by Earle Looker
David thought, “He can’t be so quickly dead. Just a moment ago he was so alive.”
“Oh, merde. I did not kill him,” Gaspard murmured. “I only humiliated him. Voila tout!” He scratched his bearded chin.
“But is he dead?” David said.
“Just dead as a million others,” Gaspard said. “Yes, it is strange, is it not?” He turned to the enemy and said slowly in German, “For decency, one of you his tunic about his middle must place.”
David could not force himself to look away from the former Oberst. This death seemed unauthorized. The whole purpose of the armistice seemed flouted. He had taken for granted they were in the midst of an armistice in death as well. He felt no familiarity with death as he looked upon this body, though he had seen so many others. Death had suddenly become as strange and shocking as it had been before the fighting.
Gaspard halted in the road. His jaw dropped. His mouth remained open in his beard. He cleared his throat, but failed to speak. He gestured to the Germans and to the body. They lifted it, caught step, started toward their line for the second time through the mud and muck. Gaspard strode away back to his own troops.
CHAPTER 3
A Chaplain’s Duty
“Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die.
And none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life.
Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt
Evacuation hospital, France, ca. 1917
Beside Alan’s stretcher, careful to keep his boots away from the dark puddle spreading under it, stood a Chaplain who David remembered had been characterized by Alan, in words that came back in almost their entirety: “One of the few voices of God who has the sense to keep his mouth shut until he’s asked. He attends to the living; he’s not the kind who remembers he must be off to the rear to bury the dead, when the shelling starts. He seems to sincerely want to efface himself and to be one of the men, though he’s middle-aged and well-fed, and he can’t remember to button more than three buttons of his blouse, which attracts more attention than the crosses on his shoulders – though I haven’t the heart to tell him.”
“If this had to happen,” David said, “why in hell didn’t it happen when he was leading his men? Why did Alan have to stand up to the firing step and look through the loop-hole a minute before eleven? Why should that have been dangerous? Was it a random shot or was it sniper fire? Why did it have to smash him in the head so no surgeon could ever help him? Why couldn’t it have been me? Why do the best men get killed? Why couldn’t it have been one of a million others not worth a good goddamn? How could anybody believe this would happen today? What can I do? What can anybody do?”
The Chaplain said, “All we can do is give him a decent burial. That’s my duty. Just you leave this to me. I’ll get bearers to take him back.”
“No!” David said sharply. “He’s not going back! I’m burying him here.”
“Not here; this isn’t fit.”
“It’s the only place!” David cried, beating the side of the trench again. “Must I repeat this whole foul business by telling you? See that?” With the toe of his muddy field-boot he indicated the double handful of loose earth upon the packed dirt floor of the trench. “Stand away from it! His brains spilled out there. His mind, do you understand, lies under that little pile of dirt I scraped over it. Jesus! A whole fine mind, full of knowledge, experience, courage, sympathies, love, ambitions, plans. I won’t have it moved. I’m standing by to guard it. Somebody’s got to. A moment ago, God was looking in another direction and this happened. I guess he must have been too busy watching over a sparrow. And the rest of him will be buried here. I’m going to have the whole traverse filled in as soon as I can get a digging detail.”
“But – Major,” the Chaplain said slowly, “It’s out of our hands. We’ve no choice about what we must do. All bodies must be taken to the rear.”
“I’ll have you to know,” David cried furiously, “that you’ll not be saying must to me! Take him to the rear for what? To wait his turn to be buried? I’ll not have him waiting in line – in a row – to have you read your book over him as per regulations. We’ll dispense with the book this time. I’m burying him here. And what explanation do I have to make to you? He’s my officer, commanding one of my companies. He should have commanded this goddamn battalion if they’d touched the right man. He belongs to this battalion. I’ll bury my dead wherever and whenever I think is best.”
“But,” the Chaplain persisted, “I have to carry out orders. I must write records, and here …”
“No more talk and no more interference. Put in the record that I’m burying him in the biggest single grave in the sector. Now that’s that! Discussion’s ended, do you hear?”
The Chaplain stood like a rock. “Be reasonable,” he said. “We can’t ‘dispense with the book’. Captain Cushing must have the benefit of proper burial, and I must read the service for him. Moreover, it’s the service he wishes.”
“How do you know what he wants? He’d laugh at you, but he can’t; he doesn’t know; he doesn’t think; he’s dead; he’ll never think again. Haven’t you seen enough of death, you fool, to know what dead means?”
“I must do my duty,” the Chaplain said. “Read the service and …”
He was sure Alan being killed was final proof there was nothing left but chance, proof that right and wrong were fictions as were future rewards and punishments – as if that mattered, proof it was wiser to make the most of whatever life’s happiness could be caught in one’s arms. David then proceeded to pour out upon the Chaplain a mixture of field, fighting and heretofore religious phrases, sacred words and thoughts twisted together with the worst. He denied all the Chaplain held divine.
David wanted to believe what he used to believe: Alan had entered into life, then some other place, then back into life. He wanted the Chaplain to stand up to him and fight it out. He didn’t. Perhaps he was afraid the weapons of his faith would turn in his hand. Perhaps he felt out of his element. But they must, these men, who’ve been able, back home, to make the gestures of infinite wisdom. Perhaps David had shocked him to speechlessness because he’d accused his God of carelessness. Perhaps he’d not seen such bitterness before. Everyone seems, even in the field, to conspire together to pretend agreement with whatever any chaplain says. That’s the common decency in most men, he thought.
It was while the Chaplain was silently praying that David saw Alan’s mind growing under that little pile of moist dirt, pushing out of it with tendrils for an instant unfolding into something like a tree of knowledge – whether the picture came from the ideas or the ideas from the picture – and thought, ‘I must control my imagination to never see a thing like that again.’ He then came back to something more like sanity and shame for the way he’d spoken to the Chaplain, who was only trying to do what he had been trained to do.
The Chaplain went down on his knees beside Alan on the stretcher and continued. “Almighty God,” his lips said soundlessly, “look down with mercy on this man who knows not what he does and deliver him from sickness of mind. Almighty God, accept the praise and thanksgiving that presently he will come to utter for deliverance from, and may his heart be impressed with a sense of thy merciful goodness. Withhold thy punishment and wrath. Comfort and relieve him. Save him from ignorance, pride, stubborn prejudice. Dispose him toward attainment of thy immortality.”
2
Abruptly, they were interrupted by another voice, a great voice so resonant and commanding and without visible body that they both started. “Peace!” it said, “Peace!” and then became human. “Doucement!” it added and immediately translated itself into English, “Gently!” as the speaker appeared from the angle of the traverse.
David felt this elemental force striding toward them. It was embodied in the person, over
-tall for a Frenchman, of an officer in the horizon blue uniform. He looked the decisive fighting man so utterly that David saw him as a medieval warrior risen out of the past, perhaps modified at close view by Continental turn of the century fashion and with the trappings of a Colonel of the Line.
“Gently!” Gaspard repeated, enunciating his English with precision. “Action has ended. Thinking has begun. If we could learn to stand under fire, cannot we learn to think without trembling? Each yield a little ground, or you will have a useless fight. Do not make of this an issue, my friends! Faire un compromis. Bury him here, in the soldier’s place. But also read the book.” The tone was one of tremendous finality. “Agreed?”
David saw the Chaplain square away to the Frenchman and brace himself.
“A fight, a fight over the body of our friend?” Gaspard said in tones combining reproach with affection. “Mais non! You old …”
“Well,” David said, “if you put it that way, Gaspard, I guess no, no fight. It doesn’t sound unreasonable.”
“Agreed?” Gaspard repeated.
“Yes,” David said slowly, “agreed. I suppose I agree.” He turned to the Chaplain, “All right. Go ahead. Read the service here now. But he’ll be buried here, mind you.”
Gaspard caught David by the elbow, and they both moved away from the stretcher.
The Chaplain’s prayer book appeared at once, as if he would hasten while the opportunity held good, and he began to read: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
Gaspard looked at David. “Ami? How?” he asked, indicating the stretcher.
“Yes. He stood up on the firing step. Said he wanted to see what an armistice looked like. Said, ‘Perhaps the last shots fired in anger in my lifetime,’ laughed, and was hit.
“When?”
“Not more than a minute before.”
“Destinee!” Gaspard clucked and added with emphatic conviction, “But not in my emplacements – non! This would not be possible.”
“What do you mean?! Your trenches are no better than mine!”
“I did not mean my trenches at all,” Gaspard said quickly. “I was speaking out of the top of my head, mon vieux. This could not have been prevented.”
“I could have prevented it! Oh Christ!” David said bitterly.
Gaspard said insistently, “The second in command of Capitaine Cushing’s company is slow getting the men back into the trenches, hein? You will be reorganizing his safeguards for him?”
“To hell with it.”
“But think,” Gaspard persisted, “what the high command in the rear will think when they learn what has happened. They will awake to the fact that all their orders have been forgotten or disobeyed, that their battalions have dissolved with those of the enemy, that their divisions have become mobs without leadership – and away from their positions! The generals will rave. Their blood will turn to steam. They will hiss at every opening. You will be cooked unless you are able to report very soon that all is as it was before eleven o’clock.”
“Nothing,” David cried, “can ever be the same!” and then added, not irrelevantly, “Damn that Chaplain anyhow!”
The voice of the Chaplain, grown strong now as he seemed to forget himself and read with long practiced emphasis, came down the trench to them. “But some men will say, ‘How are the dead raised up? Thou foolish one, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not in that body that shall be, but bear grain, and it may chance be wheat or some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed its own body. All flesh is not the same flesh. But there is one kind of flesh of men, another of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the terrestrial is one, and the glory of the celestial is another …’.”
“No more of these little pithy aphorisms cobbled together. I’ve had just about enough of this mumbo-jumbo!” David exclaimed.
“Pithy what?” queried the Chaplain.
Gaspard gave the side of the trench a kick with his boot. “I cannot blame you for wishing to dispense with it. Your convictions cry out to interrupt him, I know. You feel it insult to the intelligence of your friend, even if he cannot hear. But do not forget it is the most emouvant, most moving ceremony known to man, the best he has devised for himself.”
David gestured for silence.
The Chaplain continued with sincerity and conviction: “. . . So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. Behold I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruption must be put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality …”
Later, Gaspard confided in David that the Chaplain had affected him almost as much as he had David. Gaspard had been stirred to anger by hearing such fantasy on this day of reality. As he expressed it, by comparison he’d suddenly seen the “simple grandeur” of the ideas upon which he’d been brooding. For the first time he clearly saw their background. It was the conviction that if men persisted in trusting a non-existent God, then they’d continue to fail to act to save themselves from wars worse than we’d been through. He said he wouldn’t have to read ‘Le Temps’ for the next six months to know that the end of the fighting would begin a disturbance in men’s minds as great as at the beginning of the war itself. He said that because Frenchmen could hardly remember when they hadn’t been fighting or preparing to fight that all would be bewildered now with its end. This was Gaspard’s argument that the campaign for his plans had to be started immediately to provide something practical and definite to be done.
The Chaplain continued to pray, “Remember this, thy servant, Oh Lord, according to the favor who thou bearest unto thy people, and grant that, increasing in knowledge and love of thee, he may go from strength, in the life of perfect service, in thy heavenly kingdom …” And so on.
Gaspard threw his head back to laugh, but instead said, “Perhaps the priest believes this. Millions of civilians do and millions more pretend they do. It is to such pretense we shall return when the armies are disbanded. Your friend, who thought as we think, is spared at least the difficulties of fighting fools for the rest of his life, fools who, because they have not been here, will refuse to acknowledge these verities we have seen.
“Zut alors! I am thinking of many things that are neither simple nor susceptible of systematic or easy expression. This immortality! It is but one big lie, non? Look at that chaplain there; is he not the perfect civilian? Indeed, a good man, but stupid, yes? Does he not think we are examples of madness from fighting? A few more words, mon vieux, and you would have caused him to hurry to your colonel to tell him you are surely détraqué, crazy. But it is the priest who is mad, with these beautiful legends. Could facts be made as beautiful? The few men who have tried are great. I think your friend who lies here might have succeeded more than most. Do you think he would have let slip his grasp of truths he possessed this morning? Non! I think he would have made an attempt to persuade the world of them.”
David’s bitterness returned with renewed force. The personal import to himself of the death of Alan Cushing could hardly be understood even by Gaspard without explanations that would seem appeals for sympathy; they would only serve to intensify sorrow, frustration, anger, useless rebellion.
“Enfin,” Gaspard said, “you cannot beat a bullet!”
David reflected on that bullet, which had destroyed more than
anyone knew but Alan and himself. He suddenly felt dizzy with the recollection of how he had shared Alan’s shock and struggle with the understanding of one who had been wounded himself, and like Alan at first, had not quite lost consciousness.
3
Alan seemed to dissolve in a bloody mist. When the bullet struck him, there must have been that same burst of incandescence that made more deeply black and lonely the darkness that followed. That it was when the soul, or something like one, cries out to God for help but knows it cries in vain. At the same instant, and all with it in the brilliance and the darkness, the heart grows huge with a leap as violent as some monster wrenching within the body to force its way out.
‘Why not just admit life was nothing,’ David thought, “never had been and never would be, in an uncaring universe, more than a few short years and then was completely done? Why not acknowledge that “death put a period to existence,” as Tacitus wrote so frequently in his ‘Annals’ eighteen hundred years ago? Why not concede sudden death would come to millions more before they had hardly dreamed their future; that a man must reproduce himself often if he wished to be sure something of himself would continue? Finally, confess that chivalry and integrity and unselfishness and honor were but words, and nothing was of any lasting substance?’
Gaspard said sharply, “Sit here with me – on this step here!”
It seemed evidence of his own smallness now. How helpless David felt without Alan and how great his exasperation that his own part of the partnership had been shattered at the same time. Their plans were as dead now as the body on the stretcher. They had suddenly increased in value, as had Alan. David could not keep himself from remembering, with the interviewer’s ability to retain the sense of a conversation so that it was like a stenographic record, how Alan had made the suggestion: ‘We can share by-lines or make a composite jackass of it, but I’m sure the forelegs and hind legs at least won’t fly off in opposite directions. Your research is fine. I’ve read no one who dug to such purpose and such results for periodical publication. Down to bed rock and firm. No one can read you without knowing every statement has been confirmed and checked. You enrich any subject, enrich my interest in historical parallels, but my weakness in finding the right one …’