An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  David had interrupted, countering with, ‘I’m envious of the quality of your copy. It sings. It’s got tone and movement and significance. It’s got human vitality that excites and angers me because I can’t do it so well. I look at one of your articles the way a hod-carrier looks at a completed building, you being the architect. You’ve got construction and design and lightness when needed and …’

  Alan had again interrupted David’s thoughts, something he had said: ‘My thoughts are many and obvious. I try to spread it too thin. I’ll take an isolated fact without showing its relation to the whole. My stuff is really nothing but glossy surface writing, well-written pap.’

  He remembered himself then saying, ‘My trouble is the lightness of a tank and the details of a government report. I get so serious it makes me sick myself.’

  But Alan had protested, ‘Don’t be a modest fool and don’t forget Isaac Marcossen, that Kentucky financial editor of ‘The Saturday Evening Post’. You ride on questions as other men just mount to cover ground. They take you where you want to go. I only hope you want to go my way, and I can go with you. Look at the way it has worked out here, with this battalion: You command it because, in addition to those qualities of guts, realism, decision, composure, stubbornness, forgetfulness of self, which are all necessary for the job, you don’t let anything get by you that you don’t understand.

  ‘You question and interview like the good newspaper man you were before you went into magazines, until you get the answer. You know what the men say? They say with affection, ‘The bastard wants to know!’ I’ve heard a dozen variations of that after you’ve huddled with officers or their men asking questions pertinent to themselves, the day, the hour. You know more about the men in some of the platoons than their lieutenants. You not only question systematically from one company to the next, but you do it naturally without planning. You probably have no idea your conversations consist mainly of questions. You’ve kept me working night after night over the maps of my own trench system trying to anticipate you. You’ve developed questioning to an art. You act on the answers. You’ve got a thousand answers to questions I’ve never even taken enough thought to ask. If we combine to do what each of us does naturally and best, then we’ll have an unbeatable combination in a writing field more and more influential, more profitable – and more and more competitive. Together we can make a new superman.’

  Even more than Alan’s estimate of talents, which David had gratefully accepted since it was their first sincerely enthusiastic disclosure, was David’s assurance that in complementing each other both would grow more able. ‘It’s the truth we’re both after,’ Alan had said, ‘Let’s never forget that; you to be sure to get it; I to be sure to express it; as long as we combine to hold it we justify ourselves. The moment we forget, let it blur and we’re done.’ Alan’s voice had a ring when he said it was the silence now, David thought, which was so unreal; to see the body and listen, against all reason, for a voice that would never be heard again. Truth seemed to have died.

  David murmured to himself, “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.”

  Gaspard said, “I know what you need.” David evidently did not hear him. Gaspard tried again, “But of course you know Paris?”

  “No,” David answered automatically. “I’ve never been to Paris.”

  “What?! Never been to Paris?”

  “No.”

  “I know what you need, mon vieux. Now in Paris …”

  “Paris!” David cried. “And I forgot! When did Alan write her last? How long does it take for official notification? It isn’t as if she were home; she’s in Paris; how can I be sure to get there before …”

  “You mean how can you get to Paris to break the news of this death gently to someone? To get there before the facteur, the postman? Tiens!”

  “Least I can do. Alan gave me her address just in case. I must get to Paris before she hears it cold from someone else.”

  Gaspard scratched the middle of his beard. “You suggest impossibility. Two impossibilities: first, you cannot secure leave to go to Paris in time to beat that official notification. It may be weeks before any leave is granted, and to Paris – longer; second: you cannot delay report of his death to enable you to arrive there first. Another impossibility: no authority would give leave or orders to Paris for such a purpose; they would think it a poor ruse.”

  “Impossible, yes, if I cared what happened, but I don’t …”

  “You cannot mean you would leave your command without orders? To go absent without leave? You are fou!”

  “I’ve decided.”

  “You are determined upon this?”

  “I’ve stood about enough of this talking,” David said in a cold anger. “First that damned Chaplain and now … Where is he? He’s gone!”

  “You saw him go. He spoke to you. You thanked him.”

  “I did nothing of the sort!”

  “He said you would not regret what you had done – you thanked him, in turn, for his forbearance …”

  David put his hand on Gaspard’s arm, “I guess this has hit me pretty hard.”

  Gaspard put a Camel cigarette between David’s lips and another between his own, fumbled in his breeches pockets for his briquette for their lighting, operated flint and steel and tinder-cord. He blew the smoke down through his beard and became a burning bush.

  “I wish, “David said, “I wish I were dead. It’s all ashes in the end.”

  “Vraiment! That is reality!”

  “I’m through with this. This mud. Look at that rat! Alan must be buried quickly. I’m sick of my command. I’ve lost my best friend in this insane world. We had plans to work together after this was over; they’re gone. The old world, where there was something to believe in, that’s gone. Where the hell do we go from here? We don’t know. If we don’t know today, we’ll never know.”

  Suddenly, all of the particular evidence and clarity from more than four years of war cascaded upon Gaspard, from the beginning at the First Marne when Sargent Gaspard had worn the red kepi, blue coat and scarlet trousers in the ripening wheat and moved forward through it with his company, sure and clear and colorful to visibility, only to be cut down in mass bloody swaths. That uniform had surely cost the French no less than a hundred thousand lives, yet that was merely the beginning of death from causes that could have been overcome before the next battle.

  ‘So,’ he reflected, ‘this American Captain was lying dead because he had stood in a poorly built embrasure.’ “Name of God!” he exclaimed. His purpose was clear to him now, with its component parts, like an unfinished symphony. Indeed, pyrotechnics burst in his mind, illuminating with a white incandescence of reality, making the shadows of the open trenches black indeed by contrast. It would cost millions of francs, but it would eventually save another million lives.

  Gaspard further felt the threads of a hundred details of proof gather together now into one completed fabric. He could almost see it laid across France from the mountains to the sea, even down to the ‘Man on the Extreme Left’, that last man on the line who stood behind the sandbags, the stakes and the wire running down out of sight into the surf of the Belgian sands.

  All this, Gaspard felt, had suddenly been conceived this instant, through details long stored in the loins of experience. But it would never have come about without this death. This American had not died in vain. ‘I shall make him famous also,’ Gaspard thought. ‘There shall be a bust of him at some entrance nearest here.’ He looked upon the stretcher with less of sadness than of new respect. He looked upon David with an ill-placed pleasure; this was also partly his doing.

  ‘We know now where we are going. Bow to the day!’ Gaspard thought.

  And now he clearly saw the special opportunity of this particular day. He saw the dangers of any further delay. Abruptly, he saw it: they must go to Paris, no, today, at once, which meant, as David had suggested, to g
o without authority.

  “Name of a name!” he blurted aloud. “That is an idea!” To do just that would indeed dramatize the urgency of his mission. The danger of delay, of waiting for an order to Paris through the slow channels of military authority, should be set against the danger of punishment for going without orders. The punishment for absence without leave: a court-martial, but naturally, with the severest reprimand and promotion blocked in the reserve list in which he had no interest whatsoever. Hardly more, since they would consider his record and his decorations, possibly his politics. ‘But politically, could not such punishment be an advantage?’ he thought. ‘Yes, it could make excellent politics. A touch of the martyr makes possible the leap to power. Might not some such punishment be the spark to ignite the imagination of more than his present constituency?’ It was not as if he were new at the game; was he not a former Deputy, a former President of the General Council of the Department of the Meuse?

  There could be an intense series of speeches. ‘Could I explain to my immediate military superiors? I dare not. Could I trust the judgement of these generals with their fossilized mentality who, as I well know, have already cost France too many of her sons. I dare not. Was it not they who ordered division after division forward to be smashed down into the mud when any simple soldier could have told them to take a good position and firmly stand and fight at one tenth the cost? Rather would I trust the appreciation of the simple citizen – like the men of my own regiment who, sickened by the horror, yes, and I admit it, dispirited by this war of attrition more eager than any men have ever been to return to the arms of their loved ones, are still not only willing to delay this joyous reunion of which they have so long dreamed but also anxious to set their strength to the task for another six months, if necessary, to assure a final security and to prevent ever again these rivers of blood to flow?’

  The political strategy was clear to him now: go at once, today, to Paris to organize the political artillery and the firing schedule; return within the next forty-eight hours to surrender for absence without leave; take whatever punishment as quickly as possible and thus bring to public attention of himself and his plan, with the expected barrage of support from Paris. It seemed a perfect political sequence – a good plan, a very good plan. ‘It could work!’ he thought.

  “Gaspard, if I don’t do this for Alan,” David said, “then I’m a poor friend indeed. I owe him at least that and more.”

  Gaspard was about to comment when suddenly he leaped into the air, spun around as if he had been shot, beat upon the seat of his breeches with both hands, cursed violently and sat himself down in the mud. “Cela sent le brule; that smells of burning!” he cried. “That is an argument brule-point, for I have burned – how you say? – ‘my arse!’ I burn, but not for a woman! It is that briquette!”

  David laughed. Gaspard’s mind, he thought gratefully, is like a Charlie Chaplin film with laughter next to tears. He had seen “The Tramp” at the Charlottesville cinema the week before he left. In a pair of baggy pants, tight coat, small bowler hat, large pair of shoes, cane and little mustache, Chaplin had played a character who used his cunning to get what he needed to survive and escape the authority figures who will never tolerate his antics. The Tramp may have seen better days, but he maintained the attitude and demeanor of a high-class man. So long as he continued to act like one, he could believe he is one – and is able to keep his hope that someday he actually will be one again.

  “There’s only one other person,” David said, “Who I’d rather see this happen to. Old Eagles has a briquette like yours. I’ve been hoping for months …”

  “Comment?” Gaspard said from the ground, “Old Eagles?”

  “Eagles,” David explained. “The American Eagle, like the British Lion. Our national bird. The insignia of a colonel in our army, the eagles on his shoulder straps.”

  “Eagles,” Gaspard repeated, “the American Eagle – like the British Lion. Oui, c’est your national bird!” He felt the impact of the idea, so small, so impressive, so absurd, so logical. “Mon Dieu,” he said and laughed and beat his forehead. He recognized the click of his strategic mind as sharp and tangible as the click of a breech-lock, the idea fitting into his plan as if it had been machined to it. And it had that humorous audacity, which could never be forgotten as an example of the military stupidity, which he also had to prove. It was a touch of his own genius for the use of the smallest detail. Here, he exulted, was the solution to the whole problem of getting to Paris quickly, safely. Here was a present of the transportation as speedy, adequate, comfortable as if it had been ordered by the Great General Staff.

  It involved taking David along with him. Had not David been a journalist? Could not he be the historian of the affair? It would be, now, a matter of quick maneuvering with David.

  Gaspard observed David closely and said, “To do this for your friend – is this your only reason for going to Paris?”

  David made no response, neither did his expression change. Gaspard decided here was evidence of David’s conscious effort to conceal, enough to indicate an active smoldering of desire. It might easily be fanned into flame; meanwhile, there should be more practical persuasion.

  “I spoke too hastily,” Gaspard said. “I have been taking thought. It is not at all impossible for you to go to Paris and return and still avoid disaster. Does it not take time to discover the weak point in a position?

  “Getting to Paris is not the most important question. I know how to get there quickly and safely. The question is what will be the final result for you? The weakness is in the argument of the Judge Advocate who would seek to convict you of charges of leaving your command without orders. The prosecution is weak; your defense is strong. Tenez! You have already created all the evidence you will need to acquit yourself. Listen, mon vieux, to the way your case can be stated to the court by the officer assigned to defend you:

  “‘The cause of this officer’s strange conduct,’ he would say; ‘was the shocking death of his closest friend at eleven o’clock less one minute. There followed a temporary derangement of mind, witnessed by the Chaplain whose evidence you have heard. The mind of Commandant Atwood was blank – it was amnesia induced by shock – for many hours. Suddenly, he awoke to find himself in Paris, amazingly doing the most difficult, the most distressing duty from which brave men shrink, even yourselves, gentlemen: breaking the news of this death to …’”

  “But that …!” David interrupted, preparing to protest the falsity of this fabric being erected, most particularly because it was over Alan, who took direction from truth. David remembered, ‘The truth – the moment we forget it – we’re done’.

  “II n’y a pas a dire, it’s no use objecting!” Gaspard insisted. “It will work and that is the test! Hear me to the end. Your defense continues thus:

  “He found himself in Paris, explaining out of a broken heart what happened to this man whom he loved with the love of a comrade. Then he was horrified by sudden realization he did not know how he had come to be there in Paris, how he had left his command, and he telegraphs his colonel – this message which he sends, indeed, directly to the headquarters of the whole army, that it may be hurried to corps, to division, to brigade and down to his colonel, asking for telegraphic orders so that he may return to face the consequences for events over which, actually, he has had no control.

  “That act, the sending of this message and its wording, is in itself an epic of duty. There, gentlemen, is the whole defense. Now as to your duty, gentlemen. Military justice is real justice for it takes into consideration the whole circumstance of a case into addition to the law and the regulation. Look at this officer’s record: it is superb. Look at his command; it is known as the ‘Battalion Atwood’! Look at his decorations! Look at his character! Never would he intentionally sully that record, dishonor his command, his decorations. It is certain he did not know what he was doing. He recovered his balance of mind in P
aris; he admits that, knowing it is a point against him. But is it? It is! Had he been insincere, it would have been then he would have feigned an expected madness. But no; he does nothing of the sort. He returns, shaken, but in his behavior as sane as any of us.

  “How sane are we? How close have we come to the line between sanity and insanity in the stress of action? Many times some fortunate providence has prevented us from crossing that line. In this case, was it his fault that this providence deserted him? Need I say more? So, therefore, rather than the travesty of justice conviction would accomplish, I demand not only acquittal upon the utmost extenuation of circumstance, but also and immediately not less than sixty days leave of absence for rest and recuperation from an experience, suddenly piled – at eleven o’clock less one minute – upon the top of all that has happened to him in the last months. It might have permanently unsettled his reason, or the reason of any of us! Voilal”

  David grinned. It was devilishly plausible with Gaspard’s strange strategic logic. But the truth!

  “You must have been a lawyer,” David said.

  Gaspard preened himself. “But yes,” he admitted. “Avoue, avocat, juge de paix – you forget I am politician!”

  David saw also that it was typically Gaspard’s oratory. Oratory, he remembered, usually to conceal a purpose so realistic it required surrounding camouflage to keep it from appearing too suddenly and too starkly before the mind.

  “What’s at the back of this?” David asked. “First you say I’m a fool to think of going to Paris, even for this purpose. Now you’re advising me as to how I can get away with it.”