which was the talisman of his sanctuary and swung his arm up and back to throw it. Apparently he knew himself what was going to happen to him as soon as he released the medal, and defied it; with the medal up-poised in his hand he even stopped and looked back at the crowd