Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  The widowed girl had to bike it four or more kilometers from her house in town to the ruin of a stone cottage along the Compiègne-Soissons road. Here a dry corner would have suited her and the sergeant. Except they were impelled toward 2417D and no other surfaces would do them.

  If they met any sentries the sergeant told them he was taking the girl to one of the delegates. The officers were all in camp beds and tented against the rain squalls. The sergeant and the widow came to the blind side of 2417D and found it quite unlocked.

  He had thought she might be awed in a sight-seeing way but Compiègnoises are not easily impressed that way—Louis XIV, XV, XVI had lived more or less amongst them, at the Palais de Compiègne on the edge of the town. Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III. For two hundred years they had worked in royal households or supplied them with candles or coal, soap or pheasants. The girl’s uncle had owned a patisserie whose hand-made chocolates had ravished the Empress Eugénie. Even lately the Palais had been HQ for renowned soldiers: Nivelle, who had killed her husband, Pétain … She simply put her hand on the neatly laid out blotters. So! was all she said.

  She wasn’t there for the sights.

  He began to caress her. Her skirts were wet to the knees. He moved one of the acanthus-leaf lampshades to a safe place down the table, also an ashtray and cut-glass inkstand. Then he pitched her backward so that she lay between the note pads of Vanselow and Erzberger on one side, and Weygand and the Marshal on the other. The leather tabletop was at first very cold through her dress.

  Even if they had not already had their minds on it, they would have found coitus the obvious recourse. Simply because it was insufferable to think that in such a little space, round a table no bigger than a family dinner table, with note paper and pencils, it was possible for eight men to weave a scab over that pit of corpses four years deep.

  It was clear that the note pads flanking her reminded her of vacant memorial stones, set either side for soldiers still to die. For they found in the morning that she had written R.I.P. and Pour la patrie on them.

  Dressing, they could hear noises in the next carriage, where the duty wireless operator and the night telephonist talked and yawned. It occurred to them how dangerous their little rite had been.

  She shook her skirts together quickly, mute but not regretting. The seed now traveling in her was necessary seed.

  The sergeant replaced the inkpot, the lamp (using his handkerchief to polish its brass shaft), the ashtray, but missed the pencilled-on pads.

  He helped her back to the Soissons road.

  Rumor of them dies there. No child is said to have come from the penetration of 2417D—no drunkard or poet, deaf-mute, whore, violinist, or other symbolic offspring.

  Simply that in the coming world people would now and then nominate the sergeant and the widow as the wiser visitors to 2417D.

  OFF TO SEE THE FROCKS

  At the breakfast table, Wemyss heard that overnight there had been utter silence from Spa and Berlin. He was not enlivened by the coffee he drank opposite pert Marshal Foch.

  The Marshal: The Kaiser might abdicate? Yes. But that is not a revolution. That is the triumph of the healthy cells.

  Like Erzberger, even Wemyss considered for a moment that he might be—for puckish or other motives—denied the truth. He turned to Weygand; sphinx-in-chief, he thought.

  Wemyss: No message at all?

  Weygand: None.

  Wemyss: Could it be the weather? Transmission problems?

  He thought less of himself for grabbing at comfort in front of these two.

  Weygand: That isn’t possible, Lord Admiral.

  The Marshal: Well then, I’m off to see the frocks.

  It was his term of contempt for statesmen.

  A staff limousine heaved down the forest track to collect him. As it made for Senlis the mist grew streaky and fell away and a high wind broke the cloud apart. Smartly it traveled eastward. The sodden poilus at the front would be pleased to see it shredded like this.

  On his arrival, his staff stood to attention in the hall of the château. He saw tall Major Ferrason, who was about to take to the academic life.

  The Marshal: Did the Kaiser give up while I was on the road?

  Ferrason: His five sons have all taken a vow not to succeed him as regents. That’s all we’ve heard.

  The Marshal: And the Salonika front?

  Ferrason: The Bulgarian surrender terms are being enforced. The typhoid epidemic has worsened amongst our soldiers.

  The Marshal: Cold, isn’t it?

  Ferrason: The fire is lit in your office, my Marshal.

  At his desk, he heard the honor guard clash to the salute for the arriving Premier.

  The Marshal: Ferrason, I want you to stay and take notes.

  To enter the château, the old Prime Minister held a thorn stick well down its length, implying he might dare beat the Marshal or perhaps lesser soldiers should they mislead him. As well he wore gaiters as if on a trip to the front. His lean secretary from the War Office, General Mordacq, an army man who had backslid amongst the frocks, kept watch at his side.

  Clemenceau: A fire, my Marshal? Let’s all sit around it. I said to my PT instructor that after twenty-five years of daily calisthenics I’ve found there’s nothing tones a man up like a blaze.

  His eyes avoided the Marshal’s and his lips were well hidden behind the strands of his Confucian mustache. So he didn’t seem to wish that his intuition about toning men up would benefit anyone in particular.

  Clemenceau: What’s this officer doing here?

  The Marshal: He will take minutes.

  In fact Ferrason was shifting chairs at that moment into the fire’s ambience.

  Clemenceau: My God, we’re not going to take things down in evidence, are we? Aren’t we friends?

  The Marshal: Of course.

  Clemenceau: I don’t want him making notes. He can stay. But I don’t want notes.

  The Marshal: As you wish.

  The Premier took his seat slowly and the Mongolian eyes now settled on the Marshal. Mordacq sat by his master. Mordacq and the Marshal were, of course, well-established enemies. Mordacq, the freemason, the agnostic, pretentious about strategy, pretentious about politics. A keeper of secret files on enemies actual or possible, on people who could be used for advantage. Very much in the old man’s image.

  The Marshal knew what the old man would talk about and was not surprised.

  Clemenceau: I’m very concerned, my Marshal. The men you have in that train in Compiègne are imperial plenipotentiaries. If the German Emperor abdicates today, if there’s a republic proclaimed, they won’t have any power to negotiate.…

  General Mordacq spoke exactly to the middle air.

  Mordacq: The written authorities on the basis of which those Germans in Compiègne are working have a very exact diplomatic meaning.

  That’s meant to be information for the crude soldier, the Marshal thought. He grew pugnacious.

  The Marshal: They’re waiting simply on word from Spa. I refuse to believe that so close to signing they’ll be emptied of their authority.

  Mordacq: Not everything is a matter of believing or refusing to believe. Faith isn’t the rails diplomacy runs on.

  The Marshal put his large hand over his yawn. He decided to speak exclusively to the old man.

  The Marshal: You might remember there was some fear—the British Prime Minister, that Colonel House—that we were asking too much. What happened in the train is an answer. They will give up armies, navies, territories. They argue in small ways but you can see in their eyes they’ve already given them away. They turn pale only when we mention rolling stock, machine guns.

  The Premier’s large-boned paws caressed his thorn; there seemed to be terror of loss in his large fingers.

  Clemenceau: That’s not what we’re talking about. All they’re willing to give … it might have no meaning by evening.

  The hands went on smoothing down the blackthorn. Hands that had oper
ated on Miss Plummer, New York seminarian, and imposed three children on her before she fled to American lawyers for a divorce. Hands that had known the pelt of the highest-grade tarts. Now they were uncertain as they never were with the horseflesh of the capital.

  Clemenceau: The point is: you have to sign as soon as you can.

  The Marshal: Of course.

  Clemenceau: I called in on Monet yesterday on my way to the senate. You’re not keen on art, are you, my Marshal?

  The Marshal: No.

  Clemenceau: I told him yesterday that things were so close to an end.

  The Marshal: I suppose he’s very discreet.

  Clemenceau: Telling Monet is like telling God. I imagine you yourself, Marshal, have taken the time to inform that good friend of yours.

  When the Premier was most afraid (the Marshal knew) his jokes ran to the easy mark and were most fatuous.

  The Marshal: For both of us. For you as well, Monsieur.

  Clemenceau: Do you know what old Monet said to me? He said, Now we’ll be able to settle down to build the memorial to Cézanne. But this morning I wonder. Nothing’s sure.

  A plangent sigh out of the old fellow’s ample-bore, bull organs. Cut off by brassy Mordacq. Orchestrated agnosticism.

  Mordacq: For that reason, all of us at the War Office trust that the Marshal will keep in mind the diplomatic realities.

  The Marshal: What else?

  Mordacq: Also that he will firmly understand that it is not a mystical exercise.

  The Marshal: Monsieur Premier, if you don’t silence him I will consider it an insult.

  The Premier transferred the stick between his knees and clapped his hands.

  Clemenceau: A duel, a duel.

  Knowing that the Marshal could not duel, whatever his blood told him. Remembering too the years when he himself had kept the Chamber of Deputies in place with dueling pistols, until one day at Fontainebleau in 1893 he had had three shots at a deputy called Boudouaument and missed with all three and was therefore considered to have lost his fangs.

  The Marshal saw the Premier’s eyes glowing viscid. The glue of his memories ran there. Sentiment, sentiment.

  The fire spat and returned Clemenceau to the indecisive Saturday in which he sat. He did not like it there. He dried his flaccid mustache carefully. Perhaps the upper lip it hid was sweating wildly.

  Clemenceau: All jokes aside …

  His right hand plucked and crumpled the air, a word spinner’s mannerism he’d picked up twenty-five years back, when he’d sat down in middle age to become a novelist and done badly at it.

  The Marshal understood but would not forgive his helplessness this dripping Saturday. The Marshal thought, he never learned to sniff out the moment when reason should be suspended. Whereas I, alone with the enemy in the forest’s eye, have sniffed it out.

  SAILOR KINGS AND DÉBUTANTES

  “While [wrote the Admiral, in a memorandum for the Marshal] the British Government would certainly understand the desire of the French Army to exact payment for the insults inflicted by the German empire in 1871, it is confident that the Generalissimo will also understand that this war has been fought on every ocean and a cease-fire (as well as an eventual peace settlement) must provide for the security, navally guaranteed, of all the 500 million and more British subjects from the southern ocean to the Orkneys.…”

  As always, the wonder of this benign imperial concept brought him to a stop and he remembered sailing round it, the empire which was not only a geographical reality but a resonant abstraction also; so that on its seas you had a sense of being not simply sailor but metaphysician as well.

  He had navigated it once with Teddy, his revered king of the time. It was always temperate summer that year, for there is always summer in some limb of the empire. And the itinerary was so planned. The Ophir had been chartered for the voyage, and staffed by aristocratic officers.

  Teddy knew Rosslyn Wemyss was illicitly related through some rutting of William IV’s. Himself a sailor.

  King Teddy used to wink at me when he came up to the bridge. Never trust sailors, he’d say. If you left it to sailors we’d all be related. Not that Teddy was a slouch with the women. You had to remember his mother had never allowed him any contact with the Cabinet. The one time he’d read cabinet papers she’d raised the roof. So Teddy never got used to that side of government even after his mother died and left him to it. His specialty was droit du seigneur. Carried in the Ophir, he exercised it amongst the well-fed daughters of rich colonies.

  How long the journey took. A year. The French did not understand that: the extent of the world. All they sought was to beat the German Army in set-piece battles more or less on their common frontier. In arguing with them you faced, far more than mere inadvertence, this manic obsession.

  He began to write again but was distracted by memory breaking open in his belly like a pod. In Melbourne the king and queen had disembarked from Ophir to travel to Brisbane by train. They left on board the officers, the crew, some officials and three ladies-in-waiting, creatures only a year or so out of the débutante pages of The Queen, The Field, Country Life. Mezzotint complexions now teased a little dusky by the empire’s recurring suns.

  You had to be careful. A king’s ship could go a little slack once the king left it. But dining was somehow a pleasanter business and you drank more and had rowdy card games with the ladies the queen had left with you. And you danced with them, tipsily believing their nice breasts were burning holes in your mess jacket. And one night you bent and, your head ringing, made the sumptuous suggestion: my love, have you thought of the royal bed?

  The lady-in-waiting and he had both told each other, while still drunk and given to repetition, how much Teddy would have been tickled to know. Even if Queen Alexandra would have looked on it as trespass.

  THE DUELING SLAP

  That afternoon, it could be seen, Maiberling was drunk. He went about making trouble with Vanselow and von Winterfeldt, who worked innocently, with slight executive frowns, at separate tables amongst the black Moroccan footstools of the saloon. Busy, busy, he would say. Scribble, scribble.

  Erzberger had been writing a sort of gallows speech. He hoped to append it to the clauses. He covered with a clean sheet of paper the paragraphs he had already prepared and called to the count to sit down.

  The count’s answer was disconnected, mocking.

  Maiberling: How much did they pay you as a director of Thyssen’s?

  Erzberger: Really, Alfred …!

  Maiberling: No, come on. Tell a friend.

  Erzberger: Forty thousand marks.

  Maiberling: That’s not much as soul money goes.

  Erzberger: Not if you’re running a house in Schöneberg. But I suppose they consider it’s the honor.…

  Maiberling: Do you think they’d have me?

  Erzberger: If they still exist.

  Maiberling: You’re supposed to be the optimistic one.

  Matthias could smell the class contempt in Maiberling. There was sinew to it that had not been there last night.

  Erzberger: Do you want to rest, Alfred?

  Maiberling: No, Matthias. Neither rest nor work. I am mourning my good friend the twentieth century. Like all the other youngsters, about to turn his toes up in his eighteenth year.

  With a wave of the hand, Matthias begged off such fulsome despair.

  Erzberger: It’s painful for me to speak like this. I demand better behavior from you, Alfred.

  Maiberling: You can go to hell. My behavior, your behavior. Behavior’s ceased to have bearing.

  Erzberger: If you get drunk I won’t let you sit at the conference table.

  Maiberling slapped Erzberger’s cheek. Not an uncontrolled gesture, not a peasant haymaker; an exact, dueler’s slap, delivered from the wrist, a measured dose. Vanselow and von Winterfeldt both looked up, sat rigidly. We’ve heard that noise before. Points of honor in the mess. Their faces said, We hadn’t expected to be diverted this way.

&
nbsp; Erzberger remembered then: he hadn’t made peace with Vanselow.

  After Maiberling had about-turned and taken steps, again exactly measured, toward the far end of the carriage, Erzberger quashed the tears in his left eye and uncovered what he had been writing. Exactly like a school child who, in the face of punishment, pleads the quality of his schoolwork.

  “Considering the discussions [the uncovered page said] leading to the armistice, we might have hoped for conditions that would have brought an end to the suffering of noncombatants, of women and children, at the same time that it assured the enemy full and complete military security.

  “The German people, which has held off a world of enemies for fifty months, will preserve their liberty and their unity despite every kind of violence.

  “A nation of seventy millions of peoples suffers but it does not die.”

  It’s very well to write it. Is it a nation? Where are the men who would have negotiated a victory, with what whore do they now huddle and are they one race with us? Are Maiberling and Erzberger one race? And what is Rosa Luxemburg doing in Berlin? Is Max still Chancellor? Is the Kaiser still darting and resisting beneath the paranoid chandeliers of the Château de la Fraineuse? What are the Swabians thinking and what the East Prussians? Can Paula, Maria, and Gabrielle, from the steps of the bungalow on Wansee, see reflected in the sky the red glow of Bolshevik Berlin? And what pan-German dolt of an officer is this moment loading his service revolver with a bullet for me, a bullet for the piss-pot count?

  THE SUICIDAL HORSE

  The Marshal lowered his face so that the steam from the pea soup stung and cleansed it.

  The Marshal: And where did this happen, my Lord Admiral?