Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  “Gus Dewar was in that battle. I hope it wasn’t he who shot you.”

  “I was lucky that it healed well. A lot of men died of gangrene.”

  It was three weeks since they had been reunited. During that time Walter had been working around the clock on the German response to the draft treaty, only getting away for half an hour or so each day to walk with her in the park or sit in the back of Fitz’s blue Cadillac while the chauffeur drove them around.

  Maud had been as shocked as Walter by the harsh terms offered to the Germans. The object of the Paris conference was to create a just and peaceful new world—not to enable the winners to take revenge on the losers. The new Germany should be democratic and prosperous. She wanted to have children with Walter, and their children would be German. She often thought of the passage in the Book of Ruth that began “Whither thou goest, I will go.” Sooner or later she would have to say that to Walter.

  However, she had been comforted to learn that she was not the only person who disapproved of the treaty proposals. Others on the Allied side thought peace was more important than revenge. Twelve members of the American delegation had resigned in protest. In a British by-election, the candidate advocating a nonvengeful peace had won. The archbishop of Canterbury had said publicly that he was “very uncomfortable” and claimed to speak for a silent body of opinion that was not represented in the Hun-hating newspapers.

  Yesterday the Germans had submitted their counterproposal—more than a hundred closely argued pages based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points. This morning the French press was apoplectic. Bursting with indignation, they called the document a monument of impudence and an odious piece of buffoonery. “They accuse us of arrogance—the French!” said Walter. “What is that phrase about a saucepan?”

  “The pot calling the kettle black,” said Maud.

  He rolled onto his side and toyed with her pubic hair. It was dark and curly and luxuriant. She had offered to trim it, but he said he liked it the way it was. “What are we going to do?” he said. “It’s romantic to meet in a hotel and go to bed in the afternoon, like illicit lovers, but we cannot do this forever. We have to tell the world we are man and wife.”

  Maud agreed. She was also impatient for the time when she could sleep with him every night, though she did not say so: she was a bit embarrassed by how much she liked sex with him. “We could just set up home, and let them draw their own conclusions.”

  “I’m not comfortable with that,” he said. “It makes us look ashamed.”

  She felt the same. She wanted to trumpet her happiness, not hide it away. She was proud of Walter: he was handsome and brave and extraordinarily clever. “We could have another wedding,” she said. “Get engaged, announce it, have a ceremony, and never tell anyone we’ve been married almost five years. It’s not illegal to marry the same person twice.”

  He looked thoughtful. “My father and your brother would fight us. They could not stop us, but they could make things unpleasant—which would spoil the happiness of the event.”

  “You’re right,” she said reluctantly. “Fitz would say that some Germans may be jolly good chaps, but all the same you don’t want your sister to marry one.”

  “So we must present them with a fait accompli.”

  “Let’s tell them, then announce the news in the press,” she said. “We’ll say it’s a symbol of the new world order. An Anglo-German marriage, at the same time as the peace treaty.”

  He looked dubious. “How would we manage that?”

  “I’ll speak to the editor of the Tatler magazine. They like me—I’ve provided them with lots of material.”

  Walter smiled and said: “Lady Maud Fitzherbert is always dressed in the latest fashion.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He reached for his billfold on the bedside table and extracted a magazine clipping. “My only picture of you,” he said.

  She took it from him. It was soft with age and faded to the color of sand. She studied the photo. “This was taken before the war.”

  “And it has been with me ever since. Like me, it survived.”

  Tears came to her eyes, blurring the faded image even more.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, hugging her.

  She pressed her face to his bare chest and wept. Some women cried at the drop of a hat, but she had never been that sort. Now she sobbed helplessly. She was crying for the lost years, and the millions of boys lying dead, and the pointless, stupid waste of it all. She was shedding all the tears stored up in five years of self-control.

  When it was over, and her tears were dry, she kissed him hungrily, and they made love again.

  { III }

  Fitz’s blue Cadillac picked Walter up at the hotel on June 16 and drove him into Paris. Maud had decided that the Tatler magazine would want a photograph of the two of them. Walter wore a tweed suit made in London before the war. It was too wide at the waist, but every German was walking around in clothes too big for him.

  Walter had set up a small intelligence bureau at the Hotel des Réservoirs, monitoring the French, British, American, and Italian newspapers and collating gossip picked up by the German delegation. He knew that there were bad-tempered arguments between the Allies about the German counterproposals. Lloyd George, a politician who was flexible to a fault, was willing to reconsider the draft treaty. But the French prime minister, Clemenceau, said he had already been generous and fumed with outrage at any suggestion of amendments. Surprisingly, Woodrow Wilson was also obdurate. He believed the draft was a just settlement, and whenever he had made up his mind he became deaf to criticism.

  The Allies were also negotiating peace treaties to cover Germany’s partners: Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. They were creating new countries such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and carving up the Middle East into British and French zones. And they were arguing about whether to make peace with Lenin. In every country the people were tired of war, but a few powerful men were still keen to fight against the Bolsheviks. The British Daily Mail had discovered a conspiracy of international Jewish financiers supporting the Moscow regime—one of that newspaper’s more implausible fantasies.

  On the German treaty Wilson and Clemenceau overruled Lloyd George, and earlier that day the German team at the Hotel des Réservoirs had received an impatient note giving them three days to accept.

  Walter thought gloomily about his country’s future as he sat in the back of Fitz’s car. It would be like an African colony, he thought, the primitive inhabitants working only to enrich their foreign masters. He would not want to raise children in such a place.

  Maud was waiting in the photographer’s studio, looking wonderful in a filmy summer dress that, she said, was by Paul Poiret, her favorite couturier.

  The photographer had a painted backdrop that showed a garden in full flower, which Maud decided was in bad taste, so they posed in front of his dining room curtains, which were mercifully plain. At first they stood side by side, not touching, like strangers. The photographer proposed that Walter should kneel in front of Maud, but that was too sentimental. In the end they found a position they all liked, with the two of them holding hands and looking at each other rather than the camera.

  Copies of the picture would be ready tomorrow, the photographer promised.

  They went to their auberge for lunch. “The Allies can’t just order Germany to sign,” Maud said. “That’s not negotiation.”

  “It is what they have done.”

  “What happens if you refuse?”

  “They don’t say.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Some of the delegation are returning to Berlin tonight for consultations with our government.” He sighed. “I’m afraid I have been chosen to go with them.”

  “Then this is the time to make our announcement. I’ll go to London tomorrow after I’ve picked up the photographs.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell my mother as soon as I get to B
erlin. She’ll be nice about it. Then I’ll tell Father. He won’t.”

  “I’ll speak to Aunt Herm and Princess Bea, and write to Fitz in Russia.”

  “So this will be the last time we meet for a while.”

  “Eat up, then, and let’s go to bed.”

  { IV }

  Gus and Rosa met in the Tuileries Gardens. Paris was beginning to get back to normal, Gus thought happily. The sun was shining, the trees were in leaf, and men with carnations in their buttonholes sat smoking cigars and watching the best-dressed women in the world walk by. On one side of the park, the rue de Rivoli was busy with cars, trucks, and horse-drawn carts; on the other, freight barges plied the river Seine. Perhaps the world would recover, after all.

  Rosa was ravishing in a red dress of light cotton and a wide-brimmed hat. If I could paint, Gus thought when he saw her, I’d paint her like this.

  He had a blue blazer and a fashionable straw boater. When she saw him, she laughed.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Nothing. You look nice.”

  “It’s the hat, isn’t it?”

  She suppressed another giggle. “You’re adorable.”

  “It looks stupid. I can’t help it. Hats do that to me. It’s because I’m shaped like a ball-peen hammer.”

  She kissed him lightly on the lips. “You’re the most attractive man in Paris.”

  The amazing thing was that she meant it. Gus thought: How did I get so lucky?

  He took her arm. “Let’s walk.” They strolled toward the Louvre.

  She said: “Have you seen the Tatler?”

  “The London magazine? No, why?”

  “It seems that your intimate friend Lady Maud is married to a German.”

  “Oh!” he said. “How did they find out?”

  “You mean you knew about this?”

  “I guessed. I saw Walter in Berlin in 1916 and he asked me to carry a letter to Maud. I figured that meant they were either engaged or married.”

  “How discreet you are! You never said a word.”

  “It was a dangerous secret.”

  “It may still be dangerous. The Tatler is nice about them, but other papers may take a different line.”

  “Maud has been attacked by the press before now. She’s pretty tough.”

  Rosa looked abashed. “I suppose this is what you were talking about that night I saw you tête-à-tête with her.”

  “Exactly. She was asking me if I had heard any news about Walter.”

  “I feel foolish for suspecting you of flirting.”

  “I forgive you, but reserve the right to recall the matter next time you criticize me unreasonably. Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything you like, Gus.”

  “Three questions, in fact.”

  “How ominous. Like a folktale. If I get the answers wrong, will I be banished?”

  “Are you still an anarchist?”

  “Would it bother you?”

  “I guess I’m asking myself if politics might divide us.”

  “Anarchism is the belief that no one has the right to rule. All political philosophies, from the divine right of kings to Rousseau’s social contract, try to justify authority. Anarchists believe that all those theories fail, therefore no form of authority is legitimate.”

  “Irrefutable, in theory. Impossible to put into practise.”

  “You’re quick on the uptake. In effect, all anarchists are antiestablishment, but they differ widely in their vision of how society should work.”

  “And what is your vision?”

  “I don’t see it as clearly as I used to. Covering the White House has given me a different slant on politics. But I still believe that authority needs to justify itself.”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever quarrel about that.”

  “Good. Next question?”

  “Tell me about your eye.”

  “I was born like this. I could have an operation to open it. Behind my eyelid is nothing but a mass of useless tissue, but I could wear a glass eye. However, it would never shut. I figure this is the lesser evil. Does it bother you?”

  He stopped walking and turned to face her directly. “May I kiss it?”

  She hesitated. “All right.”

  He bent down and kissed her closed eyelid. There was nothing unusual about how it felt to his lips. It was just like kissing her cheek. “Thank you,” he said.

  She said quietly: “No one has ever done that before.”

  He nodded. He had guessed it might be some kind of taboo.

  She said: “Why did you want to do it?”

  “Because I love everything about you, and I want to make sure you know it.”

  “Oh.” She was silent for a minute, in the grip of emotion; but then she grinned and reverted to the flip tone she preferred. “Well, if there’s anything else weird you want to kiss, just let me know.”

  He was not sure how to respond to that vaguely exciting offer, so he filed it away for future consideration. “I have one more question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Four months ago, I told you that I love you.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “But you haven’t said how you feel about me.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Perhaps, but I’d like you to tell me. Do you love me?”

  “Oh, Gus, don’t you understand?” Her face changed and she looked anguished. “I’m not good enough for you. You were the most eligible bachelor in Buffalo, and I was the one-eyed anarchist. You’re supposed to love someone elegant and beautiful and rich. I’m a doctor’s daughter—my mother was a housemaid. I’m not the right person for you to love.”

  “Do you love me?” he said with quiet persistence.

  She began to cry. “Of course I do, you dope, I love you with all my heart.”

  He put his arms around her. “Then that’s all that matters,” he said.

  { V }

  Aunt Herm put down the Tatler. “It was very bad of you to get married secretly,” she said to Maud. Then she smiled conspiratorially. “But so romantic!”

  They were in the drawing room of Fitz’s Mayfair house. Bea had redecorated after the end of the war, in the new art deco style, with utilitarian-looking chairs and modernistic silver gewgaws from Asprey. With Maud and Herm were Fitz’s roguish friend Bing Westhampton and Bing’s wife. The London season was in full swing, and they were going to the opera as soon as Bea was ready. She was saying good night to Boy, now three and a half, and Andrew, eighteen months.

  Maud picked up the magazine and looked again at the article. The picture did not greatly please her. She had imagined that it would show two people in love. Unfortunately it looked like a scene from a moving picture show. Walter appeared predatory, holding her hand and gazing into her eyes like a wicked Lothario, and she seemed like the ingénue about to fall for his wiles.

  However, the text was just what she had hoped for. The writer reminded readers that Lady Maud had been “the fashionable suffragette” before the war, she had started The Soldier’s Wife newspaper to campaign for the rights of the women left at home, and she had gone to jail for her protest on behalf of Jayne McCulley. It said that she and Walter had intended to announce their engagement in the normal way, and had been prevented by the outbreak of war. Their hasty secret marriage was portrayed as a desperate attempt to do the right thing in abnormal circumstances.

  Maud had insisted on being quoted exactly, and the magazine had kept its promise. “I know that some British people hate the Germans,” she had said. “But I also know that Walter and many other Germans did all they could to prevent the war. Now that it is over, we must create peace and friendship between the former enemies, and I truly hope people will see our union as a symbol of the new world.”

  Maud had learned, in her years of political campaigning, that you could sometimes win support from a publication by giving it a good story exclusively.

  Walter had returned to Berlin as planne
d. The Germans had been jeered by crowds as they drove to the railway station on their way home. A female secretary had been knocked out by a thrown rock. The French comment had been: “Remember what they did to Belgium.” The secretary was still in hospital. Meanwhile, the German people were angrily against signing the treaty.

  Bing sat next to Maud on the sofa. For once he was not flirtatious. “I wish your brother were here to advise you about this,” he said with a nod at the magazine.

  Maud had written to Fitz to break the news of her marriage, and had enclosed the clipping from the Tatler, to show him that what she had done was being accepted by London society. She had no idea how long it would take for her letter to get to wherever Fitz was, and she did not expect a reply for months. By then it would be too late for Fitz to protest. He would just have to smile and congratulate her.

  Now Maud bristled at the implication that she needed a man to tell her what to do. “What could Fitz possibly say?”

  “For the foreseeable future, the life of a German wife is going to be hard.”

  “I don’t need a man to tell me that.”

  “In Fitz’s absence I feel a degree of responsibility.”

  “Please don’t.” Maud tried not to be offended. What advice could Bing possibly offer anyone, other than how to gamble and drink in the world’s nightspots?

  He lowered his voice. “I hesitate to say this, but . . . ” He glanced at Aunt Herm, who took the hint and went to pour herself a little more coffee. “If you were able to say that the marriage had never been consummated, then there might be an annulment.”

  Maud thought of the room with the primrose-yellow curtains, and had to suppress a happy smile. “But I cannot—”

  “Please don’t tell me anything about it. I only want to make sure you understand your options.”

  Maud suppressed a growing indignation. “I know this is kindly meant, Bing—”

  “There is also the possibility of divorce. There is always a way, you know, for a man to provide a wife with grounds.”

  Maud could no longer contain her outrage. “Please drop the subject instantly,” she said in a raised voice. “I have not the slightest wish for either an annulment or a divorce. I love Walter.”