The sergeant looked only at the tall man; he needed to do no more since he could feel the others-the quiet, attentive, quietly-breathing faces, listening, missing nothing. 'A field marshal/ the sergeant said in a bitter contemptuous voice. 'Maybe it's time some-body looked into that uniform you are wearing.' He held out his hand. 'Let's have a look at them.'
The tall man looked calmly and peacefully down at him a moment longer. Then his hand went somewhere under the smock and reappeared and extended the papers, folded once, stained and soiled and dog-eared at the crease. The sergeant took and opened them. Yet even then, he did not seem to be looking at the papers; his glance instead now flicking rapidly again about the other motionless intent faces, while the tall man still looked down at him, serene and waiting, and then speaking again, remote, calm, almost absently, conversationaclass="underline" 'And at noon yesterday, our whole front stopped except for token artillery, one gun to a battery each ten thousand metres, and at fifteen hours the British and the Americans stopped too, and when it got quiet you could hear the Bosche doing the same thing, so that by sundown yesterday there was no more gunfire in France except the token ones since they had to leave them for a little longer yet since all that silence, falling suddenly out of the sky on the human race after going on four years, might have destroyed it-' Rapidly and in one motion, the sergeant refolded the papers and extended them back toward the man, or apparently so, since before the man could raise his hand to take them, the sergeant's hand had grasped the front of his smock, gripping as one the crumple of the papers and the wadded mass of the rough cloth, jerking, though actually it was not the tall man but the sergeant who moved, the sergeant's brigand face nose to nose with the other's, his rotting discolored teeth gaped for speech, though still empty of it because the other man was still talking in that calm unhurried murmur: 'And now General of Division Gagnon is bringing the whole lot of them back here to ask the Generalissimo to let him shoot them, since that much peace and silence, falling with-out warning on the human race-'
'Not even a field marshal/ the sergeant said in his furious, seething voice: 'an advocate.' He said, in that harsh furious murmur no louder than the other man's had been, to which the static attentive faces ringing them about seemed not to listen or even hear any more than they had listened to or heard the other man while he spoke, any more than the young woman herself did or was, still gnawing and tearing steadily at the bread behind her huddled hands, but only watching them, intent and incurious as deaf people. 'Ask the bastards you have come here to look at if they think anybody has quit/ 'I know that too,' the other said. 'I just said so. You saw my papers.'
'So will the provost-marshal's adjutant,' the sergeant said, and flung, not the other man, but himself away and turned again, still clutching the crumpled papers and using his elbows and hands both this time to open his path back to the boulevard; then he stopped again suddenly and jerked his head up, and as they watched, he seemed to raise his whole body in order to look past and above the crowded heads and faces, in the direction of the old city gate. Then they all heard it, not only the sergeant already ducking back under the interlocked rifles, but even the young woman, who even stopped chewing behind her cupped hands to listen too, when as one the heads and the packed bodies turned away from her and toward the boulevard, not because so light on them had been the impact of her trouble and the spectacle of its alleviation, but because of the sound now coming up the boulevard from the old city gate like a wind beginning. Except for the shouts of the section leaders of the deployed infantry aligning each curb, the sound was not voices yet so much as a sigh, an exhalation, Wednesday travelling from breast to breast up the boulevard. It was as if the night's anxiety, quiescent for a time beneath the simple weight of waiting, now that the new day was about to reveal the actuality which in darkness had only been a dread, was gathering itself to flow over them like the new day itself in one great blinding wave, as the first car entered the city.
It contained the three generals. It came fast, so fast that the shouts of the section leaders and the clash of rifles as each section presented arms and then clashed back to 'at ease,' were not only continuous but overlapping, so that the car seemed to progress on one prolonged crash of iron as on invisible wings with steel feathers-a long, dusty open car painted like a destroyer and flying the pennon of the supreme commander of all the allied armies, the three generals sitting side by side in the tonneau amid a rigid glitter of aides-the three old men who held individual command over each of the three individual armies, and the one of that three who, by mutual consent and accord, held supreme command over all (and, by that token and right, over everything beneath and on and above the distracted half-continent)--the Briton, the American, and between them the Generalissimo: the slight gray man with a face wise, intelligent, and unbelieving, who no longer believed in anything but his disillusion and his intelligence and his limitless power-flashing across that terrified and aghast amazement and then gone, as the section leaders shouted again and the boots and the rifles crashed back to simple alert.
The lorries were right behind it. They were coming fast too, in close order and seemingly without end, since this was the whole regiment. But still there was no concerted, no definite, human sound yet, not even the crashing ejaculation of salute this time, but only the stir, the shift of movement in the crowd itself, pacing the first lorry in that silence which was still aghast and not quite believing, in which the anguish and terror seemed to rise to each lorry as it approached, and enclose it as it passed, and follow it as it sped on, broken only now and then when someone-a woman-cried out at one of the passing faces-a face which, because of the lorry's speed, had already passed and vanished before recognition became a fact, and the roar of the next lorry had already drowned it before the recognition became a cry, so that the lorries seemed to be travelling even faster than the car, as though the car, with half a continent supine before its bonnet, possessed the gift of leisure, where the lorries, whose destination could be computed in seconds now, had only the spur of shame.
They were open, with high, slatted sides as though for the transportation of cattle, packed like cattle with standing men, bare-headed, disarmed, stained from the front lines, with something desperate and defiant in the unshaven and sleepless faces which glared down at the crowd as if they had never seen human beings before, or could not see these now, or at least could not recognise them as human beings. They were like the faces of sleepwalkers looking backward across nightmares, recognising no one and no familiar things, glaring down across the fleeing irrevocable instant as if they were being hurried to execution itself, flashing on, rapid and successive and curiously identical, not despite the fact that each had an individuality and a name, but because of it; identical not because of an identical doom, but because each carried into that mutual doom a name and an individuality, and that most complete privacy of alclass="underline" the capacity for that solitude in which every man has to die-flashing on as if they had no part nor interest in, and were not even aware of, the violence and speed with which or in which they rigidly moved, like phantoms or apparitions or perhaps figures cut without depth from tin or cardboard and snatched in violent repetition across a stage set for a panto-mime of anguish and fatality.
And now there was a concerted sound: a faint yelling beginning somewhere in the Place de Ville, which the first lorry would be reaching about now. It was high, thin with distance, prolonged, not vindictive but defiant, with at the same time a curiously im-personal quality, as if the men it came from were not making, producing it, but merely passing through it as through a sudden noisy though harmless burst of spring rain. It came in fact from the Wednesday Hotel de Ville, which the first lorries were now passing, where the three sentries now stood at attention beneath the three flags hanging windless now in the following stillness of the dawn breeze, and where on the stone steps before the door the old generalissimo, the other two generals having followed him out of the halted car, had now stopped and turned, the two lesser generals stopping and turning with him, both on a step higher than his and so taller than he, both as gray as he, both slightly behind him though not behind each other, while the first lorry passed, and the hatless, dishevelled, somnambulistic men in it, waked perhaps at sight of the three flags or perhaps by the simple isolation of the three old men after the crowded boulevard, but waking anyway, and in that same instant divining, identifying the three gaudy panoplied old men, not merely by their juxtaposition to the three flags but by their isolation, like that of three plague carriers in the empty center of an aghast and fleeing city, or perhaps the three survivors of a city swept by plague, immune and impervious, gaudy and panoplied and seemingly as harmless in time as a photograph posed and fading since these fifty or sixty years-but-the men in the lorries-anyway waking, as one man, and as one man yelling, shaking their clenched hands down at the three impassive figures, the yelling passing from lorry to lorry as each entered the yelling and sped on, until the last one seemed to trail behind it a cloud of doomed and forlorn repudiation filled with gaped faces and threatening fists like the fading cloud of its own dust.