A Soldier's Tale by M. K. Joseph Page B

her glass with a little animated gesture. He silently poured her another and passed her another cigarette.
    Well, you know, Athens and Sparta had a big war, like France and Germany, and there was the King of Persia too, waiting, like Stalin. Alcibiade was good at war, so when the Spartans tried to make a peace he sabotaged it and went on fighting them. But presently he got into much trouble for some kind of sacrilege at Athens, and the priests cursed him, so he ran away and fought for the Spartans. He was a collaborator, you see. But he really had fear of no one. He slept with the Spartan king’s wife, and this made the king very angry. So he went back to Athens and won more battles for them. But in the end they lost, and the Spartans were the winners, like the Boches withus. So Alcibiade ran away to Persia. No one wanted him now. So one night the Persian king sent soldiers to surround the house where he lived. He was living with a whore, a woman who had been taken a slave in one of the wars. So there he was in bed with her, and the soldiers came and set fire to the house. But he was still a brave man. He wrapped a cloak around one arm and took his sword and he was all naked and he jumped through the fire. The soldiers were still afraid of him—imagine, one naked man—then they shot into him with arrows and spears till he died. Then his woman sold her jewels and her good dress—you know, every whore has one good dress—and she paid for his funeral.
    Who paid for hers? he said.
    She shrugged and stared down at the table and her empty glass. He refilled it and said: That was a good story.
    It means that all wars are the same, she said.
    The long sunlight was beginning to slide in underneath the clouds. He rose to his feet.
    I’ll just take a turn outside, he said. That smells good, he added, nodding at the stove.
    The pots on the stove heaved and hissed. She jumped up and ran over to them and began to lift lids and peer inside and test something with a spoon andtake everything off the heat because it was cooking too fast. The sad sulky woman turned into a busy housewife.
    Do not be too long, she said, soon the dinner will be cooked.
    At intervals, while writing Saul Scourby’s story, I have been re-reading Alfred de Vigny’s Servitude et Grandeur Militaires and thinking about it. He was too young to serve in Napoleon’s armies and in any case he was a Royalist—he did his service in the postwar army sworn loyal to the Bourbons. But he had an extraordinary sympathy and understanding for those men who had grown old in Napoleon’s endless wars, and for what he called their ‘abnegation’—their selfless lives of duty and poverty, like some fighting monastic order. Listen:
Well, during the fourteen years I spent in the army it was there only, and above all in the poor despised ranks of the infantry, that I found men of this classic stamp, men who carry the sentiment of duty to its ultimate consequences, feeling neither remorse for their obedience nor shame for their poverty, simple in manner and speech, proud of the fame of their country, while careless of theirown, happy in their obscurity, and in sharing with the unfortunate the black bread they purchase with their blood.
    I’ve known men like that, especially among regular army NCOs. Saul was not the same. His patriotism was a tribal attachment to his own place; he was poor because he needed little beyond the satisfaction of his immediate needs; and his love of obscurity was the hunting animal’s instinctive preference for shadow and silence. But he knew how to share the black bread of bitterness in his own way, as you’ll see later.
    When he came back to the kitchen, the dinner was ready. She had taken tinned potatoes, sliced them and poached them in reconstituted milk with shredded cheese to make a sort of gratin dauphinois . The tinned steak-and-kidney pudding had been taken apart and remade into a delicious