Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  Ferrason: I’ll have an immediate report written for you, sir.

  The Marshal: No, tell me. Or don’t you know?

  Ferrason: I know, sir.

  The Marshal: I’m not so old I’ll forget.

  The orderly’s razor made a subtle turn round the limits of the old man’s heavy mustache. The Marshal sat beneath the razor as marmoreal as he had lain asleep before dawn. He was that freak: the man whose private and public selves were one.

  Ferrason: The British have cleared Bruges and are west of Ath on the Brussels Road. The Americans are going forward ten kilometers east of Le Cateau. On the line of the Aisne our forces are fifteen kilometers west of Rethel. The roads are mined and barricaded. But French forces are progressing at a somewhat better rate than the others.

  He paused to signify End of Report.

  The Marshal: A little hazy, but it gives me an idea. News of the Russians?

  Ferrason: None that I know, sir.

  The barber used scissors on the Marshal’s hairy earholes.

  The Marshal: When I see you again there will be no war. I must thank you for the walks we have enjoyed together.

  Ferrason: You embarrass me, sir.

  The Marshal: I hope not. We have surely shared enough …

  In all the headquarters they had occupied, they had been walking companions. He’d acquired Ferrason when he took over IX Army in 1914. In that autumn the boy had been an adoring lieutenant, a vacant thing, a spout down which you could pour ideas about troop movement, epistemology, music, and hear them resound flatteringly. Now Ferrason was older and his own man. But they still liked each other.

  The Marshal: I thank you because even if we do walk together again the quality of the debate, the urgency … will all have changed.

  Ferrason: One can only hope so.

  The Marshal: What are you going to do then? Grand Quartier Général will run down. It seems a lot of its members are already harboring plans. What might yours be? I ask myself.

  Ferrason: I’ve been offered a teaching job at the École de Guerre. You see, they think your ideas have rubbed off.

  The Marshal: I congratulate you.

  The words were flanneled: an orderly was toweling and massaging the Marshal’s face.

  The Marshal: If it were 1872 I’d advise you to take it.

  Ferrason smiled.

  Ferrason: I wouldn’t say your ideas were as old-fashioned as all that, sir.

  The Marshal: Make your jokes. What I’m getting at is: there will be a vast allied crusade against the Bolsheviks. Yes, yes, there will be, don’t make a face.

  Ferrason: I assure you, sir …

  The Marshal lifted his thumb and for five seconds the wind surged and caterwauled in the park. You were tempted for an instant to think the Marshal had commanded and orchestrated the gale.

  The Marshal: There will be!

  Already he had prepared memoranda. French officers would staff the campaign. And those two million American boys Pershing would have by the spring. They would have their chance in wide-open Russia.

  The Marshal: I hope to be involved myself. You … you could be an army commander. In a war of movement too! You can’t have a static war in Russia, you know. The countryside doesn’t permit it.

  Upright Ferrason wore braid around the rim of his coat and was in fact crumpling it with his left hand. He gave no other sign of war weariness.

  Ferrason: With the Marshal’s permission … I would like to pass on to the new generation the lessons of this war.

  The Marshal: Don’t be a hypocrite, Ferrason.

  Ferrason: I wasn’t aware …

  The Marshal: You want one of those pleasant staff houses, you want a garden of roses and your infants staggering about amongst them. You want your wife’s endearments.

  Ferrason: I have reasons of honor.

  The Marshal: You mean then your wife’s endearments don’t count?

  Ferrason: Sir, I know you’re amusing yourself.

  The Marshal: Oh no.

  And the wind too thudded its dissent under the eaves.

  The Marshal: You’ll be a fat colonel of fifty before you know it.

  Ferrason: I regret disappointing you, sir.

  The Marshal: Ferrason, any damn private soldier can want to go home.

  Ferrason: Yes.

  The Marshal: That takes no talent.

  If God were not in my soul (the Marshal told himself), if I enjoyed my power in a cosmic vacuum, and if I did not eat the Bread of Peace on Sundays, I know what I’d damn well do. I’d detach Ferrason off to Salonika to report on means of repatriating the French Army. He couldn’t take his dumpling wife to Salonika. It was full of typhoid.

  The Marshal: Did you go to a Jesuit College, Ferrason?

  Ferrason’s hand worked again, surreptitiously, at the braid. My God, thought the Marshal, he doesn’t think it’s a relevant question.

  Ferrason: When I was a boy.

  The Marshal: Of course. That’s when you do go, when you’re a boy.

  Ferrason: I went to the Jesuits at la Poste, sir.

  The Marshal: Astonishing. Did they teach you to make acts of the will?

  Ferrason: Yes. We often talked about the Jesuits and the faculty of the will, sir. On our walks.

  When the Marshal performed his bitter laugh, his over-large head looked like a gargoyle’s. Ferrason saw the mysterious ferocity of his stained teeth. Yet it was still hard to tell if the old man was playing with him or, in fact, suffering parental hurt.

  The Marshal: Ah, there! You do think I’m senile.

  Ferrason: If you have to have the truth I think you’re the most brilliant man left standing in Europe today.

  The Marshal: I didn’t ask you here to talk about that. Please return to your post.

  The young man saluted and went toward the door. Feeling the nausea which men of powerful fatherhood can induce in their chosen young.

  The Marshal thought, if all he wanted to do was become a family man I could have strolled with someone else.

  The Marshal: Ferrason.

  Ferrason: Sir.

  The Marshal: I want you to tell the adjutant to bring me an order for signature. That all staff officers are to be subject to the eight o’clock curfew whether or not an armistice is signed.

  Ferrason: Sir, you were a military teacher until the age of fifty-eight …

  The Marshal: Fifty-nine.

  Ferrason: I would not be ashamed to follow that pattern if it equipped me for war as well as you are equipped.

  The Marshal rejected him with both hands.

  The Marshal: Get out.

  Ferrason did, the door handle moist and warm in his palm as a living organ.

  THE MARSHAL’S BREAKFAST

  The Marshal put on his winter drawers and his blue serge uniform. Simply decorated. Only two long rows of campaign ribbons. None of the cut the English affected. The pockets rather baggy. Old Field Marshal French, the English Commander, had once said you could tell the class of people the French generals were by the way they dressed. It had appalled Him to see General Berthelot slopping round GQG in a white smock and slippers.

  But we’re still here, we slapdash dressers. French has vanished in spite of the cut of his suit. Because battle might not be the only tactical fact, but trim pockets weren’t any sort of tactical fact at all.

  The Marshal insisted on a large breakfast even though he might be what they called a fussy eater. He took it in a room on the ground floor, beside the office of the Chief of Intelligence. The lights shone on him as he crossed the lobby. No typewriters sounded, no muddy couriers ran toward the Operations Boom. Only during emergencies did an HQ experience the rush of messengers, the cry for maps, the telephones pealing and staff officers chary of picking them up for fear of what they’d hear. During the offensive of 1914 and the crisis of last spring it was not unknown for wounded men to come crawling determinedly over Corps HQ doorsteps, bringing the blame home to you.

  At the breakfast table only h
is Chief of Staff, General Maxime Weygand, himself a small eater, was permitted to join him. Together they viewed the good linen and china and the delicacies.

  At half past seven Weygand entered the breakfast room. Though the Marshal was halfway through a hard-boiled egg, he stood up.

  The Marshal: Maxime.

  Chief of Staff: My Marshal.

  The Marshal: Sit down then.

  Chief of Staff: Just some coffee, thanks.

  The Marshal: Good ham, Maxime. Danish.

  The Chief of Staff handed him some flimsies; a summary of the state of war on this, one of its last mornings. While an orderly poured him the thick-brewed coffee the Marshal favored, Weygand passed across the table a second page. The Marshal put it flat on his hand so that it would catch all the light from the chandelier.

  The Marshal: When did it come?

  Weygand: During the night. Transmitted from OHL at Spa.

  It was the list of German plenipotentiaries.

  The Marshal: Erzberger … Maiberling … von Winterfeldt. Who in God’s name are they?

  Weygand: Maiberling and von Winterfeldt are obscure. But you have probably heard of the first man. A politician.

  The Marshal: No, Maxime, I don’t know any Erzberger.

  Weygand mentioned an incident to do with Erzberger’s past: some peace motion in the Reichstag. It was meant to trip the Marshal’s memory.

  The Marshal: No, Maxime. The Reichstag isn’t my favorite house. The question stands. Who in God’s name is Erzberger?

  Painstaking Maxime (my encyclopedia, the Marshal called him) had read at first light a résumé of Matthias Erzberger’s career prepared by the political section of the War Office. He answered the Marshal’s question.

  HERR ERZBERGER’S DREAM

  What dream parallel to the Marshal’s had Plenipotentiary Matthias Erzberger been dreaming all the night? In his special train, Berlin—Spa?

  His boy Oskar had died three weeks back of influenza in the officers’ school at Karlsruhe. Oskar had got a delicate frame from his mother, no peasant barrel chest. He had always been weak in the lungs. Only desperate nations called on such boys.

  Herr Erzberger’s dreams now were a sort of seepage from that death. Therefore he avoided sleep. He stayed up till two in the morning, drinking schnapps with Count Maiberling in the saloon. The Count had been tiresome earlier in the evening. There had been berserk switches of mood. But since the staff officers who traveled with them had gone to bed, Maiberling became a better companion. He had always had the jitters about officers: a strange phobia to show up in an aristocrat.

  At two, feeling better than he had for days, Matthias decided that he and Maiberling must sleep, must not be blunted. Their special train rolled slowly through rail-junctions jammed with troop trains. They found their couchettes in the next carriage.

  Erzberger: I’m going to dream, damn it!

  Maiberling: Everyone dreams. Tonight, even the drunks!

  Erzberger: I dream every night.

  So he went in foredoomed to do it in his own plush and enameled compartment.

  The second he fell asleep, there he was, at a summerhouse in a forest—the Black Forest inevitably. The space in front of the house was covered with small wild strawberries and butterflies. Sunlight lit up all the stone façade of the house. At the door he felt very pleasantly ready for the first forest stroll of his vacation and was waiting for his wife to get her hat. Down the stairs she came but dropped the hat, the mannish straw item in her trim hand, on the bare boards of the hall. She said she’d decided to stay and cook pastries. Instead, she said, producing a treacherous umbrella, instead take this.

  He had never felt threat from her before. His anger and terror were greater than anything he’d experienced in politics. For one thing, she knew after all their marriage that umbrellas couldn’t be tolerated. He refused. She said yes, now that he had a dead son he must take the umbrella and go, go for his damned walk.

  It was all at once out of his power. He took the thing, feeling nausea. He was now like a man under orders.

  Erzberger: Kiss me good-by.

  She didn’t do that but had in her hand, from nowhere, a fresh strawberry. She rubbed it along his lips. They were rather long, rather full lips, so that it took her some time to cover them—like a child coloring in. Then, more savagely, she crushed the strawberry to a pulp against his forehead.

  Wife: Now do you believe I love you?

  Erzberger: Yes.

  Wife: Time for your walk.

  He went without looking back lest she should think less of him than she did of his son. For they both knew the boy had forced his way from delirium to delirium, clear-headed about death and grappling the earth to him, since to him, drifting as he was amongst breathless constellations, it had become so small.

  With such a son, you didn’t look back although you were coerced to walk into the forest with a terrible umbrella.

  It was a clammy and fungoid forest. It wasn’t summer here. Some renting agent, too smart for his own good, must have put one over Paula by letting a summer cottage in a winter or, at best, autumn forest.

  Why do I come here for holidays? he wondered. I detest stepping back into the forest, it’s like going back into a womb, not your mother’s but Kali’s. He went on, finding the paths more and more repulsive. The elms seeped as slum walls seep with waters of uncertain origin. His journey to the place he knew, where the path turned a full corner, took some time. But when he got there two men with black masks were waiting with repeating revolvers in their hands. He didn’t like seeing them so he raised the umbrella and put it before his face. They began shooting the umbrella full of holes. He felt it struggle, was one with its panic and pains. When they’d finished he dropped it. Its wounds were blood-bespattered.

  Erzberger: Why did you do it? Now I can never go back to her.

  From each bullet hole in the sickening umbrella a pale young soldier struggled. The masked men who had done the damage ran away. One of the soldiers said it’s about time and began rapping Erzberger’s skull below the hairline.

  Erzberger awoke with angina pain in his chest. Somebody was knocking on the door. He told them to come in. It was a steward with coffee. Erzberger leaned out of his couchette and raised the blind a little. Rain fell and rain beads on the window distorted the faces of soldiers in the troop train they were passing.

  Steward: A foul morning, sir.

  Herr Erzberger thought everyone must be dreaming this November. Of pale soldiers, bullet holes, forests, seeping waters. Why do I fear umbrellas in my sleep? he wondered.

  GOSSIP FROM THE FOREST

  Since this account is not scholarly but merely gossip from the forest, the reader does not need to carry with him to Compiègne a history of the Marshal. He will find it haphazardly in these pages. He knows that the Marshal was a pontiff in Armageddon, that there is a statue to him outside Victoria Station, that his name has been given to parks, avenues and bandstands in Clermont, Birmingham, Toronto, Sydney, and the republic of Chad. As a start, that is nearly enough to know, for it accords with the Marshal’s monumental personality.

  But Erzberger’s is a name not favored by municipalities. It has to be some way explained how he comes to be on the train to Spa with his friend, Count Maiberling.

  In that November he is forty-three years old, of country stock, big-boned, plump to his friends, obese to enemies. He wears pince-nez, and the eyes behind them in the big face are delicate, and the lips are capable of being delicate. He grew up in the south, trained as a rural teacher, took to journalism and politics, organized a trade-union congress and got himself elected to the Reichstag when he was twenty-eight. He had political gifts: memory, an ability to line up votes and drive wedges between people. People said he was cunning and chivalrous. From within his own skin he did not see himself as having especial gifts of cunning.

  His specialties in those early days were budgetary, colonial, and military matters. He did not admire the colonies, or the
military.

  When he was thirty-one he exposed in the house the nature of German occupation in Africa. His motives were both opportunist and visionary: that was Erzberger’s nature. He caused the government to resign. His reputation was made, though not with his party (the Center) which had had an arrangement with the government.

  Like any country boy he thought, why are all these big names letting me get away with it? There was a vein of fatalism in him: he knew that one day the guard dogs that savage presumptuous rustics would catch and savage him.

  Within a few years Thyssen’s made him a director. They thought that he might make a grateful board member and feed them Reichstag information. It was only on looking at him a second time that they saw the fat young man made a lot of his sensible but, at its nucleus, incorruptible conscience. None the less he has been a capable director and has been able to give them sufficient expert forecasts to justify his salary.

  When war started he was made director of the Office of Propaganda for Neutral Countries. It is said the press corps liked him.

  He believed that the war would prove a thesis basic to European peace: that Germany could not be encircled. He also believed Germany should be permitted to annex Belgium and some coal areas on the French border.

  By 1917 he had grown out of his annexationist beliefs. He was less callow now, more visibly quixotic. He was already talking peace with Russian diplomats in Stockholm, with papal officials in Rome. In July he spoke in the Reichstag. He was a polished speaker, obsessed with grammatical correctness, though his Swabian accent was broad.

  He began by detailing some special communications he had received concerning failures in Galicia and the west. It was acceptable to speak of military disasters in the house. What he said next the delegates were not quite so accustomed to.

  Erzberger: Our military resources are coming to an end.… The basis of my argument is the danger of revolution. It is no good telling me that the monarchical idea is too firmly rooted in Berlin or Vienna for the monarchs to be overthrown. This war has no precedent. If the monarchs do not make peace in the next few months, our people will do it over their heads.