An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  Doubtful it had been at least two months ago. But a chapter, he knew, was often covered in a single gesture in the field; men were surer of their common experience than ever before. David reasoned that if this girl meant as much to Alan as might be suspected, judging by what she might have meant to himself, then even the suspicion would be enough to make it his duty to break the shock to her as gently as might be; her anguish might be as great as his own – even greater?

  All convictions notwithstanding, he thought, might not Alan’s mind be struggling now to get to Paris to warn her, striving at least to set up some premonition of his death so that the shock might not be so great? David felt his thought leap again to the impossible – yet was not reality even more impossible: that anything, even death, could ever destroy a mind like Alan’s?

  But after all, was it quite credible that his mind could cease to be and that all his ambitions and desires could come to complete and utter frustration? They had, undeniably. Why not accept reality, David thought, impossible though it appeared when applied to such a personality as Alan’s? Why not remember this was one small episode among a million others? The word for him and for all men was minimus? Remember that even this great killing, this world war, was perhaps unimportant in the long view? At first it would be recorded in many books, then repeated less fulsomely as to fact but with more emphasis upon causes to prove this and that, then condensed to no more than a close packed chapter in some future history, finally to a page, a paragraph – true estimate, eventually, of the cycle of war and peace, destruction and reconstruction, to house the survivors so as quickly as possible they might beget another generation to outnumber the sons of the enemy?

  He summoned what was left of his long unused newsman’s facility to phrase this fact, in order to freeze it: ‘The peace!’ he thought. ‘At last the peace has come.’ The salvos of artillery have ceased all along the line – from guns parked so close they might be placed hub to hub from one end of the battle line at the Channel to the other in the Alps. Armistice had finally been signed at Compiègne, terminating hostilities within six hours of signature. So, these guns were silent as of eleven o’clock this morning – two hours and twenty minutes ago. That silence – ordered, expected – was nevertheless followed by disbelief and then delirium, insanity, the details of which few men may distinctly remember. ‘Some of us are still stunned, still partly unbelieving,’ he thought. Yet, he had now acquired enough control of himself to reflect that at that moment there may have been more sane men gathered together than since the world began.

  Opposing battalions flung down their arms, surged up out of pit and burrow, raced into no-man’s-land shouting goodwill. They laughed and wept together with the enemy, danced and sang, exchanged tobacco and helmets, watches and rings and pictures of their girls – visited in dugouts and secret outposts – fraternized against orders. Discipline burst its bonds; authority vanished. It could not last long; presently, headquarters awoke to the fact their armies were dissolving. Frantic orders gathered urgency – and emphasis – on the way down – until they raved in the cursing of company commanders trying to get their men back into their trenches, trying to reassemble combat units, trying to reorganize safeguards against enemies altogether too friendly.

  “This happened,” David said aloud to no one.

  David had felt the sudden silence like the crack of calm in which he could hear nothing but the beat of his own heart. For a moment all had stood fast. David was not sure he was alive, unless the heavy beat in his body was proof, or that the utter stillness was not a trick of death thus to deal with unattainable hope, or that in a moment shells might not scream again to search out this trench and this time destroy him. Then, David remembered, a man had moved and another had shouted. A company had moved and shouted together. Delirium followed, the details of which he could not remember except as an attack of insanity.

  David had seen his own officers become men again and leap away with his companies. He knew that the balance of his thousand men had erupted out of his front and support lines and disappeared, as a combat unit, into the madness of no-man’s-land. He had seen this happen before his eyes; he had made no attempt to restrain them. David knew that men were resuming their full identities, regaining once more whatever they had surrendered to comradeship in arms.

  ‘Comradeship in arms!’ David’s focus further distorted and blurred, to his surprised relief, with tears he had not wept within his memory. Nor throughout these long months of the fighting could he remember so losing command of himself. It was amazingly more important than his loss of control over this battalion of infantry.

  David then saw confusion to be compared only to a general engagement gone amiss, where regiments overreach themselves and go off the map into unknown ground. Even then he was aware of the same loss of direction, the same bewilderment in unexpected ravines with units losing contact with command and with one another and presently disintegrating into smaller groups held together by suddenly arisen new leaders. Even then it had seemed to him that all moved as frantically as the ants of a hill that had been trodden upon.

  He felt he had been reborn into a world more surely his than to any of the generations before. He felt strong not only to accomplish his own part but with new reserves of energy to carry along all those about him who faltered. This place was more beautiful than any he had ever known. Long disregarded details became sharp before him with an unearthly clarity, as if he had actually been killed and had returned with new perception and leisure to examine where last he had lived.

  The hut before which he stood had changed from a filthy two-room shelter for his headquarters to a place upon which his understanding and even his sentiment might now be centered. From the mellowed tiles of its ancient roof and its thick walls of calcined stone, the pale November sun rippled back in faint waves. Even a glance, now, revealed it to be the obvious work of long dead hands, another link with the past in this land containing so much more that was old than new. Even this hut seemed to go back to the time of brothers-in-arms when there had been, actually, such a thing as chivalry.

  Thus, now, as the great instant of the armistice arrived and men had shouted with exultation, David could neither move nor speak. Yet even then he understood that the way of sanity lay away from contemplation of the tragedy beside him and through effort to observe what else was happening about him. Though it was for this that all experience had trained him, the visibility of full day seemed to have abruptly fogged in his eyes to a few short yards in which only masses of men were discernible and these as if in a red dawn mist.

  Two hours and some minutes earlier, all within the space of that last minute while David stood eagerly watching and waiting for what he knew would be the most momentous instant of his lifetime, the world seemed suddenly to come to an end. His good friend, Alan, who had stood so close their shoulders touched, had been smashed off the firing step by a bullet through the head. David’s amazement, horror, bewilderment and tremendous anger had struck into his heart as if he himself had been shot again and again.

  There was little left of that in war now; each month had stripped away more and more of its trappings. David remembered the golden leaves upon his shoulders. A poignant thing that now, he reflected, these leaves given him by Alan. Both had received their promotions in the same order. Each had sought to surprise the other; indeed, they had met in the road on the way to each other for the same purpose. At this moment, Alan was wearing David’s own captain’s bars. David was glad of that. The exchange was one of the remaining gestures of chivalry, a pledge of mutual respect and affection. David remembered how his fingers had trembled when first he had pinned these leaves to his shoulder straps and how he had felt the heady rise to height when first he had mounted and ridden off at the head of his thousand fighting men, giving the hand signal “Forward!” of which there was no greater gesture of power over men.

  No chivalry? – when he had led as fine a fighti
ng force as had won the right to swagger with fouragier swinging at shoulder, a mark of survival through such a series of battles as had given a new meaning to the word. Hard to match, these officers and men. Men-at-arms led by knights. That was not too fanciful; he could defend the fact there had been knights.

  But strangely soon, he thought to be pretending, even for one’s own morale, that the foulest cesspool men had ever made was a field of honor, that the merciless spate of machine-guns could ever be forgotten, that the glitter of steel could ever be seen without recollection of the rip of the point, that command and rank were worth learning how to weigh casualties against yards of gain.

  His mind, he thought, had gone out of control; perhaps it had tripped at last from overload of responsibility, of sights and sounds and shocks. He was well enough aware he had acquired the veteran habit of evading the full impact of fact by looking away from it when he could.

  Early this morning he had avoided the easy path, which led through a pleasant sheltered copse and beyond to a sun splashed ravine so that he might not see what he knew it contained, stenching to high heaven: casualties sprawled in the inhuman indignity and indecency of battle dead. He still “wished to count islands of peace and beauty in the field,” that was Alan, “yet whose trees are the surviving sons of great forests where men have lain in ambush for each other and fought with every sort of weapon from flints to the Mill’s grenade. Take any road through here, turn time back, and you’ll find the whole history of the civilized world night-camped along it: a sentry watching beside the Eagle of Caesar’s Second Legion, varlet grooms sleeping beside the heavy black war horses of the Robber Barons of the Ardennes, the advance party of the chivalry searching for them to cut them down, actual knights with ideals of right and justice.

  Abruptly a pocket of his memory, untouched since childhood, seemed to turn out. He remembered the very words:

  “After the fighting was done they unarmed him, and they gave him a bath in tepid water, and a soft robe of cloth of velvet. By and by, when evening had fallen, a feast was spread. One attendant bare a silver basin and another a silver ewer and the others bare napkins of fine linen. ‘Of all the knights victorious in battle,’ saith She, ‘I drink to three!’ Therewith She drank half the elixir that was in the chalice. Then to him, ‘Drink thou the rest to me!’ and he felt it run like fire through every vein of his body. Her face was beyond words, red upon white. Her eyes were bright and glancing like those of a falcon. Her lips were very red, like coral for redness, and her hair was like to silk for softness.”1

  He beat his fist against the revetment of the trench and looked down upon a stretcher on which lay a figure so motionless under its blanket that it had already become the familiar shape of death now devoid of personal identity.

  2

  Desire ran through David now, quite as strong as the familiar sensations of fear that perhaps were never to come again. He could almost feel the soft warmth of some girl’s tousled head in the crook of his arm. Her’s would be no simple sufferance, no pretense of surrender. He had no picture of her yet, but he would recognize the assurance of her glance. He could almost hear the first rush of their explanations. He had earned the ancient reward of the warrior.

  ‘After the fighting was done,’ he thought. ‘Jesus, it must really be over! So here I am. Here I am, by God!’

  He continued his unwritten story of the armistice: ‘Eleven o’clock. The battle line. Time and place have never been of such supreme importance, not for centuries. Who is there among those at home even, who does not feel his soul assume embodiment … and rush, whatever the distance, to our bloody ditches here, across France and Belgium? Joy embraces the survivors of this war (I’m one – a survivor!) with the passion of hope come true. Sorrow flings itself down into the mud with the abandon of another farewell to the dead suddenly seen again in memory. Upon the tick of eleven o’clock of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, began this peaceful silence, which … in all probability … must end the grimmest war in history.’

  Sharply, David was brought back to the immediate. That flamboyant and volatile Frenchman of unmistakable booming voice, was shouting through the leafless trees, “Where is this command post? Where is this hovel where I may find that American Commandant? That long piece of American mud with the blue eyes?”

  David saw him striding up the path, waving his arms, the hair of his moustache and beard writhing like black wires electrified. Gaspard was shouting through the clearing, “Daveed! Daveed! Nomme de Dieu! Where are you?”

  “Name of God!” he cried. “I have mutinerie!”

  “Mutiny?!”

  “Yes!”

  “Your troops?!”

  “Non, non, non! Opposite. Give to me a poignard!”

  It was Colonel Gaspard, commander of the regiment of the French Fourth Army on the left beside his own battalion, where the French and American divisions joined on the line during this intensely bloody but final Meuse-Argonne Offensive. The iron heels of Gaspard’s boots rang upon the stones in the path. David saw him also with a new eye. His sky-blue helmet was tilted upon the back of his head. David had often seen this gesture, which accomplished this angle in the excitement of action: Gaspard’s bear paw of a hand brushed the steel brim up as if it were the visor of a knightly casque and were looking freely out upon the world again, having just discharged some vow permitting him to uncover his face. And the face was that of a medieval warrior but little modified by continental fashion at the turn of the twentieth century. The moustache of a boulevardier hid the straightness of his lips, a spade beard nearly covered the regimental numerals upon the collar of his tunic.

  But even when Gaspard’s beard was most tangled and poilu, or at those times when he lapsed into his Gallic silences, his sentiments could hardly be hidden: his command eyes, blue also but with the quality of steel, reflected fire as well as ice. They smoldered now, and he stood with arms akimbo, teetering on the balls of his feet as if surcharged with energy. Though Gaspard might have been well into his mid-fifties, he was the most physical man David had ever known as well as the most oratorical, a throwback perhaps to the reckless and eloquent Napoleonic commanders, who led their charging squadrons with jeweled whips, the hard riders and deep drinkers of life, fighting for personal glory and advancement rather than from necessity and conviction.

  Yet still alive in Gaspard, if nowhere else, were David’s first romantic thoughts of war. Though Gaspard’s martial manners amused David, he still understood them. More than once had David stood at the edge of a muddy field while his battalion passed in review before him, and his thousand bayonets had seemed to gleam for him alone. The touch of pageantry made it possible, for the moment, for David to forget the cruel purpose of the bayonets and to glory in his own personal strength of command, a feeling in which Gaspard seemed to permanently live. So, though Gaspard’s own countrymen had been sickened by horror and dispirited by the war of attrition, though they had seen division after division moved forward to be smashed and ground down into the mud, David could still understand how Henri Gaspard personally accounted for the high morale of his regiment.

  Here was Gaspard full of motion, of unstoppable élan, striding toward David with compelling and obvious purpose.

  “C’est la derniere limite!” Gaspard said. “Quick, poignards! We must not fire a shot; do you not understand?”

  Questions died on David’s lips. Had something reached a last limit? Mutiny? Yet had not the impossible already happened today? Enough that it was an emergency.

  “A poignard!” he cried to David enunciating the word as only a Frenchman can. “Get me a poignard! At once! Two of them!” He galvanized himself with the words. He was vibrant. His steel eyes were bloodshot, suffused, waves of red passed down from the brim of his helmet, crossed his forehead, splashed his hawk nose with color, followed by bands of grey as shocking as the pallor of death. Gaspard was in a fury.

 
; “Nom de Dieu!” he cried, stamping his boot upon the stones and then in English, “I ask you for poignards, and you stand there doing nothing. Usually you wish to help a comrade. Have you changed into a Turco, a Senegalese, an Annamite, an Englishman? T’es débile? Cannot you understand? Trench knives!”

  He struck his chest with his fist and David saw he was wearing all his medals, not merely his double row of ribbons but the actual decorations in enamel, silver and gold. He shook, and it was like a work horse shuddering his harness. “Trench knives!” he repeated in his command tone edged with steel, the voice David had unhesitatingly obeyed when first they had met, when they had thrown their commands together and stood to save themselves.

  So David obeyed again, automatically, rousing his staff sergeant in the hut, demanding his knife and then another. “Orderly!” David shouted. “You and the sergeant, bring your trench knives quick!”

  Gaspard plucked at them and tossed their sheaths upon the ground, talking to himself: “Identical. Bon. Blades are short, but they will go!”

  Gaspard turned abruptly, a poignard in each fist, and walked rapidly away. David stood rooted, thinking he had witnessed action that might reasonably have happened here a full four hundred years before, but not today. The scabbards, however, remained upon the ground as evidence.

  David’s fat Sergeant, standing in the door of the headquarters hut, blinked pig’s eyes at them. David picked them up from the ground and handed them to his Sergeant. It was curious, David thought, looking into the man’s eyes, what little things made men grateful, but perhaps if you weighed close on to three hundred and were built like a beer cask, it would be no small matter to reach to the ground at your feet.

  “What th’hell?” the Sergeant asked.

  “I’ll find out,” David heard himself answer.

  David followed Gaspard by the ravine road, which presently became a muddy path to the main communication trench. Gaspard was moving fast. David, hurrying to overtake him, felt the muscles working in his legs but no correspondingly quick steps of logic in his mind as to Gaspard’s purpose.