Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  Wemyss: Off the South African coast. Columbine Point is the name of the place.

  Weygand: This would be during your war with the Boers?

  He seemed to intimate: since that was an unfortunate affair perhaps your story is also questionable.

  Rosslyn Wemyss could not prevent himself coughing. He could tell too there was a sudden radiant hostility in General Weygand.

  Wemyss: That’s right. Our war in Africa.

  The Marshal: A horse, you say?

  Wemyss: Yes. A troopship ran upon the rocks at Columbine Point. In foul weather.

  The Marshal: As you said.

  To show he would not repent of delays or repetitions, the admiral took his time lighting, drawing upon a cigar, inspecting its kindled tip.

  Wemyss: It carried a regiment of hussars. At that time I was the humble commander of a little patrol boat. So we were able to work in close abeam … I’m sorry, I don’t know the French term … abeam the troopship. “Abeam” means at right angles.

  The Marshal: The general and I know the term. We have sailed in Brittany.

  Wemyss: Forgive me.

  He took a long and uncontrite savoring of his cigar. They waited for him.

  Wemyss: It was late afternoon but there was still plenty of light. The captain had lit the “ship-aground” night lights fore and aft but the way she was heeled over we knew she wouldn’t last till night. I could see the hussars on deck shooting the horses in case they broke loose from the deck stalls and ran wild. Even before I could send them a line some of the cavalrymen jumped overboard but were carried to the rocks. It was frightful. They were ground up and down the rough edges until they lost consciousness. Then the currents sucked them down. I don’t know if it’s so in France, but we found that soldiers feared sea perils more than going into combat. They lost all their discipline during shipwreck.

  The Marshal sighed, lifting his hand concessively.

  The Marshal: I never sailed to colonial wars. But I imagine you’re right about soldiers. Water is not their medium.

  The general, frowning a little, was not beguiled by this debate on the eccentric terrors of soldiers.

  Weygand: And you saw this horse?

  Wemyss: Yes. It ran free and jumped a railing to get into the sea. It must have been a fine horse to find propulsion on the sloping deck.

  Weygand: They are extraordinary creatures.

  Wemyss: It knew it was bound to die.

  The Marshal: I think they do know. I think they suffer beyond the mere pain of the moment. I think like us they know they are mortal. Artillery horses are very sensitive. And, I suppose, steeplechasers.

  The First Sea Lord did not like a certain gloss in the Marshal’s eye and the too eager way he agreed that hussars feared water and horses foreknew their deaths. It was as if he were setting him up to be undercut by that tight-lipped little hippophile, brother Maxime.

  He found it, however, too late to stop telling the story. To hell with their dragoon disdain, he decided.

  He looked for an instant to his staff. Hope and Marriott neutrally spooning their soup: knowing it wasn’t their place to introduce anecdotes and influence the audience’s acceptance.

  Wemyss: It was obvious. The horse tried to commit suicide. I have never seen such a thing, before or since. It was washed to the rocks and back again at least a dozen times and each time it flung its head quite deliberately at an outcrop, and a dozen times it missed. In the end though it managed what it wanted. I saw its body go loose and its blood coloring the water. It vanished in a little while. An ominous thing, a horse killing itself. You could say, despite the conditions, quite coolly committing suicide.

  The Marshal: Amazing.

  But little General Weygand watched the cheese sideways and absorbed into himself this story of horse suicide as if he were taking account of a libel against one of the family.

  Wemyss thought, ride over the French bastard. Don’t tolerate any Gallic contempt. It might rebound when the naval clauses come up again.

  The Marshal kept on exclaiming.

  The Marshal: Astounding. I have never seen that, not in all my years as a garrison officer of horse artillery.

  Wemyss thought, where do I, tar of tars, derive this margin of fear for French scorn? Perhaps it is a vestige of the years when Scots took politics, wine, music, costume from the French.

  Idly he squeezed a rind of the African orange he had earlier eaten. The acid from its pores stung his thumb. He looked full into the Marshal’s gnostic eyes and at Weygand.

  Weygand: Do you know horses well?

  Wemyss: I keep stables, of course. I am Master of the Dysart Hunt. Like yourself, General, I have ridden steeplechases.

  The Marshal: The general was a champion, by the way.

  Weygand: I have never seen a horse commit suicide. Not in battle or under the whip. If a horse could take it in its head to kill itself, what rider would be safe?

  Wemyss: I can assure you my story is exact, General. Not random table talk.

  Weygand: I don’t mean to suggest … However, suicide is the last act of nonacceptance of pain. It has always seemed to me only man had the arrogance to commit it. Perhaps you would take these observations into consideration when you next tell the story.

  Does he want me to believe horses are all good French Catholics?

  Wemyss punched his napkin with the knuckle of his little finger.

  Wemyss: I am aware of the temperament of the horse, General. But have also had a long time to consider what I saw at Columbine Point.

  The Marshal: And excellently reported it was!

  But there was very little real conversation for the rest of the meal. General Weygand kept totally silent and whenever the Marshal said anything, it had about it the smell of condescension.

  AT THE PARALLEL MEAL

  At the parallel meal von Winterfeldt turned to Erzberger.

  Von Winterfeldt: Herr Erzberger, in what regiment did you do your military service?

  There had been little talk. The count sat across the table emphasizing his feudal superiority by cutting his meat with long sleek motions of his knife, by masticating with high chin and both fists laid delicately on the table, by long-fingered flourishes with his table napkin.

  Feeling no more enmity, Erzberger had been a little amused by all this.

  But at the general’s question his belly went into spasm and he looked up, furious. He thought the inane Prussian was asking, in what regiment did they tell you to ignore a challenge of honor?

  Erzberger: I served in the kitchen-duty office of the 199th Swabian Incompetents. Even so I didn’t belong to the officers’ mess or even to the sergeants’. So I never learnt how to work off my grudges by firing antique pistols at my fellow man in some pine forest at dawn.

  Von Winterfeldt: I think you are mocking me.

  Erzberger stood up in his place.

  Erzberger: I don’t give a damn for shooting a man ritually or being shot in the same manner. If the count wishes to be so shot he should apply to the first workers’ and soldiers’ soviet he finds across the Rhine. I am sure a man of his title and stature will go straight to the head of the line.

  The general also stood up. Holy Mother, now I’ll be expected to fight both of them. The next second, Erzberger noticed the unmilitary distress in the eyes and the lay of the thin face.

  Von Winterfeldt: Sir, you misunderstand me.… I have already approached the count and demanded that he make his apologies to you. I raised the question of military service simply as a means of starting a conversation.

  Erzberger whimpered and covered one eye with his left hand.

  Erzberger: I beg your pardon.

  Von Winterfeldt: These are monstrous circumstances. As you mentioned to the count, the waiters will report our states of mind. Please sit down, sir, and go on with your meal.

  They both sat and noticed that the count continued with his mannered use of knife and fork, chewing lightly so that the set of his jaw would not be thro
wn out of angle. But all at once his shoulders slackened, he laid both hands palms out on the tablecloth.

  Maiberling: This is damn ridiculous. Matthias understands me. Don’t you, Matthias?

  But Matthias was aware of Captain Vanselow, who stared sideways at him with eyes of sly contempt.

  MAXIME’S TRUE BEGETTER

  For a quarter of an hour after luncheon General Weygand rested in his shirt and long drawers. Looking up at the vine-leafed panels of the ceiling of his cabin, he remembered that he didn’t like trains, he never had as a child. The point about trains as experienced by young Maxime Weygand was that they had never carried you, say, from fond parents in Liège to a favorite aunt in Nancy. All his departures in trains had been absolute departures, journeys from one group of child-minders who had taken care to prove to you that you weren’t their baby, to another pair who would, sooner or later, somberly tell you that neither were they your begetters.

  He had become Maxime-nothing-at-all when born to parents whose name he didn’t know in a room over a shop in Brussels. Then he was called Maxime Sagat, after his nice nurse, till a train journey to Marseilles turned him into Maxime de Nimal. He became Maxime Weygand at the end of another train journey, when an Arras accountant of that name recognized him as son. Does that mean you actually fathered me? Yes, the accountant told him, for the purposes of legal and financial documents, that is so.

  Trains and parentage: linked questions.

  Was old Weygand merely coy? Or was he paid an annuity to be legal father? When Maxime was young he yearned to have something as palpable as an accountant for his procreator. He couldn’t think of the other possibilities with any sense of mental safety. Servants whispered about his birth. The legends spun with cyclonic speed and sucked his mind down.

  That he was the son of the Mexican Empress Carlotta by her husband Emperor Maximilian or by lover I, II, III, IV, V, and so on! That he was the son of Mexican Emperor Maximilian and inamorata I, II, III, IV, V! He simply had to read the scandalmongers of the Second Empire to fill in the numerals with names. In late adolescence he concluded that you could not be outraged at the misadventures of royal parents as you would be at the adulteries of someone like old Weygand the accountant. Emperors and their empresses moved in such spheres, a different moral galaxy. He read all the diarists, searching for a dazzling man to call father, or a picturesque lady who might have borne him.

  And it wasn’t such a bad thing, later, for a young dragoon officer to be the possible son of an Austrian archduke or a Belgian princess.

  A young lieutenant of dragoons.

  Until he met the Marshal in Lorraine, his true family had been horses. He had had that truth confirmed by the ferment arising in him when Wemyss told his tall story of the suicidal cavalry mount. It should not matter, absolutely or personally, if an army horse killed itself in 1900 on an African rock. But the general’s impulses told him: the idea of it was as dangerous as Marxism and must not be permitted standing room in the soul.

  Long ago, on visiting day at the bon-ton Lycée de Vanves, parents sat with their sons under cypress trees in the quadrangle. White-bloused mothers under vast summer hats lifted dishes of flan and brandy snaps onto tables and smiled when their sons groaned with lust for the cream. Being parentless, little Maxime de Nimal (later Weygand) was allowed to look at illustrated news magazines and books with engravings laid out on a table in the junior study. He considered himself better off than the whipped-cream gluttons outside. He believed he would discover there, in the fatherless junior study, something to his advantage.

  In an engraving in a copy of Le Cid he turned up one summer afternoon there, he saw a war horse, abstract as a god, fluent in the midst of the affairs of war. It was what one of his schoolmasters would have called the essence of horse and it called to him saying, through my hoofs the earth is possessed. This moment reverberated in him all his life. Ten years old, he told himself, this is my definite inheritance: the horse.

  In the last days of the summer of ’14 he’d been on a horse, leading a squadron of his regiment on reconnaissance in Lorraine, when a stumpy little general drove up, asked for Colonel Weygand, told the colonel to get down from his horse. They tell me you’re a member of my staff. Weygand had dismounted and driven away to the north, the crucial flank.

  It was when he heard that British admiral accuse a horse that he felt a tragic depreciation in the value of his inheritance. Why? Because I have to ride in limousines instead of on horseback? Nonsense. Because I mess about with telegrams instead of riding with dragoons? Because I don’t have time to ride in the Saumur gold cup? Who leads dragoons these days and who rides at Saumur? So exactly what loss had the admiral touched and set pulsing?

  The general muttered it aloud.

  Weygand: What loss has occurred?

  SATURDAY-AFTERNOON SPIN

  That afternoon a message came in for Wemyss. The Prime Minister would remain by the telephone in Downing Street between seven and nine that evening. He would like to hear from the First Sea Lord on the question of revictualling Germany.

  In between memories of Teddy and exotic adulteries on the coasts of the Antipodes, Wemyss had already prepared notes on the matter. His conclusion ran:

  Only the Germans can produce a catastrophic German famine. We are capable of supplying them, but failures within their frontiers, failures ideological, failures psychological, failures of good order, are the only causes which will make the Germans starve.

  The telegram from London invigorated him. He told Marriott so.

  Wemyss: I didn’t know it. But I’d started to think like a castaway.

  Marriott smiled, but with a bent head. He did not know how to deal with the confessions of superiors.

  Wemyss: Between seven and nine?

  Marriott: Sir.

  Wemyss: Presumably at nine the old Adam will get to be too much for L.G. As this bloody train is for me.

  He beat the paneling above his washbasin.

  Wemyss: You can’t live on a train for days. Even if it is stationary. Call my car and Admiral Hope. We’re going for a Saturday-afternoon spin. Ever been to Soissons?

  But they found Soissons smashed. Good bourgeois bricks tumbled into the streets, and men in the perished blue of the army of 1914 picked over the mounds, finding in every heap a handful of something to put in their sacks. What it was they made a handful of the admiral did not want to see. He feared they might be bagging the wrenched-out and incorruptible organs of dreams, or domestic utensils indecently fused in the heat of bombardment.

  He put his hand on a corner of standing masonry and muttered. Something about this war being a triumph for the heavy gunner.

  When he sat down in the car again he found his knees were jumping.

  He thought, I understand my father better.

  IS IT SOMETHING PHYSICAL?

  A quarter to four. The sun falling, peaky, an unimportant witness.

  Over the duckboards von Winterfeldt and, in spite of his sense of demerit, the count carried to Weygand the document entitled Some Observations.… Unsleeping last night and deserted by the count, von Winterfeldt had spent such lonely hours putting an edge on it. He seemed sure it would smooth away some of the harsher terms.

  General Weygand accepted and sat some time over it in 2417D, avoiding their faces, pretending or actually suffering a sort of mental weariness. Having checked it himself and looked up with the mild relief of a schoolteacher who finds neither wrong uses of case or person nor foul words in the essay of an unfavored pupil, he excused himself and went to the Marshal’s saloon to hand the submission to him. As he walked from carriage to carriage he asked himself why he so resented the smell of hope that came from the Prussian general. To be narrow, to be peevish, that isn’t the true Weygand. He remembered it was the British admiral who had put him in this state.

  He resented as well the pipe smoke thick in the Marshal’s saloon. I’ve lived with it too damned long. Why does he never change his brand? Always Old Breton.
Fishermen smoke it.

  Weygand: Their submission, Ferdinand. They’re waiting in the office.

  The Marshal asked for his glasses to be passed.

  Maxime found and passed them.

  Weygand: I think it adds nothing to the matters they’ve already raised.

  The Marshal: Of course not, of course not.

  Back in 2417D Maiberling stood up.

  Maiberling: I don’t suppose they’ll shoot me for wandering about.

  Von Winterfeldt: As you wish.

  Maiberling: I understand your coolness.

  Von Winterfeldt: Very well.

  Maiberling began pacing.

  He thought, I wonder is it something physical? Gall bladder. Prostate. Any of them can make you silly as a duck.

  From the telephone in his saloon the Marshal read von Winterfeldt’s work to Premier Clemenceau in Quai d’Orsay. Then they talked about it and decided it was not a winning document.

  Maiberling in 2417D was aware that rejection buzzed east-west, west-east above their heads. It was the general who would not lift his head, cock his ear.

  Maiberling: I’d say he won’t be back for at least another ten minutes.

  It got very dark in the office car but neither waiting delegate bothered to turn a lamp on. There was a barely heard and somehow feral scraping at the door. They looked, expecting to see an invading squirrel and found Weygand incarnated there.

  Weygand: The issues you raise are excellently put and perfectly understood. But the Allied command can offer you no satisfaction in their regard.

  Maiberling: The end of the discussion.

  He could not help but feel, perversely, vindicated.

  Weygand: It would seem so. A detailed written reply will however be handed to you as soon as possible.

  Von Winterfeldt saluted and left the carriage. His style was of an officer who knows how to lose heavily at cards, who doesn’t lump his despair about the mess but takes his bursting loss back to his billet and, if the code-of-an-officer demands it, punctures it with his service revolver.

  Maiberling had to run to catch up with him on the duck-boards across the glade. For the count had not reacted to Weygand with the general’s instant and manic dignity.