To wrap up my Memorial Day weekend series of posts, I'll return to Faulkner's tale of the First World War, A Fable, in which an an antiwar activist depicted as a Christ figure complete with twelve disciples, succeeds in organizing a French regiment to refuse orders to charge German lines, a rebellion which in rapid order brings a halt to the war along the entire front.
In this paragraph, he describes part of the aftermath:
But they would not wait for that. Already the long lines of infantry would be creeping in the darkness up out of the savage bitter fatal stinking ditches and scars and caves where they had lived for four years now, blinking with amazement and unbelief, looking about them with dawning incredulous surmise, and he tried listening, quite hard, because surely he should be able to hear it since it would be much louder, noisier than any mere dawning surmise and unbelief: the single voice of all the women in the Western world, from what used to be the Russian front to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond it too, Germans and French and English and Italians and Canadians and Americans and Australians—not just the ones who had already lost sons and husbands and brothers and sweethearts, because that sound had been in the air from the moment the first one fell, troops had been living with that sound for four years now; but the one which had begun only yesterday or this morning or whenever the actual instant had been, from the women who would have lost a son or brother or husband or sweetheart today or tomorrow if it hadn't stopped and now wouldn't have to since it had (not his women, his mother of course because she had lost nothing and had really risked nothing; there hadn't been that much time)—a sound much noisier than mere surmise, so much noisier that men couldn't believe it quite yet even, where women could and did believe anything they wanted to, making (didn't want to nor even need to make) no distinction between the sound of relief and the sound of anguish.
And he describes the hope and fear of the French people in the area of the intial revolt, wondering if they dared to believe what had happened:
Because they did not believe that the war was over. It had gone on too long to cease, finish, over night, at a moment's notice, like this. It had merely arrested itself; not the men engaged in it, but the war itself, War, impervious and even inattentive to the anguish, the torn flesh, the whole petty surge and resurge of victories and defeats like the ephemeral repetitive swarm and swirl of insects on a dung-heap, saying, 'Hush. Be quiet a moment' to the guns and the cries of the wounded too— that whole ruined band of irredeemable earth from the Alps to the sea, studded with faces watching in lipless and lidless detachment for a moment ...
In the end, the ringleader of the antiwar organizers is executed in the due course of things. And the generals on both sides cooperate to re-start the war.
In a final twist, the body of the chief organizer winds up, unknown to anyone, being the body placed in the French Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
But this story is "a fable," and the ringleader has already shown up in various forms, seemingly not bound by normal laws of time and place or even life and death. A war veteran on crutches with one arm and one leg and a badly scarred face shows up to protest at the dedication ceremony for the Tomb. He tosses his war medals toward the stage and cries out:
'You too helped carry the torch of man into that twilight where he shall be no more; these are his epitaphs: They shall not pass. My country right or wrong. Here is a spot which is forever England -'
At this point, somewhat like others in our recent experience who didn't hesitate to trash a decorated war veteran if he dared challenge the mindless jigoism which some use to hide from reality (e.g., Swift Boat Liars for Bush), the crowd pounches on him and beats him up.
The cops hold back the crowd and look down on the wounded veteran:
'Who is he?' a voice said.
'Ah, we know him,' one of the policemen said. 'An Englishman. We've had trouble with him ever since the war; this is not the first time he has insulted our country and disgraced his own.'
'Maybe he will die this time,' another voice said.
At this point, the beaten man wakes up, and an old man comes out of the crowd and cradles his head, as the beaten veteran spits out "the blood and shattered teeth." He then laughs and tells the old man:
'That's right,' he said. 'Tremble. I'm not going to die. Never.'
'I am not laughing,' the old man bending over him said. 'What you see are tears.'
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