by Irwin Shaw
“See,” Corporal Millet gestured to Boullard. “Boullard agrees.”
“See,” Boullard said. “Boullard does not agree.”
There was silence for a moment, while the men thought of the wind and the ugliness of the men around them and the possibility of dying tomorrow.
“Be more cheerful,” Boullard said, “or kindly keep quiet.”
The men sat silently for a moment, everyone heavy and gloomy because the word death had finally been mentioned.
“It will be a ridiculous thing,” Labat said. “To be killed by an American.” Labat had fought at Sedan and made his way bitterly down the length of France, cursing the politicians, cursing the officers, cursing the Germans and English and Italians and Americans. At last he had stowed away aboard a freighter to Algiers and without losing a day had joined up all over again and had since then sat, full of pent-up vengeance, in the gloom of Africa, waiting to fight the Germans once more.
“I refuse,” Labat said. “I refuse to be killed by an American.”
“You will be told what your orders are,” Corporal Millet said, “and you will follow them.”
Labat stared gloomily and dangerously at Corporal Millet. His face, which was ugly but usually pleasant enough, now was harsh and his eyes were squinted balefully. “Corporal,” he said, “Corporal of the pimples, do you know what our orders are?”
“No.”
“Does anybody know?” Labat looked around, his face still flushed and glowering, angry at Corporal Millet and the government of France and his position in the world that afternoon.
Sergeant Fourier cleared his throat professionally. “The Lieutenant. He must know. The Captain’s gone …”
“What a wonderful thing,” Boullard said, “to be a captain.…”
“Let us ask the Lieutenant,” Labat said.
“Sergeant Fourier, we make you a committee of one.”
Sergeant Fourier looked around him uneasily, pulling in his round little belly nervously, uncomfortable at the thought of any action that would make him conspicuous, endanger his pleasant anonymous future with the masseuse in Algiers. “Why me?” he asked.
“Highest non-commissioned officer present,” Labat chanted. “Channels of communication with the commissioned personnel.”
“I haven’t said two words to him,” Sergeant Fourier protested. “After all, he just got here five days ago. And he’s reserved.… All he’s said to me in five days is, ‘Make sure the men do not smoke in the open at night.’”
“Enough,” Labat said cheerfully. “It’s obvious he likes you.”
“Don’t joke,” Boullard said sharply. “We have no more time to joke.”
“I’m only joking,” Labat said soberly, “because I am willing to slit my throat.”
He got up and went to the edge of the tarpaulin and stood there, his back to the men, watching across the enigmatic plain for the first fateful dust cloud.
“What sort of man is this Lieutenant Dumestre?” Boullard asked.
“It’s hard to tell,” Sergeant Fourier said, with the caution born of three years in an army where a hasty approval of a man, before all the facts of courage, sense and rectitude were in, might one day cause your death. “He’s very quiet. Stiff …”
“A bad sign,” said Boullard.
“Very rich in the uniform department.”
“Another bad sign.”
“It doesn’t pay to be too hurried,” Sergeant Fourier protested.
“It’s the Americans,” Boullard said. “They’re in a hurry, not me. Well, there’s only one thing to be done.” He rubbed his cheek absently with the back of his hand, like a man determining whether or not he needs a shave. The other men watched him silently, anxious and curious about a definite plan that might have finally bloomed on this last nervous afternoon. “One thing,” Boullard repeated. “We kill him.”
Lieutenant Dumestre stood in the observation post and felt the headache coming on like an express train. Every afternoon the boredom and misery of the day accumulated in his brain pan and punished him for still living. He stared painfully over the darkening plain, which was silently enveloping itself in blue and purple folds, intangible and deceptive, in which the shapes of men and machines might be capriciously and dangerously lost.…
Lieutenant Dumestre shook his head and closed his eyes, measuring gloomily the exact extent of the pain in his skull.
How do you do it? he asked himself. How does a first lieutenant hand a battery over to an advancing army, without orders? How does a first lieutenant save his life in a situation like this? In the distance there is a puff of dust and soon the first shell dropping somewhere near you, and all around you doubtful and uncertain men whom you do not know but who, for the lack of a better word, are under your command. Why had he left his post in Algiers? In this one, crazy, fateful week, his transfer had to be granted, this transfer to dilemma, this transfer to death.… In the days of Napoleon it was said that every French private had a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. Today every French soldier had in his knapsack a fatal and insoluble conundrum.
Lieutenant Dumestre had asked to be transferred from Algiers because he had been spending too much money there. It was as simple as that. The bills came in, the monthly reckonings were made, the deductions for the money sent home to his mother and father, who were lean and ailing in Paris, and it became clear that on a lieutenant’s salary you could not save money in a gay town, especially if you had been rich all your life and your family rich before you and certain habits of eating and drinking and generosity ingrained in you, war or no war.…
So, it was too expensive, Algiers. So, the desert would prove to be even more expensive.
… Back in Algiers he knew the men of his battery had mimicked him behind his back—his slow, painful way of delivering orders, full of agonized pauses, as he tried to remember to keep his voice down, tried not to sound like a young idiot imposing callously on these veterans of a war that had passed him by.… They had mimicked him, but he knew them and even felt they liked him, and if he were with them now in this tragedy of a situation he would be able to go to them, talk to them, draw strength and resolution, one way or another from the men who would have to bear the burden of living and dying with him.
But here he was, on the one important day of the last two years, with a group of sullen and bearded strangers, who regarded him only with steady and cool hostility, a newcomer and an officer in an army where newcomers were automatically suspect and officers automatically hated.…
Lieutenant Dumestre walked slowly out toward the west across the dusty scrub. The sun had set and the wind had died and the walking, he felt, might help somehow. Perhaps, he thought, smiling a little to himself, there will be an American patrol and I am unavoidably captured and there’s an end to the problem.… It’s like a child, he thought, hoping that by morning he will have a sore throat so he does not have to go to school and take his examination in arithmetic. What an arithmetic was being imposed upon him now! What a savage and pitiless calculation! He looked toward the last blur of the horizon beyond which the Americans were marching. How simple it was to be an American! In their arithmetic there was an answer to all problems. How merry and dashing a lieutenant in the artillery in the American army must feel tonight, marching beside men whom he could trust, who trusted him, who all believed the same thing, who knew an enemy when they saw one, whose parents were well-fed and healthy, in no one’s power, three thousand sweet miles from all battlefields.…
What a tragic thing to be a Frenchman this year! Hamlet, sword out, killing Polonius and uncle in blind unprofitable lunges.… Frenchmen, Hamlets of the world …
Lieutenant Dumestre stopped and sat down like a little boy on the dark earth and put his head in his hands and wept. He stopped suddenly and bit his lips and neglected to dry the tears from his cheeks. Nonsense, he thought, a grown man … There must be an answer to this, too. After all, I am not the only Frenchman afloat on this continent. The thing
is, the men. If I knew what they wanted … If there was only some way to be present, without being seen. Armies have surrendered before. Detachments have surrendered before. Officers have appeared under a flag of truce and offered their services to their official enemies. The Captain was in Algiers, there was no one to stop him. “Dear sir, is there anyone here who speaks French? Dear sir, Lieutenant Dumestre, Battery C, wishes to state that he desires to join forces with the American Army in North Africa and put himself under the flag of the United States for the duration against the common enemy.…” There must be a technique to surrender, just the way there was a technique for everything else in the army. His mother and father would have to look out for themselves. Now, if only the men …
Lieutenant Dumestre slapped his thigh briskly as he stood up. At last he had reached a decision. He had faced the arithmetic and at least he knew what answer he wanted. There only remained going in frankly to the men and putting the situation up to them, in words of one syllable, simply.… He started back toward the forward gun, walking more swiftly than he had walked for a week.
“Men,” he would say, remembering to keep his voice pitched low, “this is the way it is. You may or may not know it, but tomorrow an American army will appear.” You never knew how much the men knew, what rumors had reached them, what facts confirmed, what punishments and discharges and prophecies and movements were peddled at the latrine or over a morning cigarette. “I am under orders to resist,” he would say. “Personally, I do not believe we are bound by those orders, as I believe all Frenchmen to be on the side for which the Americans are now fighting.” Perhaps that was too heroic, but it was impossible to fight a war without sounding from time to time a little heroic. “I intend to go out under a flag of truce and give over the guns of this battery.” Now the question of dissenters. “Anyone who does not wish to join me in this action is free to leave toward the rear.…” No, they’d go back and talk and by morning a troop of cavalry would come up and Lieutenant Dumestre would be finished in thirty minutes. Keep them with him? How do that? Supposing they were all Vichy men? After all, they were being paid by Vichy and there were thousands of Frenchmen in Africa who had staked their lives on a German victory. They’d shoot him in cold blood.
Once more he cursed the trick that had landed him at this moment among two hundred strangers. In his old company he would have been able to take Sergeant Goubille aside and talk honestly and get an honest answer. Sergeant Goubille was forty-five years old and there was something fatherly and tolerant of young officers in his bearing, and a man like that would be worth a man’s life on this harsh and doubtful plain tonight. Well, there was no Sergeant Goubille at hand.… Perhaps that Breton, that farmer, Boullard. He was an older man and he looked honest and pleasant.
He took a deep breath and walked swiftly, not knowing exactly what he would do but knowing he had to do something, toward the forward gun.…
Under the tarpaulin, Boullard was talking, his voice low and harsh, all the kindly, old countryman’s lines somehow vanished from the set, desperate face. “There will be a token resistance,” he was saying to the men, who were all sitting up, looking at the ground most of the time, looking up only occasionally at Boullard with a kind of deep embarrassment. “In a token resistance there are token deaths.” He looked around him calmly from face to face, his thought plain in his eyes. “A token corpse feeds as many worms as any other.…”
Jouvet, the young one, was the only one who could not manage to sit still. He rubbed his heels back and forth, making marks in the sand, and studying them intensely.
“Kill the pretty Lieutenant,” Boullard said, “and we have our own lives in our own hands. We dispose of them as we see fit.”
“Let us look at it from the political angle,” Labat said. “Politically, we are fried if the Germans win.…”
“Perhaps,” Sergeant Fourier said uneasily, his voice full of the nagging pain of having to make a decision. “Perhaps we ought to wait and see what happens.”
“We will wait and see ourselves buried,” Boullard said.
“At least,” said Labat, “we ought to talk to the Lieutenant. Sound him out.”
“I was on the Meuse,” said Boullard. “I know better than to talk to a lieutenant. I’ll take the responsibility. If you’re all afraid …” He looked around him with savage, peasant contempt. “There’re a lot of men still to be killed in this war. I don’t mind making it one more or less, personally.…”
“We have to talk to him first,” Labat said stubbornly.
“Why?” Boullard asked loudly.
“Maybe he’s with us. Maybe he wants to fight with the Americans, too.…”
Boullard laughed harshly. Then he spat. “I’m surrounded by children,” he said. “If he’s still an officer in the French Army after two years, he is not fond of the Americans. I am. At this moment, I am crazy about Americans. If there is any hope for anybody in this stinking year, it is in the Americans. I’m forty-four years old and I’ve fought in two wars. The third one, I want to pick my own side.…”
“Still,” Labat said, his voice low and persistent, “still, we ought to talk to him.”
“For myself,” Corporal Millet said briskly, standing up, “I am on duty at the observa—”
He let his hands fall gently to his sides as Boullard brought his rifle up and touched his chest lightly with the bayonet.
“You are on duty here, Corporal.” Boullard moved the bayonet tenderly on a breast button. “There is a question before the house that must be decided by a full membership.”
Corporal Millet sat down carefully.
“I don’t care,” Labat was saying, grinning at Corporal Millet, “what you do to the fighting Corporal, but nothing happens to the Lieutenant until we talk to him.” He patted Boullard’s shoulder, in a small, reassuring gesture. Boullard slowly took his eyes off Millet and the Corporal sighed.
Boullard looked around him searchingly at the men caught in this hour on this desert with him. Sergeant Fourier, haunted by dreams of a pension and his masseuse and still troubled by some obscure, painful sense of patriotism and honor, refused to look at him. Jouvet, faced at the age of twenty with the ancient, tangled threads of a bloody and complex century, looked ready to weep. Labat was smiling but stubborn. Corporal Millet was sweating, and was making a great effort to look like a man who did not intend to rush to the nearest officer and announce a mutiny.
“All right,” Boullard said wearily, “if that’s what you want. Although I tell you, two words too many and we are all against a wall, looking at a firing squad.”
Jouvet fumbled with his handkerchief quickly and Boullard looked at him curiously and impersonally.
“It is not necessary to commit ourselves,” said Labat. His long, workman’s arms waved in argument. “We approach the subject, we skirt it, we take soundings like a boat coming into a harbor …”
“Better!” Sergeant Fourier said loudly, happy at all deferment. “Excellent! Much better!”
Boullard stared at him coldly and Sergeant Fourier became quiet and nervously took out a pack of cigarettes.
“It’s possible,” Labat was saying, convincing Boullard, “to judge a man without a direct question.…”
“Possibly,” Boullard said with no enthusiasm. “Possibly.”
“I’ll do the talking,” Labat said. “I’m used to things like this. I have talked at union meetings for seven years and nothing could be more delicate …” He looked around him anxiously, hoping for a little laughter to take some of the deadly tension away, but only little Jouvet, who was always polite, smiled nervously because he realized Labat had meant it as a little joke.
“All right,” Boullard said. He fingered his rifle gently and let it dip almost imperceptibly toward Corporal Millet. “I will judge. And you …” The rifle dipped very clearly toward Corporal Millet. “You will not open your mouth. Is that clear?”
Corporal Millet sat up stiffly at attention, feeling sorrowfully within h
im that his honor demanded some show of resistance and that his life would not be worth a great deal if he was incorporated in the army of the United States. He looked at Boullard’s huge crushing hands, calm on the rifle. “It is your affair,” he said faintly. “I wash my hands of it.”
Boullard laughed.
Sergeant Fourier lighted his cigarette, gift of his plump wife the masseuse, eating her dinner comfortably, all unknowing, in the curtainy little apartment in Algiers with three exposures. He sighed and stood up and walked between Boullard and the limp Corporal Millet and stood at the edge of the tarpaulin in the full darkness, pulling with small comfort at his cigarette, while behind him, under the tarpaulin, there was no sound from the waiting men.
Lieutenant Dumestre made his way slowly across the rough black ground toward the gun position, turning over in his mind his possible opening sentences to the gun crew. “Men,” he could say, “I am going to be absolutely honest with you. I am putting a white flag up beside this gun and I am delivering this battery over to …” Or he could say, “There is a possibility that tomorrow morning American troops will appear. Hold your fire until I give the word …” while silently swearing to himself that the word would never be given. There was much to be said for this method, as it was indefinite and seemed less dangerous and didn’t tip his hand until the last moment, when it would probably be too late for anyone to do anything about it. Of course there was always the possibility that he could stand up in front of the men and pour his heart out to them, remind them in ringing words of their country’s shame, call upon them with blood and passion to forget themselves, forget their families in France, remember only honor and final victory.… He could see himself, pale and fluent, in the dim light of the moon, roaring, whispering, his voice singing in the quiet night air, the men listening entranced, the tears starting down their cheeks.… He shook himself, smiled wryly at the dream, remembering his harsh, slow way of speaking, plain, indefinite, without the power to move men to the nearest café, much less throw themselves grandly and thoughtlessly upon a doubtful and possibly fatal cause.…