A Fable
Fable, A,novel by Faulkner, published in 1954 and awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Under the pacifist influence of a corporal and his 12 followers in 1918, a French regiment refuses to attack the Germans, who for the same reason do not counterattack. The commander, concerned with his military record, requests that the entire regiment be executed, but the supreme French general, who knows the corporal to be his natural son and who has come to believe in the inextricable mingling of human rapacity and idealism, heads the tribunal considering the case. Wise and not without compassion, yet utterly cynical, he sees war not only as a political and economic necessity but as “so long ingrained in man as to have become an honorable tenet of his behavior and the national altar for his love of bloodshed and glorious sacrifice.” Having been warned of the pacifist plan by a betrayer among the corporal's 12 men, he collaborates with the German command to resume...
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