Anthony and Susan in their earlier postings have already quoted and commented on the most memorable passages of this story: those at the beginning and the end (but I'm going to quote them again). The opening sentence is "Behind the town there was a hill, behind the hill a mountain range; behind the range another range, behind that range an ancient wood, and in that wood there was a man" (p. 57). A very nice opening, much like a fairy tale, or a children's song like "The Rattling Bog" ("And on that feather there was a flea, a rare flea, a rattling flea, and the flea on the feather, and the feather on the bird and the bird on the nest and the nest on the branch and the branch on the limb and the limb on the tree and the tree in the bog and the bog down in the valley-o").

The man's forgotten about for a 2 1/2 pages as O'Brian describes (without identifying) the town and the hills and the mountains and the valleys, using a tremendous range of colors: green, blue-green, gold, crimson, white, gray, pink, black, brown, yellow. On the second page (p.58) "you" are introduced as a subject: "You would gasp to see them [flowers] in an alpine garden, but here they are in such profusion that you cannot walk without treading on them". Much of the valley has been "ravaged" by a fire, "searing it to the bare rock" (p.58)

On the third page (p.59) comes the transition: "Once across the ridge you cannot look back and see the sea any more: it is the unknown country, and everything behind and known is cut off. There are trees before you, and on each side trees: and already you among the first of the trees. This is the wood." This is the last we hear of "you". In the next sentence (which is in a new paragraph), "the man" is re-introduced, thus matching the pattern of all of the earlier short stories, which feature a man going into the woods.

The man has a purpose in going through the woods, though what it is isn't clear. At one point he hears a sound and tenses up, but is relieved to find it is "a tall gray form [a wolf, we learn a few paragraphs later], far bigger than the dog he feared" (p.61)

He hears a whistle and sees the wolf running away through the trees, and the story ends as follows:

"The whistle again, and he answered; a clear true whistle. A distant voice, well known, carried across on the silent air. 'Aa-oo, aa-oo,' and 'Aa-oo, aa-oo,' he answered

"Leaning on the silence he waited, and the words came clear, calling over the distance, 'Come back again, man: come back at the dark of the moon.'" (pp 61-62)

Exactly what is happening at the end is by no means clear, but there are hints of a conspiracy. The whistle signal and the moon are reminiscent of "The Rising of the Moon", a well known song (written by John Keegan Casey) about men planning the 1798 Irish Rising:

One word more -- for signal token
Whistle up the marchin' tune,
With your pike upon your shoulder,
By the risin' of the moon.

"The Passeur"'s last sentence is extraordinary: "Leaning on the silence" it begins -- a very nice poetical formulation, though obviously literally impossible (silence isn't a physical object that one can lean on). Then there's the spoken words. Spoken by who isn't clear. Anthony and Susan assumed it was the wolf who was speaking, either literally (a werewolf? a man becoming a wolf in the full moon?) or in the man's head. It could be, but was it also the wolf that whistled? I assumed when I first read it that it was another man that answered, entirely different from the wolf. A third interpretation is that the man himself is speaking: "the words came clear" the sentence says, without saying whether they were coming clear towards the man or away from the man.

The speaker exhorts (the man?) to "come back at the dark of the moon", employing inverted imagery: the moon normally gives off light, but here it gives off darkness, a sort of opposite, perverted light: an interesting concept, though by no means an unprecedented one. In a wartime speech (before the American Congress, if I remember correctly) Winston Churchill spoke of a German victory in World War II leading to "a new Dark Age, made all the darker by the light of perverted science" (this is from memory; the words may not be exactly right).

The idea of inverted light also appears earlier in "The Passeur" itself. On p. 61, as the man is waiting for the signal whistle, O'Brian writes, "With the creeping shadows the naked [tree] trunks stood barer still, with a light of their own under the darkening canopy." The creeping shadows + darkening canopy = a light of their own; a light from anti-light. So the inverted light concept is itself linked to the tree trunks. And is there any significance to these tree trunks which produce the anti-light?

There is indeed.

On p. 60, O'Brian writes of "ancient trees that had died where they stood, and some had fallen, bringing down others: there were ancient trees that still lived, enormous slow eruptions that had been glorious but that were now three parts dead, massive limbs that towered up beyond the screen of leaves, dead and naked in the sea of green. There were very few young trees, and even those few were gray". So the trees present a grim image of death and dying and grayness.

Worse yet, in the paragraph before, O'Brian describes the collection of trees:

"It was a wood in as natural a state as it could be, for no one had cut it, planted or touched it: it was too far, too isolated by the rocks and precipices for the charcoal burners even. But to him it looked unnatural, a wan Golgotha of a wood."

Golgotha is, of course, the spot where Jesus was crucified. So if we put together the pieces, we see that the anti-light of the moon is linked to the dead trees which are themselves linked to Golgotha, man's literal attempt to kill the divine. Now let's put this together with Anthony's information that the gray wolves may indicate the Gestapo or the Vichy police, and the quote from Churchill above, and one more piece: in 1937, in Mit brennender Sorge, his encyclical to the German bishops on the dangers of National Socialism, Pope Pius XI warned that "a people that once received from St. Boniface the bright message and the Gospel of Christ and God's Kingdom" were in danger of succumbing to "that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God", once again, light ("bright message") mutating into anti-light ("dark and impersonal destiny"). All these pieces hint at a connection between the anti-light and Nazism.

I tend to agree with Anthony that the man is an agent of some sort in World War II, perhaps passing between France and Spain, but I am not at all sure that he is on the Allied side. If he is not an actual Nazi or collaborator, he may at least be tempted in that direction ( "come back at the dark of the moon").

And I think the story could be read psychologically as well as literally, where the man is tempted by a sort of dark National Socialism of the soul. Look at the parallels with the earlier stories: the man fears being pusued by a dog. In the literal sense of the story, this may be bloodhounds leading hostile pursuers, but in the context of the short stories we've read so far, this parallels the dog or dog-like creature that pursued the narrator in "Not Liking to Pass the Road Again". And consider the scene where the man first senses the wolf:

"His mouth was half open, and his nostrils flared; he breathed, but very faintly.
"The noise stopped. He grew more rigid, and his right hand, poised above his knee, slowly clenched to. From the first second he had known that something was in presence: now it knew; and this was the crisis now." (p.61)

Is this not very similar to the psychological crisis at the end of "The Little Death"?:

"Again the quiet came back, the curtain dropped fast, and now his mind was glowing with active suspense: it even invaded his body: his heart beat and his stomach was constrained just as it had been with him and he a young boy in his first love. Now it was here, here and coming on him. "He stood up slowly, with his gun hanging open in his right hand and his left hand wavering to his lips." (p.56)

It's as if all the earlier fears and dangers from the earlier stories are now coming together (can the Scotch brothers and the keeper of the hoard be far away?) and there's a certain perverse attractiveness about it all, as the words come clear, calling over the distance,"Come back again, man: come back at the dark of the moon", back to the seductively attractive world of darkness and dead trees and werewolves and Nazism and mysterious hounds and Golgotha.

And, oh, yes, one more thing: who's speaking the words? As I stated earlier, it could be the wolf, it could be some unintroduced second person, it could be the man itself, and there's yet a fourth possibility. Have we forgotten that there's someone else in the woods? A character already introduced by O'Brian besides the man and the wolf and the hypothetical dog? Who is it? It's "you" ("already you cannot look back ... already you are among the first of the trees", p.59). At a casual reading, the "you" seems like a meaningless rhetorical construct. But is it?

John Finneran