Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  The Marshal: What do you really want, Monsieur Admiral?

  Though he had had a French nanny, it wasn’t in Wemyss’s temperament to abide these foreign skills, this powerful nonsense. His hands itched at his sides. He had never been more tempted to try strangling a man.

  Wemyss: The truth is, I won’t sign.… I am not permitted to sign any document that yields on these issues.

  The Marshal went steaming up and down the length of the main compartment. All his aides’ eyes followed him except Weygand’s, which coolly remained fixed on the First Sea Lord’s pink face. The First Sea Lord was aware of it. Quite a team, these two, he thought. They give off potent emanations of success. They must be terrible creatures to army and corps commanders who have no fleet to go home to, no court of appeal from small villainous men.

  Wemyss saw the Marshal part his lips in his mandarin way. The thick-grown passionate mustache had gone sandy from tobacco on its underside. The strong teeth too.

  The Marshal: Perhaps you don’t understand: you are a very political race, reasonable, you make arrangements. We, on the other hand, we will never make arrangements with the enemy. When we get him at this table we will make him choke down all the terms at a gulp.

  Wemyss: Like Jeanne d’Arc perhaps.

  The Marshal: The lady is true to the French temperament.

  Wemyss: That’s all very nice but the German delegates are free men. How do you … we … intend to make them swallow terms whole?

  The admiral suffered a moment’s impression that the Marshal was expanding or perhaps rising off the floor. At the same time as Wemyss hated the illusion he felt intimidated.

  The Marshal: We shall do it by the extent of our perceptions. By the dominance of our ideas concerning the true nature of the event. We shall do it through a harmonious proportion between physical and bodily elements.

  Hope and Marriott frowned at Wemyss. Appalled by the onset of mysticism in the Marshal.

  Wemyss: I don’t quite follow, sir.

  The Marshal waved his hand in the air, exactly like a teacher erasing a blackboard, beginning the demonstration all over again. For the slow children’s sake.

  The Marshal: It will happen. They need the peace, we don’t need it as they do. They will swallow it whole because I will demand it of them.

  Wemyss: I still fail to see any necessary …

  The Marshal: I shall exact it from them. I shall not accept the hypothesis of failure. My Admiral, you are not to worry. I don’t wish to see my British brothers stamping away in anger through the forest.

  The train was slowing. It stopped. There seemed to be no sound from the engine or undercarriages, only the soaking murmur of rain amongst trees.

  The Marshal stood still, his legs together, his precognitive passion all at once folded away as neatly as a beetle’s wings. Even before he spoke he had again taken on the airs of someone halfway between host and hôtelier.

  The Marshal: I think we have arrived, gentlemen. I believe they still have to back us from the main line into an artillery siding. But that will take mere seconds. In the meantime I must go and inspect the hors d’oeuvres in the dining car. I have a name for being a fussy eater and only the finest will do for my British brothers.

  When he had gone Weygand sat forward and stared more keenly still at Wemyss. Overbright eyes, overtended mustache, Weygand was the British child’s conception of a gendarme.

  Weygand: I hope the Marshal has satisfied Monsieur Wemyss.

  Wemyss understood it was dangerous to get angrier. Or feel foolish, even a little, in front of George or Marriott or the other fellow, Bagot. They had to live together many days yet.

  General Weygand’s face grew foxy in its corner. A brother’s bright pride was there too, for the ungovernable talent of brother Foch. Or a son’s bright pride for a father, a lover’s for the wild beloved.

  Wemyss ached to say aloud: you disgusting little wog!

  THE GENERAL WHO SWALLOWED A HOOK

  At Trélon, Corps HQ lived in a good two-story house with shutters. The doors were adequately marked: Operations, Intelligence, Administrative, Signals; and people went in and out of the doors. So it was a going business. Not like that room in hell they’d come from.

  An aide took them straight into a ground-floor office. There the corps general sat behind a desk. His hands were joined. He was bald. He stood up. A tall man, with a high-located paunch, right under the breastbone. His stiff walk increased the impression of pregnancy.

  General: Gentlemen, I welcome you. This is Colonel Bayerling, my chief of staff. I couldn’t manage without him. Now I have to tell you …

  The voice was thick; the general had not bowed and had generally kept the left side of his face toward the plenipotentiaries.

  Maiberling therefore whispered to Erzberger.

  Maiberling: Another piss-pot!

  General: … tell you that three of my officers have already gone across to the French lines under flag of truce to arrange the cease-fire in this sector.

  Matthias thought, the drunk and the mad, perhaps I’ll never get out of their hands.

  By accident the general turned full-face. A palsy had taken hold of the right side of his face and was dragging the corner of his mouth downward. To counteract this pull he wore the earpiece of a pair of spectacles hooked into the pink lining of his mouth and attached by wire to another hook around his ear. The tension in the wire was savage; his gums improperly exposed, his mouth threatening to slough off its pink membrane in the hope of saving itself.

  Maiberling relented on his false judgment. The susurrus of his commentary filled Erzberger’s ear and even the room.

  Maiberling: Christ, a championship trout.

  It sounded like a cruel image to Erzberger, even if it was the metaphor plaguing the minds of everyone in the office, perhaps even the general’s mind. But if the military had defaced Inga in her bath you could not absolve them just because a hideous palsy took hold of their faces. The count was this far consistent. A dim small augury of consistency at the conference table.

  As if he had overheard Maiberling, the corps commander decided before their eyes not to say any more. With a movement of his hand he yielded place to his chief of staff, limiting himself to lifting a telephone on the desk and saying a few words into it. For a lunatic second (of the type that had been recurring all day) Matthias wondered if he was alerting assassins. The likelihood thankfully fell apart. This general must have found out only an hour or so before that delegates would come his way. He had not had time or means to alert his divisional generals. Even if he were dead center of a group of extremist officers he would have found it hard to arrange for an ambush in such a little time.

  He did not look as if he were dead center of a group of extremist officers.

  Chief of Staff: A company of pioneers are clearing the Guise road of land mines. It is only fair to tell you that our engineers have planted delayed-action mines indiscriminately over there. On the roads you’ll be using, that is. We do not however count the danger high.…

  An orderly had brought schnapps in and poured six glasses, placing one at the desk. Then he served one to each of the delegates and last of all to the chief of staff.

  General: For your journey, gentlemen. I’m sure it will be safe.

  God, how cold I am without knowing it, Erzberger thought. He drank his schnapps in one intake. The orderly waited with the tray for each of the drinkers to return the glass. Maiberling gave his up without any patent regret.

  The general suggested they all wait in the officers’ mess—there was a decent fireplace in there while in the office nothing but a stand-up heater gave warmth. The delegates were taken with the idea of a fire in a fireplace. As the colonel showed them the way, the corps commander asked if he could have the honor to speak to Herr Erzberger.

  When they were alone Erzberger felt uncomfortable looking the general straight in the face. There was so much improper stress in that line from mouth to ear.

 
General: Sir, can you tell me? What’s happening inside the country?

  Erzberger squinted. Trying to catch sight of the correct wary terms. But tiredness moved upward through the muscles of his face and he could manage only something near to the truth.

  Erzberger: The sailors of the Grand Seas Fleet have mutinied but the Cabinet hopes to bring them to a settlement. There are rumors that a general strike will commence on Friday … when’s that? My God, tomorrow. But Ebert, who’s an old trade unionist, says workers will never start a general strike on a Friday—it’s payday, you see. There are Soviets in Kiel, Lübeck, Brunsbüttel, Düsseldorf.…

  General: Please, sir, I don’t want town names. What are they all doing? Don’t the dead mean anything to them?

  Erzberger cast up his hands: the general confused him as much as rebels.

  Erzberger: I think people have been seduced. Not in wanting an end to the war. But in taking Bolshevik directions. You see. For example, they tell me at Spa that even the Ruhr battalions have been corrupted.

  The general cupped his crooked jaw in one hand, and protected his right ear with another.

  General: Please, sir. I’d be grateful now for no more details. I have details enough of my own.

  He lifted a flimsy typed sheet, synthetic-looking, from the table. He offered it to Erzberger.

  General: You see. Details.

  It was the return from the day’s roll call for the 101st and 193rd divisions. It listed the day’s casualties, which seemed heavy, of offensive proportions. But his soldiers were fighting no offensive. The 101st had been reduced to 349 effectives, the 193rd to 437.

  Erzberger: These figures are correct?

  General: Correct.

  Erzberger: They couldn’t have been caused except by a great battle.

  The general soothed his desk with the palm of his hand. It might have been a restless animal.

  General: We have been in this sector for six weeks.

  Erzberger: Even so.

  General: Desertion is a word I will not countenance.

  The wire tugged wildly and even more of the mouth’s lining was pulled into view and thickened his words. Erzberger thought, if I were not a Minister of the Empire he would hit me.

  General: I tell my officers to mark down the deserters as dead.

  Erzberger: I see.

  General: It is a spiritually exact description.

  Erzberger heard boughs scraping at the window. Perhaps the general read that sound as the damned trying to beg their way back into the house of the saved.

  Erzberger: What can I say?

  General: I would be grateful, sir, if you conveyed nothing about events in Berlin or Kiel to my officers. Some of them … such special talents.

  A father begging that his favorite sons should not be corrupted. That was the general, needing to believe all his boys were political virgins. After all the fear and killing, his knowledge of men as narrow as some boarding-school chaplain’s.

  Erzberger: Perhaps they know.

  General: Know?

  For a second, tired Matthias felt a visceral urge to hit out at the man’s deformity.

  Erzberger: Perhaps they haven’t told you. Out of politeness.

  ERZBERGER MEETS A SWABIAN

  As they turned on to the main Guise road a soldier jumped in front of their vehicle, both arms stretched wide.

  It seemed to Matthias that an expectation of assassins had been racketing in and out of the heads of all the delegates, though Vanselow and von Winterfeldt had not admitted it. Now it possessed Maiberling yet again. He went squirming for the revolver in his coat’s left armpit.

  Erzberger: No!

  The loud monosyllable made the count slump.

  Erzberger: You’ll have to toss that revolver. The French will search us.

  Maiberling: Of course they won’t. We’re diplomats. Immune.

  As the car slowed they could hear the driver calling to the soldier and the soldier replying in the accent of Matthias’s home hills. Swabian, wide as a farm gate.

  Soldier: I got put here to tell you, sir, there’s a cease-fire along this road at the moment.

  Erzberger felt a sentimental but powerful impulse to speak o one of his own race. He wound his window down.

  Erzberger: You speak the Swabian tongue?

  Soldier: Yes sir. Where are you going this time of night? A decent Württemberger.

  Erzberger was gratified by this country oddity: although the soldier must have stood all-night watches at the front he still had a peasant’s view of movement after dark: that it was somehow disreputable.

  Erzberger: We are going to make a truce with the French and English.

  The soldier could see only the front car.

  Soldier: What? Just the two of you?

  Erzberger rolled up the window, laughing. The convoy drove on and, a little maudlin, he told the count how the good frowning peasant had been amazed that, though it took millions of men to fight a war, a few carloads of delegates could end it.

  Maiberling: For Christ’s sake, spare me the country wisdom.

  Erzberger: Pitch that revolver.

  Maiberling: No.

  Erzberger: Alfred …

  Maiberling: Listen, I know how these things work. It’ll be all right.

  For the first time Matthias noticed his gloves were full of freezing sweat. And now that visibility would have been prized, the hooded headlamps lit up nothing but particles of mist.

  He thought, we won’t get far because this is long traveling, it’s Dante’s hell and all we can expect is a further circle. And the worst thing is I have no Alighieri stature. I’m just a happy glutton with a head for figures and a little wife.

  Like a cardiac spasm he suffered again the terrible bereft sense that there was nothing in his background that justified this journey. Treatises on united Europe, heady speeches in the chamber—they aren’t the true Erzberger. At its most high-flown the true Erzberger’s mind wasn’t far off steak and red wine and Paula’s warm and undemanding bed.

  A NIGHT’S LOST SLEEP

  Wemyss’s discontent had broken up under the genial effect of shrimps and some Chablis, rôti and some Beaujolais.

  Everyone at table seemed to understand that the Marshal and Wemyss were to exchange stories of sea war for stories of land war and that the stories should not be somber or of loaded intent.

  Wemyss told the story particularly well of how Lawrence, long melancholy face reduced almost to femininity by white Arab robes, had visited the flagship in Jedda and tripped on his skirts while coming down a companionway to the main deck. The First Sea Lord spent time on the idea of the prophet in midair flying in his finery, army boots and hairy legs bared by the pace of the fall.

  At nine o’clock the Marshal demanded dessert and news of the German plenipotentiaries. A telephone call was made from the scullery to Tergnier, where their train waited for them. The train is still waiting here at the Tergnier station, said a transport officer. They have not arrived. It is credible they’ve been held up by cratered roads.

  Though this information did not puncture the Marshal’s vivacity at the dining table, he began to speak of his sleep. For him, sleep was as studious a matter as any other.

  The Marshal: I don’t think we should wait up for them. We all need our rest. Do you know, Lord Admiral, that I have lost only one night’s sleep in the whole of the war.

  Wemyss: I didn’t. No, I wish one could say the same.

  The Marshal: Weygand has made it possible for me. I am useless without sleep.

  The First Sea Lord knew what dutiful question must be asked.

  Wemyss: And might I ask what kept you from your bed the night you speak of?

  The Marshal and Weygand looked at each other, their eyes mutually softened. For a second Wemyss felt appalled by the intimacy of the two Frenchmen. A mouthful of sorbet wafted the shock away.

  The Marshal: It was more than four years ago. During our offensive on the Marne.

  Weygand:
One could never forget. The night of September 10, 1914.

  The Marshal: Thank you, General. I transferred a colonial division from my right flank to my left. It took longer than I thought and when it got into action with its new corps, it captured the town of Fère-Champenoise. A pleasant little town it used to be. Its little mairie was like something out of a toy village.… That was already midnight, when we got into Fère-Champenoise. We were able to settle down in a room on the first floor of the town hall. On mattresses. No covers. It was a very cold night and after that summer we were still wearing our lightweight uniforms. So we found it very cold. People came and went on the stairs—you see the corps commander had set up his HQ in the place. I don’t know if he liked having his superior officer on the premises. We were just dozing off about one o’clock when someone blundered in to tell me I’d been made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. I said, what do you think I care about that at this hour of the morning?

  Maxime Weygand’s eyes glistened with his special knowledge of the event.

  The Marshal: So we dozed a little, for an hour or so, and then an officer came in with a present of cigars from Marshal Joffre. I said, what, does the Marshal think I’ve had a baby? The same man had blankets. A rarity. The army had thrown their blankets away that summer. So we sat up the rest of the night wrapped in the blankets, smoking cigars, and people continued to come and go on the stairs. The least I could do was ask them if the bridges over the Marne were clear and intact. Within an hour all communications were being brought to us. Our bedroom became army group HQ.

  Without any noise, Weygand again laughed. Though a secretive man, he showed nakedly now his gratitude for that oddly shared night in the war’s first autumn.

  The Marshal: Will they be here before dawn? Who knows? I intend to go to bed at the usual time.

  A TRUMPET AND FACES