Money and other stories/The Tribunal

he court-martial was sitting in a small station building. A man had been brought in, arrested in the very act of murdering a wounded man. He was still young, sallow, bathed in a sweat of terror; from his lips, bruised from a rifle butt, dripped blood, which he was smearing over his face with horribly stained hands, lacerated to the bone. He was a sickeningly hideous object; shivering all over, dirty, abject, and wretched below all human level.

The presiding officer was putting questions to him. The man did not reply. He did not even state his name. He threw glances of panic and bitter hatred on every side. Then the soldiers gave their evidence noisily, with spiteful zeal. The case was manifestly clear; he had finished off a wounded soldier and was in the act of pulling off his wristlet watch. The presiding officer drummed with his fingers on the desk where, only the day before, a Morse apparatus had been tapping: no further questioning was needed. “In accord​ance with martial law,” he said at length, “I condemn this man to be shot. Take him away.” The man did not understand a single word; unresisting, he let himself be removed snuffling, and wiped his lips with blood-smeared hands. The trial was over.

The presiding officer unbuckled his sword and went to take a breath of air in front of the little railway station. It was a moonlight night. Everything was as if crystallized in marble light. The white road, white trees, shining meadows stretching as far as the eye could reach. Transparent whiteness, crystalline yearning, measureless and aching tension as far as one could see. Beyond the range of vision, an aching and luminous silence. A shining, lifeless, icily calm night. Not even a star, no friendly sign; there is nothing, nothing but this frigid glare.

The officer bowed his head. From the railway station waiting-room sounded the snoring of sleeping soldiers. The very darkness protects itself by the healthy, hearty snores against the splendour of the moonlight night; it gives voice to overcome its own apprehensions. But somewhere in the background beyond the rails was a hut, where the condemned man was confined, and where were gloom and silence; only a chink admitted the dread moonlight.

​How the sweat of anguish poured from him! Now the officer remembered that he had never shifted his gaze from his forehead. All at once a drop of sweat broke out and flowed quickly down the forehead; another and again another. As if the whole forehead were shedding tears.

Alas, had everything become lifeless under that chill hoar-frost of light? Not a beast stirring, not a mole making tracks across the grass, not the pipe of a bird to show that it lived? Are things but phantoms, with only an unearthly radiance and this lonely man shivering in the gleaming frost?

Suddenly a vast, mighty voice made itself heard, as if the moonlight spoke, “There is no law.”

The officer stiffened. Who says, who dares to say there is no law? Listen, all of us here stand before the law; we are surrounded by law as by the bounds of the horizon. How could we do anything unless we were compelled? How could I keep my thirty soldiers together or command them if there were no law? Whither could I go now if there were no law? There would be no justice; man himself could not exist without law; nothing could exist, and the world would crumble away.

The calm voice replied, speaking through the moonlight, “There is no justice.”

What, protested the exasperated officer, how ​dare you say there is no justice! I condemned him because he killed a wounded man; I acted in the name of the law. And if there were no law, I should have acted according to my conscience, and killed him on the spot. I would have split his head open with my pistol and my conscience would have been clear.

Then spoke the infinite voice: “There is no conscience!”

The president of the court-martial stood erect to oppose this terrible voice. Look on the platform, he retorted passionately, three soldiers lie there slain. Three young men who were alive this morning. This morning they laughed and talked jokingly in their rough, jolly voices. You will be killed with grief and rage, infuriated and maddened; in the name of righteousness and conscience you will strike and judge in wrath and fury; and were you God Himself you could do no other, no other than to agree with the man.

The voice which spoke through the moonlight was silent. The solitary man looked straight towards the sky, which seemed like a vast, white dome filled with frozen light. Then spoke the voice: “There is no God.” The man shuddered and was aghast. Surely now the smallest blade of grass, the dust on the road, the white stone, the drops of criminal blood now drying on the threshold will raise ​themselves at once towards heaven and cry out in protest: they will be His champions and ardently bear witness to Him—at least they will make some sound, at least they will show their horror! Silence, deadly silence; only one of the slumbering soldiers behind there, talking in his sleep. Nothing stirs. The boundless landscape is tense with the silence of the universe.

But what of me, asked the man in terror, why does no voice sound from me in reply? No sign granted to me? Nothing, no one to aid me.

Someone murmured among the soldiers, someone awoke heavily; midnight and change of guard; grunting, coughing, and with his straps clicking a soldier came on guard.

The officer started and turned round; the blinking light of a lantern, warm, greasy, friendly, greeted him in the passage, and he took it from its place to serve him as a companion and went out on the platform. By the rail were three corpses: three murdered soldiers. Nothing more. The moonlight draped them in an icy veil of weird, remote aloofness.

Before the wooden gates of a shed a soldier was patrolling. Ten paces, ten paces; a bayonet edge gleamed whenever he turned. The sand of the platform, the white framework of ​the square shed, all white, dazzling, unearthly, spectral. There is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only the universe.

The officer made his way slowly to the room where he dispensed justice, threw himself on the sofa and set the wretched little railway lamp at the sofa’s head; the little oil flame trembled, shrinking into itself for warmth, and the man on the sofa kept his gaze fixed upon it, until his eyes filled with tears, until exhausted with grief and weariness he fell asleep.