‘Yes, General Gragnon?’ the old general said.
Staring again not at anything but at simple eye-level above the old general’s head, the division commander repeated orally the report which he had already recognised as soon as he entered the room — the verbatim typescripts signed by himself and endorsed by the corps commander, lying now in mimeographed triplicate before the three generals, and finished and stopped for a moment as the lecturer pauses to turn a page or sip from the glass of water, then repeated for the fourth time his official request for the regiment’s execution; inflexible and composed before the table on which lay the triumvirate markers of his career’s sepulture, the triplicate monument of what the group commander had called his glory, he discharged for the fourth time the regiment from the rolls of his division as though it had vanished two mornings ago in the face of a machine-gun battery or a single mine explosion.
He hadn’t changed it. It had been right thirty-six hours ago when his honor and integrity as its (or any regiment’s) division commander compelled him to anticipate having to make it; it was still right the second after that when he discovered that that which had given him the chance to become commander of a division in exchange for the dedication of his honor and life, was compelling him to deliver it. So it was still right now for the very reason that it was the same honor and integrity which the beneficence had found worthy to be conferred with the three stars of his major general’s rank, rather than the beneficence itself, which was making the demand, the compulsion.
Because the beneficence itself didn’t need the gesture. As the group commander himself had practically told him this morning, what he was saying now had no connection at all beyond mere coincidence, with what lay on the table. The speech was much older than that moment two days ago in the observation post when he discovered that he was going to have to make it.
Its conception was the moment he found he was to be posted to officers’ school, its birth the day he received the commission, so that it had become, along with the pistol and sabre and the sublieutenant’s badges, a part of the equipment with which he would follow and serve his destiny with his life as long as life lasted; its analogous coeval was that one of the live cartridges constant through the pistol’s revolving cylinder, against the moment when he would discharge the voluntary lien he had given on his honor by expiating what a civilian would call bad luck and only a soldier disgrace, the — any — bad luck in it being merely this moment now, when the need compelled the speech yet at the same time denied the bullet.
In fact, it seemed to him now that the two of them, speech and bullet, were analogous and coeval even in more than birth: analogous in the very incongruity of the origins from which they moved, not even shaped yet, toward their mutual end: — a lump of dross exhumed from the earth and become, under heat, brass, and under fierce and cunning pressure, a cartridge case; from a laboratory, a pinch, a spoonful, a dust, precipitate of earth’s and air’s primordial motion, the two condensed and combined behind a tiny locked grooved slug and all micrometered to a servant breech and bore not even within its cognizance yet, like a footman engaged from an employment agency over the telephone; — half Europe went to war with the other half and finally succeeded in dragging half the western hemisphere along: a plan, a design vast in scope, exalted in conception, in implication (and hope) terrifying, not even conceived here at Grand Headquarters by the three old generals and their trained experts and advisers in orderly conference, but conceived out of the mutual rage and fear of the three ocean-dividing nations themselves, simultaneously at Washington and London and Paris by some immaculate pollenization like earth’s simultaneous leafage, and come to birth at a council not even held at Grand Headquarters but behind locked and guarded doors in the Quai d’Orsay — a council where trained military experts, dedicated as irrevocably to war as nuns are married to God, were outnumbered by those who were not only not trained for war, they were not even braided and panoplied for it — the Prime Ministers and Premiers and Secretaries, the cabinet members and senators and chancellors; and those who outnumbered even them: the board chairmen of the vast establishments which produced the munitions and shoes and tinned foods, and the modest unsung omnipotent ones who were the priests of simple money; and the others still who outnumbered even these: the politicians, the lobbyists, the owners and publishers of newspapers and the ordained ministers of churches, and all the other accredited travelling representatives of the vast solvent organizations and fraternities and movements which control by coercion or cajolery man’s morals and actions and all his mass-value for affirmation or negation; — all that vast powerful terror-inspiring representation which, running all democracy’s affairs in peace, come indeed into their own in war, finding their true apotheosis then, in iron conclave now decreeing for half the earth a design vast in its intention to demolish a frontier, and vaster still in its furious intent to obliterate a people; all in conclave so single that the old gray inscrutable supreme general with the face of one who long ago had won the right to believe in nothing whatever save man’s deathless folly, didn’t need to vote at all but simply to preside, and so presiding, contemplated the plan’s birth and then watched it, not even needing to control it as it took its ordained undeviable course, descending from nations confederated to nations selected, to forces to army groups to armies to corps; all that gigantic long complex chronicle, at the end reduced to a simple regimental attack against a simple elevation of earth too small to show on a map, known only to its own neighborhood and even that by a number and a nickname dating back less than four years to the moment when someone had realised that you could see perhaps a quarter-mile further from its summit than its foot; an attack not allotted to a division but self-compelled to it by its own geography and logistics because the alternatives were either here or nowhere, this or nothing, and compelled to his particular division for the reason that the attack was doomed and intended as failure and his was the division among all with which failure could be bought cheapest, as another might be the division with which a river could be crossed or a village taken cheapest; he realised now that it had not been necessary for anyone to have foreseen the mutiny, because the mutiny itself didn’t matter: the failure alone would have been enough, and how and why it failed, nobody cared, the mutiny flung in as lagniappe to that end whose sole aim had been to bring him to attention here before the table on which lay in its furled scabbard the corpse of his career, to repeat for the fourth time the speech, who had been denied the bullet, and finish it and stop.
‘The whole regiment,’ the old marshal said, repeating in his turn, in a voice inscrutable and pleasant and so void of anything as to seem almost warm, inattentive, almost impersonal. ‘Not just this ring-leader and his twelve disciples. By all means, the nine of them who are Frenchmen yet still permitted themselves to be corrupted.’
‘There was no ring-leader,’ the division commander said, harsh and rigid. ‘The regiment mutinied.’
‘The regiment mutinied,’ the old marshal repeated again. ‘And suppose we do. What of the other regiments in your division, when they learn of it?’
‘Shoot them,’ the division commander said.
‘And the other divisions in your corps, and the other corps on either side of you.’
‘Shoot them,’ the division commander said, and stood again inflexible and composed while the old marshal turned and translated quietly and rapidly to the British general and the American on either side of him, then turned back and said to the chief-of-staff:
‘Thank you, General.’
The chief-of-staff saluted. But the division commander did not wait for him, already about-facing, leaving the chief-of-staff once more the split of a second late since he had to perform his own manoeuver which even a crack drill-sergeant could not have done smoothly with no more warning than this, having in fact to take two long extra steps to get himself again on the division commander’s right hand and failing — or almost — here too, so that it was the old marshal’s personal aide who flanked the division commander, the chief-of-staff himself still half a pace behind, as they trod the white rug once more back to the now open door just outside which a provost marshal’s officer correct with sidearms waited, though before they reached him, the division commander was even in front of the aide.
So
