Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  Maiberling: Are you a Bavarian, Captain? A Rhinelander?

  Vanselow made a gesture with his hand that said, it doesn’t matter, I beg you to believe me brave. And not to report my behavior to historians.

  Erzberger thought, yes, how disastrous for a professional naval officer. To be known for having wept in front of the Marshal in the forest of Compiègne.

  An orderly crept in and asked them if they wanted coffee.

  Maiberling: Cognac. Cognac, gentlemen?

  Von Winterfeldt: These bridgeheads they want? Do they take in Wuppertal?

  Erzberger: I don’t know. They’ll send us maps.

  Von Winterfeldt: I knew a very fine family once. In Wuppertal.

  Major Bourbon-Busset entered from the direction of the dining car. They glanced at him, he nodded, sat, took account of their misery whose symptoms he must strictly report to the Marshal. As yet more fuel and staple for the Marshal’s theory of will.

  RADIO FLIMSIES

  In the Marshal’s saloon they needed no stimulants other than the offered morning coffee.

  Hope spoke quietly in English, privately to Wemyss.

  Hope: That naval chap crying …

  The Marshal hammered his pipe riotously on a metal smoking stand. You got the impression his short legs had been drawn gnomishly off the ground and that he might hug himself.

  Reidinger brought him a radio flimsy. He read it, nodded, held it face out to the admirals, though they could not read it from the place they were sitting. A new degree of brotherhood, he implied by this gesture. Nothing to hide.

  The Marshal: From the War Ministry. The Italian government insists that Bavarian troops evacuate the Tyrol.

  Wemyss laughed. The modesty of the request! He too was suddenly full of blatant gaiety.

  The Marshal threw an order over his shoulder.

  The Marshal: Mark it on the agenda.

  At a quarter past eleven maps were brought to the German delegates’ train. In one envelope maps for the information of Erzberger, Maiberling, von Winterfeldt, Vanselow. In the other, sealed, copies to be carried by von Helldorf to Spa.

  Erzberger was first to inspect the maps. The others sat about a small console, pens in hands. Expecting to be shown, as they would have to be. But Erzberger hesitated to hand them their copies. What would it produce? Gunplay from Maiberling, tears from Vanselow, inane and gentlemanly hurt in von Winterfeldt?

  The crosshatching on the maps covered the Rhineland and crossed the Rhine and swelled, three neat goiters thirty kilometers deep, eastward. At least Wuppertal’s nice family did not fall inside these ruinous bridgeheads.

  When he handed out the maps the others considered them indolently; directors well into a routine board meeting. Von Winterfeldt delivered some statistics evenly, like a clerk recording mortgaged land.

  Von Winterfeldt: So they take our Rhineland. Twelve thousand square miles. Five million people. German since 1814. So they take it.

  Von Helldorf, recent translator but courier now, had already begun packing his satchel.

  Seeing him, Erzberger spoke to the others, saying they couldn’t wait a day or more for answers from Spa and Berlin whenever a courier was sent through the line. The only quick method was to send a radio message. In it, to ask if Max and the generals believe that the terms must be accepted, they should authorize their men in the forest, us that is, to sign at once. Getting what concessions we can; from that old man.

  The others would not answer, their hands ran over the maps like mice. At last, the general.

  Von Winterfeldt: Could we code such a message?

  Erzberger: Blauert says not.

  Vanselow: No. It would be too hard. And finish full of mistakes.

  Von Winterfeldt: The Marshal would read it before it was sent. He would know we’re willing to accept his terms. In principle, as they say.

  Maiberling: As they say. What’s the use, trying to play diplomats. He has us by the balls.

  Yet he seemed placid about the fact.

  Erzberger: If he does know … it’s the best means of softening him to make concessions.

  Von Winterfeldt: He isn’t easily softened.

  Erzberger: Our best strategy is to make him see that Western Europe is endangered.

  Maiberling belched.

  Maiberling: It’s endangered. Yes.

  Von Winterfeldt: He hasn’t eyes for such propositions.

  Yet the message was taken to 2417D to be transmitted.

  When the Marshal had inspected this message he immediately drafted a communiqué to the War Office in Paris. It said that the German delegates accepted the terms in principle. Later the Marshal was told that that decadent old sentimentalist Clemenceau had wept when he saw the flimsy. Of course, the Marshal thought. His intent that they should accept wasn’t as strong as mine. On the battlefield the will can be balked by tactical facts: mud, gas, machine guns. But in 2417D it was just them, us, the terms, no tactical surfaces, no blockages.

  OVER THE SOUP

  At lunch in the German dining car everyone felt better.

  Maiberling: This afternoon. That’s when the important work will be done.

  Over the soup they felt eloquent, they breathed in the soup vapors as if they might nourish their powers of negotiation.

  Erzberger felt happier than ever before with his three colleagues. At one o’clock Bourbon-Busset brought news that transport and safe-conduct had been arranged for von Helldorf. Von Helldorf put on his overcoat and had an attaché case locked to his wrist. He remained a second in the saloon, looking for best wishes. A well-tailored messenger to that empire, already dim in outline, that Erzberger had left only yesterday.

  The young horseman traveled by army truck to the Noyon road, where a limousine waited for him. Alone in its back seat he played somewhat with the chain about his wrist and raised his arm. Testing the weight of his country’s certificate of chaos.

  THE GODS OF AGENDA

  Erzberger spent the afternoon in the saloon writing expansive notes and submissions for the plenary sessions. He started with energy but apathy got into his blood about three o’clock and he went to a window and looked out at the scene that had already got tedious for him, as a suburban garden gets tedious. In this garden grew mud, vaporous drizzle, guards in duck-egg coats, and varnished coaches.

  It was getting dark and his tongue itched to make small talk to someone. We won’t see the sun again today. But there was no one about. Even Bourbon-Busset had gone to his cabin to sleep off his earlier vigilance.

  In 2417D, the count and the general were arguing with Weygand.

  Maiberling: One wonders if the Allies draw up such severe terms just to have the Germans refuse them?

  Weygand: There is nothing hidden about the Allied intentions.

  Maiberling: Do the Allies intend to make the armistice fail so that they can go straight on to a discussion of peace terms?

  Weygand: If you knew the jealousy of our politicians! We are forbidden to speak of peace terms. Peace terms are their business. For us, just the settling of a truce.

  The count still behaved with ceremony, appearing to believe as much as anyone in the gods of agenda, minute paper, conference table.

  The general and he argued in tandem, in the manner of genuine colleagues.

  Maiberling: A truce is necessary. To save ourselves. But to save Europe as well. There are already soviets in Hamburg, Cuxhaven, Altona.…

  Weygand: Yes, yes.

  Von Winterfeldt: We came to you through the wreckage of units. You know as I do, General. The German Army could not recommence fighting once the armistice is signed, once the withdrawal starts. The war began with railway timetables and will be finished by them. Our railway timetables, taking over inexorably. Making us incapable. You understand this. So the severe terms are wasted.

  Maiberling: You must understand that the surrender of thirty thousand machine guns would weaken the army too much in the event of its having to take on the Bolsheviks in its own rank
s and in the interior.

  Von Winterfeldt: If the army isn’t kept intact for fighting these rotten elements, Germany will be lost and incapable of paying reparations.

  Maiberling: So it is to everyone’s advantage that the army should be given time to march back in an orderly fashion.

  In these and other terms they chorused each other like brothers. While Maxime Weygand kept tidy notes of all they said—section heading across the page, indented a’s, b’s, c’s—in a small hand. Generally they spoke to his brushy scalp. In the end they felt their diplomatic eloquence sapped by Weygand’s mute bobbing head.

  Maiberling: In poorer parts of east Berlin and Hamburg and a number of provincial towns, people are getting as little as eight hundred calories a day in the form of corn meal or potatoes.

  He saw Weygand write down eight hundred faithfully.

  Maiberling: The state of famine is already established. Therefore the clauses touching the continuation of the blockade and the surrender of five thousand locomotives and … what is it?… 150,000 wagons?… are inhuman.

  Weygand: The bridgeheads!

  Maiberling: The bridgeheads?

  Weygand: Are they inhuman too?

  Von Winterfeldt: They take in such cities as Mülheim, Solingen, Remscheid.…

  Weygand: We are aware of what is taken in.

  The tufty head of hair jerked a little impatiently before them. I suppose this is the way the unemployed are treated at poor clinics, thought the count.

  Weygand laid down his pen slowly, as if seeking for it a particular and exact axis.

  Weygand: The Marshal wishes the German delegates to understand that these informal discussions are merely exchanges of opinion.

  Maiberling: What is your opinion though? After all, you are obviously intended to give your opinion.

  Weygand: It is my opinion, based on a knowledge of the statesmen who framed the terms on the advice of military experts, that you would be mistaken to look for substantial concessions.

  They went back to Napoleon’s saloon and had cognac and coffee with Erzberger. Matthias had been already infected, from across the mud, by their despair.

  Erzberger: We have to work. We have to say the same things over and over.

  They switched on the lights as more autumn rain fell into the forest. They began work on a submission called Some Observations on the Conditions of an Armistice with Germany. But the count wrote only a few headings and tossed his pen down.

  Maiberling: It’s only basket weaving, this. To keep the inmates happy.

  And he glared at Matthias and the general and the opulent draperies. Wanting a fight.

  VON HELLDORF AND ENFILADING FIRE

  North of Bohain, Captain von Helldorf was taken down into a shallow French system of connecting trenches. He could smell careless latrines in the support trenches where unshaven poilus slept on crumbling ledges in trench coats and beneath especially fouled blankets. Did they fight the whole war like this, like Armenians?

  His guide: a middle-aged captain, synagogue-Jewish to look at. Someone had impressed on him that Hauptmann von Helldorf must not be shot. He kept exhorting the cavalryman.

  Guide: Head down please, Captain. These trenches are mere drains, so rudimentary. The speed of the advance hasn’t allowed …

  He was a gentleman and an obvious civilian. He implied a certain carelessness on the part of his people in that their spade work had not kept pace with their victories. In his elbow he carried an exactly rolled white flag for von Helldorf’s use.

  Guide: A hundred meters on our right.

  They had to crawl in the front line, which was made of shell holes and connecting entries scraped in the mud. In the holes men slept or lay at ease. Machine guns worked regularly from both flanks and from the German lines as well. The noise seemed to encourage them in their repose.

  Von Helldorf’s Jew found the appointed regimental officer. A young man with a cough. He excused himself every ten seconds and turned to one side to spit. He’d been told they were coming, he said.

  He took out a whistle, blew it, spat uselessly. Down the line other subalterns blew whistles. The French machine guns stopped. A runner on his side in the hole heard the cessation in his sleep and woke inquiringly. His thin slum-child neck stood out at full stretch.

  The machine guns in the other lines spoke out again. The spitting officer nodded at von Helldorf.

  Officer: Your dogs are still barking, sir.

  His right hand on the side of the pit for balance, von Helldorf believed he could feel, as vibrations through the mud, the impact of bullets.

  Officer: They’ve been told?

  Guide: By radio. They’ve been informed. At divisional and brigade level.

  Officer: Command is very broken up over there. That’s obvious. Eh?

  He coughed. It sounds tubercular, von Helldorf thought in a corner of his brain.

  Officer: It’ll be too late when I get pneumonia.

  Von Helldorf asked for the flag. The guide gave it up reluctantly.

  Guide: They’re in a dangerous mood. Like anyone asked to offer himself up … they don’t care who’s offered up with them.

  The runner was standing, sensing there would be calls on him.

  Von Helldorf chanced his flag over the rim of the hole and scrabbled up the embankment.

  Guide: Careful!

  Officer: It’s his funeral.

  Guide: That’s the armistice he has in that bag.

  On his knees in the open, von Helldorf saw the mud spitting to his left and reaching to take him in. He let himself glissade back into the hole. He still had the flag. The retention of it gratified him as a professional.

  His guide was scribbling a message for the runner. A droll sergeant strolled up and spoke to von Helldorf.

  Sergeant: What’s the difference between a staff officer and a vase?

  Von Helldorf: I don’t know.

  Sergeant: Nothing. They’re both decorated before they go under fire.

  There was no malice in him—he simply offered the foreign gentleman a little joke to take back to OHL.

  Routine machine guns from the French lines had started up again. But everyone in the shell hole seemed buoyant and brotherly, pleased that a hopeful thesis was being proven by the German gunners; namely, that the enemy could not pass messages from brigade to his outposts. Or, if they could, the outposts no longer understood. They had become foreigners to each other.

  Guide: The runner is being sent back, Captain. It won’t take long.

  Von Helldorf however insisted the cease-fire whistles again be blown. The consumptive officer did his dry spit and blew. Whatever pitch he blew at, there was immediate obedience, not only up and down the line, but from the gunners on the German side.

  Von Helldorf rose out of the hole, not saying good-by to anyone. He held the truce flag wide of his body, free of the mud. In the last daylight he walked three meters but could then hear two lines of fire moving to nip him dead.

  Launching himself forward into a mudhole, he got sodden at the knees and the palms of his gloves. He muttered about what sort of army it was over there, and remembered the twitching generals he’d seen last night.

  In a silence he yelled his name and status. He had mud on his chin and rain began to fall, dissolving the authority of his call. Will you answer? he yelled; I demand an answer. He believed an answer was framing itself warily over there amongst the sacrificial gunners. We will sacrifice successive screens of very brave men, Groener had announced. The successive screen ahead of him was tremulous about his voice. He thought, they’re full of the dream of slipping away in the dark to some unassailable knoll. All their thoughts rearward, they don’t easily listen to me calling on them from the wrong direction.

  The guide jumped on top of him and the gunners fired.

  Guide: I had orders to verify that you were safe.

  Von Helldorf: That’s most unfortunate.

  They lay as close together as lovers in that little sump.
The guide had sour breath and began to sneeze.

  In the next silence and the one after that von Helldorf called to them and at last someone shouted the words. Come! You alone.

  He went, without looking once at his guide. The guide however was frightened that von Helldorf might be shot in the back from the French lines and called cease-fire exhortations to his rear. There were a few indolent replies but soup canisters had been brought up and even von Helldorf out in the mud could smell the poured and savored soup and understand why they would not bother sniping at him.

  So they let him go forward with the offer of exorbitant peace chained to his wrist.

  THE SOFTER VERSION

  Toward dinnertime the Marshal sent to see Admiral Wemyss privately. But when he reached the saloon, Wemyss found the Marshal’s concept of privacy to be eccentric. For Weygand was also there.

  Wemyss: Shall I send for Admiral Hope?

  He put as much side to the question as he could.

  The Marshal: No. I could send Maxime away. There are no notes to be taken. But I am so used to thinking of him as a limb.

  Little Weygand seemed improperly pleased to be named part of the Marshal’s mystical body. The rump, Wemyss thought.

  Wemyss: The general is welcome to stay.

  The Marshal: I thank you. Sit please, Lord Admiral.

  Wemyss sat. The Marshal gestured with his pipe.

  The Marshal: About the news of their courier.

  Wemyss: He had a problem, I believe. Crossing over.

  The Marshal: I would like your opinion.

  Wemyss: Oh?

  The Marshal: It seems to me we can tell the story two ways. First, we can take their courier’s difficulties—

  Wemyss: The fact that he was shot at.

  The Marshal: Yes. We can take it as symptom of a decay of authority inside the German Army.

  Wemyss: The outbreak of Bolshevism?

  The Marshal: If you wish to use such terms. On the other hand you can take it as a purely local breakdown of communications, natural here and there along the front of an army in retreat. You see, two different stories.