Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  What are you? some of the Conservatives whispered in his ear in the Reichstag library. A socialist? Even socialists don’t talk like that.

  A day or so later he moved a motion in the Reichstag: that Germany should negotiate for peace, renounce all her conquests. His party voted with him, and the socialists of all varieties. The motion was carried 212 votes to 126; it sent the Kaiser into dazed retreat at Wilhelmshohe. With his Empress, whose heart was suspect. But the advice of Matthias Erzberger and 211 others was not followed.

  ERZBERGER GETS THE JOB

  For this and other reasons, Matthias Erzberger was taken into the cabinet of peace-makers appointed in October 1918 to bring the war to an end. The Chancellor was a quiet Red Cross official who had married the daughter of an English duke. His name was Prince Max of Baden and his nickname was Max-Pax. Within three weeks he caught severe influenza, took too much sleeping draught and did not wake again until Turkey had surrendered and Austria sought an armistice. His ruinous reawakening made him prejudiced against sleep. He avoided it and grew sallow.

  It became clear to him and his cabinet that generals could not go to France to make an armistice. For their very names would provoke the Allies and they might also be unbending on terms.

  On 6th November, in the late morning, there was a meeting of cabinet ministers in the Reichstag library. A secretary from the Chancellery acted as chairman in Max’s absence. Max was trying to telephone the Kaiser, who had fled a month before to Spa, to be with his soldiers. In fact he had taken up residence in the Château de la Fraineuse outside the town and spent his days refusing to take up the telephone.

  At the cabinet meeting in the Reichstag the secretary from the Chancellery opened his dispatch case and took from it the one almost transparent sheet of paper that lay there. Only a few lines of typing stood on it; you could see that much even from the reverse side. The secretary read what was on the paper.

  Secretary: Soviets have seized control of all utilities and communications in Lübeck, Hamburg, Brunsbüttel …

  Erzberger thought of desecrated property and broken tabernacles. Schiedemann and Ebert, though socialist in name, also went numb at the word “soviet.” They were honest trade unionists, like Erzberger himself. Their idea of revolution was to give poor boys a chance to join the middle class. Not Soviets in Hamburg, Lübeck, and God knew where else.

  Secretary: The Chancellor appoints Minister of State Matthias Erzberger to lead an immediate Armistice Commission to the enemy lines on an axis of which Supreme Headquarters will inform him. At the earliest possible moment Herr Erzberger and other plenipotentiaries will be given their accreditations. They will travel to OHL, Spa, by special train. I wish them God speed and pledge them the gratitude of the German people.

  Signed

  MAX VON BADEN

  Reichs Chancellor

  No one spoke. Matthias Erzberger’s stomach got very cold.

  He thought, yes this is what is meant for me. To be told this is like coming on a lover unexpectedly in the dark. Or a murderer.

  Erzberger: Not me.

  A colleague called Trimborn told him he was the youngest.

  Colleague: We others couldn’t take on such a dangerous trip.

  Erzberger: So you admit it’s dangerous? Why me?

  Colleague: It’s your temperament, Matthias. To take on this sort of thing.

  Matthias thought, you can’t have it clearer. They’ve called me circumspect but I have no art to match that argument. It’s your temperament, Matthias.

  Secretary: Herr Erzberger, you will find waiting for you at the Foreign Office a communication received last night from the U.S. Secretary of State. You’ll take it with you as an entrée to the enemy. You don’t have a lot of time—your train leaves Lehrter station at five o’clock this evening.

  Erzberger: Who are the others? The other delegates?

  Secretary: I’m afraid I don’t know. I haven’t seen His Excellency all morning. I was given this paper and the information about the American letter and the train. That’s all.

  Erzberger thought, this has all the marks of dream: impossible timetables, nebulous instructions, undisclosed fellow travelers and destinations.

  Erzberger: There’s hardly time to pack.

  No one bothered agreeing.

  Erzberger: I must see the Chancellor.

  Secretary: It may not be possible.

  Erzberger: Five o’clock.

  Secretary: A car is supposed to be waiting for you in the Platz. If not, commandeer a truck, a trap, anything.

  Erzberger: Give me that piece of paper as authority.

  The secretary seemed reluctant. Once he gave that up his briefcase would be empty for the first time in his career. At last he extracted it and laid it in the hand of Plenipotentiary Erzberger.

  ERZBERGER BEGINS HIS JOURNEY

  Beyond the lobby and in the Platz soldiers were sitting on folded greatcoats on the steps of the Bismarck monument. Above fantastically expressive stone figures, the Iron Chancellor thrust his granite belly toward the Generalstab Building.

  One military sedan stood at the curb.

  Erzberger: I am Staatsminister Matthias Erzberger. I need a driver.

  The soldiers went on sitting on the steps. So close to the Generalstab Building. Admittedly protected from its windows by a bulk of statuary.

  Erzberger: I am going to France to make a peace. I demand the use of that vehicle so that I can call at the Foreign Office for my papers.

  Two then immediately stood. One had an unsteady left leg, the other an annealed purple blur in place of an ear. After opening and closing the passenger door for Erzberger, they both took the front seat.

  Erzberger: Are the trams still running in Leipzigerstrasse?

  Soldier: Yes. Some people are even shopping. And there’s a lot of tub thumping.

  Erzberger: All right. Go by the Gate.

  He thought, the most frightening rebellion is the rebellion of those with the habit of obedience. Last year when the French soldiers mutinied these men stayed docile. Their discipline made them bywords from San Francisco to Tomsk: they have visible marks of it. Why aren’t they intimidated any more by the Renaissance conceits of the Reichstag Building, by the lowering classicism of the Generalstab office, by the Gothic cathedral? On 6 November 1918 army privates were surrounded by the overbearing forces of architecture and couldn’t give a damn.

  Three blocks down Wilhelmstrasse the sedan stopped. Here too, soldiers and factory hands from the industrial suburbs conferred as they pleased against the iron railings on the far side of the street. On the departmental statuary in front of government buildings sat picric-tainted munitions workers and a few yellowed pretty girls playing at socialist beneath the brims of their Sunday hats.

  The Foreign Office lobby was empty. It made Erzberger’s breath catch and ears ring to see it that way: he felt like an archaeologist entering a ruin.

  On the second floor a tall official stood in the corridor polishing pince-nez, squinting in the direction of Erzberger’s passage up the marble stairs. As it happened they knew each other. The official’s name was Kniege. A man of some importance, head of their Legal Section.

  Kniege: I knew it was you.

  Erzberger: Did you?

  Kniege: Well, it certainly wasn’t socialists. I’d imagine any socialist would run up such stairs, wouldn’t he? It’s part of their religion, isn’t it? Running upstairs with red banners.

  Erzberger: It isn’t part of mine.

  Kniege: No. I could tell it was a heavy man. Come in. The Chancellor telephoned me. About the document you were to be given.

  All the loyal clocks of Legal Section were banging away—they had inherited the empty offices.

  Kniege handed him the document from the United States. There was jealousy, retentiveness in Kniege’s hand.

  Erzberger: My entrée.

  Kniege: I see.

  Erzberger: Could I have an attaché case for this? My train leaves at five and I ha
ve nothing to carry things in.

  Kniege: Your train leaves at five.

  Erzberger: And my accreditation documents. Where are they?

  Kniege knew nothing about accreditation.

  Kniege: Accreditation for what?

  Erzberger explained. He saw Kniege’s upper lip fluttering.

  Kniege: They could have told me.

  Erzberger: I devoutly wish they had, Herr Kniege.

  Kniege: What did they think? That I’d make things difficult for you? I’ve never been one of those who poke fun at your country ways. Or your clothes. Or your boots. I’ve never shown you the slightest condescension.

  Erzberger had been member for Biberach since 1901, and was by now too used to the hauteur of the Prussian civil service to argue with it this Wednesday.

  Erzberger: There must be accreditation letters.

  Kniege: The Chancellor rushed in this morning. But he signed no documents. That I know of. Would you care to follow me?

  He led Erzberger down a corridor of marble. Teutonic goddesses with big hips and dense frowns went on setting an example to the vanished staff of the imperial Foreign Office. Erzberger and Kniege entered an immense carpeted hall set with tidy desks, as if for an examination. A milky sun was already low down in the tall barred windows. The chief of Legal Section unlocked a door at the far end of the hall. Inside, amongst dim rows of filing cabinets, stood three men in worn suits. Alarmed by the opening of the door, they had rifles in their hands. At one end of the filing room a fire had been lit; logs and full coalbins flanked it. It spat an ember.

  Erzberger was aware of the heat pressing his cheeks and could hear the hissing breath of a clerk with bronchitis.

  Kniege pointed to the fire.

  Kniege: In case of revolution. Documents we don’t want outsiders to set eyes on. These brave fellows …

  One of the brave fellows held his rifle by the muzzle, as if needing it as a crutch. Seventy years. Yes, seventy. Erzberger suffered a ten-second certainty of never reaching seventy and for the same period detested the old clerk’s inane survival in a bad suit.

  He looked a gentle and reliable old man.

  A second of his colleagues came fully out of the shadow of the particular filing cabinet he was meant to protect to the death. He must have weighed 270 pounds. His face was purple.

  Erzberger thought, the Foreign Office elite corps! The less trusty (it seemed), the less battleworthy, had been sent home.

  Kniege spoke to the purple man.

  Kniege: Did the Chancellor deposit any documents for Herr E-R-Z-B-E-R-G-E-R this morning?

  Purple Man: No sir. He signed in no documents. He left nothing for transmission.

  Erzberger: You’re sure? He couldn’t have left it with another section?

  Purple Man: This is central filing, sir. Fetch the Chancellor’s file, Herr Walsmier, if you please.

  The old man found a thick file in a top drawer. His purple colleague opened it to the business of that day. It was a copy of a memorandum from Max-Pax indicating that he had read the letter transmitted by Secretary of State Robert Lansing and that it was essential that copies be given or transmitted to all members of the proposed Armistice Commission and to General Groener, First Quartermaster General, OHL, Spa. It was signed by the Chancellor.

  That was all Max had left for him in the hot room. Am I fainting? Erzberger wondered. Bile moved in his throat. He would have put his head against the wall and been sick if it had not been for the three filing clerks, watching him so intimately, as if for an excuse to start the feverish incineration of German history.

  Erzberger: My train leaves at five.

  Kniege: It’s nearly two now.

  Matthias thought of sending one of the three clerks home to fetch what he needed for a journey of three or four nights. But he couldn’t choose which one was least likely to die with his linen and toiletries, of burst hearts and aneurisms, halfway between Schöneberg and the railway station.

  Erzberger: I admire you, gentlemen. I’m going to the Chancellery. If the Chancellor comes here, telephone me.

  The urgency he’d picked up in the overheated annexe stayed with him in the corridors. Calling good-by to Kniege he ran downstairs into the lobby where four sentries from the Berlin garrison, whom he hadn’t seen on his way in, presented arms. Where had they been? In the toilets reading socialist material? Or perhaps something as innocent as pornography.

  HERR ERZBERGER AND A SEDITIOUS TELEPHONE

  The car, still crewed by his two maimed soldiers, bore him back up Wilhelmstrasse to the Chancellery. All the way he inspected the state of his cuffs. I know I have no name for style. But am I meant to appear before the Marshal in a dirty collar? Something will have to be done.

  Max’s office was on the second floor. Only a few Chancellery officials were in sight. In this state of chaotic vacancy the imperial décor looked flatulent, an opera set the morning after the performance.

  One of the Chancellor’s senior secretaries went to the door of his master’s office and threw it wider open to show Herr Erzberger there was no one inside.

  They began a crazy and (from the secretary’s side) formal conversation:

  Erzberger: Oh God.

  Secretary: Sir.

  Erzberger: Do you realize my train leaves at five P.M.?

  Secretary: The Chancellor is at Berlin Garrison HQ trying to compose a joint statement by telephone with General Groener.

  Erzberger: Joint statement?

  Secretary: For public release. Informing citizens that an armistice commission is being sent.

  Erzberger: Holy God! Wouldn’t it be wiser to give me my papers first?

  Secretary: I think His Excellency considers it more important that people should know an armistice is being sought. An hour’s delay here or there in actually dispatching commissioners …

  Erzberger: Have you had contact with any other members of the proposed commission …?

  Secretary: Our Secretary in Copenhagen, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, is the only other member I heard the Chancellor mention.

  Erzberger: Is Brockdorff-Rantzau on his way? Here? Or to Spa?

  Secretary: I told him by telephone to Copenhagen this morning.

  Erzberger: How can he get to Berlin in time to catch the five o’clock train?

  Secretary: It’s impossible. I knew nothing of this five o’clock train. That was someone else’s arrangement.

  In Herr Erzberger’s rare mood of kismet, to find those accreditation documents and to catch the five o’clock train had become crucial objectives in their own right. The world had lost its way forever if these simple goals could not be attained.

  Already it was a quarter to three.

  Erzberger: Do you think you can get me through to Garrison HQ? I must speak to the Chancellor.

  Secretary: Come in. I’ll try.

  The secretary let him into the office of Prince Max von Baden. The desk was clear of anything but a telephone—it looked as if even the blotting paper had been hidden away to save it from revolutionary hands. A photograph of an overly handsome Kaiser, dressed in the style of Lohengrin, was the only decoration to the walls.

  The secretary picked up the telephone. Inanely scabbed with fin-de-siècle ornamentation, it served to augment Matthias Erzberger’s secret frenzy.

  Deep in the Chancellery a single telephonist was on duty.

  The secretary gave Erzberger the telephone. He seemed to be saying I’ve done what I could. Now I don’t want to hear the noise of chaos on the far end of the line.

  Voice: Hello. Major Heindorff, wine-procuring officer, Berlin Garrison.

  Erzberger: My God, you’re still working?

  Voice: I’ve been at this work for eighteen years, sir.

  Erzberger told him who he was, and that somewhere in the garrison buildings was the Chancellor, perhaps, sitting at a telephone. Matthias suggested that Heindorff should consider it his day for procuring chancellors.

  Voice: He’d be in the communications r
oom, no doubt. Perhaps I can get you transferred. But the privates who run the switchboard have all gone socialist. They switched you through to me for a joke.

  Erzberger: Tell them it’s a message for the Chancellor. About an armistice. They want an armistice, don’t they?

  Waiting. The secretary would not look at him other than sideways. I am the most inauspicious diplomat he’s ever talked to. Yet, as if I were going to a wedding, I wish to catch that train.

  And is the line dead or vacant? What tricks were the Spartacist privates playing down that vacant well the telephone imposed on his ear?

  Voice: Reichschancellor.

  Erzberger: Erzberger, sir. I’m calling from your office.

  Voice: Oh.

  Erzberger: I can’t find my accreditation documents.

  Voice. Accreditation.

  Erzberger: For the armistice commission.

  Voice: Of course. You must forgive me, Matthias. You go to Spa and I’ll send Brockdorff-Rantzau on after you with the accreditations.

  Scapegoat, perhaps. But there are corners of the wilderness I will still not go to without proper papers.

  Erzberger: I’m afraid I can’t go to Spa without the documents. I’d be defenseless before the Supreme Command, before the Kaiser. Also Brockdorff-Rantzau will take too long to catch me up. Can’t you consider anyone else?

  Voice: Oh God, it’s too much.

  Erzberger: For all of us, sir.

  Voice: Is Threme there?

  Erzberger: Yes.

  Voice: Put him on.

  Erzberger pushed the receiver at the secretary. While Threme spoke … Yes, sir. Yes I have his home number … Matthias Erzberger watched substantial storm clouds circling at their ease in the east and below them the nameless government offices, hives of good clerks, the railings, the trees, the drifts of poplar and linden leaves, the newly insolent soldiers and lathe operators scuffing, kicking, rearranging them with their boots. It was so late in the autumn, someone should have by now swept up the dead leaves.

  Secretary: I’ll tell him, sir.

  He put the receiver down. Minister of State Erzberger, sniffing conspiracy, had even raised his walking stick a little.