Fable, A - William Faulkner [38]
'Because-dont you see?--they cant have this. They cant permit this, to stop it at all yet, let alone allow it to stop itself this way-the two shells in the river and the race already under way and both crews without warning simply unshipping the oars from the locks and saying in unison: We're not going to pull any more. They cant yet. It's not finished yet, like an unfinished cricket or rugger match which started according to a set of mutually accepted rules formally and peaceably agreed on, and must finish by them, else the whole theory of arbitration, the whole tried and proven step-by-step edifice of politics and economy on which the civilised concord of nations is based becomes so much wind. More than that: that thin and tensioned girder of steel and human blood which carries its national edifice soaring glorious and threatful among the stars, in dedication to which young men are transported free of charge and even with pay, to die violently in places that even the map-makers and -dividers never saw, that a pilgrim stumbling on it a hundred or a thousand years afterward may still be able to say, Here is a spot that is (anyway was once) forever England or France or America. And not only cant, dare not: they wont. They have already started not to. Because listen. On the way back up tonight, I got a lift in a lorry. It was carrying AA shells. It was in a column almost three miles long, all chock full of AA shells. Think of it: three miles of AA shells, think of having enough shells to measure it in miles, which apparently they did not have in front of Amiens two months ago. But then, naturally it takes more ammunition to recess a war for ten minutes than to stop a mere offensive. The lorry was in charge of an old man I knew who had been waiting for three years at an ammo dump at St. Omer for his application to go through for leave and permission to go to Mons and search for his son who hadn't or didn't or couldn't or didn't want to-anyway, failed to-come back that afternoon four years ago. He showed me one of the shells. It was blank. Not dud: blank, complete and intact except that there was no shrapnel in it; it would fire and even burst, harmless. It looked all right on the outside; I doubt if its father in his West End club (or Birmingham or Leeds or Manchester or wherever people live who make shells) would have known the difference, and only a dyed-in-the-wool archie bloke could. It was amazing, really; they must have worked like beavers all last night and today too there at the dump, altering, gelding three miles of shells-or maybe they had them all ready beforehand, in advance; maybe after four years, even Anglo-Saxons can learn to calculate ahead in war-' talking, the voice not dreamy now: just glib and rapid, he (the runner) in the moving lorry now, the three of them, himself, the old man and the driver, crowded Tuesday Night into the close and lightless cab so that he could feel the whole frail length of the old man's body tense and exultant against him, remembering how at first his voice had sounded as cracked and amazed as the old man's, but soon no more: the two voices running along side by side as logical in unreason, rational and inconsequent as those of two children: 'Perhaps you'd better tell me again. Maybe I have forgot,'
Tor the signal!' the old man cried. The announcement! To let the whole world know that He has risen!'
'A signal of AA shells? Three miles of AA shells? Wouldn't one gun be enough to herald Him? And if one gun, why hold His resurrection up long enough to run three miles of shells through it? Or if one shell to each gun, why only three miles of guns? Why not enough for every gun between Switzerland