Fable, A - William Faulkner [26]
And now the division commander was no longer a general, still less the sergeant of twenty-five years ago whose inflexible pride it Monday Night had been to accept odds from no man. 'But to me,' he said. 'What will happen to me?'
And now even the nightcap had vanished and only the muffled voice came from beneath the covers. 'I dont know,' it said. 'It will be glorious,'
TUESDAY NIGHT
Some time after midnight that Tuesday (it was Wednesday now) two British privates were resting on the firestep of a front-line trench below the Bethune slagheap. Two months ago they were looking at it not only from another angle but from another direction; until then, the line's relation to it seemed fixed to a longer life than memory's. But since the breakthrough there had been no fixed line at all. The old corridor had still remained of course, roofed over with the Tuesday Night shriek and stink of cordite, but attached to the earth only at the two ends: the one somewhere on the Channel and the other somewhere up the roof of France, so that it seemed to belly before the Teutonic gale like a clothesline about to carry away in a wind. And since three o'clock yesterday afternoon (yesterday morning rather, noon when the French quit) it had merely hung in its spent bulge against the arrested weight of the Germanic air, even roofless now since with dark the last patrolling aircraft had gone to roost and there remained only the flares arching up from behind the flicker-less wire with a faint hiss, a prolonged whispered sniff, to bloom and parachute and hang against the dark with the cold thick texture and color of the working lights in a police morgue, then sliding silently down the black air like drops of grease on a window-pane, and far away to the north the spaced blink and thump of a single gun, a big one, with no following burst at all, as though it were firing at the Channel, the North Sea itself fifty miles away, or perhaps at some target even vaster and more immune than that: at Cosmos, space, infinity, lifting its voice against the Absolute, the ultimate maw, harmless: the iron maw of Dis, toothless, unwearyable, incapable, bellowing.
One of the privates was a sentry. He stood on the firestep, leaning slightly against the wall beside the sandbagged aperture in which his rifle lay loaded and cocked and with the safety off. In civil life he had indubitably been a horse-groom, because even irkhaki and even after four years of infantryman's war he still moved, stood in an aura, effluvium of stalls and tack-rooms-a hard-faced jockey-sized man who seemed to have brought on his warped legs even into the French and Flemish mud something of hard, light, razor edge horses and betting-rings, who even wore the steel helmet at the same vicious rake of the filthy heavy-checked cap which would have been the badge of his old dead calling and dedication. But this was only inference, from his appearance and general air, not from anything he ever told anyone; even his mates in the battalion who had stayed alive long enough to have known him four years knew nothing about his past, as if he did not have one, had S not even been born until the fourth of August,--paradox who had no business in an infantry battalion at all, and an enigma to the extent that six months after he entered the battalion (this was about Christmas,) the colonel commanding it had been summoned to Whitehall to make a specific report on him. Because the authorities had discovered that eleven privates in the battalion had made the man beneficiary of their soldiers' life assurance policies; by the time the colonel reached the war