An Acceptable Warrior

by Earle Looker

  He turned his head, half opened his eyes and said, “I am not unmindful of our present danger. That Chef may take thought. Or his orders may be questioned by a higher authority. Instructions to arrest us may be telegraphed to all stations upon our route. Against such mishap we have the quickness of our wits and the strength of our legs. Can we not think and act more quickly than most? No emergency could equal those through which we have passed, hein?” He closed his eyes and seemed to drift into sleep, for his forehead smoothed and became younger; his medals rose and fell with his regular breathing.

  The train diminished speed, lights passed, then bands of yellow; a station suddenly clattered and thundered past in reverberation. Perhaps it was Rheims, halfway? David thought the wheels had taken on a new cadence: “Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris …”

  The monotonous click of the rails made logical thought impossible. David thought with each moment there was more to think about. Ever since he had followed Gaspard from the hut, into no-man’s-land and back, to Vouziers, and now more than ever rushing with roar and clangor through the night toward Paris, he had been crossing a succession of so far indefinable but certain new frontiers lying upon the ground of action.

  “Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry –”

  He was more aware of fatigue this day than any he could remember during the fighting, though it was like the end of combat when he could not remember what he had last thought and asked only for blankness and deep, soothing, dreamless sleep.

  “Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris … Thierry – Meaux – Paris …”

  But he knew he would be able to rouse himself, as always he had in the field, the moment the rhythm changed about him.

  PART 2

  PARIS HIATUS

  “They say that when good Americans die, they go to Paris.”

  ~ Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, 1891

  CHAPTER 6

  La Ville Lumière

  “Nothing is so painful to the human mind

  as a great and sudden change.”

  ~ Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus”, 1818

  Paris’s seven bridges (Sept-Ponts), taken from St. Gervais et St. Protais Church, from a postcard dated 8 May 1918.

  Gaspard’s voice, as from outside a deep dugout, outshouting the rumble and roar and metallic screeching of a barrage, was crying, “Out! Out! The attack! Gare de l’Est! Gare de l’Est!”

  David was slapped again.

  Gaspard was saying, “We are coming into le Gare de l’Est. Paris, la Ville Lumière – enfin!”

  “We’re there?” David said stupidly.

  “Paris! Objective reached!” Gaspard said in his clipped military manner. “But it has not been captured. Up! Collect forces. Attack! Have your wits about you! Straighten yourself! Prenez de l’assurance, Monsieur l’Aigle!”

  The train slid to a gentle halt, hissed, panted. David’s hair rose at the back of his neck.

  “Now you look more the man!” Gaspard said.

  The door of the compartment was torn open from the outside. A ghastly blue light flickered down from arcs hung high above in the vault of the train shed, upon a ring of bayonets on the platform.

  “This is an arrest!” Gaspard said under his breath. “If opportunity, I make a break. I know where I go. But you do not. Therefore, do not try to escape. No time to arrange rendezvous; you do not know Paris. If I go I shall return. I am not deserting you. From the moment you are arrested refuse to talk, even if you are taken to American headquarters. Say only this, ‘When the Colonel Gaspard returns I make my explanation, not before. We are on a confidential mission. He is in command.’”

  There was no time for David to answer. The bayonets moved across the platform as if actuated by a single mind. A diminutive figure appeared out of their midst, as if from a trapdoor. From the top of its gold-laced kepi, with golden laurel leaves embroidered upon it, down across its tight, befogged, black tunic with campaign ribbons, its baggy scarlet riding breeches, to its shining patent-leather boots with rudimentary spurs, it quivered with officiousness. This little figure raised its head to look up at them in the coach. It seemed so old it had lost the power of facial expression. The oval eye-glasses perched precariously upon its nose magnified its eyes alarmingly.

  Gaspard saluted with elaborate precision, “Mon general! You! Of all the Army of France whom we are honored to meet!” To David, he whispered, “Name of God, who can he be? This ancient general; he has been long dead. We will descend now to the platform.”

  Their movements upon the platform were precise. David and Gaspard complied with the platoon as if taking part in a familiar drill. Only a glance was enough to see that the Gare de l’Est was like a garrisoned stronghold. Gaspard and the little general began a low-voiced conversation and then pivoted to the left. David copied them in a daze, and they marched off to the center of a hollow square no less obvious than its feeling in his stomach. Fast clicking steps took them down the platform, through the gates and into a concourse where a score of civilians stared as if at prisoners of war. David noted in passing that here seemed to be the first woman he had ever seen who actually wore a hat – and what a thing – instead of the familiar peasant shawl over her head. They were passing saluting gendarmes now, crossing cobbles.

  Other details began to register in David’s eyes. Three Peugeots were drawn up at the curb, their occupants ominous, each chauffeured by a French soldier in a shining blue helmet, the straps of their revolver holsters crossing their shoulders. The center car was empty except for the driver, but those to front and rear were overflowing with armed infantrymen, their long Lebels, with bayonets fixed, sticking out like chevaux-de-frise.

  Gaspard must have seen at that instant escape was impossible. It was just like him to throw his head up to the stars and laugh.

  Paris! The whole fabric of the city seemed to David to be in ceaseless motion. Though there were none but troops on this side street, there seemed welling into it every repercussion of sound, stifled cries, the dashing together of waves of murmurings against the walls of it, as if just out of sight jostled a packed humanity.

  The little general, with surprising strength of arm, shoved David into the rear seat of the center car. Gaspard followed. The general seated himself at their right. The original guard sprang aside, at the same time bringing their rifles up to the present. The cars were off through the streets in the chill Paris night air.

  Gaspard turned to David and said with formality, “You will notice, my dear American Commandant, that the French Army does these things well. No one could have penetrated such a guard, and no one can escape it now. Suppose there should be an accident to one of these autos, or suppose we are halted, the poilus ones to the front and rear would descend immediately, surround us again.” His hand was upon David’s arm; evidently answer was demanded.

  “Yes, mon colonel,” David frowned. “It’s marvelous.”

  The little general, understanding that last word, or David’s forced tone of compliment, smiled. It was startling; his other expression had been his formal face.

  Almost immediately, the cars halted with screaming brakes. The street was blocked by such a multitude David doubted even a squadron of cavalry could have charged through it at first attempt. At its center milled about an army camion on the top of which two girls sat, dangling silk legs to the crowd below. Surely it was a British seaman, without his cap, who held them firmly by the waist. Whistles were trilling, rattles used for gas alarms were clacking. Flags and torn newspapers waved. Then David understood. This was their armistice; carnival perhaps at first but now spasmodic, exhausted yet loath to end. Perhaps this day, if ever, there would be amnesty for military off
enses?

  David noted the cars had come out of the Rue d’Alsace and into the Boulevarde de Strasbourg. Here the leading car veered about, the crowd opening enough for it to turn along the Boulevard de Magenta, the lamppost said, to be checked again by a fluidity of faces that moved back, eventually, to avoid the bayonets of the escort. Then left into the Rue de Faubourg Saint Denis and right once more.

  “Rue de Paradis!” Gaspard said with something of his usual spirit. “We have just passed the Prison of St. Lazare, for the unfortunate women. Their paradise! Or was it through this street they approached this prison?” More especially to David he said, “Take note of the streets.”

  In case Gaspard meant to convey a real request, David tried to observe: the turn was right, into Rue de Faubourg Poissonniere and, after he had counted seven crossings, left into Boulevard de Rochechouard, comparatively deserted. Gaining speed, passing Place Pigalle, rushing up along the clear sweep of avenue from Place de Clichy to Place des Ternes, swerving about a taxicab here, avoiding the hub of a dray there, sliding like pistons into empty cylinders of city traffic.

  Though unfamiliar with the streets, David saw Paris was being crossed in a westerly direction. While he was wondering whether the purpose was to take them out of the city to some prison compound within a fort of the outer ring, the cars swerved into the high façaded elegance of the Avenue de Wagram and in another moment, the majestic, unbelievable, Arc de Triomphe rose up before them.

  “Le Trophee!” Gaspard cried.

  The vast arch was encircled with captured cannon, and at intervals howitzers pointed out and up like empty throats taking breath between notes in the chorus of victory. Guns again, hub to hub, were massed at the base of the arch itself, against the sculpture. As the cars half circled about the Place de l’Etoile, the angles of the arch changed so fast that the figures of the marching men under the cornice seemed to David to have been set into living motion. Under them he saw the list of their battles: Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and the names of their generals cut deep in the stone.

  “Magnifique!” Gaspard breathed as if he had never seen it before.

  “Oui. Superbe!” the little general agreed.

  The amazing width and depth and height of it against the sky appalled David. Built by one man, he thought, to his own greater glory, whatever the inscriptions. A Caesar’s arch, ten times magnified in all directions for Napoleon. To the General, the General-Emperor, the General-God. ‘Look at it!’ David thought, feeling the straddling weight of it crushing down not only Paris but all the earth in the name of conquering generals. David remembered, as Gaspard had said, that the old professional soldiers were in high command. He then imagined a glittering cavalcade of identical little Gaspard clones riding in triumph through the arch.

  How, David wondered, if Gaspard received a promotion, would Monsieur le General Henri Gaspard, of the Great General Staff, look upon the offenses committed this day by an obscure American Major and a Colonel of the Line? Would it be with the good humor and amused tolerance of a fighting man? David went cold. But those to whom Gaspard would appeal for help were not field fighting men. While Gaspard had been wallowing through mud, cursing and even praying, perhaps, through fire, his friends had been delicately moving little pins across maps. Perhaps he had never considered how his highly placed friends might have changed, controlling the greatest armies the world had ever seen? How stubborn their determination for victory must have become, how cold their hearts, how humorless? David saw that Gaspard’s assumption, that there was protection in the threat of laughter, might well be false. David knew nothing so infuriates the staff as laughter at its own expense. Might it not act swiftly and decisively to protect itself against the entering wedge of criticism?

  Their sirens blared – and then more.

  David saw the traffic of half the great avenues radiating from l’Etoile were halting to let them pass. The Arch was left behind; they were speeding up the Avenue de la Grande-Armes.

  Now they were halted again, at an iron picket fence across a plaza on the far side of which the avenue narrowed to cut through the masonry of old fortifications. A hundred yards further to the right – was it Alan who had told him? – was an American “Luna Park”, but he forgot to look for it in his amazement at the debris cast against the fence: café chairs, tables, broken bottles, a sky-blue helmet, a walking stick, a fragment of silk edged with lace. He wondered if the underworld had boiled up out of the sewers, danced a Carmagnole, got out of control. This seemed the high-tide mark of a mob that had receded into the city.

  “La Porte Maillot,” Gaspard murmured.

  Agents de la Douane, from the embroidery on their caps, swung back a section of the fence, seen now to be hinged. Thus was avoided a long line of traffic being inspected by the duoaniers, a fact curious to David in the face of the abandon to disorganization elsewhere.

  Swerving to the right and left seemed now to be the only way of passing through narrow streets.

  Gaspard pointed. “This is Neuilly.”

  Again, there was a halt. The infantrymen scrambled from the car’s front and rear and formed a single line upon the sidewalk to the left.

  David looked about him curiously. Any of these solid, smooth-faced houses, he thought, might be large enough for the bureau of an examining officer. It was out of the way. It would appear they had been brought here out of the need for secrecy. David found himself hoping, as they stepped from the car, that some billet as good as this might be the place of their detention.

  Then suddenly he understood. They must have already been court-martialed. In absentia. For secrecy. Interference with the armistice was serious, however fortunate the result. It was past speculation now that the theft of the train was a joke on themselves – enough of a joke to have decided quick action. Laughter … criticism … was to be smashed down, buried deep, covered over. What better than to select this half-dead little martinet of a general for the work, with this precise platoon? David now realized he and Gaspard had been allowed to get to Paris, since they had been as easy to trace as kings travelling incognito, because it was far from their commands. Simply, they would never be heard of again. Life had been nothing in the field, so why here?

  If David had thought he felt paralysis in events so far, he only now realized how he had been numbed from time to time. He was incapable of taking a step or lifting his hand. It was the combination of that line of rifles to the left of the street and a cold, blank, whitewashed wall to the right. This was not the effect of reading romantic tales. There had been nothing imaginary about one grisly wall he and a picked platoon from his battalion had etched in photographic detail upon their everlasting memories. He had seen exactly what a Lee-Enfield, Mark VIII, with .303 conical bullet, could do to a man when it smashed him in the face. What, David thought, would ten slugs from these clumsy Lebels do?

  The rifles to the left and the stark wall to the right had become the whole world.

  A gas lamp, on projecting bracket, threw a spot-light upon the pavement. That would be the natural place to stand.

  He had no idea now whether the surrounding details included an open street, a courtyard or a dead end. His life had narrowed to the circle of light upon the ground.

  For a long moment, his mind must have become a vacuum. It would have been better had it remained so, for with return of thought he knew the offense from which all action of this day had proceeded, placing the armistice in jeopardy, merited death.

  Death! In another moment, David thought, their bodies would be lying huddled under the light, empty of whatever went rocketing up – if it did. When the chaplains dared no longer offer their bygone heavens, even Donovan with religious medal around his neck, and a drop too much cognac down his throat, had his own mocking moments when he talked with strange shocking humor of an assignment board of overworked and irritable angels and archangels sorting souls: “‘Send this bastard baack,’ says the Sen
ior Archangel, ‘he’s lost his serrvice recorrd.’. . . ‘Back wherre, sirr?’ a First-Class Angel asks. ‘Beggin’ y’pardon sirr, th’man says where he could go baack isn’t anny more.’. . . ‘Then,’ says th’Archangel, short and sharrp, ‘De louse th’sonnabitch an’ don’ let me see him again till he’s clean. Bring in th’next case. No! This office’s closed f’th’night. I’m sick av hearin’ personal hist’ries … what’s that noise? Who’s singin’?’. . . ‘Ev’ry day we sign th’pay roll, ev’ry day we sign th’pay roll, ev’ry day we sign th’pay roll, but we don’t get a Goddamn cent …’ ‘Hey! Y’ can’t sing like that ‘round here! Take that man’s numberr an’ name. Give him sivinty thousand years’ latrine diggin’ in purgatory f’singin’verses out av’turrn. What? He says he’s a regular? Why didn’t he say so in th’ beginnin’? Man, y’look like a real soger at that. Angel, send him straight t’God …’”

  Straight to God; a God no more likely than a heaven. More likely to be launched into the void to join Alan and the vast multitude of all from the vanished past? To join? If only a reception committee might be standing on the other side of that wall. If only Alan might be waiting there, quietly amused by the importance given this last moment, lips slightly twisting. Alan with a hole in the side of his head.

  Death! Time now to see it coming. Time to think too much. Time to have thought today he was reborn into a world more beautiful than ever before and to understand more completely the wrench of leaving it. Death, just as soon as his mind had received an edge and a tempering, when his perceptions were at their keenest, at the moment toward which Alan had looked when he had written, “I hope to think again …”

  Just as he had become a complete man, David thought, by his veteran understanding that all power was within himself, he was only to find he possessed no strength whatsoever. This was vastly worse than fear in the field where death came quick, in a flash, where there was cover to take and decisions to make and your own men were close beside you. There was time enough to realize he had been cruelly carried to the point of happy survival only to look down into the abyss. Death here … If it must be, but how much better it would have been in some ditch made decent at least by purpose and courage and self-sacrifice. Death without any backward look or fore vision, for this bullet would be well aimed, and its impact would blot out all consciousness.