Gossip From the Forest Page 10

  As they went forward a trumpeter jumped on to the running board and hooked his left arm into the driver’s compartment. What he blew on the trumpet was meant to be the cease-fire, but the shattered road jolted him so much that it sounded like a student rampaging on Walpurgis Eve with a hunting horn.

  Then Erzberger saw German soldiers crowding in on the car. At first he thought they were mobbing it, but that was only the narrowness of the road. They were in fact lining the way. They seemed silent. Erzberger thought he saw a boy, raising his hand to wave them well, fazed out of it by the anonymity of the peacemakers inside the vehicle. In the refracted light all the helmets seemed too big for all the heads. All the heads therefore seemed under sentence. Like faces in a Gothic propaganda poster—one devised by someone clever on the other side, and dropped on our lines.

  Erzberger: What’s wrong with them?

  They should have been laughing at the frantic trumpeter. Their lack of sane laughter turned Matthias’s heart cold. He might have been traveling his own funeral route.

  Then he was aware of a newcomer’s horror in the count and thought, of course he’s never been here before. And never seen such faces.

  Erzberger: You were never invited?

  Maiberling: Not exactly. I didn’t want to come.

  Matthias wanted to say, they’re as innocent as Inga, some of these men. But he didn’t want to start the count on that line again.

  The trumpeter blew tar-ant-ah and then the notes slewed.

  Maiberling: Boys home on leave, twenty-one-year-olds, twenty-two, twenty-three. They began to look so knowing. I wasn’t so knowing. So I never came.

  Erzberger: Yes. Knowing. That’s the word.

  He remembered his nephew whom he’d gone to look at in Pankow military asylum. Private Pieter Erzberger, son of a postman, split eardrums, split nerve ends. From an artfully orchestrated artillery barrage at Arras. Pieter Erzberger and fifty other men, filing into a dugout, lifted by a great current of blast and laid down in crooked positions. Pieter stayed some hours amongst the forced, scorched smiles of his blast-dead colleagues. The shelling passed over and returned, over and back yet again. When fetched by stretcher-bearers Pieter Erzberger had nothing to say, an attitude he had now maintained for three months. And though his eyes stood wide open like a gibbon’s, what they swelled with was knowledge. A glut of knowledge had seized up the mechanisms of his throat.

  Erzberger: Yes. Knowing.

  ARRIVING

  Maiberling: They’re gone.

  The soldiers had vanished.

  Maiberling: What now?

  His knees jumped. The car bounced and the inane bugle call went thinly ahead.

  Matthias felt exaltation like static electricity in his skull and hands.

  Erzberger: I can’t believe we’re arriving.

  Maiberling: No man’s land?

  The words scratched up the count’s clay-dry throat. Matthias could tell he got no joy from arriving amongst the armed millions of the Germanophobes.

  Erzberger: But think, Alfred. You’re safe now from all those German officers.

  He counted to seven and there they were: a convergence of French soldiers. Holding their rifles slackly, by the muzzles; as had the old clerk defending the records in the Foreign Office.

  Erzberger’s door was opened and torchlight took him full in the face; then Maiberling. A very young French officer held the torch.

  Officer: Les plénipotentiaires Allemands? The German plenipotentiaries?

  Erzberger: Oui Yes.

  Officer: Trumpeter! Go back.

  He made broad gestures with his free arm.

  Officer: Back! Back to your lines!

  The trumpeter made a wide passage round the outskirts of the torchlight. He began to shamble through the mud in Germany’s direction. A second or two and he couldn’t be seen, but he blew the cease-fire all the way back, in case he caused the war to begin again in that sector.

  Helmet off, the French officer got in with Erzberger and the count. He pulled down a jump-seat and sat forward. He had a flat, seducer’s mustache. One could well suspect it had been drawn on the callow face for a comic purpose with blackened cork or boot polish.

  Erzberger noticed that a French bugler had mounted the running board in front. Meanwhile the boy with the theatrical mustache had been joined by another officer, who might have been as old as twenty-five. This one also pulled down one of the retractable seats and spoke to Matthias and the count in rehearsed German.

  Officer: I am Captain Huillier, commanding the 171st Infantry Regiment. Please tell your driver to go on, following the signposts marked La Capelle.

  Erzberger passed on these directions.

  The vehicle pitched and yawed and the two French officers smiled at each other and the Germans on account of its wild movement. At every jolt, it seemed to Erzberger, the concussion of the accident outside Spa revived in small ways in his body.

  Officer: An evil road. Many mines.

  The bugler blew, taking the shocks, bending at the knees. A little jockey of a man.

  Erzberger thought, perhaps this will become a simple journey, more direct now that we have come into the well-organized half of Europe. But it was a foolish hope.

  He read the road signs. They were in Gothic script: this stretch of France had been German for four years and had only last week ceased to be so. Where the mist frayed Erzberger saw a dressing station and a priest in surplice and purple stole burying a poilu. It seemed improbable that the dying could not hold on in a cease-fire, could not bide a truce.

  The road rose out of a cutting and was all at once strewn with bricks, looking soft in the rain, like crumbled bread.

  Someone had painted an Art Nouveau sign in cursive Roman script and stuck it, enhanced with an asterisk, in rubble. La Capelle, it said.

  Poilus crossed in front of the headlights without adverting to the Kaiser’s eagles on the car hoods, the imperial guidons in the flag-holders.

  Matthias saw electric light in an estaminet on the left and two slim women dancing beneath it amongst the soldiers. They were only girls, and Matthias felt a minor reverberation of concern for them. In an armistice they would suffer mounting by hundreds of poilus. Each pounding in the point: here I am, alive, and no one’s ever going to take aim at me again.

  Officer: Here! Here!

  They were in a square, and a pocked municipal building of the Second Empire stood shuttered in front of them. It was still labeled Kaiserliche Kreiskommandantur in studious German script. Clusters of French flags hung sodden from its balconies.

  All three vehicles nosed in toward the municipal building and the officer told Erzberger to get out.

  The German party stood on the muddy cobbles. Von Winterfeldt moved from Vanselow to Maiberling to Erzberger, speaking softly.

  Von Winterfeldt: Pardon my saying. We must not look confused or lose our dignity.

  Maiberling: Thank you. Very valuable.

  Von Winterfeldt: If there’s anything the French respect in us its our composure.

  Maiberling: Jesus!

  Von Winterfeldt: Leave it to me to explain why we’re late.

  A staff officer strolled down the steps of the building marked Kreiskommandantur.

  His face and limp were thoroughbred. He moved with the aristocratic boredom that either angered Matthias or rendered him fearful. There is no doubt, thought Erzberger, this man has been sent to meet us and be up to our weight. Where have you vanished, pleasant Captain Huillier and your boy-subaltern?

  Von Winterfeldt moved forward to the man and made a salute. He introduced himself and began to speak volubly in French. Erzberger thought, he’s really enjoying himself, they’ll begin discussing vintages very soon.

  But the staff officer’s eyebrows began to rise in the light from the vehicles. The subtlest arrogance invaded his face.

  Staff Officer: There is no need for any of you to speak our language. I have made arrangements for you to speak your own and to be understo
od.

  He implied, of course, that he was denying them access to a special tongue. Von Winterfeldt became rigid, did not move, might never move again. Just to show that he had sangfroid in the face of unreasonable prejudice.

  Staff Officer: Herr Erzberger.

  In fact he had addressed Count Maiberling.

  Erzberger: I am Herr Erzberger.

  Staff Officer: Major Bourbon-Busset. I am to take you to the meeting-place.

  Erzberger: Where exactly …?

  Bourbon-Busset: I am not permitted to say. There are many reasons. Your safety is one. And in the matter of safety … your party cannot travel farther in German imperial automobiles. They will be kept here in the transport pool. The drivers will be fed and looked after and you will pick them up on your return journey. You are welcome to dry yourself at the fire inside while we wait for the French vehicles.

  Von Winterfeldt still waited, irrelevantly stiff, facing the blank doorway of the municipal building. The rain hissed down, which made his game of hurt honor, his mute back, seem even more precious and astounding. It was when the rain began that Erzberger noticed, by the sound of rustling ground-sheets, that they were surrounded by French poilus, young boys smooth-shaven and men of thirty-five or more with heavy rustic mustaches. With them too, Erzberger thought, the middle areas of youth have been destroyed. They scarcely talked, they did not poke fun at von Winterfeldt, perhaps because they did not understand his gesture. They were engrossed, like recruits, say, watching the dismantling of a machine gun. They seemed to have no more hate than cattle.

  Lapsing from grace, Matthias saw that von Winterfeldt and Major Bourbon-Busset were more of a common nationality than Bourbon-Busset and these Frenchmen. But to think that was a dirty Bolshevik thought. Erzberger suppressed it by conscious effort.

  Maiberling was already halfway up the steps and called to Matthias.

  Maiberling: How are you enjoying the Third Republic?

  In the waiting room three German officers in muddy uniforms stood beneath a wall-high portrait of Napoleon III. They were the ones sent ahead with truce flags and they were pale and kept their voices low beneath the statuesque vulgarity of the painting.

  The count nudged Matthias and pointed to Vanselow. The captain surveyed, in his stiff-necked way, the lower reaches of the masterpiece.

  Maiberling: Perhaps sailors don’t see much art.

  But there was an edge to the comment and his eyes returned to the three officers. As if they proved the killing pervasiveness of the German army by being here, so deep down a road they had already given up.

  At nine o’clock Bourbon-Busset came back. There were to be five cars and no two plenipotentiaries were to travel in the same car. It was for safety’s sake.

  Outside, the near-silent crowd had invaded the machines, standing on the bumpers and the mudguards. A military photographer exploded a flash powder at the base of the stairs. The powder charred an umbrella the photographer’s assistant held over it and when Erzberger could see again the assistant was inspecting the fabric in a melancholy, anything-for-art’s-sake manner. Umbrella, umbrella, thought Erzberger.

  Matthias told the count.

  Erzberger: I’m going to protest to this Bourbon-Busset. He’s got too many little shocks arranged for us.

  Where, for example, had this further crowd come from? Had Bourbon-Busset cleared out the estaminet and ordered all the poilus to HQ steps.

  Matthias, though he knew it wouldn’t profit him, attempted to impart to his heavy body movements of crisp, jolting protest.

  Bourbon-Busset: Make way there.

  As Erzberger turned to his car the poilus came crowding around him. Finie la guerre? they asked quietly, flatly. Just perceptibly they pulled at his coat. Finie la guerre? Finie la guerre? Bourbon-Busset did nothing to protect him from their exhalations, which were of sweat, excreta, mud, death, cordite, sperm. An old soldier asked him, Cigaretten, Kamarad?

  Erzberger: Excusez-moi, je ne fume pas. Je n’ai pas rien cigarettes.

  A few laughed quietly at his tourist’s French. Someone said, Eh bien, vive la France! From disappointment over the cigarettes.

  The drivers were speeding their engines but still the broad peasant faces, the damp factory-hand mustaches blocked him off from haven amongst the upholstery. Finie la guerre?

  What’s French for “perhaps”? his brain cried out. Is it peut-être? And how do you say eu in French? Without turning Frenchmen hostile?

  Erzberger: Peut-être. May be. Peut-être finie la guerre. Je ne sais pas.

  Then the car doorway presented itself. Bourbon-Busset sat up in his pillbox hat. Erzberger pulled himself inside and the poilus shut the door for him.

  A playful voice from amongst the soldiers called Gang nach Paris and there was a little laughter.

  Bourbon-Busset: The general!

  Von Winterfeldt still stood, his back to poilus and the whole mêlée, in the spot where his French had first been rejected. Had he stood there, unheeded as a piece of municipal statuary, all the time they’d been inside? Maiberling yelled to him from the second car and called again. The general made a regimental turn and walked, tight-faced, straight to the vehicle and in its door. No poilus bothered asking him for predictions or handouts.

  Bourbon-Busset had taken the count’s corner—no jump-seat deference for him. He rapped on the driver’s glass.

  Bourbon-Busset: Driver! Straight on to the left!

  Out of a sudden loose encirclement of whistles and catcalls the vehicles escaped. Nach Paris.

  Bourbon-Busset smiled privately.

  Bourbon-Busset: Your friend the general likes to speak French.

  Erzberger: He has a name for admiring your country.

  Bourbon-Busset: Oh?

  His eyes significantly took stock of the rubble across the street.

  Bourbon-Busset: We’d better give him his head a little. Eh?

  SMART JEW MAYER

  Beneath his used cheese plate the Marshal found a note. All at table observed him finding it because the discovery was enacted in the midst of some sentence, not a significant one, since Wemyss, disarmed by the cognac, immediately forgot what they had been talking about. As the Marshal glowered at the note, Wemyss took the chance to smile at George Hope.

  The smile said, those poor Germans out on the cold roads now, or jolting along behind a locomotive driven roughly by some hostile French patriot. They’re not being amused like us.

  But it was only a marginal smile. You had, out of artistic respect as much as for diplomacy, to give the mass of your attention to the thunderous performance of the Marshal.

  The Marshal: The same insult!

  He gave the note to Weygand. Weygand bent his compact face to it.

  The Marshal: That smart Jew Mayer! Could he have managed the war though? Could he, Maxime? Could he have conducted campaigns?

  Weygand: No. Not that I knew him personally. But by report, the practice of war was beyond him.

  Wemyss thought, do the French ever really speak like that? The Marshal and Maxime sound like historical melodrama. In rehearsal at that.

  The Marshal’s ham fist took the note back from his chief of staff.

  The Marshal: My friends must forgive me. I cannot expect them to know that in the remote past I published The Principles of Warfare. A work of faith rather than of science. Clever Jews don’t understand these things. A clever Jew called Mayer was one of my chief critics. Mayer had made a grand study of your Boer War, and such. Someone—I don’t know who—has written an opinion of Mayer’s and left it here under my plate.

  He bowed to his three officers.

  The Marshal: I know it is none of my staff.

  They returned the bow over their coffee cups and the fragments of wafer and Gruyère.

  The Marshal: And of course not my British brothers.

  Feeling with some justice that he was being forced into some alien stock part, Marriott bowed as awkwardly as an Etonian third-former in a Nativity play.
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br />   The Marshal: Someone has gone to the trouble of copying out in their own hand Mayer’s prognostication. “A great European war will put face-to-face two human walls, almost in contact, separated only by a strip of death. This double wall will remain almost inert despite the will to advance on one side or the other, despite the attempts that will be made to break through.” And the second paragraph. “One of these lines, baffled frontally, will try to outflank the other. That, in its turn, will extend its front; there will be competition as to which can extend the most, so far as its resources allow. Or at least, this would happen if it were possible to extend indefinitely. But nature presents obstacles. The line will come to a halt at the sea, at the mountains, at the frontiers of a neutral country. The families of soldiers will grow tired of seeing the armies marking time without advancing, if not without suffering grievous losses. It is this that will put an end to the campaign.…”

  The Marshal raised his eyes, his forehead and jaw had somehow grown more delicate, like the face of a monk.

  The Marshal: “It is this that will put an end to the campaign rather than the great victories of other times.” Captain de Mierry, do you think that this is a true forecast of what has happened in the last four years?

  The captain answered with valor, though the valor too sounded rehearsed.

  de Mierry: It has a certain … limited validity.

  Weygand: It is easy to be right in the privacy of one’s study.

  The Marshal: Could you call in the chef and his assistant, the wine waiter and both the servants?

  All the naval men felt that they had blundered into the annual general meeting of a club to which they did not belong and whose rituals might prove disgusting.

  Wemyss: Would you like us to excuse ourselves, my Marshal?

  The Marshal’s face coruscated with furious attachment to all the four Englishmen at table.

  The Marshal: Please, my friends, you mustn’t leave the table. This will quickly be attended to.

  Wemyss nodded. He was beaten by the man’s blatant use of unction, such as he had beheld only during productions of King Lear or once when he went with his mother to the burial of a high-church peer (his uncle) and listened to a frenzied panegyric given by some homosexual pulpit orator.