Beowulf

the official had said, pursing his lips as if he nibbled a pencil permanently. “You have been domiciled abroad ever since you left India and you are well over military age.” Colonel Ferguson had not even troubled to reply, “To offer my services.” After half a dozen young men in as many different Ministries had turned him down in varying tones of boredom and icy politeness, the logical part of his mind was saying “Why?” to himself.
It would be different this afternoon. Finally Ferguson had unearthed Harris, his old chief. With Departments evacuated all over the countryside, his letter had gone to a dozen places before it had reached its destination. Harris himself was marooned in Yorkshire but had sent him an introduction to a London colleague who would be sure, he wrote, “to fix you up at once.” Ferguson was seeing the man at three, and tomorrow, or at latest next week, he would be back, surely, in harness?
There were no children in the park, not even an old maid with her dog. Along the entire row there were only himself and a French soldier, walking towards him, looking frozen and miserable. For a moment Colonel Ferguson felt tempted to speak, to say, “I don’t feel at home here myself,” but his French was rusty and the fellow might not have understood him. How they must miss the sun, the funny shutters with the paint scratched off, not with nails but with light, the clusters of … what did they call it … glycines, that were so formal in spite of their abundance, and reminded him of grapes in an architectural drawing. It was all very well to make speeches, but imagine the landing that these men had had, struggling up the salt-stained steps of some West Country port, with everything lost, no news, and nobody to welcome them. Two wars in a single generation asked too much of any race.
The trees reminded Ferguson of the brooms in a shop that he had just passed. It was not their stiffness, for they were soft against the autumn sky, but their tiny, bristling edges made just the same patterns as the brushes against the glass window. A piece of parachute silk fluttered from a branch near the explosive circle of a new crater. Patches of grass were corroded as if by acid, a piece of broken railing stuck out of the earth. The whole landscape had the bare, haunted loneliness of the moors in Lear; only a fretful succession of necessary acts, eating, sleeping, getting warm, differentiated life from nightmare.
It was strange how impressions returned, as if they were no isolated events but had separate echoes vibrating along memory. Lausanne was a blur in his mind; it was coming home, that final day in Paris, that he could not get out of his head. He saw himself (it must be meeting that French soldier) walking up the Champs Élysées under absurd catkincoloured little clouds whilst the different faces brought back the journeys of his life as if it were farewell, not to France only but to all the harbours of a long experience.
Ferguson had had the whole afternoon in front of him and no friends to visit. There had been fewer taxis but nearly as many cars, most of them unmistakably civilian, racing powerfully towards the Bois. The wind had been sharp in spite of the April colours, and because he was a little tired after the long night in the train he had drifted into a spiral of people waiting outside a cinema. He liked a good picture now and again though it was hard work to find one. For a moment he had seen an earlier Paris, carriages drawn by grey and roan horses, children in pinafores holding the hands of governesses in big, feathered hats. Nothing changed really, he had thought, except environment; it was easier to develop some years than others. There had been the usual bourgeois couple in the queue, the wife in black, with a square, shiny handbag tucked under her arm as she clung to her plump husband’s rather rumpled sleeve. Why was it that French materials seemed to crush immediately? Froissé, it was a better word than creased but unsuited to the texture of English, either language or cloth. They were discussing the price of butter, the Colonel thought, though it was easy to miss a phrase after the leisurely sung Vaudois. A Senegalese was staring at the poster whilst a soldier slouched beside them in a grease-stained tunic and the worst military boots that he had ever seen. Of course, the French could improvise, but wasn’t there also something to be said for English smartness? Perhaps he had listened too much to his neighbours in Lausanne; they were always showing him photographs of sunburnt faces under steel helmets. There was one picture of tanks crawling round a road in a gigantic question mark that had haunted his mind for months. Morale was more important than machinery and yet, Colonel Ferguson looked up suddenly at another ribbon of silk flapping beside a dead, solitary leaf, in that moment of memory he had seen personified in a single soldier the story of an end of France.
It was too cold, too lonely; even if the war ended in an hour, there would always be a rift, a sense of loss. History repeated itself, but in each age there was something as ephemeral as these autumn reds and russets that no reconstruction could replace. The bright ochre leaves rolled away into the gutters, and under a scarred tree that had half its roots in the air the pathway was littered with small branches and green twigs. Death is not dissolution, the Colonel thought, turning towards the park gates; it is the moment when humanity needs our services no longer. He must not be foolish, however, just because the morning was so desolate; there were years of work in him still if he could only get