“By which authority, monsieur?” the officer said. He was tall, with a gaunt, tragic face. I saw then that one of his eyes was glass. It was motionless, rigid in a face that looked even deader than the spurious eye.
The M.P. glanced toward his brassard, then instead he looked at the officer again and tapped the pistol swinging low now against his flank. “I’ll take him all over your goddamn lousy country. I’ll take him into your goddamn senate and kick your president up for a chair for him and you can suck your chin until I come back to wipe the latrine off your feet again.”
“Ah,” the officer said, “a devil-dog, I see.”
He said “dehvildahg” between his teeth, with no motion of his dead face, in itself insult. Behind him the patronne began to shriek in French:
“Boche! Boche! Broken! Broken! Every cup, every saucer, glass, plate — all, all! I will show you! I have kept them for this day. Eight months since the obus I have kept them in a box against this day: plates, cups, saucers, glasses, all that I have had since thirty years, all gone, broken at one time! And it costing me fifty centimes the glass for such that I shame myself to have my patrons—”
There is an unbearable point, a climax, in weariness. Even alcohol cannot approach it. Mobs are motivated by it, by a sheer attenuation of sameness become unbearable. As Monaghan rose, the M.P. flung him back. Then it was as though we all flung everything overboard at once, facing unbashed and without shame the specter which for four years we had been decking out in high words, leaping forward with concerted and orderly promptitude each time the bunting slipped.
I saw the M.P. spring at the officer, then Comyn rose and met him. I saw the M.P. hit Comyn three times on the point of the jaw with his fist before Comyn picked him up bodily and threw him clean over the crowd, where he vanished, horizontal in midair, tugging at his pistol. I saw three poilus on Monaghan’s back and the officer trying to hit him with a bottle, and Sartoris leaping upon the officer from behind. Comyn was gone; through the gap which he had made the patronne emerged, shrieking.
Two men caught at her and she strove forward, trying to spit on the German. “Boche! Boche!” she shrieked, spitting and slobbering, her gray hair broken loose about her face; she turned and spat full at me. “Thou, too!” she shrieked, “it was not England that was devastated! Thou, too, come to pick the bones of France.
Jackal! Vulture! Animal! Broken, broken! All! All! All!” And beneath it all, unmoved, unmoving, alert, watchful and contained, the German and the subadar sat, the German with his high, sick face, the subadar tranquil as a squat idol, the both of them turbaned like prophets in the Old Testament.
It didn’t take long. There was no time in it. Or rather, we were outside of time; within, not on, that surface, that demarcation between the old where we knew we had not died and the new where the subadar said that we were dead.
Beyond the brandished bottles, the blue sleeves and the grimed hands, the faces like masks grimaced into rigid and soundless shouts to frighten children, I saw Comyn again. He came plowing up like a laden ship in a chop sea; beneath his arm was the ancient waiter, to his lips he held the M.P.’s whistle. Then Sartoris swung a chair at the single light.
It was cold in the street, a cold that penetrated the clothing, the alcohol-distended pores, and murmured to the skeleton itself. The plaza was empty, the lights infrequent and remote. So quiet it was that I could hear the faint water in the fountain.
From some distance away came sound, remote too under the thick low sky — shouting, far-heard, on a thin female note like all shouting, even a mob of men, broken now and then by the sound of a band. In the shadow of the wall Monaghan and Comyn held the German on his feet. He was unconscious; the three of them invisible save for the faint blur of the bandage, inaudible save for the steady monotone of Monaghan’s cursing.
“There should never have been an alliance between Frenchmen and Englishmen,” the subadar said. He spoke without effort; invisible, his effortless voice had an organ quality, out of all proportion to his size. “Different nations should never join forces to fight for the same object.
Let each fight for something different; ends that do not conflict, each in his own way.” Sartoris passed us, returning from the fountain, carrying his bulging cap carefully before him, bottom-up.
We could hear the water dripping from it between his footsteps. He became one of the blob of thicker shadow where the bandage gleamed and where Monaghan cursed steadily and quietly. “And each after his own tradition,” the subadar said. “My people.
The English gave them rifles. They looked at them and came to me: ‘This spear is too short and too heavy: how can a man slay a swift enemy with a spear of this size and weight?’
They gave them tunics with buttons to be kept buttoned; I have passed a whole trench of them squatting, motionless, buried to the ears in blankets, straw, empty sand bags, their faces gray with cold; I have lifted the blankets away from patient torsos clad only in a shirt.
“The English officers would say to them, ‘Go there and do thus’; they would not stir. Then one day at full noon the whole battalion, catching movement beyond a crater, sprang from the trench, carrying me and an officer with it.
We carried the trench without firing a shot; what was left of us — the officer, I, and seventeen others — lived three days in a traverse of the enemy’s front line; it required a whole brigade to extricate us.
‘Why didn’t you shoot?’ the officer said. ‘You let them pick you off like driven pheasant.’ They did not look at him. Like children they stood, murmurous, alert, without shame. I said to the headman, ‘Were the rifles loaded, O Das?’ Like children they stood, diffident, without shame. ‘O Son of many kings,’ Das said. ‘Speak the truth of thy knowing to the sahib,’ I said. ‘They were not loaded, sahib,’ Das said.”
Again the band came, remote, thudding in the thick air. They were giving the German drink from a bottle. Monaghan said: “Now. Feel better now?”
“It iss mine head,” the German said. They spoke quietly, like they were discussing wall-paper.
Monaghan cursed again. “I’m going back. By God, I—”
“No, no,” the German said. “I will not permit. You haf already obligated—”
We stood in the shadow beneath the wall and drank. We had one bottle left. Comyn crashed it, empty, against the wall.
“Now what?” Bland said.
“Girls,” Comyn said. “Would ye watch Comyn of the Irish nation among the yellow hair of them like a dog among the wheat?”
We stood there, hearing the far band, the far shouting. “You sure you feel all right?” Monaghan said.
“Thanks,” the German said. “I feel goot.”
“Come on, then,” Comyn said.
“You going to take him with you?” Bland said.
“Yes,” Monaghan said. “What of it?”
“Why not take him on to the A.P.M.? He’s sick.”
“Do you want me to bash your bloody face in?” Monaghan said.
“All right,” Bland said.
“Come on,” Comyn said. “What fool would rather fight than fush? All men are brothers, and all their wives are sisters. So come along, yez midnight fusileers.”
“Look here,” Bland said to the German, “do you want to go with them?” With his bandaged head, he and the subadar alone were visible, like two injured men among five spirits.
“Hold him up a minute,” Monaghan told Comyn. Monaghan approached Bland. He cursed Bland. “I like fighting,” he said, in that same monotone. “I even like being whipped.”
“Wait,” the German said. “Again I will not permit.” Monaghan halted, he and Bland not a foot apart. “I haf wife and son in Beyreuth,” the German said. He was speaking to me. He gave me the address, twice, carefully.
“I’ll write to her,” I said. “What shall I tell her?”
“Tell her it iss nothing. You will know.”
“Yes. I’ll tell her you are all right.”
“Tell her this life iss nothing.”
Comyn and Monaghan took his arms again, one on either side. They turned and went on, almost carrying him. Comyn looked back once. “Peace be with you,” he said.
“And with you, peace,” the subadar said. They went on. We watched them come into silhouette in the mouth of an alley where a light was. There was an arch there, and the faint cold pale light on the arch and on the walls so that it was like a gate and they entering the gate, holding the German up between them.
“What will they do with him?” Bland said. “Prop him in the corner and turn the light off? Or do French brothels have he-beds too?”
“Who the hell’s business is that?” I said.
The sound of the band came, thudding; it was cold. Each time my flesh jerked with alcohol and cold I believed that I could hear it rasp on the bones.
“Since seven years now I have been in this climate,” the subadar said. “But still I do not like the cold.” His voice was deep, quiet,
