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heart, to set Saint Paul against Christ. The crisis of the allegory lies
in
the interviews of the Supreme Commander with some of the prison–
ers, ' but above all with the leader. The analogy with Christian myth
is covertly insinuated: the leader is in fact the bastard son of the once
dissolute and immensely wise Supreme Commander, who is admirably
drawn; he tempts the son with freedom, with the arguments of Saint
Paul, but finding him obdurate, leaves him to be shot. By an odd chance
he falls dead, with two others, still tied to the post of the execution
yard and with a crown of barbed wire on his head. It is a crucifixion.
By accident or design he is identified with the unknown soldier, a
symbol of the will of man in his solitude to prevail.
Such a simplification of the theme is necessary but intolerable. Mr.
Faulkner may be playing rhetorical poker with the marked cards of
myth and symbol, but he is not a purveyor of melodrama. He is en–
riched by his vices and his idiosyncrasies as a novelist. There is the
characteristic digression into the garrulous story of the stolen race–
horse which can win races on three legs. There is the tale of the horse's
foul-mouthed and crooked English groom, who is later seen getting
the soldiers to gamble with him on their expectation of death, at a
shilling a day. There is the absurd figure of the exalted Negro preacher.
There are the women. These are entangled in the allegory and, with
Mr. Faulkner, that means their declamatory unconscious is entangled
and their pungent physical presence. The prose is written as incanta–
tion, in swelling and diminishing monologue; it is filled with purple
patches, conceits, epigrams, and lapidary phrases, and those images that
paralyze movement, but intensify the moment. For Mr. Faulkner's aim,
as an historian, is to isolate and freeze each moment of the past:
And that was all. Then it was sunset. As they stood in the turning
flood of night, the ebb of day rang abruptly with an orderly discordant
diapason of bugles, orderly because they all sounded at once, discordant
because they sounded not one call, but three; the
Battre aux Champs
of the French, the
Last Post
of the English, the
Retreat
of the Ameri–
cans, beginning inside the city and spreading from cantonment and
depot to cantonment and depot, rising and falling within its own
measured bruit as the bronze throat of orderly and regulated War
proclaimed and affirmed to the end of day, clarion and sombre above
the parade rite of
Mount
and
Stand Down
as the old guards, custodians
of today, relinquished to tomorrow's, the six sergeants themselves ap–
pearing this time, each with his old guard or his new, the six files in
ordered tramp and wheel facing each its rigid counterpart juxtaposed,
the barked commands in the three different tongues ringing in the same
discordant unison as the bugles, in staccato
poste
and
riposte
as the
guards exchanged and the three sentries of the new ones assumed the
