‘It does to me. How it dies is the reason it died. That’s my record.’
‘Bah,’ the corps commander said.
‘Since what I lost was merely Charles Gragnon. While what I saved was France — —’
‘You saved us,’ the corps commander said.
‘Us?’ the division commander repeated again.
‘Us,’ the corps commander said in that voice harsh and strong with pride: ‘the lieutenants, the captains, the majors and colonels and sergeants all with the same privilege: the opportunity to lie someday in the casket of a general or a marshal among the flags of our nation’s glory in the palace of the Invalides — —’
‘Except that the Americans and British and Germans dont call theirs “Invalides”.’
‘All right, all right,’ the corps commander said. ‘ — merely in return for fidelity and devotion and accepting a little risk, gambling a petty stake which, lacking glory, was no better than any vegetable’s to begin with, and deserved no less of obscurity for its fate. Failed,’ he said. ‘Failed. Charles Gragnon, from sergeant to general of division before he was forty-five years old — that is, forty-seven — —’
‘And then lost.’
‘So did the British lieutenant general who commanded that army in Picardy two months ago.’
‘And whatever boche it was who lost contact or mislaid his maps and compass in Belgium three years ago,’ the division commander said. ‘And the one who thought they could come through at Verdun. And the one who thought the Chemin des Dames would be vulnerable, having a female name.’ He said: ‘So it’s not we who conquer each other, because we are not even fighting each other. It’s simple nameless war which decimates our ranks. All of us: captains and colonels, British and American and German and us, shoulder to shoulder, our backs to the long invincible wall of our glorious tradition, giving and asking.… Asking? not even accepting quarter — —’
‘Bah,’ the corps commander said again. ‘It is man who is our enemy: the vast seething moiling spiritless mass of him. Once to each period of his inglorious history, one of us appears with the stature of a giant, suddenly and without warning in the middle of a nation as a dairymaid enters a buttery, and with his sword for paddle he heaps and pounds and stiffens the malleable mass and even holds it cohered and purposeful for a time. But never for always, nor even for very long: sometimes before he can even turn his back, it has relinquished, dis-cohered, faster and faster flowing and seeking back to its own base anonymity. Like that out there this morning — —’ again the corps commander made the brief indicative gesture.
‘Like what out there?’ the division commander said; whereupon the corps commander said almost exactly what the group commander would say within the next hour:
‘It cannot be that you dont even know what happened.’
‘I lost Charles Gragnon.’
‘Bah,’ the corps commander said. ‘We have lost nothing. We were merely faced without warning by an occupational hazard. We hauled them up out of their ignominious mud by their bootstraps; in one more little instant they might have changed the world’s face. But they never do. They collapse, as yours did this morning. They always will. But not us. We will even drag them willy-nilly up again, in time, and they will collapse again. But not us. It wont be us.’
The army commander was waiting too; the car had barely to stop for him. As soon as it was in motion again, the division commander made for the second time his request in the flat, calm, almost dispassionate voice: ‘I shall shoot them, of course.’ The army commander didn’t answer. The division commander had not expected him to. He would not have heard any answer because he was not even listening to the other two voices murmuring to one another in brief, rapid, half-finished phrases as the corps commander briefed, reviewed to the army commander by number and designation, the regiments in the other divisions on either flank of his own, until the two voices had locked block into regimental block the long mosaic of the whole army front.
And — not only no sound of guns here, but never at any time — they were challenged at the chateau gates and entered the park, a guide on the running board now so that they didn’t even pause at the carved rococo entrance but went on around to the side, across a courtyard bustling with orderlies and couriers and popping motorcycles, passing — and the division commander neither noticed nor cared here either — two cars flying the pennons of two other army commanders, and a third car which was British, and a fourth one which had not even been manufactured on this side of the Atlantic, and on to a porte cochere at the back of the chateau and so directly into the shabby cluttered cubicle not much larger than a clothes press, notched into the chateau’s Italianate bijou like a rusted spur in a bride’s cake, from which the group commander conducted the affairs of his armies.
They were all there: the commanders of the two other armies which composed the group of armies, their heavy moustaches, already shaped to noon’s spoon, richly luxuriant from the daily ritual of soup; the English chief of staff who could have looked no more indomitably and rigidly youthful if the corset had been laced in full view on the outside of his tunic, with his bright ribbons and wisps of brass and scarlet tabs and his white hair and moustache and his blue eyes the color of icy war; and the American colonel with the face of a Boston shipping magnate (which indeed he was, or at least the entailed scion of one) — or rather, an eighteenth century face: the face of that predecessor or forefather who at twenty-five had retired rich from the quarter deck of a Middle Passage slaver, and at thirty had his name illuminated in colored glass above his Beacon Hill pew.
He was the guest, the privileged, since for three years it had not even been his nation’s war, who had brought already into the conclave the privileged guest’s air of prim, faintly spinsterish disapproval — an air, quality, appearance too, almost Victorian in fact, from his comfortable old man’s shoes and the simple leather putties of a Northumberland drover (both — shoes and putties — beautifully polished but obviously purchased at different times and places and so never to match in color, and neither matching the ordnance belt which obviously had been acquired in two places also, making four different tones of leather) and the simple flareless breeches cut from the same bolt as the shorttailed jacket rising unblemished by any brass to the highboned throat with its prim piping of linen collar backside foremost like the dog-collar of a priest.
(There was an anecdote about that uniform, or rather about its wearer, the colonel, going the rounds of messes six months ago, about how, shortly after the American headquarters had been set up, a junior officer — no Bostonian, this: a New Yorker — had appeared before the colonel one morning in the Bedford cords of a British officer and a long skirted tunic cut by a London tailor, though it did have the high closed throat; the colonel would meet many duplicates of it later, but not then because that was 1917; the youth appearing a little sheepishly, probably a little fearfully, wishing perhaps, as many another pioneer has done, that he had let someone else be first, before the cold banker’s eyes of his superior, saying presently: ‘You think I shouldn’t have done it? It’s bad form, taste, aping — —’; then the colonel, pleasant, immediate: ‘Why not? They taught us the art of war in 1783 by losing one to us; they should not object to lending us the clothes in 1917 to win one for them.’)
And, cynosure of all, the Mama Bidet, the General Cabinet, the Marshal d’Aisance of the division commander’s calm and icelike implacability not for justice for himself but for vindication of his military record, who — the group commander — had brought twenty-five years ago into the African sunglare not a bent for war (that would reveal later) and not even a simple normal thirst for glory and rank, but a cold, pitiless preoccupation with the mucous membrane buttoned inside his army breeches, which accompanied (even preceded) him from troop to squadron to regiment to brigade, division and corps and army and army group as he advanced and rose, more immune to harm as his stars increased in number and his gift for war found field and scope, but no more pitiless — the short, healthy, pot-bellied little man who looked like a green grocer retired happy and cheerful at fifty, and then ten years later dressed not too willingly for a masquerade in the ill-fitting private’s tunic without a single ribbon on it nor even any insigne of rank, whose real name had been an authority for fifteen years among textbook soldiers on how to keep troops fit, and a byword for four years among field commanders on how to fight them.
He didn’t ask the division commander to sit down when the army- and corps-commanders did; as far as the division commander could have affirmed, the group commander had not even remarked his presence, leaving him to stand while that unbidden and uncaring part of his attention recorded the tedious recapitulation of regiments and divisions, not merely by their positions in the front but by their past records and the districts of their
