Gossip from the Forest (25 page)

The chef begged the messieurs' pardons, for none of the staff were actually permitted to speak to Their Excellencies. He even spoke in slow, simple French: an ultimate kindness. Then he held out a special 5:00
A.M.
edition of
Le Matin
. How he had got it he didn't say, someone must have rushed a carload from Paris to Compiègne and spread them around the forest, even to the kitchen staff in the German train. Apologetically radiant, the chef indicated the headline:
THE KAISER ABDICATES
.

Erzberger:
May I read it?

The chef was doubtful about giving away more than headlines. The waiter said that monsieur must understand their position.

Erzberger:
Please.

He had enough French to read it and as he read he passed information to the others.

Erzberger:
It says Scheidemann announced a republic at midday yesterday.

Maiberling:
Republic. Republic?

He sniffed the word over.

Erzberger:
Why Scheidemann? They say the soldiers from the Arsenal, from Reinichendorf, Spandau, and Wedding have come in and pledged loyalty to the Soldiers' and Workers' Council. They make Ebert sound like a roaring Red, like Lenin's little brother. They say that the Kaiser and all his sons have skipped from the country. The King of Bavaria has abdicated and Kurt Eisner has taken the Cabinet over. Holy God, the list! The Duke of Brunswick, the Grand Duke of Hesse, the Wettins in Saxony. The Duke of Oldenburg deposed. Prince Henry of Reuss has renounced the throne in Gera. Can you take more?

Maiberling:
It's only a newspaper.

Von Winterfeldt:
Yes.

Erzberger:
Grand Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Weimar has renounced the throne on behalf of himself and his family. As a private citizen the King of Bavaria has joined his wife Maria Theresa in Wilsennath, where she is dying or dead.… I'm not good at participles.

He showed it to von Winterfeldt.

Von Winterfeldt:
Dying.

Maiberling:
We all fall down.

Vanselow felt light-headed and remembered returning from leave to Wilhelmshaven one autumn evening, approaching the dockland gate in a wet dusk, around him a hundred or more ratings coming back to the sterile fleet and blaming him out of the corners of their eyes as if he had compelled, by incantation, their return. He raised his head that night and saw the framework of Big Heinrich, the harbor crane, written against the last light like a formula for boredom, and above the gate the eagle of Prussia. Of which Heine had written,
Full of venom he stared down at me
.

Now the venomous eagles were fowl meat. Amazing.

Old-fashioned von Winterfeldt played with a simple royalist hope.

Von Winterfeldt:
Perhaps His Highness will remain on in his role as King of Prussia.…

Maiberling:
The Emperor is ex-officio King of Prussia. He can't abdicate as Emperor unless he abdicates as the other. That's the constitution.

He seemed all at once embarrassed to betray such keen constitutional insight after all his deranged behavior. He made a shamefaced correction.

Maiberling:
That
was
the constitution.

Even though they now lacked all standing they felt better for hearing such precise intelligence from Bourbon-Busset and for reading
Le Matin
's spectacular list of abdications. The chef was astounded to see how well they suddenly began eating.

TWENTY-SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

The Marshal and his friend Maxime drove to Mass at the chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu in Compiègne. Not knowing this, Wemyss went searching for them around the saloon and wagons-lits. He did not employ juniors on the task but went himself, wanting to feed off the Marshal's fixity, wanting too to be further annoyed by it.

In the end one of the staff found him seeking down the corridors and told him where the Marshal was.

Wemyss went and sat with Hope in the dining car. The cloth was bare on the table but spattered widely with coffee stains. I would never permit
that
in my wardroom, he thought.

Wemyss:
Devotion's all very well. But while he listens to the sermon anything could happen in Germany.

At the Hôtel-Dieu it was the twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost and the priest wore green vestments. Around the choir stalls the carved standards of the guilds of Compiègne stood. The Marshal felt ecstatic here amongst the exquisite woodwork of the Middle Ages. Jeanne d'Arc had heard Mass in this chapel and seen the same figurines. That of St. Euphrosyne, the transvestite saint of Compiègne. Jeanne d'Arc saw the standard of St. Euphrosyne on the last morning of freedom, before the Bastard of Vandomme caught her down the hill a little and hauled her off her horse.

If woodworm had got to the Euphrosyne Jeanne saw, some craftsman had modeled a new one according to the old. The continuity of French things!

Weygand sitting at his side, he listened gratified to the priest read the Latin Gradual.
Look and see how good and genial it is when brothers live together in one heart. It is like oil poured on the head, that runs down into the beard, as it ran into the beard of Aaron
.

He thought, this isn't the rootless brotherhood Clemenceau feels for his calisthenist. This is Roncevalles brotherhood. I am a very fortunate man.

THE COMIC TRAIN TRAVELER

At ten Bourbon-Busset brought them a telegram from Spa, from the generals themselves. Shoulder to shoulder they massed around this direct pabulum. Any news from Spa certified their existence and must be gratefully fragmented and absorbed. Erzberger, holding the telegram, found the fingers of the others straying round its rim.

It was from General Groener and told them OHL would indicate all planned positions of delayed-action mines in recently occupied French territory. The ordinariness of it pleased them.

Maiberling:
Something to work on, eh? Something to work on.

Erzberger smiled. It seemed the count had chosen to revamp his faith in the century.

Before another hour had passed three German staff officers rolled into the glade in an open car. Under as good a sun as could be had in November they dismounted and marched amongst the thin ground mist to the officer of the guard. Bourbon-Busset went to examine them and then to speak to the Marshal. The Marshal said admit them to Herr Erzberger. But not until their boots could be heard in Napoleon III's anteroom did Erzberger and the others know they had so easily infiltrated France.

For a man who detested staff officers, the count behaved for a while very much like a rescued member of the Spitsbergen expedition, putting his hands on their shoulders.

But they were not the kind of men to encourage handling. All three in their thirties. Caps under arms. Hair exactly groomed. No fat on them. A death squad, perhaps.

No. 1:
Your Excellency, we have come to tell you something of what has happened since you left Spa.

Erzberger:
Did General Groener send you?

No. 2:
Not in an official sense. He permitted us to come. We are from the Strategic Offensive Office. You understand things have got slow for us since August, we are easily spared. We have travel documents and an authority to pass through the lines. I would like you to see them.

They were produced. Erzberger read them. He could feel his throat pulsing. What will it be like when they come for me and I know why, and there are no alternative explanations for their presence?

He handed the papers to von Winterfeldt, who might perhaps know more about military documents.

Erzberger:
What can you tell us then, gentlemen?

No. 2:
From the capital, very little. I was however present at the château with Colonel Heye during the discussion between Quartermaster General Groener and the Kaiser concerning the latter's abdication.

Erzberger:
Please tell us. Everything.

The young man explained how on the morning of abdication, OHL staff drove out of Spa to the château. There they found the Emperor raving with the unrealistic fevers his friend Admiral Muller had breathed into him. He really believed that within a week he would be at the front, living and perhaps dying like an infantry sergeant. That the love of Emperor was at the core of every soldier. As basic as the love of God or life, the Kaiser said. With my élite men, I shall crush the workers' and soldiers' soviet in Cologne.

Erzberger noticed how the young man from the Strategic Offensive Office spoke of the Kaiser with little grimaces at the ends of the mouth. As if the Emperor had always been some other people's vice and hard to account for.

When the Kaiser made these fantastic proposals, the Field Marshal looked at the floor, but General Groener read loudly the results he had got from his poll of regimental officers.

The Kaiser said, they have an oath to the colors. I am their warlord.

Groener said, these words mean nothing any more. The world's vocabulary is changing.

His Highness kept tossing his head. He said he wished his English mother had been alive to see him suffer like this. It would have consummated her perfidious life. But for that whole morning he did not leave the house. He knew it had got beyond rushing out of doors.

A little after one o'clock, the Kaiser agreed to abdicate as King of Prussia and went off to lunch, helped through the dining-room door by the Crown Prince.

“After a good lunch and a cigar,” the Prince told him, “things will look a lot better.”

But the event had its impetus now. In Berlin Max announced the Kaiser's total abdication and gave the seal of state to Ebert. And Scheidemann, panicked by the crowds outside the Reichstag reading room, announced from the window a republic.

Ebert was upset, said the officer. A trade unionist he might be, but the idea of a republic made his skin itch.

The three officers smiled. There was scorn there too. As for the Kaiser, who a week ago had been an evocation of the sun, yet today was just a comic train traveler.

We know about Ebert's itchy skin, gentlemen, said the young officer, because he told General Groener. After the circus in front of the Reichstag, Ebert went back to the Chancellery and sheltered in Max's office, not knowing what to do, even what telephone connected him to what place. He was fearful to pick any of them up. In the end one of them rang. It happened to be extension 988, which, without his knowing it, connected him to Spa.

Groener was on the line. Ebert was so grateful that he told Groener about the terrible afternoon he had had and was delighted to hear Groener say that the army offered itself to him for the purpose of suppressing the Bolsheviks. So a new pact was made. The republic and the army. I am not certain that I can control events, Ebert said. Neither am I, said Groener. But we'll try.

That is all we knew (said the officer to the delegates) when we started out yesterday evening.

YOUNG TURKS

Like the count, von Winterfeldt had taken a dislike to these three élite children of OHL.

Von Winterfeldt:
Do you intend to treat all republican officials as if they were ridiculous?

For all Matthias knew, the old general might really be striking out for the Kaiser's sake.

One of the officers spread his hands, a lenient movement.

Officer:
If the republic can control affairs we'll be very happy. Perhaps it will be a passing phase.

Maiberling:
But I want to ask you this. Are you the sort of young turks who wanted to fight to the end?

Officer:
It isn't the year for that, sir.

Erzberger:
Didn't Ebert … when he spoke to Groener … didn't he mention us? Our
standing?

Officer:
General Groener said nothing of it.

Matthias felt envious of Groener, who had nothing but railroad maps to deal with.

Erzberger:
I wish he could have managed better than that. Doesn't he understand our situation here?

Officer:
We have told you what we are empowered to. If it leaves you more uncertain than you were yesterday, that's the condition of all of us.

After this cool chastisement, Matthias sent them away to have coffee.

When Blauert had led them away toward the dining car, Maiberling fell into a chair.

Maiberling:
Simple soldiers. Circumspect. Respectful to their government's representatives, oh yes, no political ambitions, oh no, honest mechanics of the killing machine. Canny as river rats.

Index finger to lips, the general hushed him.

Von Winterfeldt:
I think you've said too much.

Maiberling:
One mustn't anger the young masters.

At his desk, Matthias was distracted by the autumn sun, which now seemed strong in the glade. He wanted to be a vacationer and stroll down the deer tracks. It took many midair gyrations of his pen before he could remember what he meant to write and wrote it. The exercise wearied him. This train-bound air, he thought. Then, raising his voice to chairman level and still wincing above his note paper, he began speaking.

Erzberger:
There are two conclusions we must work by. One is that the new government wants an armistice signed—they haven't said otherwise. The second is that if the new government wants an armistice they must consider they have the power to enforce it. That's how it seems to me.

The general and Captain Vanselow took note of both conclusions but Maiberling closed his eyes.

On such principles all except Matthias went once more to speak with Weygand and the admirals across in 2417D. Erzberger was left alone and spent the time noting down remembered statistics from government white papers on Germany's hunger, Germany's diseases, the death of Germans.

The figures came slowly today. He must jolt them out of a steamy brain, part vapors to get at them. What is happening? Memory used to be my strong suit. When I was a journalist writing politics for
Deutsches Volksblatt
I was able to research and write a book on Napoleon's land confiscations in Bavaria. During the debates on corruption in German Africa I carried precise figures of fiddled accounts and dispossessed tribesmen into the Reichstag without having to copy them down, tote cumbrous notes.