Fable, A - William Faulkner [33]
And it had run out. It was already spring; the Americans ( now) were in it now, rushing frantically across the Atlantic Ocean before it was too late and the scraps were all gone, and the breakthrough had come: the old stale Germanic tide washing again over the Somme and Picard towns which you might have thought had served their apprenticeship, washing along the Aisne a month later so that clerks in Paris bureaus were once more snapping the locks on the worn and homeless attachd-cases, May and even the Marne again, American troops counter-attacking this time among the ruined towns which you would think might have had absolution too. Except that he was not thinking now; he was too busy; for two weeks now he and his heretofore unfired rifle had been in an actual platoon, part of a rearguard, too busy remembering how to walk backward to think, using in place of the harassing ordeal of thought d fragment out of the old time before he had become incapable of believing, out of Oxford probably (he could even see the page) though now it seemed much younger than that, too young to have endured this far at all: lo, I have committed fornication.
But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead Tuesday Night So when it finally happened, he had no warning. The wave had stopped, and he was a runner again; he had got back from Division Headquarters at dawn and two hours later he was asleep in the bunk of a man on a fatigue party, when an orderly summoned him to the office. 'You can drive a motorbike,' the colonel said.
He thought You should know. He said: Tes, sir,'
You're going to Corps Headquarters. They want couriers. A lorry will pick up you and the others at Division.'
He didn't even think Other what? He just thought They have killed the serpent, and now they have got to get rid of the fragments, and returned to Division Headquarters, where eight more runners from the other battalions and a lorry waited, the nine of them by that special transport to serve as special couriers out of Corps Headquarters which by ordinary bristled with couriers, not warned still, knowing no more yet, not even wondering, not even caring; fixed behind a faint wry grimace which was almost smiling in the midst of what was not ruin at all because he had known it of old too long, too long of old: Yes, he thought, a bigger snake than even they had anticipated having to destroy and efface. Nor did he learn any more at Corps Headquarters, nor during the next two hours while at top speed now he delivered and exchanged and received dispatches from and to people whom even his travels had never touched before-not to orderly room N. C. O,'s but in person to majors and colonels and sometimes even generals, at transport and artillery parks, with columns of transport and artillery camou flaged beside roads and waiting for darkness to move, at batteries in position and Flying Corps wing offices and forward aerodromes-no longer even wondering now behind that fixed thin grimace which might have been smiling: who had not for nothing been a soldier in France for twenty-one months and an officer for five of them, and so knew what he was looking at when he saw it: the vast cumbrous machinery of war grinding to its clumsy halt in order to reverse itself to grind and rumble in