Gossip From the Forest Read online

  I am too naïve a man to be making this journey.

  Meanwhile the general’s eyes were stinging and he wanted to stop reading but was prevented by the imponderable risk that Vanselow might start talking.

  While he shuffled the pages he thought of Erzberger. Erzberger’s vanity all that morning in the Grand Hôtel Britannique. It is not my war, I renounced it long ago, none the less I go to end it for you. The south German and Catholic fulsomeness of fat-man Erzberger rankled strongly with the general. I buy the dangers, sight unseen, but only if it be enacted that I am the moral primate of all the travelers.

  Memoranda? The general would like to draft a memorandum.

  For the attention of Herr Staatsminister Erzberger. It might be of use to Herr Erzberger to know that General von Winterfeldt grew ambiguous about this war not as late as 1916 but even in the first days of August 1914. And that, for the very good reason that the battleline ran down the middle of his marriage bed. When, eleven years ago, the general, then a colonel, asked his military superior for permission to marry a delicious Frenchwoman aged thirty-five years, he was advised to marry a Jewess or a Matabele rather than. At brigade, divisional, and even corps level he was pointed out as the officer who had married incautiously. If he had had six fingers on one hand it would have been hard for him to have attracted a higher notoriety. Also, he and his Frenchwoman were frequently visited, surveyed, and questioned by men from the Prussian War Office. I do not put it any higher than that at the start of the war he was ambiguous, and I mean by that term that he saw the event as a necessary visitation and a means to suppress quickly the hubris of British statesmen and French generals, excrescences who had nothing to do with the soft thing he held in bed. Then why did the soft thing enter a sanitarium in 1915, attack him with a knife in the new year and subside into paleness and mandragora in an expensive institution in Reinickendorf? That aside, Herr Erzberger should know that he is not the only one who travels this evening by his own consent and favor and because he owes little to the individuals who asked him to make the trip.

  He had special knowledge of France and must be permitted to make use of it. Or did Erzberger want to corner that specialty as well?

  DRINKS IN 2417D

  They went along to 2417D brushed, shaven, their intentions locked in place. Hope, Marriott, Bagot took scotch in small sips and stood about, vigilant.

  The carriage was set up like a board room. The dining table in the center of the dining compartment had become a board table—blotters had been put down instead of place mats. The Marshal waited by a corner table on which two unconnected telephone handsets stood. Above his head was a thermometer to aid the wine waiter in his decisions on when the claret should be opened.

  There were small tables set in other corners for secretaries, aides, interpreters. And even a few through the door into the serving pantry. This evening they served as places to lay aside your barely sipped liquor.

  The Marshal took a chair at one of these peripheral tables. His staff and the British sailors imitated him, but Wemyss sat casually in a corner seat at the central table.

  The Marshal: Your health!

  He didn’t waste time with his cognac. He sniffed it rowdily. He drank it quickly. He wiped his mustache with his hand, and even the rim of his sleeve. He was all head and hands—the head and ham fists of a much bigger man stuck on the pip-squeak body. Even by these means he defocused the concentration of opponents. As a cunning fetus in 1851 he had stopped just short of being a monster.

  He told in English a funny story about one French general who made his sons pray every night that they would grow up to be like Bayard and Guesclin.

  Wemyss considered. Do you always laugh at your generals for the benefit of strangers? Or is it a gesture of kindred feeling for us?

  Marriott laughed through pursed lips, like a schoolboy sitting for a class photograph.

  The Marshal told of the comic nervous breakdown of another French general four years before, during the battle of the Marne. As the Sixth Army detrained into the midst of a retreat, the poor man had ordered his aides to bring him no more bad news and gone stamping up and down the terraces of the Château of Craonne, reciting the odes of Horace for defense.

  Now? thought Wemyss. Now? The Marshal had a sort of malign radiance that brought all a man’s self-doubt to the surface. Not that I have much. But some.

  ERZBERGER AT DIVISIONAL HQ

  Maiberling: Guns.

  Erzberger wound the window down.

  He could hear guns.

  At a crossroads a sign said ←CHIMAY. Erzberger clearly saw the lettering, as if the windows were disposed to unfog whenever significant pointers to his fate arose.

  Air coming in the window blew so sharp. It sliced open their fugged senses.

  The headlights fell on a log barricade and a seventeen-year-old, thin in a helmet, keeping guard.

  Erzberger jumped from his vehicle. Lightly and with the minor elation that goes with arriving.

  Erzberger: Clear this road.

  Boy: Sir.

  Erzberger: We have to get to Chimay. We’re German delegates to France.

  Boy: I don’t know.

  Erzberger asked him where his officer was. The boy blew a whistle that hung around his neck. An officer splashed up from their right, pistol drawn.

  Erzberger thought, Holy Christ I do hate those things.

  The officer in his expensive trench coat looked younger than the guard. All the fathers had abandoned the front and left their children behind.

  Before Erzberger could talk to the boy mud entered his boots and, it seemed, his lungs. He began coughing. Von Winterfeldt appeared at his elbow.

  Von Winterfeldt: Put that away. This is Staatsminister Erzberger on his way to arrange a truce with the enemy. Who had these logs put here?

  The child in the trench coat nominated some general. The corps commander, he explained.

  Erzberger controlled his whooping. He noticed that the pistol had remained in the infant’s hand, but at a loss.

  Erzberger: Do you have an HQ? Battalion? Brigade? Divisional?

  The officer sneezed.

  Officer: If the gentlemen will follow …

  The general spoke to him paternally.

  Von Winterfeldt: Please couch your side arm. Couch it. Please.

  Together all delegates climbed a muddy embankment following the boy. Mist blew in their faces and in the small glow from hooded headlamps Erzberger saw von Winterfeldt lift a gloved hand and sigh to see mud on the kidskin.

  The western guns thumped away in a bored manner. It was hard to believe their fire came down anywhere. Machineguns however spoke up, both sides of the road, with their old bereaving vigor. Short bursts.

  Erzberger: Would you tell me how far please?

  Officer: Two hundred meters.

  Young as he was he found without hesitation the hole in the earth he was looking for. It was a farmhouse cellar, but the farmhouse had flown away in the autumn, so had the beasts and the farmer.

  A voice asked, yes?

  Officer: Government officials, sir. They say.

  Voice: I don’t believe that. Search them for weapons.

  A comic end, thought Erzberger. They find the gun in Maiberling’s armpit and we get shot routinely as infiltrators.

  In the aftershadow of this mad image Erzberger began to act with authority. He found he had opened the cellar trap and hauled a vertical black drape aside. Von Winterfeldt too had taken a strong handful of the stuff. The boy was, after all, barely Oskar’s age.

  There was one upright man in the cellar. He was younger than Erzberger; and thinner, as it was appropriate to a field commander to be. He wore black woolen mittens and the epaulets of a brigadier. In a corner two or three runners or aides slept industriously. A bright new map hung on the seeping wall. A telephonist sat, preternaturally stiff, at the field telephone.

  General: Who are you?

  Erzberger told him who, and that all the logs must be taken
down.

  General: Oh no. Oh no sir. We felled a forest for the roadblocks. We worked ourselves lean.

  He wasn’t interested in the credentials Erzberger pulled from the attaché case, nor suspected them any more of not being the men they said they were. His mind lay all on the threat to his logs.

  Erzberger: That is the La Capelle–Guise–Chimay road?

  General: Yes. But, of course, the French are in Guise.

  The count, who had come on behind and spotted the genuine dementia in the general, was all at once cool as Aristotle, making apt suggestions.

  Maiberlings: When we sign an armistice all the roadblocks will come down.

  General: It isn’t easy work, sir, once they’re up. They don’t fall down at a signature, you know. You’ll have to go some other way.

  He took a family picture from the desk. Erzberger could see its surface, framed summer boughs and blouses and the most determined smiles. The general impassively studied the picture, as if it were someone else’s family.

  Erzberger: The French nominated this road. Only this road. Chimay-Guise.

  General: You’d have thought someone would have told us.

  Maiberling: Things are breaking down.

  Von Winterfeldt: Can your telephonist get Corps HQ?

  What a fine idea, thought Erzberger. Applause for the Francophile.

  The general gave a nod to his telephonist.

  Erzberger: While we cross over there’ll be a cease-fire in this sector. Your corps commander should have word of it.

  General: Maybe, maybe. Do what you like.

  He went to a heavy farm cupboard by the map and took out a flask. He poured and drank the liquor privately, his back to the plenipotentiaries, eyes on the bright map. His necessities, it seemed, were his necessities. He couldn’t spare a drop.

  Erzberger approached the telephonist, and touched his shoulder.

  Erzberger: Could you contact your Corps HQ?

  Without speaking the telephonist arranged it and, at full stretch, elbow militarily locked, pushed the receiver at Erzberger.

  Everyone in the cellar could hear the liquor traveling down the general’s throat.

  Taking the receiver, Erzberger spoke at last to the corps chief of staff.

  Chief of Staff: I shall ask my general what he wants done.

  Erzberger: I should speak to him.

  Chief of Staff: It wouldn’t be much use. He’s had an accident. His telephone voice is very blurred. Excuse me.

  Erzberger heard the moaning silence on the line.

  Chief of Staff: The general would like to speak to his divisional commander.

  Erzberger: If he can speak to his divisional commander he can speak to me.

  Chief of Staff: Please, sir, his divisional commander is able to understand him.

  Erzberger took the phone away from his ear. He spoke very loudly to the meditative general in the corner.

  Erzberger: General. It’s your corps commander.

  None of the sleepers moved. They might well be HQ dead, Erzberger thought, waiting for collection. But I won’t ask.

  The brigadier locked away his schnapps and the smiling manna of his family in the corner cupboard, pulled his coat straight, cracked a few of the joints in his mittened fingers and came to take the telephone. The plenipotentiaries saw him nod and consent to everything. Meanwhile the telephonist went about offering the cellar’s three chairs to the dignitaries. They all waved him aside.

  Without warning the brigadier hung up.

  Brigadier: He wants you to visit him at Corps HQ. Trélon. Just two kilometers back.

  Erzberger’s flesh prickled in the familiar way. An urgency rash. As in Berlin, all the links of coherence and arrangement were shriveling apart.

  Erzberger: We can’t waste time touring the front.

  Brigadier: It will take two hours, perhaps three, to clear your road. He’s sending a pioneer company. Also three volunteers will go down the road with white flags. You must do what you like. You’re an important man. Sit about here if you like.

  When he saw that they wanted or, at least, felt foredoomed to travel two kilometers back toward Spa, he took a whistle from his desk and blew it. Out of a hessian-covered alcove another boy subaltern fell; like an Italian saint resurrected from a catacomb for conspicuous innocence. None of the sleepers in the corner woke. It isn’t our whistle, their humped forms insisted.

  Brigadier: These gentlemen to Corps HQ. Good evening, your excellencies.

  THE PUNY RANGE OF THE COUNT’S OBSESSIONS

  Outside, in the dark arable mud, Maiberling walked close to Matthias.

  Maiberling: I could see how angry you were. Bad form, failing to offer us a drink. Ill-bred bastard.

  The puny range of the count’s obsessions brought Erzberger to a sick stop.

  Erzberger: Will you for God’s sake, Alfred, understand that from this point onward it will be all bad manners?

  Maiberling: The French, you mean. Oh, the French know how to veil things. Unlike that bullet-headed ignoramus.

  By accident Matthias touched a relic of St. Gertrude Paula had sewn into a seam of his overcoat. It radiated no efficacy.

  He thought, dinner and conference tables, that’s where I’ve known you, Count Alfred. It was not enough. You learned nothing of a man at tables. Fifteen minutes at the front and Matthias had caught a soldier’s contempt for the way life is managed in Berlin.

  So Herr Erzberger and Count Maiberling blundered toward their automobile. Well-acquainted strangers.

  THE MARSHAL’S RITE OF ARGUMENT

  In the rolling office car, Wemyss still meant to outweigh the Marshal by dinnertime. Not outweigh in general but in the special matter of the enemy’s navy. Yet like the premiers and presidents of October he was acted on in turn, finding the Marshal’s rite of argument easy to foresee but hard to manage. And though something of the rite has already been recorded we can now watch more exactly its effect on its subject.

  The Marshal: Compiègne!

  He stood up and crossed the compartment and looked out as the wet tar of Compiègne station rolled by. Shepherds waited at the railway gates.

  The Marshal: There!

  He indicated with energy an exact spot amongst the town’s blurred lights.

  The Marshal: Jeanne d’Arc, our little general. Captured just there. Dragged off her horse there by the railway bridge. Well, well.

  He turned and smiled at Wemyss.

  The Marshal: She knew how to make people swallow things whole.

  Wemyss thought, let him know now! That he can’t get away with his Jesuit legerdemain.

  Wemyss: I don’t have that trick, sir. But I have instructions to stick by the naval clauses. As they stand in the agenda. The disarmament of every ship. The internment of specified vessels. You will have to swallow that whole. If I may say.

  Soul-brother to Feisal, the Marshal kept his large face bright and mantic. The way all Wemyss’s small knowledge of the man would have him expect. He thought, I could not have known it would rile me so quickly. The old man was a sort of mad chemical that ate into the small lock-up safe of a man’s rationality and foamed at the front of the brain.

  The Marshal: The last day of May in 1916.

  Wemyss: I don’t follow, sir.

  The Marshal: I am naming the last time the German High Seas Fleet put to sea. Your government requires millions of soldiers to go on risking their persons? For a fleet that never puts to sea?

  While Wemyss replied the old man flattered him with the full power of the old eyes but occasionally bent at the knees, exercising himself, implying, I can deal with this at something less than all-in concentration.

  From the bright lamps on the wooden molding of the ceiling, the admiral’s lens caught light and signaled sea wisdom to land-locked Foch. But this was small magic. The Marshal, bobbing slightly every two seconds, evaded it.

  Wemyss none the less made his speech.

  The British blockade had done what could not b
e done on land. It had destroyed the enemy’s supply line. It was true, wasn’t it, that German soldiers during their spring offensive had been depressed by the quality of stores they captured in the French and British trenches? This disparity of supplies was produced by the British success at Jutland and the continuing control of the Baltic by the British Navy.

  The Marshal went on doing his varicose exercises. Though Wemyss felt his blood rising he knew you couldn’t threaten to walk away from the conference table just because an old man bent at the knees and looked flippant.

  It wasn’t too much to say, Wemyss said, that the war had been decided on the sea—if the Germans had not declared unlimited submarine warfare there would have been no declaration of war by America. But for the convoy system devised by the British Navy there would have been a failure of raw supplies to British and French industry.…

  The Marshal had begun to stare at Wemyss more slyly, pretending to have been overtaken by some new presentiment. As if he understood that Wemyss’s polemics were a cover for a more primal and unhappy itch. As if, in fact, what Wemyss might in fact be asking was that whores should be laid on.