Gossip from the Forest (28 page)

In 2417D the Marshal and the others sat already at table. They all kept busy at their papers. Admiral Wemyss sighted a document through the lens in his right eye socket and grunted at it a little. It might have been a proposal for some minute change in jack tars' rations.

The Marshal:
Sit down, messieurs.

He held a pen in front of him and gave it four febrile little jerks through the air, using both hands. He seemed to be pretending that he thought they might seize it out of his fingers and sign anything, at once.

The Marshal:
Have you come to tell us that you are ready to sign?

Erzberger:
There is information you must have first. Otherwise there will be no reality to our talks.…

He handed across the table four copies of a digest he had made of the Hindenburg telegram. The Marshal and Weygand and the admirals received them with a scalding sort of toleration; studied them and made marks in the margins of their papers.

The Marshal:
Very well, we alter Clause IV to the surrender of 1700 aircraft.

Von Winterfeldt:
The entire force?

The Marshal:
That's right. The entire force.

Erzberger:
We accept that.

Erzberger saw them all making checks on their papers. Exeunt all the flying circuses. Von Winterfeldt had retracted his long neck to its shortest possible form and held his chin tucked flush against his collar. He seemed to have caught
that
virus from Vanselow.

The Marshal:
And on the basis that the figures you have given us are reliable, let us write 5000 trucks in Clause VII. Please don't ask for a further amelioration in this area. There will be none. I want the war to stop tomorrow. So I won't waste time with mere penultimate offers. Not tonight, messieurs.

Erzberger:
Five thousand trucks.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, went the Allied plenipotentiaries. Who were authentically full of power; skins crammed with it.

Von Winterfeldt:
All 5000 …

The Marshal:
Eh?

Von Winterfeldt:
All 5000 are needed for the evacuation of the army. Which everywhere stands on enemy soil …

The Marshal:
I thought the enemy was now within. I thought we were now united Christendom standing against the Bolsheviks. No?

The Prussian general brushed the grit of this irony off the surface of his notes.

Von Winterfeldt:
I am required to ask for time extensions in all directions. Particularly in the matter of time allowed for the evacuation of the army. The evacuation will have to take place by way of fourteen main rail junctions. Antwerp, Liège, Luxembourg, Metz, Nancy, and so on. You are aware that in 1913 a total of four million passengers was passed through these junctions, west to east.

Weygand:
You tell us this in your
Observations
.… Of course, in peacetime railways never operate at capacity. We now require you to operate these lines at full capacity for a month or so.

Von Winterfeldt:
The analogy between armies and ordinary passengers is a faulty one. Ordinary passengers pack their bags individually, buy their tickets, travel individually, individually feed themselves. I needn't tell you it's different with armies. All soldiers should travel in units—that's totally necessary now, for
our
army, in
our
country. Some units supervise the travel of others and ultimately travel themselves under the supervision of yet other units. The complications are four- or fivefold. You want us to move four million men within twenty-five days not only from the territories they occupy but from the Rhineland and bridgeheads as well.…

At the end of the table the count leaned forward in his overcoat. He had once more refused to give it up. Matthias thought, perhaps he's the sanest of all of us. For if I had a weapon resting at my left pap I would find it hard now not to abstract it and use it on the Marshal.

Maiberling:
I agree utterly with General von Winterfeldt's protest. Again the problem of turning on the Bolsheviks.

The First Sea Lord groaned and threw his lens on the table.

Wemyss:
The fear of Bolshevism is a greater evil than Bolshevism itself.

He could not keep out of his face his creative pleasure at this furious aphorism.

The Marshal:
There may be room for a small extension.

Maiberling had passed Erzberger a note. It said—in the language of telegrams—“Essential you arrange territorial sovereignty, East Berlin Cycle Club.” Erzberger, reading it, felt mad fear prickling in his larynx, lest the count might not be joking, lest his mind—under the early morning bludgeoning—had shrunk to concern for the bike riders of Friedrichshafen.

But for all those hours he could not be quit of Maiberling's suggestion; that in a dream that lay just beyond the corner of the coming second they were the executives of two rival East Berlin cycling clubs, planning a meet for the Paladrome.

Meanwhile the official Erzberger worked well.

Erzberger:
The First Sea Lord might like to hear a brief index of the spread of Soviets in Germany. On November 5 revolution and the formation of Soviets occurred in Kiel, Lübeck, and Brunsbüttel. By November 7 … last Thursday … these had been joined by Wilhelmshaven, Ciixhaven, Bremen, Hanover, Hamburg, Oldenburg.… I won't go on with the list. By Friday, Leipzig, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Magdeburg, and so on. By yesterday, Berlin, Posen, Breslau, Stuttgart … There has been communication and collusion between the various Soviets.

Wemyss:
“Soviet” is merely a word to play with. If I were as depressed as some Germans, I'd play with it too.

Von Winterfeldt:
It is more than a word. For that reason we need more machine guns than Clause IV would leave us.

The Marshal:
You can use rifles.

Von Winterfeldt:
I am sure the Marshal is not serious. Through their seizure of a number of barracks the revolutionaries are in possession of a quantity of armored vehicles and machine guns.

The Marshal:
There may be a small final adjustment of the figure for machine guns.

In the silence they heard a poilu catcall another in the forest, and an hour had gone.

Meanwhile the Marshal said he would let a half-thousand German officers, hiding in the forests on the borders of Mozambique, capitulate honorably. It seemed to amuse him to do it.

And the debate circled on four pivots: time, machine guns, rolling stock, blockade; time, machine guns, rolling stock …

Erzberger:
I have the following information from my study of German statistics and of such reliable outside authorities as the Swedish Medical Association and the Red Cross. Milk and fat are in acutely short supply in the cities. Stuttgart, I know, receives one-third of its prewar supply of milk. Klagenfurt 11%. Graz 6%. Dr. Ingmar Beck of Sweden reports a form of infantile scurvy rampant in the industrial suburbs of Berlin. Five thousand cases were reported in September in the capital alone. The available milk, he reports, will not cure the disease because of the impoverished quality of stock feed. Dr. Martin Vantzius of the Dutch Red Cross speaks of a new strain of tuberculosis which he calls acute tuberculosis. It is deadly amongst adolescents, and in many cases the disease shows its first symptoms and kills its victim all within the space of the one season. During the summer months therefore the death rate of children two to sixteen years increased 60% on its 1914 figure. You might well discern the effects of acute tuberculosis if I told you the death rate of children eleven to sixteen years has increased 95% on its 1914 figure, the death rate of children six to ten years 55%. In the sixteen years to twenty years area the rate is 120% over that of 1914. I see a trebling and quadrupling of these rates if the blockade does not stop, if the merchant marine is not permitted to perform its function, and if we are deprived of our rolling stock. There is, for example, no fuel for the coming winter. The Ruhr coal production has fallen sixteen million tons and it seems there will not be a Ruhr left to us soon.

Across the table the Marshal trembled with simple-soldier probity.

The Marshal:
That is not for us to discuss. Continue with your case.

Erzberger:
There are as many as one and a half million children with rickets in our cities, but the number is difficult to define exactly, because of internal chaos. What is known is that the weight of boys at one year is down 41% and of girls 32%. These figures appall one all the more when it is remembered that the middle class can afford to buy their children black-market food, so that hidden behind the percentages must be thousands of infants from the working masses who weigh a third the weight of a normal one-year-old and who will not see the new year. I know it is not your purpose—any more than it is ours—to wage war on such people. In their name I say there is no justice in a continued blockade.

The First Sea Lord's facial pouches turned pink. There had, it seemed, been a lapse in taste.

Wemyss:
Anyone can talk of innocents.
I
can talk of innocents.

He held his hands up none the less, above the level of the table, to show that he had made a record, on his paper, of Erzberger's figures.

Wemyss:
You say there's no justice. You sank ships without discrimination and now say there's no justice. My God, you're hot, you fellows.

Erzberger:
I should also speak of the thousands of vagabond children—twenty thousand in Berlin.

Wemyss:
My God, we'll have Peter the Hermit soon.

His hand patted the table in a brittle way that said: these pats could be blows, and I turn into a northern barbarian.

Wemyss:
You sank our ships, sir. Everyone's ships. Do I talk to you of the child corpses of the
Lusitania?

The Marshal did not miss the opportunity to point up his own freezing composure.

The Marshal:
These figures, Herr Erzberger. Do you have any official documents to certify them?

Erzberger:
They are from memory.

The Marshal:
Do you have any official documents to certify your memory?

Erzberger:
You force me to say my memory is a byword in the Reichstag. Your Political Section might be able to advise you of the fact …

Before he was cool and ready, the First Sea Lord rushed back.

Wemyss:
You look pretty sleek to me, Herr Erzberger. Your colleagues'
Observations
mentions citizens of Berlin who manage to eat only 100 grams of meat a week. This statistic, I would venture to say, does not include you.

Erzberger:
At the Hotel Bristol and Adlon you can buy a good meal. The best hotels and nightclubs are kept well supplied as a propaganda measure, so that visitors to the country, influential Swedes, for example, will believe the abundance of the Bristol is typical of the entire country.

Wemyss:
The advertising succeeds rather too well in your case.

Erzberger:
We all know that we belong to a class of people who would manage to get food even in extreme circumstances. If Britain were this morning in the position of Germany I would not expect to see the First Sea Lord emaciated.

From his executive Erzberger felt inane reverberations of applause. Wemyss too felt the outer ripples break against his jaws. He closed his eyes and disciplined his breathing. Opening them, he became a calmer and more dangerous man.

Wemyss:
We do not know what the situation in Germany is and we do not believe that you necessarily have a clear concept. We are prepared to deal with famine. The British War Cabinet has detailed a hundred thousand tons of British shipping to carry foodstuffs to the north German ports.

Maiberling:
Foodstuffs.

The count's lips were shuddering. Everyone pretended not to notice.

Wemyss:
Powdered milk and eggs. Flour. Canned and frozen meats.

Maiberling:
Canned meats.

Matthias prayed, Christ silence the count.

Wemyss:
These ships will sail under naval escort as soon as the new German government establishes its authority in its seaports. They will continue to ferry foodstuffs until the need passes. So I shall not tolerate talk of innocents dying. Innocents come readily to hand as soon as a military nation runs into problems. Might I simply add that if the German government does not quickly create order along its seaboard, the Royal Navy very soon will.

Maiberling:
Powdered eggs. We need our rolling stock. You can't distribute powdered eggs in a handcart, you know. Not from Hamburg to Munich. Not a chance.

The Marshal:
The surrender of locomotives and wagons in the specified number is a strategic necessity.

Erzberger:
I cannot see that. It is an economic punishment. It is not provided for in President Wilson's points.

At the mention of that remote platonist of the prairies, a film fell on the eyes of the French generals and British admirals. They looked like men who had been unexpectedly reminded that at the age of fourteen they had learned physics or history from a scholarly man of endearing naïveté.

COUNT IT FIVE O'CLOCK

See, at four o'clock, little Vanselow make his ordained bid to save the fleet. Putting the question with the same futile courage as a small-hours suicide choosing the second in which to pull the trigger. Since, said Vanselow, the German fleet had not been defeated on the high seas it should not all be disarmed, interned, confiscated. Admiral Wemyss turned his large face toward the protest. The left eye was nearly closed, the right so large behind the monocle that you might have thought it painted on the lens.

Wemyss:
If you'd wanted that attended to, you had but to sail out.

Vanselow's left hand twitched like a rabbit. He covered it with his right.

Prosit, Lieutenant Rank. You were right in the wardroom of
Holstein
when the pyramid fell.