Today's Scripture reading is from William Faulkner's A Fable (1954). Yeah, I pretty much consider his entire body of work canonical. Except for the occasional drunken interview, on which occasions the divine inspiration was somewhat clouded by chemical influences.
Actually, I'm aware of only one of even those occasions. And Faulkner himself claimed in that case that he had been misquoted as saying things no sober man would say and no sane man believe.
A Fable was written during the height of the McCarthyist Red Scare period, during the Korean War and when the Cold War was getting into full swing. The official position of the Eisenhower administration was to "roll back" Communism is eastern Europe. Fortunately for the peace of the world, Eisenhower didn't extend the rhetoric of rollback into actual wars of liberation against Evil, as our current Republican administration insisted on doing in Iraq.
This novel (I understand the professional literary crowd questions whether it's technically a novel, but I've never understood the distinction) is about the First World War. As the story opens in 1918, something has gone wrong with an attack by a French division in the endless war of attition against the Germans. Horribly wrong. The French troops stayed in their trenches. They didn't attack.
And when the Germans saw that the attack had faltered and they could have gained a few meters of ground for a while by attacking, they also stayed in their trenches. Within hours, this state of affairs had spread all across the western front. The troops had simply stopped fighting.
In this particular scene, the French division commander in whose command the initial refusal had begun is talking to the French group commander about the implications of the event. The division commander is so focused on the disaster it means to his own army career, and so focused on the desire to shoot the soldiers who refused the order to charge, he still can't comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe.
The group commander tries to explain to him: "It wasn't we [the officers] who invented war. It was war which created us. From the loins of man's furious ineradicable greed sprang the captains and the colonels to his necessity." The dialogue continues:
'You,' the group commnander said. 'We can permit even our own rank and file to let us down on occasion; that's one of the prerequisites of their doom and fate as rank and file forever. They may even stop the wars, as they have done before and will again; ours merely to guard them from the knowledge that it was actually they who accomplished that act. Let the whole vast moil and seethe of man confederate in stopping wars if they wish, so long as we can prevent them learning that they have done so. A moment ago you said that we must enforce our rules, or die. It's no abrogation of a rule that will destroy us. It's less. The simple effacement from man's memory of a single word will be enough. But we are safe. Do you know what that word is?'
The division commander looked at him for a moment. He said, 'Yes?'
'Fatherland,' the group commander said. Now he raised the top of the covers, preparatory to drawing them back over his head and face. 'Yes, let them believe they can stop it, so long as they dont suspect that they have. ... Let them believe that tomorrow they will end it; then they wont begin to ponder if perhaps today they can. Tomorrow. And still tomorrow. And again tomorrow. That's the hope you will vest them in. The three stars that [you] won by [your] own strength, with help from man nor God neither, have damned you, General. Call yours martyrdom for the world; you will have saved it. ...'
The world which the group commander wants to "save", of course, is the world of wars. (And, yes, the omission of the apostrophes in "dont and "wont" are that way in the text.)
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