Gossip from the Forest (13 page)

Maiberling:
For Christ's sake, spare me the country wisdom.

Erzberger:
Pitch that revolver.

Maiberling:
No.

Erzberger:
Alfred …

Maiberling:
Listen, I know how these things work. It'll be all right.

For the first time Matthias noticed his gloves were full of freezing sweat. And now that visibility would have been prized, the hooded headlamps lit up nothing but particles of mist.

He thought, we won't get far because this is long traveling, it's Dante's hell and all we can expect is a further circle. And the worst thing is I have no Alighieri stature. I'm just a happy glutton with a head for figures and a little wife.

Like a cardiac spasm he suffered again the terrible bereft sense that there was nothing in his background that justified this journey. Treatises on united Europe, heady speeches in the chamber—they aren't the true Erzberger. At its most high-flown the true Erzberger's mind wasn't far off steak and red wine and Paula's warm and undemanding bed.

A NIGHT'S LOST SLEEP

Wemyss's discontent had broken up under the genial effect of shrimps and some Chablis,
rôti
and some Beaujolais.

Everyone at table seemed to understand that the Marshal and Wemyss were to exchange stories of sea war for stories of land war and that the stories should not be somber or of loaded intent.

Wemyss told the story particularly well of how Lawrence, long melancholy face reduced almost to femininity by white Arab robes, had visited the flagship in Jedda and tripped on his skirts while coming down a companionway to the main deck. The First Sea Lord spent time on the idea of the prophet in midair flying in his finery, army boots and hairy legs bared by the pace of the fall.

At nine o'clock the Marshal demanded dessert and news of the German plenipotentiaries. A telephone call was made from the scullery to Tergnier, where their train waited for them. The train is still waiting here at the Tergnier station, said a transport officer. They have not arrived. It is credible they've been held up by cratered roads.

Though this information did not puncture the Marshal's vivacity at the dining table, he began to speak of his sleep. For him, sleep was as studious a matter as any other.

The Marshal:
I don't think we should wait up for them. We all need our rest. Do you know, Lord Admiral, that I have lost only one night's sleep in the whole of the war.

Wemyss:
I didn't. No, I wish one could say the same.

The Marshal:
Weygand has made it possible for me. I am useless without sleep.

The First Sea Lord knew what dutiful question must be asked.

Wemyss:
And might I ask what kept you from your bed the night you speak of?

The Marshal and Weygand looked at each other, their eyes mutually softened. For a second Wemyss felt appalled by the intimacy of the two Frenchmen. A mouthful of sorbet wafted the shock away.

The Marshal:
It was more than four years ago. During our offensive on the Marne.

Weygand:
One could never forget. The night of September 10, 1914.

The Marshal:
Thank you, General. I transferred a colonial division from my right flank to my left. It took longer than I thought and when it got into action with its new corps, it captured the town of Fère-Champenoise. A pleasant little town it used to be. Its little
mairie
was like something out of a toy village.… That was already midnight, when we got into Fère-Champenoise. We were able to settle down in a room on the first floor of the town hall. On mattresses. No covers. It was a very cold night and after
that
summer we were still wearing our lightweight uniforms. So we found it very cold. People came and went on the stairs—you see the corps commander had set up his HQ in the place. I don't know if he liked having his superior officer on the premises. We were just dozing off about one o'clock when someone blundered in to tell me I'd been made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. I said, what do you think I care about that at this hour of the morning?

Maxime Weygand's eyes glistened with his special knowledge of the event.

The Marshal:
So we dozed a little, for an hour or so, and then an officer came in with a present of cigars from Marshal Joffre. I said, what, does the Marshal think I've had a baby? The same man had blankets. A rarity. The army had thrown their blankets away that summer. So we sat up the rest of the night wrapped in the blankets, smoking cigars, and people continued to come and go on the stairs. The least I could do was ask them if the bridges over the Marne were clear and intact. Within an hour all communications were being brought to us. Our bedroom became army group HQ.

Without any noise, Weygand again laughed. Though a secretive man, he showed nakedly now his gratitude for that oddly shared night in the war's first autumn.

The Marshal:
Will they be here before dawn? Who knows? I intend to go to bed at the usual time.

A TRUMPET AND FACES

As they went forward a trumpeter jumped on to the running board and hooked his left arm into the driver's compartment. What he blew on the trumpet was meant to be the cease-fire, but the shattered road jolted him so much that it sounded like a student rampaging on Walpurgis Eve with a hunting horn.

Then Erzberger saw German soldiers crowding in on the car. At first he thought they were mobbing it, but that was only the narrowness of the road. They were in fact lining the way. They seemed silent. Erzberger thought he saw a boy, raising his hand to wave them well, fazed out of it by the anonymity of the peacemakers inside the vehicle. In the refracted light all the helmets seemed too big for all the heads. All the heads therefore seemed under sentence. Like faces in a Gothic propaganda poster—one devised by someone clever on the other side, and dropped on our lines.

Erzberger:
What's wrong with them?

They should have been laughing at the frantic trumpeter. Their lack of sane laughter turned Matthias's heart cold. He might have been traveling his own funeral route.

Then he was aware of a newcomer's horror in the count and thought, of course he's never been here before. And never seen such faces.

Erzberger:
You were never invited?

Maiberling:
Not exactly. I didn't want to come.

Matthias wanted to say, they're as innocent as Inga, some of these men. But he didn't want to start the count on that line again.

The trumpeter blew tar-ant-ah and then the notes slewed.

Maiberling:
Boys home on leave, twenty-one-year-olds, twenty-two, twenty-three. They began to look so knowing. I wasn't so knowing. So I never came.

Erzberger:
Yes. Knowing. That's the word.

He remembered his nephew whom he'd gone to look at in Pankow military asylum. Private Pieter Erzberger, son of a postman, split eardrums, split nerve ends. From an artfully orchestrated artillery barrage at Arras. Pieter Erzberger and fifty other men, filing into a dugout, lifted by a great current of blast and laid down in crooked positions. Pieter stayed some hours amongst the forced, scorched smiles of his blast-dead colleagues. The shelling passed over and returned, over and back yet again. When fetched by stretcher-bearers Pieter Erzberger had nothing to say, an attitude he had now maintained for three months. And though his eyes stood wide open like a gibbon's, what they swelled with was knowledge. A glut of knowledge had seized up the mechanisms of his throat.

Erzberger:
Yes. Knowing.

ARRIVING

Maiberling:
They're gone.

The soldiers had vanished.

Maiberling:
What now?

His knees jumped. The car bounced and the inane bugle call went thinly ahead.

Matthias felt exaltation like static electricity in his skull and hands.

Erzberger:
I can't believe we're arriving.

Maiberling:
No man's land?

The words scratched up the count's clay-dry throat. Matthias could tell he got no joy from arriving amongst the armed millions of the Germanophobes.

Erzberger:
But think, Alfred. You're safe now from all those German officers.

He counted to seven and there they were: a convergence of French soldiers. Holding their rifles slackly, by the muzzles; as had the old clerk defending the records in the Foreign Office.

Erzberger's door was opened and torchlight took him full in the face; then Maiberling. A very young French officer held the torch.

Officer: Les plénipotentiaires Allemands?
The German plenipotentiaries?

Erzberger: Oui
Yes.

Officer:
Trumpeter! Go back.

He made broad gestures with his free arm.

Officer:
Back! Back to your lines!

The trumpeter made a wide passage round the outskirts of the torchlight. He began to shamble through the mud in Germany's direction. A second or two and he couldn't be seen, but he blew the cease-fire all the way back, in case he caused the war to begin again in that sector.

Helmet off, the French officer got in with Erzberger and the count. He pulled down a jump-seat and sat forward. He had a flat, seducer's mustache. One could well suspect it had been drawn on the callow face for a comic purpose with blackened cork or boot polish.

Erzberger noticed that a French bugler had mounted the running board in front. Meanwhile the boy with the theatrical mustache had been joined by another officer, who might have been as old as twenty-five. This one also pulled down one of the retractable seats and spoke to Matthias and the count in rehearsed German.

Officer:
I am Captain Huillier, commanding the 171st Infantry Regiment. Please tell your driver to go on, following the signposts marked La Capelle.

Erzberger passed on these directions.

The vehicle pitched and yawed and the two French officers smiled at each other and the Germans on account of its wild movement. At every jolt, it seemed to Erzberger, the concussion of the accident outside Spa revived in small ways in his body.

Officer:
An evil road. Many mines.

The bugler blew, taking the shocks, bending at the knees. A little jockey of a man.

Erzberger thought, perhaps this will become a simple journey, more direct now that we have come into the well-organized half of Europe. But it was a foolish hope.

He read the road signs. They were in Gothic script: this stretch of France had been German for four years and had only last week ceased to be so. Where the mist frayed Erzberger saw a dressing station and a priest in surplice and purple stole burying a poilu. It seemed improbable that the dying could not hold on in a cease-fire, could not bide a truce.

The road rose out of a cutting and was all at once strewn with bricks, looking soft in the rain, like crumbled bread.

Someone had painted an Art Nouveau sign in cursive Roman script and stuck it, enhanced with an asterisk, in rubble.
La Capelle
, it said.

Poilus crossed in front of the headlights without adverting to the Kaiser's eagles on the car hoods, the imperial guidons in the flag-holders.

Matthias saw electric light in an
estaminet
on the left and two slim women dancing beneath it amongst the soldiers. They were only girls, and Matthias felt a minor reverberation of concern for them. In an armistice they would suffer mounting by hundreds of poilus. Each pounding in the point: here I am, alive, and no one's ever going to take aim at me again.

Officer:
Here! Here!

They were in a square, and a pocked municipal building of the Second Empire stood shuttered in front of them. It was still labeled
Kaiserliche Kreiskommandantur
in studious German script. Clusters of French flags hung sodden from its balconies.

All three vehicles nosed in toward the municipal building and the officer told Erzberger to get out.

The German party stood on the muddy cobbles. Von Winterfeldt moved from Vanselow to Maiberling to Erzberger, speaking softly.

Von Winterfeldt:
Pardon my saying. We must not look confused or lose our dignity.

Maiberling:
Thank you. Very valuable.

Von Winterfeldt:
If there's anything the French respect in us its our composure.

Maiberling:
Jesus!

Von Winterfeldt:
Leave it to me to explain why we're late.

A staff officer strolled down the steps of the building marked
Kreiskommandantur
.

His face and limp were thoroughbred. He moved with the aristocratic boredom that either angered Matthias or rendered him fearful. There is no doubt, thought Erzberger, this man has been sent to meet us and be up to our weight. Where have you vanished, pleasant Captain Huillier and your boy-subaltern?

Von Winterfeldt moved forward to the man and made a salute. He introduced himself and began to speak volubly in French. Erzberger thought, he's really enjoying himself, they'll begin discussing vintages very soon.

But the staff officer's eyebrows began to rise in the light from the vehicles. The subtlest arrogance invaded his face.

Staff Officer:
There is no need for any of you to speak our language. I have made arrangements for you to speak your own and to be understood.

He implied, of course, that he was denying them access to a special tongue. Von Winterfeldt became rigid, did not move, might never move again. Just to show that he had sangfroid in the face of unreasonable prejudice.

Staff Officer:
Herr Erzberger.

In fact he had addressed Count Maiberling.

Erzberger:
I am Herr Erzberger.

Staff Officer:
Major Bourbon-Busset. I am to take you to the meeting-place.

Erzberger:
Where exactly …?

Bourbon-Busset:
I am not permitted to say. There are many reasons. Your safety is one. And in the matter of safety … your party cannot travel farther in German imperial automobiles. They will be kept here in the transport pool. The drivers will be fed and looked after and you will pick them up on your return journey. You are welcome to dry yourself at the fire inside while we wait for the French vehicles.