Free Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier Page B

wounded.
    “Much good their education has done them,” said the Head of State, getting into the long black Renault that was to take him to the railway station. “Have any soldiers been killed?”
    “Two, because one student and a janitor were armed.”
    “See that they have national funerals with gun carriages, funeral marches, and places in the Pantheon of Heroes, since they fell in the performance of their duty.”
    And the armed forces gathered on the pavements with agreat display of helmets, leather belts, chin straps and spurs, binoculars and riding whips, and with much to-ing and froing of sergeants looking like German
Feldwebels
and piling the troops into coaches, cattle trucks, and luggage vans. They began with the élite: the chasseurs and hussars, with shining boots and soldierly spit and polish; they were to go in the presidential convoy. Then, in other trains, came shabbier infantry, in stained tunics and unpolished boots, and after that third-class infantry, with machetes, cartridge belts, old rifles, and odd pairs of shoes. And slipping in everywhere among the groups of soldiers, sneaking through the carriage windows, climbing onto the roofs, were the camp followers carrying stores and kitchen utensils, wrapped up in bedding and bags. Two Krupp cannons had been set up on platform wagons on a turntable, with its complicated machinery of cog wheels, levers, and handlebars.
    “And is all this going to be needed?” asked the Head of State.
    “It’s been proved by experience,” said Hoffmann, “that water conduits and four yoke of oxen can be carried in railway wagons.”
    “Very practical for quick action,” said the President, who had been put in a good humour by all these preparations.
    In the end, after a delay of three hours spent intercalating trucks, moving trucks, interpolating trucks, extrapolating trucks, finding this wouldn’t do but that would do, that the one farther up was blocking the brakes, that the cistern wagon was full of putrid water, and that the cement mixer didn’t work, and after two more hours occupied in pulling up bogies from disused lines, breaking up strings of trucks to make others, moving forwards, backing, while locomotives whistled and the bugles of the military bands sounded, the army started off, to the accompaniment of the indispensable song:
    Goodbye, goodbye
.
    Light of my life
,
    Said a soldier
,
    Underneath a window
.
    The Head of State withdrew early with Peralta into his comfortable presidential compartment, to drink what had been brought in the Hermès case, out of sight of the captains and colonels who were celebrating their departure to the front in the Pullman car around bottles bearing good labels. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he gazed gloomily at the toes of his shining boots, his Sam Browne belt hanging from a peg, his pistol in its holster—heavier and of larger bore than the light Browning for his own personal use.
    “General” … “My General” … “Señor General” …
    And the sleepers under the railway lines repeated with obsessional regularity as the wheels passed over them: “Gen-ral … Gen-ral … Gen-ral … Gen-ral … Gen-ral.” Possibly he was the only general in the whole world to whom the title of general gave no pleasure, and he accepted it only when he was with soldiers, or when he had, as now, to direct some operation. Because the truth was that he had conferred that title on himself a great many years ago, in an early incarnation of his political life, when he had placed himself at the head of an armed contingent back in Surgidero de la Verónica, and led about seventy men to attack a small fort occupied by some rebels against the government to which at that time he was loyal—though he was to overthrow it later on (but then with the help of real generals) and instal himself in the Presidential Palace. Now, for a while—as long as the operations lasted—he would once again become “General,” “My