Fable, A - William Faulkner [31]
So he learned about the thirteen French soldiers almost at once-or rather, the thirteen men in French uniforms-who had been known for a year now among all combat troops below the grade of sergeant in the British forces and obviously in the French too, realising at the same moment that not only had he been the last man below sergeant in the whole Allied front to hear about them, but why: who five months ago had been an officer too, by the badges on his tunic also forever barred and interdict from the right and freedom to the simple passions and hopes and fears-sickness for home, worry about wives and allo'I'ment pay, the weak beer and the shilling a day which wont even buy enough of that; even the right to be afraid of death-all that confederation of fellowship which enables man to support the weight of war; in fact, the surprise was Tuesday Night that, having been an officer once, he had been permitted to learn about the thirteen men at all.
His informant was an A. S. C. private more than sixty years old, member of and lay preacher to a small nonconformist congregation in Southwark; he had been half porter and half confidential servant with an unblemished record to an Inns of Court law firm, as his father had been before him and his son was to be after, except that at the Old Bailey assizes in the spring of the son would have been sent up for breaking and burglary had not the presiding judge been not only a humanitarian but a member of the same philatelist society to which the head of the law firm belonged; whereupon the son was permitted to enlist instead the next day and in August went to Belgium and was reported missing at Mons all in the same three weeks and was accepted so by all save his father, who received leave of absence to enlist from the law firm for the single reason that his employers did not believe he could pass the doctors; eight months later the father was in France too; a year after that he was still trying to get, first, leave of absence; then, failing that, transfer to some unit near enough to Mons to look for his son, although it had been a long time now since he had mentioned the son, as if he had forgot the reason and remembered only the destination, still a lay preacher, still half night-watch-man and half nurse, unimpeachable of record, to the succession of (to him) children who ran a vast ammunition dump behind St. Omer, where one afternoon he told the runner about-the thirteen French soldiers.
'Go and listen to them,' the old porter said. 'You can speak foreign; you can understand them,'
'I thought you said that the nine who should have spoken French, didn't, and that the other four couldn't speak anything at all.'
They dont need to talk,' the old porter said. 'You dont need to understand. Just go and look at him.'
'Him?' the runner said. 'So it's just one now?'
'Wasn't it just one before?' the old porter said. 'Wasn't one enough then to tell us the same thing all them two thousand years ago: that all we ever needed to do was just to say, Enough of this-us, not even the sergeants and corporals, but just us, all of us, Germans and Colonials and Frenchmen and all the other foreigners in the mud here, saying together: Enough. Let them that's already dead and maimed and missing