Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  It was from General Groener and told them OHL would indicate all planned positions of delayed-action mines in recently occupied French territory. The ordinariness of it pleased them.

  Maiberling: Something to work on, eh? Something to work on.

  Erzberger smiled. It seemed the count had chosen to revamp his faith in the century.

  Before another hour had passed three German staff officers rolled into the glade in an open car. Under as good a sun as could be had in November they dismounted and marched amongst the thin ground mist to the officer of the guard. Bourbon-Busset went to examine them and then to speak to the Marshal. The Marshal said admit them to Herr Erzberger. But not until their boots could be heard in Napoleon III’s anteroom did Erzberger and the others know they had so easily infiltrated France.

  For a man who detested staff officers, the count behaved for a while very much like a rescued member of the Spitsbergen expedition, putting his hands on their shoulders.

  But they were not the kind of men to encourage handling. All three in their thirties. Caps under arms. Hair exactly groomed. No fat on them. A death squad, perhaps.

  No. 1: Your Excellency, we have come to tell you something of what has happened since you left Spa.

  Erzberger: Did General Groener send you?

  No. 2: Not in an official sense. He permitted us to come. We are from the Strategic Offensive Office. You understand things have got slow for us since August, we are easily spared. We have travel documents and an authority to pass through the lines. I would like you to see them.

  They were produced. Erzberger read them. He could feel his throat pulsing. What will it be like when they come for me and I know why, and there are no alternative explanations for their presence?

  He handed the papers to von Winterfeldt, who might perhaps know more about military documents.

  Erzberger: What can you tell us then, gentlemen?

  No. 2: From the capital, very little. I was however present at the château with Colonel Heye during the discussion between Quartermaster General Groener and the Kaiser concerning the latter’s abdication.

  Erzberger: Please tell us. Everything.

  The young man explained how on the morning of abdication, OHL staff drove out of Spa to the château. There they found the Emperor raving with the unrealistic fevers his friend Admiral Muller had breathed into him. He really believed that within a week he would be at the front, living and perhaps dying like an infantry sergeant. That the love of Emperor was at the core of every soldier. As basic as the love of God or life, the Kaiser said. With my élite men, I shall crush the workers’ and soldiers’ soviet in Cologne.

  Erzberger noticed how the young man from the Strategic Offensive Office spoke of the Kaiser with little grimaces at the ends of the mouth. As if the Emperor had always been some other people’s vice and hard to account for.

  When the Kaiser made these fantastic proposals, the Field Marshal looked at the floor, but General Groener read loudly the results he had got from his poll of regimental officers.

  The Kaiser said, they have an oath to the colors. I am their warlord.

  Groener said, these words mean nothing any more. The world’s vocabulary is changing.

  His Highness kept tossing his head. He said he wished his English mother had been alive to see him suffer like this. It would have consummated her perfidious life. But for that whole morning he did not leave the house. He knew it had got beyond rushing out of doors.

  A little after one o’clock, the Kaiser agreed to abdicate as King of Prussia and went off to lunch, helped through the dining-room door by the Crown Prince.

  “After a good lunch and a cigar,” the Prince told him, “things will look a lot better.”

  But the event had its impetus now. In Berlin Max announced the Kaiser’s total abdication and gave the seal of state to Ebert. And Scheidemann, panicked by the crowds outside the Reichstag reading room, announced from the window a republic.

  Ebert was upset, said the officer. A trade unionist he might be, but the idea of a republic made his skin itch.

  The three officers smiled. There was scorn there too. As for the Kaiser, who a week ago had been an evocation of the sun, yet today was just a comic train traveler.

  We know about Ebert’s itchy skin, gentlemen, said the young officer, because he told General Groener. After the circus in front of the Reichstag, Ebert went back to the Chancellery and sheltered in Max’s office, not knowing what to do, even what telephone connected him to what place. He was fearful to pick any of them up. In the end one of them rang. It happened to be extension 988, which, without his knowing it, connected him to Spa.

  Groener was on the line. Ebert was so grateful that he told Groener about the terrible afternoon he had had and was delighted to hear Groener say that the army offered itself to him for the purpose of suppressing the Bolsheviks. So a new pact was made. The republic and the army. I am not certain that I can control events, Ebert said. Neither am I, said Groener. But we’ll try.

  That is all we knew (said the officer to the delegates) when we started out yesterday evening.

  YOUNG TURKS

  Like the count, von Winterfeldt had taken a dislike to these three élite children of OHL.

  Von Winterfeldt: Do you intend to treat all republican officials as if they were ridiculous?

  For all Matthias knew, the old general might really be striking out for the Kaiser’s sake.

  One of the officers spread his hands, a lenient movement.

  Officer: If the republic can control affairs we’ll be very happy. Perhaps it will be a passing phase.

  Maiberling: But I want to ask you this. Are you the sort of young turks who wanted to fight to the end?

  Officer: It isn’t the year for that, sir.

  Erzberger: Didn’t Ebert … when he spoke to Groener … didn’t he mention us? Our standing?

  Officer: General Groener said nothing of it.

  Matthias felt envious of Groener, who had nothing but railroad maps to deal with.

  Erzberger: I wish he could have managed better than that. Doesn’t he understand our situation here?

  Officer: We have told you what we are empowered to. If it leaves you more uncertain than you were yesterday, that’s the condition of all of us.

  After this cool chastisement, Matthias sent them away to have coffee.

  When Blauert had led them away toward the dining car, Maiberling fell into a chair.

  Maiberling: Simple soldiers. Circumspect. Respectful to their government’s representatives, oh yes, no political ambitions, oh no, honest mechanics of the killing machine. Canny as river rats.

  Index finger to lips, the general hushed him.

  Von Winterfeldt: I think you’ve said too much.

  Maiberling: One mustn’t anger the young masters.

  At his desk, Matthias was distracted by the autumn sun, which now seemed strong in the glade. He wanted to be a vacationer and stroll down the deer tracks. It took many midair gyrations of his pen before he could remember what he meant to write and wrote it. The exercise wearied him. This train-bound air, he thought. Then, raising his voice to chairman level and still wincing above his note paper, he began speaking.

  Erzberger: There are two conclusions we must work by. One is that the new government wants an armistice signed—they haven’t said otherwise. The second is that if the new government wants an armistice they must consider they have the power to enforce it. That’s how it seems to me.

  The general and Captain Vanselow took note of both conclusions but Maiberling closed his eyes.

  On such principles all except Matthias went once more to speak with Weygand and the admirals across in 2417D. Erzberger was left alone and spent the time noting down remembered statistics from government white papers on Germany’s hunger, Germany’s diseases, the death of Germans.

  The figures came slowly today. He must jolt them out of a steamy brain, part vapors to get at them. What is happening? Memory used to be my strong s
uit. When I was a journalist writing politics for Deutsches Volksblatt I was able to research and write a book on Napoleon’s land confiscations in Bavaria. During the debates on corruption in German Africa I carried precise figures of fiddled accounts and dispossessed tribesmen into the Reichstag without having to copy them down, tote cumbrous notes.

  The numbers he wrote down this Sunday in the forest did not assert themselves on the page in the old way.

  Weight of boys at 1 yr. (he wrote) down 41%.

  And, after a long wait,

  Weight of girls ditto down 32%.

  He was sure that was right. Or nearly.

  In Büttenhausen they say of my brother Heinrich the postman, he never forgets the smallest detail about changed addresses or anything like that. In Stuttgart they say of my brother the typesetter, it’s as if he’d written the copy himself. They’d both found safer uses for their congenital memories.

  In Stuttgart.

  He wrote:

  Stuttgart in receipt of ⅓ prewar supply of milk.

  Klagenfurt 11%.

  Graz 6%.

  Crick-necked Vanselow and then the other two returned from the Marshal’s train. They sat about saying nothing; the count even fell asleep.

  A WHISKY TIPPLE WITH GEORGE

  Sunday dinner, and the Marshal had no wise repented of his vision. History (he still believed) would, like black ball in corner pocket, slot down into the neat cavity of his presumptions.

  Provoked this way, Wemyss took to his cabin and spent the early afternoon resting and having a whisky tipple, from a private bottle in his valise, with George Hope.

  Wemyss: Did you take a nap, George?

  Hope: Not really, sir.

  Wemyss: Pity. It will be a long night’s argument if word comes from Berlin.

  Hope: I’m used to long watches, sir.

  He was proud of it.

  Wemyss: Indeed. Well, another crossing tomorrow, whatever happens, truce or not. Your wife meeting you at Folkestone?

  Hope: No, sir. My daughter’s not able to be left alone.

  Wemyss: I’m sorry.

  Hope: She lost a husband.

  Wemyss: It’s appalling. Do you know? The French picked up a signal detailing a British air raid tonight. Transmitted en clair by our people! The dying isn’t over, George.

  Hope: No.

  In shirt sleeves the First Sea Lord scratched his left breast, less because it itched than as the first act in some rubric he used for coming to decisions.

  Wemyss: I want to ask you something, George. I don’t want to embarrass you but I know you’re a good man. I don’t mean good in the frightened, pallid way we English use it, but really good. Close to … close to …

  Hope: God, sir?

  Wemyss: That’s right.

  Hope: I’m not frightened of being accused of that.

  Wemyss: So let me know, what do you think, George? Are those people lying? About chaos? About famine? About Bolshevism?

  The blue eyes pulsed once with a certainty appropriate to Savonarola but then returned to their proper Anglican repose.

  Hope: You know the beggars are lying, sir.

  A STAG OVER YOUR SHOULDER

  That afternoon the sun still stood quite clearly over the forest and the sentries took their trench coats off and every now and then their fingers raked around inside their collars to wipe away mild sweat or scratch the smallest of heat itches.

  Erzberger asked the count if he’d care for a walk through the woods. In spite of all the man’s freakish behavior, Matthias still looked to his company as to a last true friend.

  They escaped their train and took the first path they could find. The forest made its own strange light beneath its boughs. Its breath was cold on the cheeks. There was, as well, a stag presence in the place. The tremulous could easily imagine a great beast breaking cover to gore them. This afternoon Matthias was tremulous.

  Alfred Maiberling seemed tense. Perhaps he expected reprimands from his head-of-mission. As if I’d dare. As if we wouldn’t end brawling like two stevedores.

  At last a conversation got started.

  Maiberling: What was your mother’s name, Matthias?

  Erzberger: Katarina.

  Maiberling: Did you see much of her?

  Erzberger laughed.

  Erzberger: Of course. It was a small house. And Büttenhausen is full of Jews and Protestants who didn’t mix much with us. Nor, to tell the truth, us with them. Yes, I saw a lot of her.

  Maiberling: Servants …?

  Erzberger: None. We were the servant class.

  Maiberling’s high forehead struggled to ingest this alien condition.

  Maiberling: You were lucky. I can tell: your little wife …

  Erzberger: Paula.

  Maiberling: Paula. She’s that sort of mother, a good country mother. Who gives a damn if she lacks style? Her children won’t care.

  Matthias was used to the sideways compliments of the upper classes. But thought, what is this style business and who has it if Paula hasn’t? And what an oaf I must have seemed when I first came up to the Reichstag from Biberach.

  Maiberling: Think of my mother. She had style. She used to visit us once a day—that was her style. An administrative visit, by and large, a visit to the colonies. If we were lucky it lasted ten minutes. The nursery was a great room at the top of the house. There was one little coal fire there. I bet you spent your childhood around a great stove.

  Erzberger: Yes. I did. There you are. We had nothing else.

  Maiberling: We had a nanny who used to take fits. She would become very still on a chair in one of the cold corners. My older brother Hans was a real bastard. He would put a flame close to her eyes and she wouldn’t move—perhaps she wanted to move, perhaps she was in a fever of fear but she couldn’t do anything about it. Her eyes did not blink. Hans would make experimental cuts in her ankles with his penknife. When she came around she never mentioned them or tried to punish Hans. She was ashamed of having fits and didn’t want to mention them by name. My mother said to us one day, if Nanny should fall down in a fit I want you children to force her jaws apart and put a pillow between her teeth. It’s something Nanny does now and then. That was bloody dangerous advice, as it turned out. Nanny could have bitten our little pink fingers off. I suppose it would have all helped to make us reliable German gentry.

  Erzberger felt uncomfortable to hear the count speak of his parents this way. His peasant respect for ancestors trembled in him, but he could think of nothing to say.

  Maiberling: My father was high in the Foreign Office, higher than me, a friend of Holstein’s, in fact. We sometimes saw him on Sundays but he was more interested in his theoretical friends in chancelleries from Tokyo to London than he was in my friendship, or in Hans’s. Or even in my sister’s. I had a sister. Called Lisa. When she was nine years old Hans murdered her one evening in the nursery. He had always had what my father called unhappy leanings. Nanny slept in front of the fire, this night. Alix stood in a corner. Thoughtful. I was doing a jigsaw puzzle. Hans was whittling away at one of the peg dolls we’d all had as children. He’d started into all our old toys with a scout knife three evenings before and hacked away with a vengeance. He resented those things, he resented the fact we ever depended on them, invested them with personalities, and so on. The night I’m speaking of, he simply stood up and put his knife into Lisa’s stomach. I heard her grunt. She was a correct little girl and a grunt wasn’t in her usual repertoire. So I looked up from the pieces. Hans was leaning on her. I heard her say, don’t. He stepped away. She sat in the corner and fell on her side. He had a whetstone in a cigar box that he used for sharpening his scout knife and you could have shaved with that blade. He’d put it into Lisa’s waist and cut downward. She was very quiet. She said, please get my mother, to no one in particular. Perhaps to God, because it would have taken God to get my mother up to the nursery at dinnertime. She told me, Alfred, wake Nanny. I went to Nanny and shook her shoulder and said, Nanny, Hans h
as put his knife in Lisa. Hans was at the water basin rubbing his clothes down with a washcloth. The flow of blood from Lisa amazed me. Even though I had a brother like Hans who used occasionally to slice up kittens. I didn’t suspect humans carried so much blood about with them and I’d never guessed it’d leave them at such a rate. Nanny walked around the mess and put her hand on Lisa’s shoulder. Lisa’s eyes were already remote. She didn’t seem to hear anything when Nanny spoke to her. Mother and Father left a dinner at the Russian Embassy to hurry home. A dead daughter has power to claim things a live one can’t. Amongst my class that’s so, anyhow. Because it was an important dinner: he was always a member of the détente-with-Russia school in the Foreign Office. It would have taken murder in the family to bring him home.

  Matthias felt cold, the stag breathing on his shoulder.

  Erzberger: What can I say? It’s the most horrible thing …

  Maiberling: Is it? I suppose you’ve fought all your life to have the same advantages as me. Now you can see what my advantages were.

  Erzberger: Your brother …?

  Maiberling: My father sent him to a military school. But even the insanity of that sort of place wasn’t enough to cover him. When he was fourteen he had to be put in an asylum. He’s still there. It’s in Potsdam.

  Erzberger: But the police …? The little girl was murdered, after all.

  Maiberling: A Foreign Office official interested in a détente with Russia can’t let people think that his children are killing each other upstairs. He talked to the highest police officials, who thought he’d suffered enough without having his son tried for juvenile fratricide. He got a death certificate from a physician that said Lisa Maiberling, aged nine years, had died in a fall from her nursery window. He was sole witness in the coroner’s court. He said that she had always been an adventurous child and he wept and the coroner was very sympathetic. In the nursery the boards were scrubbed with carbolic and no knife allowed. I ate with a spoon until I went away to school at eleven. My parents found it easiest to assume we were all killers.