The Bride of Texas by Josef Škvorecký Page B

Rebel sergeant had ended up on his bayonet, but the Rebel had actually skewered himself. It had happened like this: Shake, lying unhurt beside Zinkule and merely scared out of his wits, had decided to flee the field of glory, but as he was getting to his knees the standard-bearer, thinking him dead, stepped over him and tripped over his rising behind. He fell and impaled himself on Zinkule’s bayonet. The Rebel flag fluttered down on top of Zinkule and, when he recovered enough to stand up, he got tangled up in it, lost his bearings, and set out towards where he thought the enemy was. Shake tagged along because he saw that in fact they were heading back towards the reserves. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the unit arrived running. Nobody noticed anything amiss, and Zinkule got the glory for capturing the flag. Shake maintained that he himself should have got the credit, since he had set the action in motion, or his behind had. But he couldn’t be bothered making the effort to get his name in the report.
    Zinkule, meanwhile, took the incident as a sign and started believing in his dreams, in which he was always dying a hero’s death, and he recounted them at great length around the campfire. Finally Salek got so fed up that he told him, “If you don
’
t watch out, you’ll wind up like the village idiot in Brnives. Remember him?” Zinkule shook his head. “Surely, you old fool, you remember the petrified devils in the chapel under Saint Prokop
’
s church in Sazava?” Zinkule shook his head again, so Salek went ahead withthe story: “Once Saint Prokop was serving mass there, and these two devils come in and start tempting him, so Saint Prokop makes the sign of the cross over them and they turn into stone. They’re still there today. They look more like bears, but in fact they’re devils. One time —”
    When they ushered the lady in to see Sherman, the sergeant suddenly felt that maybe Zinkule was on to something. Was this a sign? A vision? He knew he’d seen her before, but he couldn’t remember where. He cast his mind back through the confusion of his life. When had he met her? A long time ago, that was for sure, but where? Then she spoke to the general.
    “I am surprised and indignant, general,” she said, “that your army should behave so towards a conquered people who have surrendered their city and do not resist. I have always told people we had nothing to fear except the accidents of war — but I do not consider the deliberate burning of a city an accident.” Her tone was haughty, her accent heavy. What sort of accent was it? He couldn’t put his finger on that, either.
    The general looked at the lady. He was exhausted and had to force himself to remain calm. Dawn was coming and the sky was red, but it wasn’t just the sunrise, it was the fires that the fire brigades hadn’t managed to put out yet. The general’s face was like a desert gullied with dry river-beds. Outside, they could hear the crackle of burning beams.
    “I have told my friends,” the lady went on, “private property and women would be protected when you came. But no, instead of this —”
    He knew the general was sensitive to criticism, but deep in his heart he also knew the general was right. It was a different war now. Even the Southern officers, who used to consider digging trenches cowardly and undignified, now dug in when canned hell started exploding overhead. There had never been anything as horrifying as Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, whenthe neat ranks of Georgians were mown into huge bloody heaps by canisters at short range and volley after volley from repeating rifles, when musket balls and shrapnel ripped into corpses and the wounded alike. The general was determined to end that horror once and for all, and he had a single recipe. The sergeant agreed with him.
    “Instead of this, you have waged warfare,” the lady continued contemptuously, “that is a disgrace to our history.”
    “What do you mean by