—You must have been on a bender for this one.
Peter did his best to look sheepish and charming.
The real test, he knew, would come at the first French checkpoint. The group was to leave from a free Belgian port and arrive at Le Havre, making an end run around the trenches and sailing under a clean bill of health from the German submarines. Peter thought the photo would not pass the French as easily as it had done the Germans. The European war had come about because the Germans were too industrious to be observant while the French were too observant to do anything, and two such radically opposed temperaments could not exist side by side on the same map. But the first and only Frenchman to inspect his credentials before whisking him on to Paris merely lifted one eyebrow at the ridiculous likeness.
—Old photo?
The strain of the journey had worn away Peter’s resistance.
—Actually, sir, it isn’t me.
The poilu affected a dry laugh, as if to say, “We French may be getting the shit kicked out of us, but no one can say we don’t like a good joke.” In this way, Peter Kinder, become Schreck, made his way through the world conflict to a besieged Paris, completing the first step in his transformation to Theo Langerson, Dutch war correspondent.
The Parisian authorities issued him a cold-water flat and kept him in close check. They required him to report each morning at ten to a makeshift International News chamber, to have his name marked off a roster, and to stay for an optional official briefing on the hostilities to date. His first such session featured a sanitation worker who, in Gallieni’s already legendary defense of Paris, had had a three-inch lead pipe blown through his brain, entering at the frontal and exiting at the parietal lobes.
The briefing covered how the fellow had undergone massive personality changes and claimed to have come from another time. The French authorities gave the press carte blanche to interview the man, providing, of course, their accounts passed the usual wartime censors. At this first briefing, Peter realized that, even if he were interested in covering the war, the official French news conferences would be of no help.
He tried to see the sights of Paris, but gave it up after only two hours when all the famous structures began to resemble Les Invalides. The city had been prettier from a distance, in the rotogravure. He did not feel at home in this city of the homeless, largely because, though transient, he was there not as a person who could not find his turf, but as one who took to each new climate too easily. In Paris, one really had not to belong to belong.
He left his flat each morning with just enough time to reach the press parole board at ten. He skipped the ensuing briefing, taking off immediately for no place in particular. For the deal with Theo never stipulated that Peter take seriously his war reportage. Their arrangement was equally convenient: both saved the other’s skin. Theo could not bargain for much more. Yet Peter, grateful for his delivery from the two rotund German agents, tried to satisfy the requests made of him by the pact—from what he could remember, to keep eyes and ears open, send back numbers and geography, and stay out of trouble with authorities.
Theo had explained to him that most reporting consists of elaborating on extremely small quantities of facts. A good journalist could get by with almost none at all. Theo called it “restoring the context,” and pointed out that the public liked a vivid description of an artillery barrage more than statistics and kilometers. Who knew how long a kilometer was in wartime anyway? “Gallant stand” and “wavering defense” cut a better figure with the fellow spending his news guilder than “position x, position y, position z.”
And so, from a few offhand observations Peter picked up and forwarded in his first weeks’ walking around Paris—observations running from “Men in shirtsleeves try to use opera glasses to spot the front from upper windows” to “My concierge found a shell fragment on a picnic”—the real Theo, living a happy life among cigars and the widow’s fat folds, put together an editorial called “The Boulevards Under Siege.” The title took longer than the copy itself, which he created by bringing the bones Peter pitched him into line with a few facts from a single-volume encyclopedia.
The article caused a sensation, boosting the paper’s reputation a head above the other Maastricht regulars, who relied on dry strengths and maneuverings plagiarized from one another. A negligible government agency cited the article as “outstanding in bringing the war home to the Dutch people,” although the citation did not go on to explain why such an activity was commendable.
Peter’s humble war correspondence, rising no higher than “Generalissimo Joffre announced publicly today that the French are winning,” would have trickled out altogether after a few weeks if it weren’t for a perversity: he adored the strange sensation of posting a letter to himself. To address an envelope with his name, care of the widow’s shop, gave him the exquisite pleasure of receiving inside word from the front, although in his role of sender, he knew the word to be worthless. He felt he was the first to communicate from beyond the grave, or from one time to another. His propriety unhinged each time he posted correspondence to himself, and the novelty of standing detached from his old self refused to diminish.
The wartime authorities of Paris, however, soon intervened. One day, not six weeks after his arrival, Peter was summoned for a hearing before the military censors.
—Mr. Langerson, it has not escaped the attention of our copy readers that the stories—and I use the term literally—you send back to your home country are the briefest, most sporadic, and least accurate of any foreign editor in the city. Is it your paper’s policy, Mr. Langerson, to turn the gravest calamity in all history into a bowl of steamed tripe to serve up over breakfast?
—Over breakfast, sir?
—Dinner, then, if you will. I assumed that your paper, of which I am blissfully unaware, has no afternoon edition.
—No afternoon edition, sir.
—Well then, my friend, we understand one another. Now ordinarily we would not interfere; we allow anything to pass not libelous or injurious to our cause. Let the public hang its sources, is our motto. But in your case, it smacks of suspicion to have a foreigner nosing about Paris, never once visiting the front he is supposed to be covering, sending abroad infrequent, speculative notes not fit for the sports pages.
—Not fit . . . ? I’m new to this sort of reporting, sir. I used to do . . . the other sort of reporting, you understand? I mean, our first war fellow was killed, poor sap, at Liège. Bloody mess up there, sir, as I’m sure you’re aware. Our second went down in Alsace. We had two gents die with the Germans from eating canned brats. Finally, I was the only one left. I used to do the “Society Chat” column. You know: who’s poking whom, and who cares. I just can’t seem to adjust to this whole . . . world conflict business, sir.
—Quite. You understand our position, however. In wartime, everyone’s conduct, particularly our guests of the state, must be beyond suspicion. Or they are deported or tried as spies. The Germans shoot civilians, you know.
—Thank you, sir. I’m sorry, sir.
Peter used these two phrases instinctively when in trouble, as his mother had always drilled into him that good manners can save a man’s life. He suppressed “much obliged,” the third in the trilogy, only through a mighty effort of will.
—That’s all, Mr. Langerson. And if you are looking for the war . . .
The chief examiner pointed a finger northeast. Peter left the room and building heading in that direction, so as not to draw further suspicion. It did not take a great leap of insight to see that the revelation that he worked under an assumed name and sent his copy to a tobacco shop would not bode well at a spy trial. He had, it seemed, to creep still closer to the front to escape it.
His copy increased and improved suddenly and considerably, for one with only a fifth-grade education. Pushing deeper into the war zone under armed escort, he discovered a thrill in being there as a noncombatant. He took a voyeur’s, even a collector’s, pleasure in knowing the sold
iers’ routines without having to follow them himself. He was allowed to reconnoiter only on those days when a visible lull hung over the lines, and his presence always noticeably moved the troops. They swelled and mugged for his benefit, competed for his attention, reporting a garden variety of acts of valor that, albeit small, had, each assured him, radically altered the war.
As he and his notebook traveled about the lines, Peter could not at first adjust to being the center of attention. He’d always played the Lümmel, and the respect of all these earnest men left him with the overwhelming urge to tell, with visual accompaniment, the joke about the fellow whose bowels wouldn’t move. But the slightest donnybrook and he was hung for espionage—the only draftable German behind French lines. To compensate for the old nihilistic urge, he grew even more formal, reserved, rigid. This, in turn, led the common poilu to lend more authority to his act, and they badgered him all the harder with personal histories.
Although not school-bred, Peter possessed enough native intelligence to see that his new dispatches, although vastly improved in range and detail, were no more accurate than his old reports concerning his concierge’s inside information about a pact with Italy. First, he only saw those areas not directly involved in conflict. He had never witnessed, even from the safety of a nearby hill, the actual mechanics of slaughter. So long as the French government controlled his movements, he could not hope to look directly at the war but only at its by-product—the reflection of an eclipse in a pinhole shadow box.
Second, the troops obviously altered their behavior for his benefit. On seeing him, they went from shelled silence to singing the Sambre et Meuse. From grumbling about meat-maggots, they rallied to brag about the battering of the Boches in the last encounter. Peter wondered about the nature of the camps in his absence, but dismissed the question as meaningless. He could not report on what he did not know. He could know only what he saw firsthand. Yet his firsthand presence forever altered the observed.
When he had used Paris simply to stay out of the service, Peter had felt no qualms about the quality of his military reports, doing no more or less than needed to preserve his adopted identity. But compelled by the authorities, for form’s sake, to draw closer to his subject matter, he began trying to close in on it. Over several visits to the lines, he befriended a frequent escort, a Breton sergeant, in the hopes of finding some hard data less suspect than his subjective interviews with cooks, MPs, and carbine grist not yet knocked out of their cran and élan vital. One day, he asked the sergeant casually:
—Tell me about the war: what drives it? How will it fall out? I know so little.
With a curious look and an ironic salute, the sergeant packed him into an unreliable staff car and assaulted the top of a nearby hill. The two left the auto and stood overlooking the lowlands, teeming with the unknowable movements of the hive. The sergeant stood at attention, and with almost Germanic, paradelike precision, extended his arm and index finger, describing the grandiose arc of a porcelain music-box ballerina, calling out:
—The Germans came down on us in a large, circular scythe. To our far left, nearest the Channel, came Kluck and their First Army. He was to set the pace, being the circumference of the wheel. Next in, Bülow had the Second. Then came Hausen with the Third. They went through Belgium like that. Some titled gents headed up the Fourth and Fifth: the Duke of Württemberg and the Crown Prince, Frederick Wilhelm. Now facing them are our men: to the left, the Fifth, under Lanrezac, the Fourth under . . .
The text had already been printed, bound, reviewed, and only awaited events to catch up before being shipped to bookstores everywhere. Peter stopped the sergeant just before he reached the pitched battle marking the end of the war and the final cleansing of the world.
—Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, but do all these names belong to people? These fellows are the war?
—Of course not, sir. Patience, and give me a chance. I’m getting to the matter of the British, and the affair in the East. A great disappointment to us, the Russian steamroller. Then there’s the small countries in the Balkans, but I’m not too up on that.
—So Kluck plus Bülow divided by Lanrezac equals all those men back at hospital who want me to know that they didn’t scream when the mine blew off their big toe? That’s what I’m to write home to my paper?
—Sir?
The sergeant gave Peter the fossil stare he reserved for cutting off a draftee’s obtuseness. He attempted comprehension, rallied, attacked, wavered, and at last retreated from the discussion in a rout.
—Don’t the Dutch enjoy reading about commanders? I’m not a politician, and it’s a little late to be bothering about causes at this date, sir.
Insulted, the sergeant returned gruffly to the auto. On the way back to Paris, he declined to answer questions, saying only that there wouldn’t be any Germans on French soil if officers could fight rather than give tours.
Peter wrote to the original Theo for pointers on improving his journalism. He wrote delicately, to keep from alarming the French censors:
Dear Peter, I hope that as my managing editor you enjoyed my last reports from this side of the war. The French are more than helpful with material, yet I think I can improve my work. I want to write the story of the real war—I mean the father’s, wife’s, son’s war, the small businessman’s war. Can you give me any help? Any word an old paper-hound like yourself could give would be gold to me. Theo.
The old Theo, alarmed by the recent dramatic improvement in Peter’s articles, grew terrified at this letter. Everything had been so perfect; by sending a proxy to the front, he’d escaped a shrewish family and publisher, and learned more about cigars than he thought possible. Editing was easier than ever; studying the rival papers, he could transform Peter’s scraps into eyewitness accounts that involved all Maastricht. A good feature took only half an afternoon.
But when the dispatches began including facts, Theo worried that Peter, by enlisting another’s aid, had jeopardized the whole system. Confused by the euphemistic tone of the note, the oversubtle Theo jumped to the conclusion that Peter was blackmailing him: the small businessman’s war; every word being gold. Obviously, Peter had gotten a cushy protection, and no longer needed him. The veiled threat: pay up, or I’ll tell all. Panicked, he did not know whether to write the new Theo or make out a will for the old one. The widow was no help:
—Let the scamp try thing one and I’ll go to the front and teach him how to cover the war.
The old Theo had been content to let nations reach their moment of crisis while he sat on the neutral sidelines editing observations. But the belligerents came to claim their own, it seemed. His life as a small shopkeeper lay ruined. The little bell on the shop door, formerly filling him with the delight of potential sale, now made him flinch and turn his face involuntarily. The bell ringer—his publisher, the widow’s husband’s corpse, his own wife perhaps, Joffre, or the Goblin King—was after him.
All Holland knew that Germany, having drawn Britain into the war by violating Belgium and Luxembourg, stood to lose nothing but two days in swallowing up the Netherlands. But these worries did not alter the armchair editor’s feelings of having been singled out for persecution. He would rather have the war come to him than have to go to it. He wrote to Peter: “Stuff your war and your stories. You can’t threaten me.” Peter, too confused by this to be hurt, thought he was ready, with some spelling help from a censor who had studied Dutch at the École Normale, to send his articles directly to the paper in Maastricht.
Hearing no response from his double at the front, Theo felt more than ever that the jig was up. For months he refused to leave the shop, even to take the air. When customers entered, he ducked behind the counter and called out, “Who is it?” in a high, squeaky voice. He dreamed of assignments in New York or Khartoum, but he had no identity papers. Theo Langerson was a minor celebrity for his Paris by-lines; Peter Schreck was wanted for extradition. And with fifty thousand names a day being erased, aliases were at a premium.
Reporting directly to the paper, Peter grew more aware than ever of the injustice his stories did his readers and the events. He wrote increasingly cavalierly about the facts of fighting, making them up or ignoring them entirely. Had the French and Germans accumulated the territorial gains he claimed, they would have been in Moscow and Tulsa, respectively. Had his casualty and ammunition counts been right, the war would long ago have trickled down to two fishmongers slapping each other with carp yanked from the Somme.
Yet he caught the effect of an artillery barrage: “Put your ear to the engine block while your neighbor cranks for twelve hours.” In short, halting sentences, he described the first, flimsy flying machines a hundred feet above the lines, how half the men clapped their hands in rapture, while half, terrified, trained their guns on the unknown. Peter was the first to suggest in print that both sides use insignia, so troops would know which side strafed them.
He relied more and more heavily on direct quotes. One foot soldier confided: “The best thing about mass formation is that you stop worrying about your smell.” Another said: “It’s all waiting; first I wait for something to happen, then I wait for it to end, then I wait for an explanation, but that passes quickly. Now I wait to be hit, which seems the real comfort. Everything’s been dealt; I’m just waiting to see the down cards.”
Gradually, nothing he wrote seemed to the point except these direct quotations. He especially liked second-hand quotes: “I overheard Captain M. saying . . .” He trusted these more than lines composed for his benefit. In daydreams, he built a mechanical eavesdropper that allowed him to quote at a distance those words that would never have been said in his presence. Such a machine would turn each person into his own journalist, and everyone would be the subject of an article.
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