Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  Erzberger: You hung up!

  Secretary: There was nothing more to discuss, sir.

  Erzberger: I’m the judge.

  Secretary: The Chancellor told me to request you to catch your train. He has decided to appoint Count Maiberling of this office to the commission.

  Erzberger: Count Maiberling is my friend.…

  He remembered a pleasant diplomat in Sofia. Together they had talked to the Bulgarian foreign minister, eaten state dinners, afterward, drunk at their hotels, made private jokes about their hosts. For such purposes the count made a good companion.

  Now in the hollow Chancellery, a flush of paranoid fear came over Staatsminister Erzberger. Someone has cleverly marked the count and his friend Matthias for the irksome journey. Some David was choosing appropriate Uriahs. Except that Maiberling and I … we never tasted any regal whore. Unless you considered a seat on the board of Thyssen’s to be commerce with harlots. Or took note of the few milk-white Bulgar girls the count had thrown in my path.

  Secretary: The accreditations will be made out and handed to you at the train. There won’t be another Spa special tomorrow evening, you see. You will have to travel with some of General Groener’s staff officers who are returning to OHL. The Chancellor is sure you won’t mind that, Herr Erzberger. You always got on well with officers.

  Erzberger: In the early days. Not for the past few years.

  Secretary: Quite … I’ll telephone Count Maiberling.

  Downstairs the two soldiers were still waiting by the sedan. This was strange constancy by the standards of the day. Why were they so attentive? Assassins! his guts told him. Assassins are always attentive.

  Erzberger told them he wanted to go to Schöneberg. He said he’d show them the way.

  All the way southwest he watched the driver’s luminously pink and junked ear. It shone like a rose in the half-light, like the vulva of a woman.

  Erzberger tapped on the glass to break up this too clear and, for the moment, too threatening image.

  Erzberger: Off the Bayerischer Platz!

  The house stood behind a modest stucco wall. Unhappily there was no one in it. Paula, with Maria the spiritual adolescent and infant Gabrielle, was staying with friends in a bungalow in the woods on Grosser Wansee, where the pleasure boats used to sail all summer. November, and such a November as this, had turned it into a muted, private place. This bereaved November his own house seemed dead. It gave off cold of its own.

  Old Dieter answered the door.

  Erzberger: Aren’t you cold, Dieter?

  Dieter had once done military service and lost his left eye in Tanga. He let one believe the eye had been poked out by some tribesman. But, knowing that Herr Erzberger was an expert on German Africa, never offered too much vivid testimony about the supposed battle in which it had been lost. He wore an exquisite glass eye from Bohemia, piercing and young in the old face and beside the bloodshot other eye.

  Dieter: I’ve got a fire in the back room, sir.

  Erzberger: Good. I’ve to pack my bag, Dieter. I’m making a journey. While I’m upstairs don’t let anyone in.

  It wasn’t like packing for a routine journey. He handled with some hunger his toiletries, his clean linen, the celluloid collars, the neckties, the better overcoat (fur-trimmed neck). He packed them with some tenderness. The fashionable might laugh at me for my country clothes but, my God, garments—plentiful and of thick weave—reassure me.

  He didn’t call Dieter to carry the case: he wanted to be out of the house. When he got downstairs both the soldiers were in the hall and the front door stood ajar.

  Erzberger: Dieter, I said …

  Dieter: But, sir, they were soldiers. I thought soldiers …

  Erzberger couldn’t explain to the old man how soldiers had suddenly turned assertive, grown ironic about the eyes. These two seemed to be on the lookout for things to pocket. The limpy one stopped in front of a hanging photograph of Oskar.

  He turned to Erzberger with authority.

  Soldier: Your boy?

  Erzberger: He died in training. Three weeks back.

  He felt that he betrayed Oskar in being afraid to say officer school.

  The soldier shook his head with a sort of schoolmasterly annoyance, as if he were saying, of course, of course, tell me something fresh.

  Erzberger: I have to catch the five o’clock from Lehrter.

  It seemed to him he’d been repeating that formula all afternoon.

  The soldiers eyed each other. They appeared to be holding a secret vote between themselves. The one with the smashed ear suddenly opened the door for him.

  Erzberger: Dieter, these are bad times. Lock the main gate after I’ve gone and answer it only to people you know. Trot down to the police station and tell Inspector Martensen that I’m away on government business.

  Dieter carried the bag. In the autumn garden the pruned roses stuck up as awkwardly as the improvised grave markers he had seen so much of. Before he lost the confidence of the officer corps and was no longer invited to the front.

  The second he saw Count Maiberling pushing schnapps down in the saloon, he understood this isn’t the man I knew at Sofia. This is too pale, too slumped in a corner chair. The long neck at full stretch; Maiberling keeping a weather eye on the staff officers quietly drinking coffee at a table close by.

  He seemed to maintain awareness of them over his lowered right shoulder even after he sighted Erzberger and smiled, and offered him the flask, holding it high as a person does for an athlete who has just broken the tape.

  Erzberger: I’m sorry.

  He meant, for landing you here.

  Maiberling: I can understand them picking you. A cabinet minister. But me? I’m no potentate.

  Erzberger: Are you frightened?

  Maiberling: Are you?

  Erzberger: I don’t think we have much to fear.

  Maiberling: Bloody liar!

  Receiving back the flask, Maiberling topped it and put it in his coat pocket.

  Maiberling: Me? I feel imposed on. As if they skimmed off four layers of dignitaries to unearth me. Maybe a little excited as well.

  He hit the pillow behind his head. It was embroidered with a Hohenzollern eagle.

  Maiberling: I like train travel.

  At five to five no documents had come from the Chancellery. Erzberger went to see the young general who was traveling with them.

  The general regretted the train had to go on the second. He was under orders in that matter. General Groener, the new Quartermaster General, was an expert on railway systems and had decided that in view of the chaos the best hope was to be obedient to timetables.

  Erzberger decided the railway people themselves would be easier to sway. He thought he might begin with the engineer.

  As he dismounted from the saloon he saw a middle-aged man in a shiny civil-service suit and wing collar crossing the tracks at a half-run toward the Spa special.

  The civil servant had an envelope in the hand he extended to Erzberger. The envelope carried a red Chancellery seal and a thick official nap in which the man’s sweaty finger-marks were visible.

  Breaking the seal, Erzberger’s hand scrabbled inside the envelope for the documents. Expecting they might become butterflies and decamp across the shafts of lamplight from platform three.

  Official: His Excellency says the last two named will be waiting for you at Spa.

  The document read:

  1. Full Power.

  The undersigned, Chancellor of the German Empire, Max, Prince von Baden, hereby gives full power:

  To Imperial Secretary of State, Matthias Erzberger (as president of the delegation) …

  Erzberger sought the railing by the carriage door. The word “president” scorpioned up his arm and bit him on the underside of his brain.

  Erzberger: You go!

  Official: I beg your pardon, sir.

  Erzberger: You go! Anyone will do as president of the commission, it seems. So you go!

  Offic
ial: I think you’re making a joke, sir.

  Erzberger: My God, I am.

  He climbed aboard and waved the documents toward Maiberling, who now had definitely taken on the air of a man off on holidays. All he lacked was a lumpy wife and brats.

  Erzberger: They’ve arrived, Alfred.

  Maiberling: Well. We’re away then.

  Erzberger: Yes.

  He thought: Matthias Erzberger, reliable stall-holder in the Reichstag cow market, sometimes known to have given inside advice to the barons of coal and steel and chemicals if they were decent barons and his workaday conscience was not defiled. But in questions of Paula and children, in questions of war and brotherhood of nations, he presumed to strain toward idealism and vision, and even wrote books that resembled the American President’s books. For though he might be a fat-assed Württemberger, his spirit was as trim as President Wilson’s. And it was exactly the gap between his knockabout commercial morals and his high conscience of the home and printing press that would not be forgiven. And for which he was put on a train and sent to be punished.

  Maiberling: Sit down then. A brown study, you.

  Erzberger: I was having indecent thoughts.

  Maiberling: You bloody peasants. Cocks like fire hoses!

  It was not a subject Erzberger wanted to spend time on. He excused himself and moved back into the anteroom at the end of the carriage.

  The whole train spat steam, steam whirled past the saloon door as a porter slammed it shut. The man from the Chancellery still stood on the platform wiping his face. Like the last wellwisher on earth. Erzberger continued to read

  … as president of the delegation;

  To Imperial Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, Count Alfred Maiberling, and

  To Major-General Detlev von Winterfeldt, Royal Prussian Army, to conduct in the name of the German Government with the plenipotentiaries of the Powers allied against Germany, negotiations for an armistice and to conclude an agreement to that effect, provided the same be approved by the German Government.

  Berlin, November 6, 1918

  (signed) MAX, PRINCE VON BADEN

  There was another thick official page.

  2. As additional plenipotentiary, Captain Vanselow of the Imperial German Navy is appointed and the name of General Erich von Gundell is removed.…

  On a third sheet, typing paper this time, was written:

  The general and Vanselow are at OHL. Obtain what mercy you can, Matthias, but for God’s sake make peace.

  MAX

  Erzberger found himself shivering and … what?… weeping. He tore this last message into halves, quarters, eighths, and so on, all the time hiding at the end of the carriage. Then he lowered the window and the fierce November air buffeted him. He let Max’s little message flutter back down the length of the train, and saw, half-blinded, the elegant suburb of Tiergarten. He felt sure that as soon as it withdrew from his vision it would re-form itself into a new pattern of evocations. The same bricks would have a different meaning for a returning Matthias Erzberger. Who had always wanted to be rich enough to live there.

  THE MARSHAL MEETS SOME SAILORS

  Late in the morning of 7 November a black limousine flying a wet British naval pennon drew up at the Château of Senlis.

  From it stepped a rather fleshy British admiral in a topcoat, and three aides. When the chasseurs presented arms at the door the tremendous slap of boots, and of butts on palms, dislodged his monocle and he turned and laughed with his aides after putting it back in his eye socket. In his office Marshal Foch heard the barking laugh that race emits and knew the British naval plenipotentiaries had arrived.

  Though he made a face he was reminded of his good friend Henry Wilson, Double-Vay. But Double-Vay was an exceptional Briton, half-Irish for leavening; accused of being a frog-lover for bringing some of the Marshal’s teaching techniques into the lecture halls at Camberley. If there’s any frog I love it’s you, you little bastard. Double-Vay was the Marshal’s one Englishman. So it was hopeless to look for any lasting remembrances from the laughter of British admirals.

  At the moment Double-Vay sat with the Welsh lecher in Versailles. The Marshal thought it would have been more pleasant if the British, instead of trying him with sailors he did not know, had empowered dear old Double-Vay to travel with him to the forest.

  The Marshal told Major Ferrason to fetch the arrivals into the office.

  He thought, if I speak to them in English I won’t have to tell them as much. I can be ambiguous.

  When they came in he was standing with his hip hitched on his desk. He extended his hand flatly, as if for licking, to the monocled admiral.

  The Marshal: First Sea Lord Veems. Very happy.

  Wemyss: Sir. We have glimpsed each other over the conference table at Quai d’Orsay. Also …

  The Marshal: … at Le Trianon. I have not forgot Introduce me if you will to your staff.

  Wemyss took on the stance for it.

  Wemyss: Admiral George Hope … Captain Marriott … Bagot here.

  The Marshal: There. Yes. Bagot.

  Admiral Hope and the two juniors had those amazingly mens sana faces the English are capable of carrying into middle age. I wonder, thought the Marshal, were they artfully chosen to demonstrate the racial pretensions of the British?

  Lord Wemyss wore a beefy and more complex face.

  Wemyss: We can all speak French, sir. In fact we’ve been rather looking forward to having scope to use it …

  The Marshal: Your generals have little gift for the same.…

  Wemyss: An unhappy imbalance.

  The Marshal: No, no, let this old man do the better he can with your jewel language. Some cognac first. For the coldness.

  His mustache quivered at one corner and Ferrason poured five cognacs. Wemyss smiled a little, secretly. A these-French-are-like-head-waiters smile. Or so the Marshal read it.

  Wemyss: Too kind.

  They received and held their glasses till the Marshal had been served. Then the Marshal bowed to them and they began sipping.

  The Marshal: A long way from the sea, gentlemen.

  The First Sea Lord wagged his finger.

  Wemyss: Still, the sea is there.

  The Marshal: I did not mean argumentative. I just remarked. Have you any hunger?

  Wemyss: We had a picnic basket in the back of the car, Monsieur Marshal.

  The Marshal: How jolly.

  Wemyss: Quite pleasant.

  The First Sea Lord composed his face roguishly. The glint in his monocle threatened, two more sips and then we start talking about the German fleet. There was a theatricality, a straining in the new tone of the features. The Marshal resented it and was bored. He decided he’d get rid of them till train departure. Wemyss had none of the ease of wit of old Double-Vay, his dear British general. Who would have loped into the room saying, “Here comes the ugliest man in the British Army. And how’s the little Frenchman today, how’s little Monsieur Foch, where is the little bastard, is he hiding from me?… There he is, behind the third paper clip on the left!”

  Maxime Weygand came in. Neat as a pin for the journey. Neat as a jockey in silks. Able to tell from the way the Marshal’s eyes were shifting that he was to take away, entertain, buffer his Marshal from the Royal Navy.

  The Marshal: My General Weygand, these are my dear brothers in victoire from the fleet of the British Navy. Will you please look to them with all care for me.

  Weygand bowed and took an ushering-out stance at the office door. The First Sea Lord could tell he was being dismissed.

  Wemyss: A second, Monsieur Marshal.

  The Marshal spun and rushed to him, the manager of a first-class hotel rushing to an aggrieved celebrity.

  Wemyss: I have to impress on you the seriousness of the naval demands.

  The Marshal: I have the copy of what your Mr. Lloyd George wants. Therefore it is serious enough for me. I will push the terms to the Germans.

  The First Sea Lord’s mouth
hung a little agape; a wince of bellicose amusement.

  Wemyss: It’s the spirit in which they’re put, my Marshal. Not that I …

  The Marshal: I will not put it to them for the fun, Lord Veems. I will put nothing to them for the fun.

  Wemyss: Quite. However, I must say I would be quite happy to undertake the bulk of the debate on the naval terms. Under your chairmanship.

  The Marshal: Yes, yes. You are the one who knows boats. Excuse me now. If you hope to rest, write letters, use some telephone, General Weygand will be happy …

  General Weygand stirred at then flank. For some reason his decorum reminded the Marshal for the first time in months of the rumor that Maxime was the bastard of the Empress of Mexico, a lady still alive in Brussels but in bad mental health. In four years the Marshal had never had the ill grace to ask General Weygand was it true.

  From this daydream of Carlotta’s widowhood (soon to be recaptured by the British Army bearing up the road from Tournai) Lord Wemyss distracted him.

  Wemyss: We haven’t been told where the meetings will be held.

  The Marshal: The place for the armistice isn’t here. This town of Senlis is taken by our enemy for small whiles in 1914. While they are here they executed the mayor and numbers of hostage, you understand. So the place for the armistice isn’t here.

  Wemyss: I see. Might I ask where?

  The Marshal: In a forest.

  Wemyss: I say, this just isn’t good enough, sir. We are plenipotentiaries, you know.

  The Marshal acknowledged how reasonable the First Sea Lord’s aggression was by shaking his hands contritely before his face.

  The Marshal: The language slowness! The place is la Forêt de l’Aigle. Seven kilometers on the other side from Compiègne. The railway siding called Rethondes. It is private and every comfort for our British brothers.

  Admiral Hope spoke—a lean one, sun-tanned, perhaps from service in the Indian Ocean. A long way from the great bloodletting.

  Hope: Sir. What time are the German plenipotentiaries due at Rethondes?

  The Marshal: Nine o’clock. Midnight. They have difficult travel, roads all over with holes. From Tergnier they travel by the train. The saloon car for them to sit in is saloon car belonged to Napoleon the Third. Eh? Eh?