Gossip from the Forest (24 page)

Weygand:
The issues you raise are excellently put and perfectly understood. But the Allied command can offer you no satisfaction in their regard.

Maiberling:
The end of the discussion.

He could not help but feel, perversely, vindicated.

Weygand:
It would seem so. A detailed written reply will however be handed to you as soon as possible.

Von Winterfeldt saluted and left the carriage. His style was of an officer who knows how to lose heavily at cards, who doesn't lump his despair about the mess but takes his bursting loss back to his billet and, if the code-of-an-officer demands it, punctures it with his service revolver.

Maiberling had to run to catch up with him on the duck-boards across the glade. For the count had not reacted to Weygand with the general's instant and manic dignity.

Maiberling:
You see, you must rest now. All that writing's futile.

He thought, damn it all, why do I feel brotherly toward the old fool?

Von Winterfeldt:
Please. I don't want to hear any more about what's futile.

The late sun hung, Chinese-lantern style, in the boughs of an elm. It seemed even to rock in the cold wind blowing out of the Low Countries.

Look at me, rattling over duckboards behind a soldier in glacé kid gloves, the kind old lechers wear. And being despised by this old dinosaur, yet running at his heels rather than be alone in the forest.

It's the way Erzberger says: there
was
a Count Maiberling in Sofia who was effective. And controlled. I set up the Foreign Minister with a mistress, a German mezzo-soprano. Egg-timer waist, thin ankles. The Foreign Minister of heavy-limbed Bulgaria very much wanted a girl with trim ankles. By such means, cannily arranged by Count Maiberling, all the martial demons were born from the chanteuse's womb and Bulgaria entered the war.

Von Winterfeldt broke into the count's amazement at his new self.

Von Winterfeldt:
Do you think a soldier considers the question of futility? Nearly all a soldier does in peace is futile. And in war the odds mount in favor of futility.

Maiberling: You
shouldn't talk that way. You're a Prussian.

Von Winterfeldt:
What a childish man you are.

UPSTART SOCIALIST

Just before dinner the news came from Berlin spies, Spa spies, and intercepted telegrams,
en clair
, dispatched to Swedish news editors by their German correspondents. Prince Max of Baden had given up the Chancellery to a socialist called Ebert. The telegrams vaguely delineated a seizure of power.

Weygand gave the news when the Marshal and Wemyss and their staffs came to the saloon at seven o'clock for an apéritif. Hearing it, the Marshal said nothing. Wemyss understood the quality of the Marshal's silence. He is not shaken and still believes he has endowed the delegates across the tracks with some cosmic authority, that it cannot be eroded by any upstart socialist.

Wemyss himself talked a great deal.

Weygand thought, he's depressed, and a good thing too, after all that senseless chatter at lunch.

Wemyss:
What sort of socialist is he?

Weygand:
Political Section says
moderate
.

Wemyss:
Then … one hopes he can hang on.

Weygand:
Yes.

The Marshal:
For the moment Herr Erzberger will not be told.

Later, when the Marshal telephoned the War Office once again, old Clemenceau himself said he feared Ebert might mean a new regime, that Erzberger and his colleagues might now be mere private citizens. Paris, he said, is full of Czarist Russians in exile. Perhaps those men over the tracks are simply the first trainload of
Kaisertreu
Germans in exile.

Clemenceau:
I'm very depressed. I'm going home to Passy. You'll sleep well, won't you?

It was an accusation.

The Marshal:
As always, Monsieur.

Clemenceau:
Yes, I know, damn you. In the bosom of Jesus.

The Marshal:
Aren't we all, Monsieur?

Clemenceau:
That's a matter of bloody opinion.

IN PASSY

In Passy, in a little suburban house, he had lived alone since his bankruptcy twenty-five years ago. Even the Marshal would have admitted that for old Georges it had been a tenebral bachelor's life, regulated by prostate, diabetes, the disciplines of earning a living by writing, and an eventual return to politics. Behind his virtues lay no love of abstract ethics. He had learned, almost by accident, he was a lonely and ascetic man. And it was also true that if you wanted to deal dirt in the house it was better to have no dirt in your own closet.

In the superb racy decades from 1870 he had committed enough of the conventional sins and been amazed to find that, indeed, he enjoyed more the splitting of coalitions than the parting of vulva.

STANDING

At midnight all the German plenipotentiaries were sleeping or pretending to in the deep chairs in Napoleon's saloon. If they
were
asleep you might guess they dreamed of women and telegrams: the improbable arrival of either; and certainly Erzberger dreamed of little Paula, desirable in a man's postal employee's uniform left vacant by a soldier, cycling round Charlottenburg with astounding messages and, in any case, never one for him.

Bourbon-Busset woke him.

Oh yes, he remembered, Count Alfred decided we ought to drink a little for the general's sake. Maiberling had come back from 2417D kindly disposed toward the general. It seemed the general was not of the Inga-killing species.

Erzberger:
What?

Bourbon-Busset:
The Marshal has had news.

He handed Erzberger a careful message Weygand had got ready. It told of Max and Ebert, quoting sources, saying the Marshal would communicate with Herr Erzberger tomorrow regarding the effect this information might have on Herr Erzberger's standing.

Matthias read it aloud to the others.

Maiberling:
It's simple. We mightn't have
any
standing.

Vanselow:
I don't understand.

Maiberling:
It's simple. If this is the revolution.

Erzberger:
Please don't explain it.

Maiberling:
I was only answering him.

Erzberger:
Please don't explain it.

A NOT INESTIMABLE WEIGHT AT THE THROAT

An hour later in his cabin, Vanselow found on taking off his jacket that the brown thread which held an Iron Cross at its collar had very nearly frayed through. He groaned at the idea of calling for needle and thread and repairing the ribbon in the forest.

For the first time he understood he didn't have to wear the thing. He could let the threads fray through. The Cross might fall without a sound onto carpet or into mud.

Or he could take nail scissors and snip it away. Cutting would be difficult and the wiry thread hard to extract totally from the fabric of his uniform. But in the last days a few unexplained fibers could be permitted to obtrude.

Once it is cut away, he thought, I'll put it in an envelope and send it to someone deserving. With the note: I was awarded this Grand Cross, a not unnoticeable weight at the throat, at Easter 1915 for staff work, at a time when our flagship had not once sighted the enemy, and the extent of the dangers I ran were the scrimmages at the end of the seventh course in the officers' mess.

I began well on the
Holstein
. I inspected the men's food, I ordered improvements. But in the evenings we all fed like aristocrats in the mess and the bread-and-bacon sailors below could hear us sing our schnapps away. And then the admiral tells you that you are to be given the Cross. Since you are high on his staff, it's the Grand Cross for you. Refusal is an affront to the Emperor. Sixty-three officers and petty officers of
Holstein
are being so honored. All but a few of the midshipmen. And even not they on the grounds that they were uncomradely in the mess or have liberal ideas. Probably because they are alcoholics.

He remembered the sailors sniggering on the forward deck of
Holstein
at Easter when sixty-three men who had never heard an English shell were honored. Commander Vanselow. Lieutenant Rank.

Rank knew what was happening and said it when they were both drunk.

They had been part of an extempore pyramid formed by officers in mess tails during the coronation-day dinner aboard
Holstein
. He and Rank had been given a place near the apex. The pyramid had not lasted long. There had been hisses and curses and someone began laughing infectiously. There was a rain of men, cascading wing collars, serge, braid, silver buttons. Rank's arm was still around him when they landed without any sense of pain. Rank landed—amongst the shouting, the hysterical recital of injuries—somber.

Rank:
We have no stature as warriors, Vansie. In my opinion the navy's just a trump card for our diplomats to use. When they begin their bargaining.

Rank had not considered a time might come when the diplomats, unable to form
their
accustomed pyramids, might call on friend Vansie.

If I put the Cross in an envelope, Rank would be a suitable addressee. If he still had an address.

Dearest Rank,

If at Jutland a freakish shell had not lobbed down one of
Holstein
's stern ventilators and alighted on the floor of your gunroom; if the oxygen had not been so instantly sucked up and the heat so far beyond imagining that when later we opened the lock we found you and your men all dusty and tangled together in striving like Laocoön and his sons; and if on touch this whole sculpture had not fallen to ashes—poor Rank, in the tradition of elegiasts, instantly democratized down to dust—then you would have seen a day of negotiations which began with your friend giving the navy away, a basic, reasonable and unarguable act.

Come Vanselow (Vanselow muttered aloud)! You didn't always see the Cross as an albatross around the neck, a frontal Calvary. You wore it on leave for its social potency. Your wife liked to see it on you. Only now and then did you feel its mass.

As in the summer of the award. You sat in the sun on the station at Erfurt with colleagues from the fleet. It was an intense season, God's last gift of a summer in the prewar manner.

A freight train came in, a summer carnival on wheels. Open freight wagons full of bearded soldiers from France. Birch leaves and branches hung all over the wagons, bouquets of flowers exploded from the mouths of the artillery and daisies were stuck in the muzzles of the stacked rifles.

The wagons sported inscriptions.
Flea powder still accepted here. You are all finished Nicolaievich!
They were on their way to Russia.

Red Cross ladies went round the train with raspberries and the Russia-bound soldiers laughed, heads back, a carmined mash of berries behind their teeth.

Vanselow could see them nudging and pointing at the naval officers. The others didn't care, and he could do an excellent mime of not caring. The Cross burned at his throat.

(In the forest, Vanselow thought: caring, not caring, how simple-minded of us in any case.)

As the train moved out in the lost summer the soldiers had begun to sing. No barrack-room ditty: the Red Cross ladies had made them sentimental.

When the spring comes
,

The lilac blossoms and swallows

Come back again
.

Courage then revives anew

And all is well again
.

Departing, they had taken on holiness in Vanselow's eyes.

Now their skulls were gourds of snow in Russia. All these possible addressees for his possible envelope.

PLATONIC CONFECTIONERY

If he slept for as much as ten seconds that night, having gone to his bunk in his long underwear, some buffeting in the ether would spring his eyes wide open again.

One such buffeting brought the news into the Marshal's train at half past two. Weygand received it but knew that the Marshal did not need to know it till four. The Kaiser had given up his family's call on the German throne. He had swayed away in his gold and white train from Spa without farewelling the Supreme Command. A republic had been declared and Ebert was President.

Still suffering the disquiet of the afternoon before, Weygand thought, good, they're royalist officers, just like us, those German generals. We've had to stomach a republic, mean fare, stale old Platonic confectionery. Now let those bastards eat of it.

AS ONE IS TO THE BEREAVED

By breakfast time there had been accretions of news: the Berlin garrisons, for example, had placed themselves at the disposal of the new government. The Marshal took all Weygand could tell him at breakfast, as if it were fruit that had ripened in season. Weygand himself, by rule a rational man, yet thought that the Marshal was wise to be tranquil, that this was a morning on which certain leaps were necessary. It was useless to sprout syllogisms.

As Admiral Wemyss did, taking coffee only.

Wemyss:
That's it Our friends no longer have power to negotiate.

The Marshal:
This business won't be decided in the old-fashioned diplomatic manner.

That made the admiral look peevish and rather old. His square face began to melt down into dewlaps.

Wemyss:
I would like to know what other means there are for deciding it.

The Marshal:
They will present themselves.

The old argument they'd been having since they met.

The Germans were told at breakfast by Bourbon-Busset. Just in time. For while they all still sat in silence, becoming accustomed to the climate of an altered world, the chef and assistant chef burst from the kitchen, argued in whispers with the waiters in the serving area, enlisted them in their company and came forward to Erzberger. They were respectful, as one is to the bereaved.