Gossip from the Forest (10 page)

Marriott:
There's a heating device, sir.

Bending, he turned a knob.

Wemyss:
We're moving.

Hope:
Indeed.

Wemyss sneaked a final look at the old women on quai three. They did not seem even to notice the fluently departing armistice train.

As well as supplying heat, Marriott had taken the trouble to turn on the admiral's reading lamp. They all sat down—Marriott on the bed, notebook in his hand, an obeisant distance from the dress shirt. Hope, in shirtsleeves, took from his brief case two dossiers and put them on Lord Wemyss's desk. Wemyss turned to Marriott.

Wemyss:
These are the reports of Political Section. Enlightening, one would hope. Concerning our two colleagues in the next carriage. You read, George.

Hope pulled his chair in close to the desk so that he was shoulder to shoulder with Wemyss. For concentration's sake the First Sea Lord let his monocle dangle and jutted his face toward the molded ceiling.

Hope:
The Marshal first. “Foch, Ferdinand, born Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrenées, 2nd October, 1851, son of a senior provincial civil servant.…”

Wemyss:
Sixty-seven years old at the moment.

Hope:
Indeed. “Jesuit-educated. Enlisted infantry 1870, saw no service. Entered École Polytechnique at Nancy, 1871, where Germans still in occupation. The Marshal affected as much as any Frenchman by these memories of defeat and occupation. Commissioned, horse artillery, 1873. Attended cavalry school. Promoted captain, age 26. Spent next ten years—apart from one year as student École de Guerre—rising to rank of major in a succession of horse-artillery regiments. Was well known in army circles as a contributor to journals of military science. His teachings stressed morale as the great strategic and tactical determinant in warfare.…”

Wemyss:
Can you skim, George?

Hope:
I think so, sir.

Wemyss:
Then skim like a good chap. It's the
insights
we want. Where are we?

Marriott tried to supply the geographic answer by peering out the hazed window at a poorly lit multiple-word sign on the station they came slewing through. The too-many syllables swiped him across the eyes. He could not catch them.

Hope:
“Colonel 1895 … professorship École Supérieure de Guerre … director of same 1905. Appointment due to M. Clemenceau, unexpected.” Here's an interesting item. “While a teaching military scientist, Foch met and greatly influenced Sir Henry Wilson, commandant Camberley and later Director of Operations, War Office. Sir Henry a devout Francophile. On becoming Director of Operations, War Office, 1911, Sir Henry's task was drawing up mobilization plans. His work mirrored the conviction which he and Foch fraternally shared: that in the coming conflict the British should operate as the French left flank facing Germany. Through Sir Henry and others, the Marshal has had a greater influence on the British conduct of this war than any other French soldier.…”

Wemyss:
I've seen the two of them clowning in the anterooms in Versailles.
Double-Vay
, the Marshal calls him. Amazing.

Hope:
“Appointed general commanding XXth Corps, Nancy, 1913. Led this formation impetuously but with some skill, August 1914.… Commander IXth Army on Marne at end of month. Contribution crucial in turning German flank … 1915, general assisting Marshal Joffre … canny use of reserves … removed from post, December 1916, after failure Somme offensive …” Sorry, Rosy, we'll get there.… “Planning job … then chief of general staff … German breakthrough, March this year, appointed generalissimo Allied Forces, in view his vim and aggressiveness, and signs of nervous instability, Haig and Pétain.”

Wemyss:
Vim and aggressiveness …

Hope:
Ends, sir, with a brief analysis. “In accordance with his temperament, the Marshal sees war as a moral and mystical exercise. In some ways too his ideas of the meaning of the war are based on the French defeat by the Prussians in 1870. The present war has been, as it were, a replayed tournament. He is therefore either ignorant or contemptuous of the part sea power has had in this war as also in the wars of Napoleon, about whom he is a supposed expert. Attached is a bibliography.…”

Wemyss:
Don't worry about the bibliography. It's too late for reference libraries.

WEMYSS REMEMBERS FEISAL

He got up from the desk and began roving the cabin.

Wemyss:
Strange man. Strange man.

His fallen monocle bounced from his chest.

Hope:
Indeed.

Turning at the door he saw Marriott sitting on the
couchette
, bland, solemn. A
London Illustrated News
staff artist's impression of a British heavy-cruiser commander who has just given the order to ram. He thought, can we really be so simple, so much to a formula? What does he do with his wife, this Marriott? Has he got girls in ports? Or boys? Can he begin to deal with weird men like Foch?

No, no, Wemyss muttered. Identify the true enemy. Why be captious about poor Marriott? Who turned your heater on.

The one you're uneasy about is the Marshal.

Wemyss had suffered like moments of threat when faced with Emir Feisal last year. A contemptuous subtlety in deep Hamitic eyes. As if they only let us rule them, make treaties over their heads, in consolation for our own stupor.

That Lawrence, whom Wemyss had once carried on his flagship in the Gulf of Arabia, certainly made no bones about it: the Arabs had all the
inner
answers, according to Lawrence. Lawrence himself a weird man with inner answers!

Now Foch, the mad Arab of the Western War.

Wemyss:
Saying he won't put the naval terms to them for fun … it isn't good enough.

Hope:
It doesn't give us any proper guarantees.

Wemyss:
How to corner the cocky old bastard!

For he was aware of failing to corner him that afternoon.

Hope waited long enough to be sure Wemyss wanted him to make suggestions. Unimpeachable George Hope. Little private income—some small estate near Devizes. And even in far British legations and wild caliphates, faithful to his wife's honor, calmly so, in the name of his calm Anglican God. That was real virtue. Not all the fiery sword stuff of fetid little Frenchmen.

Hope:
I should imagine we introduce the subject without warning. Perhaps when the laughter dies down from one of his stories. He's a raconteur. Especially in his own eyes.

Wemyss:
There's an element of spite to him. The hardest thing has always been to get him to discuss the thing on its merits.

Hope:
I suggest we don't move till he
has
. Four of us. In the uniform of another country's navy. Refusing to budge.

The First Sea Lord turned absently to Marriott, who rushed to contribute.

Marriott:
If he won't listen. Yes sir.

Wemyss:
Agreed then. We don't leave the office car …

Marriott:
2417D, sir.

Wemyss:
Quite.

Hope seemed to find the captain's gift for numbers engaging, and explained it with a smile.

Hope:
Marriott is a ciphers man, sir.

Marriott:
For my sins, sir.

If you have any, Wemyss wanted to say.

Wemyss:
We must be clear what we want. We need some sign of what he means to do should the Germans balk about their navy. It isn't that we need his support in any absolute sense.

Hope:
Indeed.

They all felt more robust now, after suspecting all afternoon that the Marshal might artfully be about to downgrade them.

And Hope and Marriott thought, Lord Wemyss is an enlightened consulter of aides, a modern and liberal lord of sea.

And Wemyss thought, this is what makes me a tolerable commander. No Poseidon, me. No great whale. It is impossible that I should ever blaze and burn out amongst clouds of mad cordite like, to name the most preposterous case, Horatio Nelson. I am First Sea Lord because First Sea Lord Jellicoe hoarded for his own decision such matters as the caliber of armament to be mounted on trawlers, wattage of Aldis lamps on mine sweepers. Disappearing into his own In tray, J. R. Jellicoe had no time to tool a strategy. The cry from the Navy Board and even from Downing Street was, find someone who will deputize.

Rosy Wemyss had begun lobbying only after his name had been pushed forward. And lobbying hadn't been hard.

For he had no enemies.

Now, in the truce train, he spoke to his flattered deputies.

Wemyss:
We must nearly be there. Please, George, give us the end of the Weygand dossier.

ALL THE KAISER'S SOLDIERS

It seemed all the Kaiser's soldiers were already coming home eastward on the country roads of Belgium. Through the distorting window Erzberger saw an occasional gaping mouth aimed at him. What, going west? the mute mouths said. So late in the day?

Sometimes ambulances appeared head-on, moving a little faster than the soldiers. They beeped for right of passage. I'm wounded too, Maiberling would mutter inside his blanket. Beneath the privacy of his skull, Erzberger made the same claim. He wanted to let down the window and be sick in the mud. But that act, he felt crazily sure, was politically dangerous. It would outrage the mass to see Minister-of-State-without-Portfolio Erzberger sick on their familiar mud.

Light went early, and against the unscheduled clouds of men they were lucky to make fifteen kilometers an hour.

IN THE CAR SHARED BY THE GENERAL AND VANSELOW

In the car shared by the general and Vanselow, von Winterfeldt read typed instructions by the light of a hand torch. Vanselow could only presume they were documents supplied by Groener, and wished he himself had so many memoranda to steer by. He felt embarrassed to open his own attaché case, in case the general noticed how sparse the directives were inside it, how thin the dossiers labeled
Defense and River Craft, Destroyer Flotillas, Grand Seas Fleet, U-Boats
. He sweated inside his overcoat. I am too naïve a man to be making this journey. Oh yes, all the admirals have told me my memory is good—on that account, taken me into palaces and embassies. I've been that species of aide who stands by the potted plants and doesn't drink more than the one measure of spirits all evening. If I'd stood there a thousand years no brilliant woman would have spoken to me. Nor could I have controlled my cowardice if she had. Twice I have dined with the Emperor and the imperial cabinet and kept hysterically mute except when Admiral Müller once called on me to agree to some half-whimsical truism he uttered about the burdens of junior officers. Not for a moment did getting spoken to at that high table ease my mad suspicion that those men did not breathe the same air as the rest of us. And where is this table we're traveling to at the moment? And what awesome men will be sitting there? For midget Vanselow to face? The burdens of junior officers …

I am too naïve a man to be making this journey.

Meanwhile the general's eyes were stinging and he wanted to stop reading but was prevented by the imponderable risk that Vanselow might start talking.

While he shuffled the pages he thought of Erzberger. Erzberger's vanity all that morning in the Grand Hôtel Britannique.
It is not my war, I renounced it long ago, none the less I go to end it for you
. The south German and Catholic fulsomeness of fat-man Erzberger rankled strongly with the general.
I buy the dangers, sight unseen, but only if it be enacted that I am the moral primate of all the travelers
.

Memoranda? The general would like to draft a memorandum.

For the attention of Herr Staatsminister Erzberger. It might be of use to Herr Erzberger to know that General von Winterfeldt grew ambiguous about this war not as late as 1916 but even in the first days of August 1914. And that, for the very good reason that the battleline ran down the middle of his marriage bed. When, eleven years ago, the general, then a colonel, asked his military superior for permission to marry a delicious Frenchwoman aged thirty-five years, he was advised to marry a Jewess or a Matabele rather than. At brigade, divisional, and even corps level he was pointed out as the officer who had married incautiously. If he had had six fingers on one hand it would have been hard for him to have attracted a higher notoriety. Also, he and his Frenchwoman were frequently visited, surveyed, and questioned by men from the Prussian War Office. I do not put it any higher than that at the start of the war he was ambiguous, and I mean by that term that he saw the event as a necessary visitation and a means to suppress quickly the hubris of British statesmen and French generals, excrescences who had nothing to do with the soft thing he held in bed. Then why did the soft thing enter a sanitarium in 1915, attack him with a knife in the new year and subside into paleness and mandragora in an expensive institution in Reinickendorf? That aside, Herr Erzberger should know that he is not the only one who travels this evening by his own consent and favor and because he owes little to the individuals who asked him to make the trip.

He had special knowledge of France and must be permitted to make use of it. Or did Erzberger want to corner
that
specialty as well?

DRINKS IN 2417D

They went along to 2417D brushed, shaven, their intentions locked in place. Hope, Marriott, Bagot took scotch in small sips and stood about, vigilant.

The carriage was set up like a board room. The dining table in the center of the dining compartment had become a board table—blotters had been put down instead of place mats. The Marshal waited by a corner table on which two unconnected telephone handsets stood. Above his head was a thermometer to aid the wine waiter in his decisions on when the claret should be opened.

There were small tables set in other corners for secretaries, aides, interpreters. And even a few through the door into the serving pantry. This evening they served as places to lay aside your barely sipped liquor.