An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  “Messieurs,” the Chef called with the ring of pride in his voice, “it has taken but four minutes and forty-six seconds to move the wheels from the time the order was given.”

  “You will receive official commendation,” Gaspard promised.

  Again, salutes all around.

  The little group at the station receded. The buildings, the yards, slid away, to Vouziers, the train gathered speed.

  Gaspard lurched into the compartment, tore at the hook at the collar of his tunic, mopped his face with his sleeve. “Name of a name!” he sighed. “What a chance, speaking of those orders! And those bayonets! I did not see the train, for a moment, behind those bayonets. It looked an arrest. But now, mon vieux, our special train – on cleared tracks – Vouziers – Rethel – Reims – Château Thierry – Meaux – Paris.”

  David remembered that once he had feared madness if ever he came alive out of a particular barrage. Here it was, at last. The cumulative strain of the fighting had been too much for him. This must be the final and complete mental crack-up he had been waiting for. Was he conscious of his surroundings or was he merely seeing some first-class compartment photographed upon his memory? It seemed perfect enough, however, even down to the last detail of cushions, windows, hardware, luggage racks and the spy-warning poster, “Taisez-vous! Mefiez-vous! Les oreilles enemies vous ecoutent!” Against this background Gaspard seemed to sit, looking not unnatural though pale. David could not remember ever having seen Gaspard in a railway coach. But the mind was strange, it could doubtless put the recollection of a person into the memory of a place, when all understanding of reality had gone.

  3

  David knew no way to dispel these hallucinations. They controlled all his senses. He could smell and taste, as he wet his lips with his tongue, the briquette smoke wafting into the compartment. He could hear the locomotive fighting to get its second wind. The unbelievably real figure of Gaspard, also, rose in all its glitter of decorations and turned toward David, exhibiting that paternal expression he sometimes affected. His great hairy hand, stubby fingers outspread, moved in a well-remembered gesture, flipping away what he considered inconsequential.

  And slapped David heavily across the face.

  David sprang up, feeling realistic anger and the swaying of the floor of the coach beneath his feet, but he had failed to completely awaken. The whole scene remained just as before.

  “All the symptoms,” Gaspard said above the rumble of the train, “of shell shock. A mild case. Mon vieux, I have de-shocked you, hein?”

  Distinctly, the wheels of the coach were chanting in faster and faster rhythm, “Rethel – Reims – Château Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Rethel – Reims – Château Thierry – Meaux – Paris …”

  “Good God!” David cried. “This seems to be really happening! I can’t believe this train …”

  “Yes, it is true.”

  “Special to Paris – too much!”

  “You were there; you saw how I manage it. You are here; you know we are aboard it. Have you lost the brain you never possessed, Monsieur l’Aigle? The Eagle. Silver Eagles!”

  “Means nothing.”

  “That Chef de Bureau knows what it means.”

  “The fool …”

  “Tiens! Suppose that Chef, whom you call a fool, had been as stupid as you? We would not be on our way now, so fast. The difference between fooling a Frenchman and fooling an American is that you let the Frenchman’s superior intelligence trick him while you let an American’s naïve ignorance overcome him.”

  “Talk straight. Explain.”

  “It is simple. Any French officer, even in the railway service – which means he is good for nothing else – knows more in his little finger than you in your whole body. When that Chef saw the Silver Eagle, he understood at once it was the Silver Greyhound.” Gaspard lay back upon the cushions, more than pleased with himself, waiting for comprehension to dawn upon David. It did not.

  “Connard! Must I draw the map for you?” Gaspard said with irritation. “The Silver Greyhound is the insignia of the King’s Messenger.” Again, he waited for David’s expression to change. Finally, he waved his arms, tousled his hair and cried, “Do you not know that the King’s Messengers carry the most important and most confidential dispatches? Do you not know they are of high rank, yet for safety sometimes they wear the uniform of a private, a sergeant, a junior officer? Their identity, but naturally, is a secret. Is it not common knowledge that these Englishmen carry no written orders but only a little silver talisman in the shape of the Silver Greyhound? You have not heard that? There is the difference between the French and the rest of the world. Ninety-nine out of a hundred French officers and half the French army have heard that story and believe it. Whether fact or not, it is just such a thing we repeat to ourselves with pleasure, a part of the romance of life without which we could not exist, no?”

  Now, slowly, David was beginning to understand. The Silver Eagle had been taken at Vouziers as the American equivalent of the British Silver Greyhound.

  “The King’s Messenger shows his talisman,” Gaspard said, “and it works. With its authority, he commandeers all means of transportation – horses, motorcycles, autos, trains, aeroplanes, a battle ship if he requires it! Perhaps there is no such messenger in the American Army? I have asked Americans; none have heard of it. What lack of imagination! Had I been asked, I would have created the Messenger on the spot – but why go on?”

  David caught his breath. The seriousness of the deception, from the military point of view, was a new worry. Here was a second military crime in which he had become involuntarily involved. Now they were rushing through the dusk with an impetus reserved for the highest command. Yet he could not but admire Gaspard’s audacity. He was cocking his head now with more than a little amused conceit.

  “But I do hand it to you, Gaspard” David said, “for getting the leave orders!”

  Gaspard rose and slid shut the door of the compartment. “I did not get the orders,” he said blandly. “I did not even try to get them. Certainly, you must know that was impossible. Did not your American armistice orders contain a paragraph prohibiting all leave? Or, at any time, do you think an officer of whatever rank or reputation can get leave within a quarter hour merely by asking for it?”

  “Then,” David cried, “I’ve gone AWOL!”

  “Precisement. We have both gone absent without leave. But the punishment for that crime, by itself, is nothing to what it would have been had we remained in our trenches to be accused of that affair of that Oberst.”

  “So now we’re running away. Three crimes!”

  “Four, mon vieux. Is it not a crime to steal a military train?”

  “Oh my god!” David said.

  4

  Eventually David said, “You’ve used me, Gaspard. Used my poignards, used my lines and now you’re using me for transportation.”

  Gaspard’s blue eyes flicked into David’s. “Put with conciseness,” he agreed.

  “A – way,” David said indignantly, “to use a comrade. I was a fool to let you pull me into this. I’ll never forgive you about those orders.”

  “That was a stratagem for your own good after – how you say? – I pull you in, yes?”

  David looked at him, thinking, ‘He’s got a cunning, insane mind,’ but said, “You’ve got an answer for everything.”

  “The answer,” Gaspard said and grinned, “for even those questions you are about to ask. What is the situation? Four crimes you say. First one, and then three others committed in our effort to avoid punishment for the first. All of them can be wiped away as easily as one. Who to do it? Will not my friends in the Boulevard St. Germain play a bon chat bon rat? You are worried because you are just enough of a realist to let your imagination grow weak, unexercised. Imagination is our best weapon in this affair. Let us make it flexible for use. Suppose we are ar
rested for this matter of the train. My political argument to prevent even an accusation being drawn up against us for that would be that if they did do something officially, the result would be a laugh from one end of the lines to the other – and on both sides. Ha! What we have done would make an ideal story for a journalist eager to expose the stupidity of the high command. It would even make a question for interpellation in le Chambre!”

  His eyes glistened. “Cannot you see the immediate action of the Ministry of War? ‘What a question!’ the Government would say. ‘What a wild story! It is not possible for such a thing to happen except in the brain of a subversive journalist of the opposition. To exactly this length have they gone! Obviously, it is nothing but a rumor, a legend, a fantastie!’ I tell you the Ministry of War would not allow it to be made fact, to dignify it by allowing evidence to prove it in a court-martial. Henri Gaspard is a deep one, hein? But I have thought something else. I have more ammunition still. I have an unselfish motive of which I have not spoken for going to Paris in disobedience of orders. This reason, if you understood the French, you would see was worth five hundred thousand francs for our defense. Thinking about it has so burned a hole in my brain that when you said ‘Silver Eagle’, and I realized that thus we could get to Paris,” he gestured to the landscape flying past the windows, “perhaps I was mad for the instant to …”

  “Quit shadow-boxing,” David said. “Put it all down that you’ve lied to me once and that I should expect even more.”

  Gaspard seemed to be imposing a strong control upon himself. Finally, he said, “It is an affair, which will have to be handled with much tact.”

  “That’s the tone you use,” David said irritably, “when you’re talking about a woman.”

  “Perhaps I am,” Gaspard admitted.

  David saw red, heard sounds as of gurgling and whistling, felt heat and used short and ugly words.

  Gaspard ran his fingers through his hair. His ice blue eyes stabbed into David’s, his face suffused. He began, “I can read your mind, you” – and continued on and on in a mixture of field, barrack, staff, colonial-campaign and heretofore religious language, mixing sacred words with the profane, as if dumping his mind upon the ground to fertilize phrases so they would shoot out tendrils and take the form of a growing tree bearing the fruit of knowledge of good and evil.

  It was as terrible and surprising to David – this cursing in French – as it was magnificent. David could only catch a few of Gaspard’s expressive missiles – Nom de Dieu – saloperie – merde – d’enculé de ta mère – putain – connard – bordel – imbecile – batard – branleur – and the rest, best left unknown, could be likened to precious pearls before swine.

  “That,” Gaspard said with sudden calmness, “was but a slight expression of my anger at your look and tone. If she were some other woman I might let it pass. I have started explanation, which I wished to make in my own way. You misunderstood my first words; you chose to misunderstand; it is more than difficult now to begin again.”

  “You needn’t,” David said. “I’m fed up with your nonsense and damn near deaf with the sound of your voice. You’ll be frank with me in the next five minutes because I’m going to decide whether I’ll go on with you or leave you. Your way, you say, or the highway. I’ll get at the truth in my own way. We’ll get further, quicker, if you’ll answer some questions and answer them straight.”

  Gaspard shrugged in acquiescence.

  “Who is this woman?” David asked.

  “Celeste.”

  “Name’s nothing. What’s she to you?”

  “She is my daughter.”

  David’s next question died before it was born.

  Gaspard’s good humor had returned to him. “Ha! To see you adjusting yourself,” he said, “to a new idea, which is not military. Did you think all of my life was this war? Did you think my whole existence has been within the time you have known me? Zut alors, let us compute. I was an officer of the Army of France perhaps two years before your parents made you.”

  “This isn’t the time,” David said wearily, “to play on the Papa Gaspard theme.”

  Gaspard laughed with full throat. “Fils de salope! What a name, Papa Gaspard! Am I that ancient? Perhaps. Celeste was born in the year eighteen ninety-eight. Even you will seem an old man to her, hein? It is just as well. At least you are – what? – five years older and …”

  David rose abruptly to look out the window. It was dark now. There was no way to estimate the speed, but he knew he had never travelled so fast on rails. A pull of the bell cord in the corridor would doubtless blow the whistle, halt them, but then what?

  “You set up smokescreens with words,” David said. “Get back to the subject. You can be brief when you wish. What do you propose to do now?”

  “Ah!” Gaspard said. “You wish, ‘One – the mission’ and ‘Two – the urgency’, hein?”

  “Would be a relief!”

  “Eh bien. One – proceed to Paris. Two – prevent her from becoming a nun.”

  “A nun?!” David laughed. “Your daughter? What do you mean?”

  “Oui. Just what I say.”

  “The mission, man, we’re talking about that.”

  “That is mine.”

  “Then we have two missions. We can’t have two.”

  “What is impossible?”

  “You mean to tell me that after all we’ve been through – that you’re going to Paris for the purpose of preventing somebody, your daughter, from becoming a nun – and then, perhaps, after you get through with that, you’ll look into a little matter of keeping yourself and incidentally, I suppose, me, out of the guardhouse for the rest of our lives?”

  “Doucement! Gently!” Gaspard admonished. “It was not necessary for me to tell you about Celeste. Yet I can use that, just as I used the idea of the Silver Eagles, to help us. I can say to my friends at the Ministry: ‘Yes, I admit pretending this American Commandant was someone he is not. I admit the stealing of the train. But, as men of feeling, of sympathy, of understanding for a father, I ask your heart, did I not have to do something the first moment of the first possible hour? The moment the fighting ceased, my responsibility to my command – no, did not cease, but lessened to the degree in which I could choose to run the risk of my reputation by coming to Paris without authority. Was it not a situation demanding immediate action?’

  “Three weeks ago, I received a letter saying my child, my Celeste – and she is known to all these friends of mine – had arrived at my sister’s. My sister! She also is known to them. I do not know in the whole of my acquaintance a more wicked woman. You look bewildered? My sister is virtuous – how virtuous? All her desire, since first she desired to be kissed by a man, has been put aside into a receptacle of her mind, which has now corroded and leaked out through the rest of her, so even the touch of silk is wicked because it is pleasant. My God, she is a Saint! Do you not see how dangerous a woman this is?”

  David put a cigarette into Gaspard’s mouth to halt the flow of words. “We might discuss,” David said, “all the members of your family. Or we might read, in a loud voice, every word of a newspaper, or we might tell funny stories. I couldn’t care any less.”

  Gaspard spat out the cigarette. “But my sister, for her own reasons, since the moment Celeste was born, has wished to make her a nun.”

  David looked at him; only a pistol butt could halt this raving.

  “Now this child of mine,” Gaspard said, “is under my sister’s roof in Paris, being told all worldly things are wicked, learning what one needs is a cold bath in the English manner, learning it is necessary to kill all that is youth. Can she resist the persuasion of this – this old she-bitch? How do I know at what moment a word, a phrase, will strike upon the brain of this child at some place skillfully prepared for it to take seed? At what moment is a combat action decided? Who knows?”

 
David wondered, against an inner warning that sharp practicality would be his only salvation in this whole situation, how he could aid Gaspard to resolve this remote absurdity. He failed to halt a not unromantic idea. He had started to smile with sarcasm; he found he was smiling with imagination so mad it matched Gaspard’s. Gaspard was subjecting him to another of those penetrating glances.

  “What if my sister is unsuccessful?” he asked. “She could fail only if Celeste rebels against her. If Celeste throws off these restraints – ah! Is not that prospect just as dangerous? I have never shown you her picture. Then you will understand all my concern.” Gaspard touched the flap of his breast pocket. Suddenly his expression changed. “Nom de Dieu!” he cried. “I have lost a button! What bad luck! Could it have been at Vouziers? Might it have dropped on the road? Or here, in this wagon?” He pawed among the cushions, muttering the smaller curses.

  “A button?!” David said with contempt, but nevertheless going down on his knee to scrutinize the dusty floor of the compartment, to peer under the seats.

  “Just a button?!” Gaspard said furiously from the swaying floor where he now was bent over searching. “Just a button?!” he returned unsuccessful in a mood of brooding. David was more assured than ever before that he was indeed travelling with a madman.

  Gaspard seemed to have talked himself out, and David was not ungrateful. Gaspard was arranging himself for comfort, unbuttoning his tunic, unbuckling his belt, stretching himself out at full length upon the seat. David, hardly mindful of what he was doing, tossed Gaspard the first-class pillow that came with the compartment. Gaspard tucked it under his head and actually closed his eyes. With veteran habit, he was taking every advantage of a new billet.