'Thanks,' the runner said. 'Maybe what I need is to have to meet somebody. To believe. Not in anything: just to believe. To enter that room down there, not to escape from anything but to escape into something, to flee mankind for a little while. Not even to look at that banner because some of them probably cant even read it, but just to sit in the same room for a while with that affirmation, that promise, that hope. If I only could. You only could. Anybody only could. Do you know what the loneliest experience of all is? But of course you do: you just said so. It's breathing,'
'Send for me,' the old Negro said.
'Oh yes-if I only could.'
'I know,' the old Negro said. Tou aint ready yet neither. But when you are, send for me,'
'Are what?' the runner said.
'When you needs me,'
What can I need you for, when it will be over next year? All I've got to do is just stay alive,'
'Send for me,' the old Negro said.
'Good-bye,' the runner said.
Descending, retracing his steps, they were still there in the vast cathedral-like room, not only the original ones but the steady trickle of new arrivals, entering, not even to look at the lettered banner but just to sit for a while inside the same walls with that innocent and invincible affirmation. And he had been right: it was August now and there were American uniforms in France, not as combat units yet but singly, still learning: they had a captain and two subalterns posted to the battalion, to blood themselves on the old Somme names, preparatory to, qualifying themselves to, lead their own kind into the ancient familiar abbatoir; he thought: Oh yes, three more years and we will have exhausted Europe. Then we-hun and allies together-will transfer the whole busi-ness intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage, like a travelling minstrel troupe.
Then it was winter; later, remembering it, it would seem to him that it might actually have been the anniversary of the Son of Man, a gray day and cold, the gray cobbles of that village Place de Ville gleaming and wimpled like the pebbles beneath the surface of a brook when he saw the small augmenting crowd and joined it too, from curiosity then, seeing across the damp khaki shoulders the small clump of battle-stained horizon blue whose obvious or at Wednesday least apparent leader bore a French corporal's insigne, the faces alien and strange and bearing an identical lostness, like-some of them at least-those of men who have reached a certain point or place or situation by simple temerity and who no longer have any confidence even in the temerity, and three or four of which were actually foreign faces reminding him of the ones the French For-eign Legion was generally believed to have recruited out of Euro-pean jails. And if they had been talking once, they stopped as soon as he came up and was recognised, the faces, the heads above the damp khaki shoulders turning to recognise him and assume at once that expression tentative, reserved and alert with which he had become familiar ever since the word seeped down (prob-ably through a corporal-clerk) from the orderly room that he had been an officer once.
So he came away. He learned in the orderly room that they were correctly within military protococlass="underline" they had passes, to visit the homes of one or two or three of them in villages inside the British zone. Then from the battalion padre he even began to divine why. Not learn why: divine it. 'It's a staff problem,' the padre said. 'It's been going on for a year or two. Even the Americans are probably familiar with them by now. They just appear, with their passes all regularly issued and visaed, in troop rest-billets. They are known, and of course watched. The trouble is, they have done no-' and stopped, the runner watching him.
'You were about to say, "done no harm yet,"' the runner said. 'Harm?' he said gently. 'Problem? Is it a problem and harmful for men in front-line trenches to think of peace, that after all, we can stop fighting if enough of us want to?'
To think it; not to talk it. That's mutiny. There are ways to do things, and ways not to do them.'
'Render unto Caesar?' the runner said.
'Ican't discuss this subject while I bear this,' the padre said, his hand flicking for an instant toward the crown on his cuff.
'But you wear this too,' the runner said, his hand in its turn indicating the collar and the black V inside the tunic's lapels.
'God help us,' the padre said.
'Or we, God,' the runner said. 'Maybe the time has now come for that': and went away from there too, the winter following its course too toward the spring and the next final battle which would end the war, during which he would hear of them again, rumored from the back areas of the (now three) army zones, watched still by the (now) three intelligence sections but still at stalemate because still they had caused no real harm, at least not yet; in fact, the runner had now begun to think of them as a for-mally accepted and even dispatched compromise with the soldier's natural undeviable belief that he at least would not be killed, as regimented batches of whores were sent up back areas to compro-mise with man's natural and normal sex, thinking (the runner) bitterly and quietly, as he had thought before: His prototype had only mans natural propensity for evil to contend with; this one faces all the scarlet-and-brazen impregnability of general staffs.
And this time (it was May again, the fourth one he had seen from beneath the brim of a steel helmet, the battalion had gone in again two days ago and he had just emerged from Corps head-quarters at Villcneuve Blanche) when he saw the vast black motorcar again there was such a shrilling of N. C. O. s' whistles and a clashing of presented arms that he thought at first it was full of French and British and American generals until he saw that only one was a generaclass="underline" the French one: then recognised them alclass="underline" in the rear seat beside the general the pristine blue helmet as un-stained and innocent of exposure and travail as an uncut sapphire above the Roman face and the unstained horizon-blue coat with its corporal's markings, and the youth in the uniform now of an American captain, on the second jump seat beside the British staff-major, the runner half-wheeling without even breaking stride, to the car and halted one pace short then took that pace and clapped his heels and saluted and said to the staff-major in a ringing voice: 'Sir!' then in French to the French general-an old man with enough stars on his hat to have been at least an army commander: 'Monsieur the general,'
'Good morning, my child,' the general said.
'With permission to address monsieur the director your com-panion?'
'Certainly, my child,' the general said.
'Thank you, my general,' the runner said, then to the old Negro: 'You missed him again.'
'Yes,' the old Negro said. 'He aint quite ready yet. And dont forget what I told you last year. Send for me,'
'And dont you forget what I told you last year too,' the run-ner said, and took that pace backward then halted again. 'But good luck to you, anyway; he doesn't need it,' he said and clapped his heels again and saluted and said again to the staff-major or perhaps to no one at all in the ringing and empty voice: 'Sir!'
And that was all, he thought; he would never see either of them again-that grave and noble face, the grave and fantastic child. But he was wrong. It was not three days until he stood in the ditch beside the dark road and watched the lorries moving up toward the lines laden with what the old St. Omer watchman told him were blank anti-aircraft shells, and not four when he waked, groaning and choking on his own blood until he could turn his head and spit (his lip was cut and he was going to lose two teeth-spitting again, he had already lost them-and now he even remembered the rifle-butt in his face), hearing already (that was what had waked, roused him) the terror of that silence.