Now a small party of horsemen rode rapidly up from the rear and stopped just outside the square, behind it; they were the town major, his adjutant, the provost marshal adjutant and three orderlies.
The sergeant-major shouted, the parade (save for the pariah regiment) came to attention in one long metallic clash, the sergeant-major wheeled and saluted the town major across the rigid palisade of Senegalese heads, the town major accepted the parade and stood it at ease then back to attention again and returned it to the sergeant-major who in his turn stood it at ease again and turned to face the three posts as, abruptly and apparently from nowhere, a sergeant and file came up with the three hatless prisoners interspersed among them, whom they bound quickly to the three posts — the man who had called himself Lapin, then the corporal, then the simian-like creature whom Lapin had called Cassetête or Horse — leaving them facing in to the hollow of the square though they couldn’t see it now because at the moment there filed between them and it another squad of some twenty men with a sergeant, who halted and quarter-turned and stood them at ease with their backs to the three doomed ones, whom the sergeant-major now approached in turn, to examine rapidly the cord which bound Lapin to his post, then on to the corporal, already extending his (the sergeant-major’s) hand to the Médaille Militaire on the corporal’s coat, saying in a rapid murmur:
‘You dont want to keep this.’
‘No,’ the corporal said. ‘No use to spoil it.’ The sergeant-major wrenched it off the coat, not savagely: just rapidly, already moving on.
‘I know who to give it to,’ he said, moving on to the third man, who said, drooling a little, not alarmed, not even urgent: just diffident and promptive, as you address someone, a stranger, on whom your urgent need depends but who may have temporarily forgotten your need or forgotten you:
‘Paris.’
‘Right,’ the sergeant-major said. Then he was gone too; now the three bound men could have seen nothing save the backs of the twenty men in front of them though they could still have heard the sergeant-major’s voice as he brought the parade to attention again and drew from somewhere inside his coat a folded paper and a worn leather spectacle case and unfolded the paper and put the spectacles on and read aloud from the paper, holding it now in both hands against the light flutter of the morning breeze, his voice sounding clear and thin and curiously forlorn in the sunny lark-filled emptiness among the dead redundant forensic verbiage talking in pompous and airy delusion of an end of man. ‘By order of the president of the court,’ the sergeant-major chanted wanly and refolded the paper and removed the spectacles and folded them back into the case and stowed them both away; command, the twenty men about-turned to face the three posts; Lapin was now straining outward against his cord, trying to see past the corporal to the third man.
‘Look,’ Lapin said anxiously to the corporal.
Load!
‘Paris,’ the third man said, hoarse and wet and urgent.
‘Say something to him,’ Lapin said. ‘Quick.’
Aim!
‘Paris,’ the third man said again.
‘It’s all right,’ the corporal said. ‘We’re going to wait. We wont go without you.’
The corporal’s post may have been flawed or even rotten because, although the volley merely cut cleanly the cords binding Lapin and the third man to theirs, so that their bodies slumped at the foot of each post, the corporal’s body, post bonds and all, went over backward as one intact unit, onto the edge of the rubbish-filled trench behind it; when the sergeant-major, the pistol still smoking faintly in his hand, moved from Lapin to the corporal, he found that the plunge of the post had jammed it and its burden too into a tangled mass of old barbed wire, a strand of which had looped up and around the top of the post and the man’s head as though to assoil them both on in one unbroken continuation of the fall, into the anonymity of the earth.
The wire was rusted and pitted and would not have deflected the bullet anyway, nevertheless the sergeant-major flicked it carefully away with his toe before setting the pistol’s muzzle against the ear.
As soon as the parade ground was empty (before in fact; the end of the Senegalese column had not yet vanished into the company street) the fatigue party came up with a hand-drawn barrow containing their tools and a folded tarpaulin.
The corporal in charge took a wire-cutter from the barrow and approached the sergeant-major, who had already cut the corporal’s body free from the broken post. ‘Here,’ he said, handing the sergeant-major the wire-cutter. ‘You’re not going to waste a ground-sheet on one of them, are you?’
‘Get those posts out,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Let me have two men and the ground sheet.’
‘Right,’ the corporal said. The corporal went away. The sergeant-major cut off a section about six feet long of the rusted wire. When he rose, the two men with the folded tarpaulin were standing behind him, watching him.
‘Spread it out,’ he said, pointing. They did so. ‘Put him in it,’ he said. They took up the dead corporal’s body, the one at the head a little finicking because of the blood, and laid it on the tarpaulin. ‘Go on,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Roll it up. Then put it in the barrow,’ and followed them, the fatigue-party corporal suddenly not watching him too, the other men suddenly immersed again in freeing the planted posts from the earth.
Nor did the sergeant-major speak again. He simply gestured the two men to take up the handles and, himself at the rear, established the direction by holding one corner as a pivot and pushing against the other and then pushing ahead on both, the laden barrow now crossing the parade ground at a long slant toward the point where the wire fence died in a sharp right angle against the old factory wall.
Nor did he (the sergeant-major) look back either, the two men carrying the handles almost trotting now to keep the barrow from running over them, on toward the corner where at some point they too must have seen beyond the fence the high two-wheeled farm cart with a heavy farm horse in the shafts and the two women and the three men beside it, the sergeant-major stopping the barrow just as he had started it: by stopping himself and pivoting the barrow by its two rear corners into the angle of the fence, then himself went and stood at the fence — a man of more than fifty and now looking all of it — until the taller of the two women — the one with the high dark strong and handsome face as a man’s face is handsome — approached the other side of the wire.
The second woman had not moved, the shorter, dumpier, softer one. But she was watching the two at the fence and listening, her face quite empty for the moment but with something incipient and tranquilly promising about it like a clean though not-yet-lighted lamp on a kitchen bureau.
‘Where did you say your husband’s farm is?’ the sergeant-major said.
‘I told you,’ the woman said.
‘Tell me again,’ the sergeant-major said.
‘Beyond Chalons,’ the woman said.
‘How far beyond Chalons?’ the sergeant-major said. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘How far from Verdun?’
‘It’s near Vienne-la-pucelle,’ the woman said. ‘Beyond St Mihiel,’ she said.
‘St Mihiel,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘In the army zone. Worse. In the battle zone. With Germans on one side of it and Americans on the other. Americans.’
‘Should American soldiers be more terrible than other soldiers?’ the woman said. ‘Because they are fresher at it? Is that it?’
‘No, Sister,’ the other woman said. ‘That’s wrong. It’s because the Americans have been here so young. It will be easy for them.’ The two at the fence paid no attention to her. They looked at one another through the wire. Then the woman said:
‘The war is over.’
‘Ah,’ the sergeant-major said.
The woman made no movement, no gesture. ‘What else can this mean? What else explain it? justify it? No, not even justify it: plead compassion, plead pity, plead despair for it?’ She looked at the sergeant-major, cold, griefless, impersonal. ‘Plead exculpation for it?’
‘Bah,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Did I ask you? Did anyone?’ He gestured behind him with the wire-cutter. One of the men released the handle of the barrow and came and took it. ‘Cut the bottom strand,’ the sergeant-major said.
‘Cut?’ the man said.
‘It, species of a species!’ the sergeant-major said. The man started to stoop but the sergeant-major had already snatched the wire-cutter back from him and stooped himself; the taut bottom-most strand sprang with a thin almost musical sound, recoiling. ‘Get it out of the barrow,’ the sergeant-major said. ‘Lively.’ They understood now. They lifted the long tarpaulin-wrapped object from the barrow and lowered it to the ground.
The woman had moved aside and the three men now waited at the fence, to draw, drag the long object along the ground and through the wire’s vacancy, then up and into the cart. ‘Wait,’ the sergeant-major said. The woman paused. The sergeant-major fumbled inside his coat and produced a folded paper which he passed through the fence to her. She opened it and looked at it for a moment, with no expression whatever.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It must be over,
