“Well,” said Sergeant Gounod, and that was all he could bring himself to say for a while. Langlois and Férol looked at him. He looked at them, and what he saw was two terrified animals at bay.
“Well,” said Gounod again, “let’s get busy. What’s the use of hanging around.”
“Yes,” said Langlois. “Quickly, quickly. Where to? Is it far? Let’s run there, what d’you say?” Langlois was smiling and Gounod had to look away.
“For Christ’s sake, haven’t you got a drink for us?” said Férol.
“Of course,” said Gounod, relieved to have the talk brought back from the slightly insane direction he felt it was getting away to. “I almost forgot. Here you are.”
Férol took a pull at the canteen, such a long one that Gounod had to grab it away.
“Leave some for somebody else, will you?”
“Yes, for the sergeants as usual, I suppose.”
Gounod said nothing and handed the canteen to Langlois.
Langlois took a mouthful and swallowed it with an effort. The cognac descended slowly, warming a column down the centre of his icy, trembling body, past his pounding heart to a point where it began to spread sideways.
Suddenly it was all in his throat again, spewing forth through nose and mouth. He stood there, shocked by the unexpectedness of the reaction, cognac dripping from his face, tears from his eyes.
“I can’t hold it,” he said, and smiled again through his acrid drooling.
“Well, leave it for someone who can,” said Férol. Sergeant Gounod again looked away.
“Here’s some cigarettes,” said the sergeant. Both men took one and Gounod lighted them. Langlois’s was quivering so that the sergeant had difficulty keeping the match near it.
Gounod went over to Didier and bent down to offer him a drink, but Didier didn’t seem to understand and turned his face away from the canteen.
“Give it to me, then,” said Férol. “I need it. I didn’t even taste that last swallow.”
Gounod gave him another drink and watched him suck the cigarette smoke deeply into his lungs.
“Come on,” said Gounod. “We’ve got to get going. Pick up the stretcher, there! Come on, you two. Courage. It’ll soon be over and you’ll be in a better place than what I am.”
The stretcher-bearers picked Didier up and carried him out the door. The sergeant of the guard, standing there, saw that his eyes were closed, so he gave him a couple of smart slaps in the face as he passed. Didier opened his eyes.
Férol walked out right behind the stretcher. He had been nursing along an accumulation of flatus, and he let it rip as he passed the guard.
“That’s what I think of you,” he said, pleased with his timing. Nobody laughed.
Langlois walked out behind Férol. How he loved that guard-house . . . his last home on earth. He fixed his mouth to whistle, but it was only a sigh that came.
“Oh, my darling . . .”
The regiment was, as regiments always are for parades, and seldom are for attacks, if the military historians are to be believed, ready ahead of the appointed time.
Regimental Sergeant-Major Boulanger was there, busy, competent, as regimental sergeant-majors always are, in the same way that head waiters are busy, competent, or seem to be so, if they are good head waiters.
The firing-squads were there, standing at the side of the field farthest from the place where they had entered it. They looked at the execution posts and they looked at each other. They looked at Sergeant-Major Boulanger and at the entrance to the field. They were themselves being looked at by the regiment. The regiment looked at them as if they were men apart. There was curiosity or speculation in many of these glances.
The quartermaster-sergeant and his details were there, near the execution posts. They were hanging around, ill at ease, talking in low voices, inspecting and re-inspecting the posts, ropes, and blindfolds which Boulanger had already inspected and found correct.
The posts were there, evenly spaced and neatly aligned. They looked stark, lonely, and a little absurd. The absurdity was undoubtedly due to their strangeness. Three such posts were not often met with well out in the confines of the field. They did not look as if they were at home and this aspect was increased perhaps by the little mounds of fresh earth in which they had their roots. Because of what was to be done there, the actual texture and form of the posts seemed different from ordinary posts. Not one of the fifteen hundred men present who looked at them could define the difference, but each one felt that it existed.
The parade ground was alive with a kind of electricity, the electricity of men’s glances which were constantly flickering back and forth from the posts to the sergeant-major to the entrance to the field to the firing-squads.
In spite of the sergeant-major’s order that nothing was to be hurried, there was a tendency on everybody’s part, including his own, to advance or to anticipate the time. At seven-twenty-five Boulanger was already facing the regiment from the centre of the field and shouting commands. For some minutes he manœu-vred and drilled the mass of blue around until he had it in the formation he wanted. This was a three-sided hollow square of double ranks with the First Battalion forming the base. The fourth side of the square was empty except for the three execution posts, the men who stood near them, and the long, early-morning shadows which the posts and the men cast. The sergeant-major stood the regiment at ease and walked over to the firing-squads.
He inspected the squads carefully, looking each man in the eye as if taking his measure for the job he was going to have to do. He inspected their rifles equally carefully and cautioned two men to put the elevation of their sights back to zero. He gave the order to load and followed it at once by the order to unload. Thirty-six live rounds fell out on the ground and Boulanger now knew for certain that the magazines would automatically fill all the breeches again and that no man could evade his duty by having an empty breech. Then he spoke to them:
“This is a duty you have to perform. It is like any other duty in the army, and it must be performed properly. The better you do it, the easier it will be for the condemned men. You will not be more than seven metres away from the posts. Aim at the prisoners’ chests and fire when the warrant-officer gives the word. Attention! Load!” Thirty-six shells were again clicked into the thirty-six breeches.
The officers were now seen arriving on the field in a group. Boulanger called the parade to order, then went to meet the colonel and reported that everybody was present and correct.
Colonel Dax stood the regiment at ease again and beckoned the quartermaster-sergeant over to him.
“You know, sergeant,” he said, “that one man has broken his leg and will be on a stretcher. Can you prop it up against the post all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, be sure that you do. I don’t want anything messy to happen.”
Dax looked at his watch.
“The officers will take their posts,” he said.
The group moved off, began to spread, then scattered and distributed itself along the front of the three battalions. Colonel Dax started to walk up and down with the adjutant.
“It makes it all the harder, the day being so fine,” he said. “Poor fellows! What frightful torture!”
Herbillon didn’t say anything. He was worried about reading out the sentence of the court martial. He had an uneasy feeling inside him and he was afraid he might fail to keep his voice under control. He was also obsessed by the thought that when he stopped reading, the prisoners would have only a few seconds left. This seemed to put a responsibility on him, a responsibility which was almost an outrage.
The prisoners and their escort stopped at the clump of trees near the entrance to the parade ground while Didier’s stretcher was being pulled out of the ambulance. Gounod offered each one his canteen again, but Férol was the only one who wanted a drink. Gounod had to pull the cognac away from him a second time.
“He’s passed out,” said one of the guards pointi
ng to the deep-breathing figure on the stretcher. Gounod went over to Didier and pinched his face until he opened his eyes.
“This is solid comfort,” said Didier. “Did I get wounded?”
“Yes,” said Gounod.
“Where are we going?”
“To the hospital,” said Gounod.
“D’you see that thing, up there in the branches of the tree?” Didier went on, talking slowly and more to himself than to the men around him. “Something very funny going on. I can’t quite understand it. It’s got a name which doesn’t seem to belong to it. Whoever heard of a thing like that being called Sambre et Meuse?”
“Like what?” said the priest who was standing beside the stretcher. “I can’t see anything.”
“Like that. It keeps slipping down, but it never gets any lower. It keeps moving, and yet it’s always there,” Didier murmured, obviously fascinated by what he saw from under lids which had a tendency to close. “. . . Ah, now I’m beginning to understand. It’s got something to do with me . . . It’s my pain, that’s what it is . . . But why up there in the tree . . . ? Queer sort of pain, too . . . It doesn’t seem to hurt in the proper way . . . Strange, but I never felt better in my life . . . I feel wonderful . . . I feel so wonderful I think I must be dead. . . .”
“You soon will be,” said Férol, and quickly dodged the blow which Gounod aimed at him. Didier had closed his eyes again. There was an expression of unutterable contentment on his face.
“It’s almost a pleasure to take a brute like you to the execution ground,” said Gounod, glaring at Férol.
“The pleasure is all yours,” said Langlois, and started grinning, smugly, ingratiatingly, a little idiotically.
“Come on,” said Gounod. “You with the stretcher, lead the way.”
“Oh, faster, faster . . .” said Langlois. He made a faint gesture with his hand, and nothing could have conveyed despair more accurately.
Gounod was feeling acutely uncomfortable, and it was Langlois of the three condemned men who made him feel so the most. Every time he looked at this man, or heard him speak, he was conscious of being on the brink of an unknown horror. He was unable to define what he saw going on, but he sensed that he was watching a mind in the process of losing itself, a human life in the obscure and subtle stages of a lonely disintegration. It made him feel a little sick and more than a little afraid. Gounod crossed himself surreptitiously.
The group left the clump of trees and moved out on to the field, walking slowly. Férol walked next behind the stretcher and kept up a steady flow of profane and obscene invective, loud enough to drown out the muttered prayers of the priest, who was the object of a good deal of his abuse. Férol was just drunk enough to have everything look very clear and near to him, not drunk enough to have things look double. He waved to the backs of the regimental ranks as he approached them and shouted: “Assassins! Watch a hero die!”
Langlois came on to the field staring at his own feet, watching them make the steps, looking at the ground and thinking: “This grass that I am walking over is the outmost boundary of the world I have lived in. I never thought of it before, but the next stopping place after this surface is infinity.” He looked up, as if to search for infinity in the sky, but what he saw, all at the same moment, was the regiment, the execution posts, and the firing-squads beyond.
“Will they let me take my jacket off?” he asked, turning quickly to Gounod. “I’m afraid the buttons will turn the bullets into dumdums.” Panic lurked just behind his eyes.
“Sure,” said Gounod, without returning the look.
“Do you know,” Langlois went on, relieved, “it just occurred to me. Lots of things are just occurring to me. It just occurred to me that I haven’t had a single sexual thought since they drew the lots. That’s rather extraordinary for a man. That’s what fear will do to you. Fear and pain are the complete neutralizers of sexuality. Of course fear is pain, the most terrible of all. But just at this moment I don’t feel so afraid. Funny, isn’t it? It’s those posts that did it, I think, those posts marking the end of my life. Few people, I’ll bet, have had the ends of their lives marked out for them like that in both time and space. Or maybe it’s the motion. Did you ever notice how much harder fear is to control if you are standing still? The time before zero hour is much worse than the time after. Waiting, waiting, that’s what’s unbearable. But now I can see the posts and those fellows over there. They must be the firing-squads. That means the waiting is coming to an end. That means that this solid lump of ice inside me will soon be liquefied....
“Those posts make it look like the Crucifixion, don’t they? And if we keep in this order, it will be Férol who will play the role of Christ. That’s the proper touch of irony, all right. Has it ever impressed you how that touch of irony seldom seems to be absent, even in the most trivial happenings? But then this is really a trivial affair for everybody except us. Half an hour after we’re gone you’ll be back in the sergeants’ mess, finishing off that canteen of cognac, figuring out when it will be your turn to go on leave again and be with your wife . . .”
Langlois stopped talking abruptly. He was blinded by a rush of tears, lost his balance a little, stumbled against one of his guards, then recovered himself. The guard gave him a sidelong look. He saw a pale, bruised face, dirty, unshaved, and sopping wet. An under lip that trembled and was utterly out of control. A creased jacket, hanging from a pair of forlorn shoulders, two medals dangling listlessly from the left breast. Baggy trousers, untidy and despondent, flapping around a pair of slightly quivering legs. A tramp. The guard looked away.
“Here we are,” said Gounod. “Courage, old man! Show them a brave front. Many of us will soon be joining you. This war . . .”
“Oh, God! Oh, Christ!” Langlois fixed his mouth to whistle, but again all that came was the escaping air of a deep sigh. He felt himself grasped by the elbows and turned.
“Let me take my jacket off,” he said. The jacket was taken from him, a little roughly because the men who did it were overzealous and nervous. Langlois heard his medals tinkle. “Please give me the medals.”
The medals were detached from the jacket and handed to him.
“I return these decorations for bravery to the French people. I do not feel brave now.”
He said it simply, and flung the medals from him, quite without melodramatic intention. He watched them sail away, glint in the sunlight, and separate, then fall to the ground. His eye followed them, as it had followed the cigarette butt he had tossed in among the carpenter’s tools—when was that? In another life? No, day before yesterday only. The medals lay there on the grass, their ribbons gay, evocative of dances when on leave and of the admiring looks of women, the envious glances of men. . . .
When Langlois lifted his gaze from where the pieces of metal had fallen he found that a wall of horizon blue had formed in front of him, so close that it shut off the whole world except for a narrow strip of ground.
He drew a deep breath again, trying to ease the solidified anguish of his spirit. At that moment he felt his wrists gripped, pulled behind him, and tied. Men were all around him, puffing in his face, smelly, clumsy, yet tender. He liked the feeling of them when they brushed against him, he liked the smell of them.
He was forced back a couple of steps, felt the hard support of the post behind him, felt ropes pass round his chest and waist, then a constriction as he and the post were lashed tightly together, so tightly it hurt his bound and clenching fists.
A voice from behind asked if he wanted to be blindfolded.
“No,” he said. His sight was the last remnant of freedom which was left to him and he would cling to that until the end.
The little crowd around the post moved away. Langlois stood there, soaked in sweat, panting, alone. The rigidity of his attitude gave him an aspect of defiance which he did not feel. He looked at the line of blue in front of him, but the faces of the men did not seem to have any features.
A man came up and exami
ned him, felt the tension of the ropes, took Langlois’s cap off and threw it aside.
“Courage!” said Sergeant-Major Boulanger, then vanished as quickly as he had come.
The unearthly silence in which Langlois seemed to be floating was suddenly broken by the beat of drums. It was a throbbing sound, savage and full of doom, yet it comforted Langlois a little because it absorbed some of the piercing ache of his own throbbing heart.
The drums ceased, and a voice began to drone. He caught some of the words and they sounded familiar to him. He had heard them used in those combinations and cadences somewhere else, somewhere where there was also the sound of running water, or was it pigeons? The faces of the firing-squad were becoming more distinct now. That fellow on the end, where had he seen him before? Ah, yes, the recruit who wanted to win medals. Well, he could have those two, down there near his feet. What was his name? Du-something. Duclos? No. Morval? No, not Morval. Of course, Duval! Same name as the restaurant where Louise and he used to eat before they were married....
Férol stood roped to his post, muttering—muttering, had anybody been there to hear it, an incoherent hotch-potch of autobiography, opinion, prejudice, and blasphemy. The last drink of cognac was now in full possession of his brain and he therefore saw twelve men in front of him who were partially effacing twelve others, duplicate of themselves. Time meant nothing to Férol. Nothing meant anything to him. He had managed unwittingly, through a mixture of hatred, contempt, and cognac, to achieve a state of detachment which made him almost as oblivious of what was going on around him as was the man on his left.
Of the three, Didier more nearly maintained the illusion that a crucifixion was in progress. He hung on his stretcher which had been propped up against the post. He hung there, the shape of his shoulders distorted by the ropes in the same way that the shoulders of cripples are distorted by crutches. The top of the post, pushing through the canvas of the stretcher, thrust Didier’s head forward and a little downward. His two arms spread outwards, then drooped at the elbows in a drunken farewell. His mouth was open and his tongue was hanging out. He was breathing with some laboriousness, slobbering a little, now and then choking. When he choked, his head jerked upwards to free the obstruction, but this was merely a reflex action, for Didier was in a morphine stupor of some depth. And he would have died there anyway in the end, because his position made it so that he was slowly strangling. Didier did not know this. Didier did not know anything.
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