Gossip from the Forest (29 page)

Toward the end of the night the air grew thin and feverish. Though he had an illusion of breathlessness, Erzberger talked, wooden and fluent, about prisoners-of-war.

The Marshal:
No. That's a settled matter. It's nearly five o'clock, you know. If we hurry things along, we can have the last shot fired at eleven.

General Weygand cradled the amended document in his arms in such a way as to show Matthias and the others that the improvements had been written into the text, the old figures scratched out in ink. Amend 14 days for clearing invaded territories. Make it 15. Cross out 25 days for evacuating the Rhine-land, write in 31. Cross out 10,000 trucks in 15 days, write in 5000 in 36. Cross out 30,000 machine guns. Write in 25,000. Write in that the return of German prisoners-of-war shall be settled at the conclusion of the peace preliminaries.

Give two copies for signature to the Germans. They all sign both; even that little lockjawed nothing of a sea captain signs. When the documents are returned to the Marshal's side of the table only he and Wemyss sign. Generalissimo of earth. Generalissimo of water.

It was ten past five.

The Marshal:
We shall count it five o'clock, gentlemen. The armistice will operate from eleven.

Erzberger sought leave to read and append the document that said a nation of seventy millions suffers but does not die. He read it and the interpreter who had not known what
Schluss
meant directed it, fragment by fragment, onto the table, in front of the Marshal's chest.

The Marshal:
All right.

Then he, his pet general, the admirals, simply walked out.

THE MAIBERLING THESIS

At the breakfast table the count chattered across the condiments at mute von Winterfeldt.

Maiberling:
You've seen it now. Behavior, professional or unprofessional, didn't have any meaning.

He seemed elated, as if he had proved some Copernican vision of the arrangement of things.

Matthias drank coffee and was quiet and somnolent and, for a small while, tranquil. No need to debate whether I should become a target. Now I
am
. The only question left is the dodging of bullets.

POSTERITY RESERVES ITS GRATITUDE

Where the Marshal and Wemyss sat, telegrams and decrees were written. Telephones quavering with the voices of politicians were brought to them.

The Marshal composed a telegram.

AFTER RESOLUTELY BEPULSING ALL THE ASSAULTS OF THE ENEMY
,
YOU HAVE WON THE GREATEST VICTORY IN HISTORY AND RESCUED THE MOST SACRED OF ALL CAUSES
,
THE LIBERTY OF THE WORLD
.

The Marshal:
You won't edit this, Maxime. Not a word.

Weygand:
Very well, Ferdinand.

The Marshal:
You may well be my encyclopedia. You may be the encyclopedia editorial board as well. But you won't touch this.

Wemyss refused to smile any more than fractionally at this show of fraternal teasing. It was strange that he felt lightened less on account of the success of the naval clauses than of never having to spend a weekend with the Marshal again. There would be no invitations to Brittany next summer. If the Marshal mentioned him at dinner tables on summer evenings it would be as a glum and parochial Englishman. Whose parish was, whimsically, the sea. And who spoke of the sea as if
it
were the center, and the western war its flank.

The Marshal, bent on disarming him, read a sentence of the telegram aloud.

The Marshal: Posterity reserves its gratitude for you.…
What does posterity
do
, Maxime? Should we say
it reserves
or should we say
it will reserve?

Weygand:
That's a question.

The Marshal:
Posterity doesn't exist at the moment. It will exist. In ten or twenty years. But not now.

Weygand:
However, Ferdinand,
posterity
, the noun, is the present name for a future reality. When the reality arrives it will no longer be posterity but will go by other nouns.

The Marshal:
I begin to see.

Weygand:
Posterity has existence in the present as an abstract force.

The Marshal:
I wouldn't want to make an error of grammar.

Weygand:
There is surely no noun with which you cannot use the present tense.

The Marshal:
So
posterity reserves
is correct?

Weygand:
Exactly.

The Marshal:
My encyclopedia.

Admiral Wemyss gave the last of his telegrams to Marriott. It congratulated the fleet, which lay this morning in the Firth of Forth in sight (if the sun rose clear) of his childhood coasts. The professional officers would be depressed. No Trafalgar had come their way. The ratings would be happy and in nine months' time there would be navy bastards born to the loose girls of Methil and Burntisland.

In the first of the light an army truck carrying two photographers and all equipment backed down the track until level with the windows of 2417D. The Marshal, Weygand, the admirals bunched around one of the small tables. Weygand had supplied the Marshal's copy of the truce to put on the table and a pen for the Marshal's hand. Wemyss was crushed so close to the gnomic Frenchman that the piquancy of sweat, heavy tobacco, and shaving soap stung his eyes. So he gazed up at the lens with the same glazed geniality as, at five years, he had projected when photographed on the knees of fishermen at Issambres. And the Marshal. Because he had not been to bed and the light was thin he looked thinner than he was. His brows cast a long shadow over his face when the phosphorus flashed. The oblique flash caught all his age lines and put a membrane of heroic exhaustion over what his face was trying to say; For all of you and for France my vocal will has triumphed single-handed over Germans and frocks. A claim that even on such a day as this would seem to some (though not many) in Paris to be extreme and even pathological.

The Marshal:
There is to be another photograph when we leave. Will you travel with me, Lord Wemyss?

Wemyss flinched. The unwelcome intimacy was not yet finished.

Wemyss:
That would be most generous of you.

The Marshal:
We can both hand over the text to the Tiger.

Wemyss:
You're too kind.

The Marshal:
No. I have ordered a car for seven-thirty. You mustn't think me rude. I shall probably doze all the way up.

Wemyss thanked God that sleep was part of the old man's performance.

SAINING

Now he wanted to clear his head of the static fug of the Marshal's train. He and George Hope fetched their overcoats and went for a stroll. The mist uncoiling in the forest reminded him of his family's mythology.

Wemyss:
Did you know, George, that the elm was a resurrection tree with the Druids?

Hope:
Indeed, Rosy? No, I didn't.

Wemyss:
I wouldn't know it myself. Except, when we were brought home from London all wrapped up and newly born, an old lady called Meg McLeod used to force her way into the castle and swing a burning elm bough over mother and child three times. I can't remember it. But old Meg called it “saining.” I wonder what it meant?

Hope:
There's a lot of that sort of thing goes on even in the home counties.

Wemyss:
Trees are strong magic, George. I was always a bit uneasy in forests. When I was a child.

The long toe of Hope's shoe went far ahead and crushed something in the mauve mud ahead of them. The exotic conversation perhaps.

Hope:
You must be very proud, Rosy.

Wemyss:
Oh yes, oh yes.

Hope:
You have every right. Every right.

Wemyss:
I was well supported, George. The mundane things will be harder. Talk about sailors' Soviets! We've got 'em, George. Call them committees if you like, “soviet” is a loaded word. It would be too unfortunate if we had a sailors' strike.

Hope:
The marines, Rosy.

Wemyss:
Send them in, you mean?

He thought, if ever I have to, I hope you're still with me, unflinching in the front office.

Wemyss:
One has to admit, George. One and eightpence a day for seamen. Damn awful pay.

Hope:
We could all complain, sir. Admiral's pay hasn't gone up since 1855.

Wemyss:
Imagine George Hope on strike. Imagine.

Hope:
Indeed.

Wemyss:
Still. It would be nice to be able to announce a pay raise on the way. For all hands.

Hope:
Mightn't that seem to be playing up to them?

Wemyss:
We don't play up to people, George.

Hope:
It's just that in the new world, Rosy, I can see trade unions running mad.

The First Sea Lord found that he himself was grinding away at the mud conclusively with his boot. He thought, I wonder what
I
understood of the blazing elm circle over my head? Chagrin rose in him.

Wemyss:
Imagine those chaps trying the
starving-children
line!

THEIR TALK HAD SOLEMN RHYTHMS

Long after the generals and the admirals drove away, Matthias sat working on a report for Ebert and at another table von Winterfeldt wrote observations down for his masters. The habits of work protected them in a forest which threatened, on the Marshal's departure, to become as notional as forests in dreams. You could not help believing that minds trying to dwell on the woods this morning, under the thin sun, would fail to get purchase, would fall out of their accustomed notches. Vanselow and Maiberling evaded this hazard quite well by sleeping. Blauert kept to a deep lounge chair. Chained to his wrist a brief case, and in it the signed document itself as well as maps to illustrate all its terms. He was to be flown to Belgium from a field at Tergnier—Weygand had said that. But it seemed no plane was available for him till noon.

As for the train, Bourbon-Busset had told them it would be two hours before it was flagged out of the forest.

While Matthias worked, more staff officers arrived from Spa.

Somehow they had got passes from Groener's office and radioed and white-flagged their way through the lines and been treated seriously by the French. Erzberger wished Groener's office had not been so careless with its travel permits.

They were very spruce young men. Blauert, who still waited for his plane, introduced them to Erzberger. They carried no particular news but seemed unshaken by their journey. One of them said that they would leave the train and let Herr Erzberger get on with his work. Erzberger said, leave the train and go where? Camp under an elm? No, use that end of the saloon.

For a minute or so Erzberger watched them all, the young professionals, the men who had come yesterday, this morning's group. Their talk had solemn rhythms. Occasionally someone laughed, but only briefly. They lacked, to a degree that Erzberger found indecent, any suggestion of belonging to an endangered army.

Their talk, however restrained, annoyed von Winterfeldt. Erzberger was surprised to see the general get up and begin snorting.

There may have been an old regular's envy there for their General Staff carmine-striped pants and golden buttons, so untarnished in these last hours of war.

In the end he did not speak up to them. Only to Matthias.

Von Winterfeldt:
You see. The General Staff. Yesterday they dropped their potentate. But they're lasting well, don't you think? Tomorrow they'll pick up some other divinity.

Erzberger:
But now a republic! No more divinities.

Von Winterfeldt:
Can you believe, Herr Erzberger, that you're truly going home to a republic?

And Matthias tried the tension in his belief and found it slack.

Von Winterfeldt:
I see these things. I see them with an outsider's eyes because my wife is French and an intelligent woman. They used to make her drink beer on Wednesday mess nights. Like any fat frau.

At half past eleven sentries boarded the train, sealed all windows and pulled the blinds down. The engine, which Erzberger could hear sighing steam half the morning, dragged them away in an instant. Erzberger, who disliked haphazard departures and thought that you only truly saw a place when you were leaving it, peeped out of the half-inch aperture between blind and pane and saw Blauert step into a French army vehicle, his black case strapped to his wrist. He seemed to carry it without sense of onus.

No quick journey. There was much traffic on the line. The stations crowded. Behind the windows the pallid delegates did not care to peep out and see whether it was soldiers or refugees cheering and singing and baying threats; or sightseers drawn by rumor to view this train amongst all the others. In some places they could hear sentries ordering people back.

By early afternoon it had become so wearing that Matthias and the others sat all together in a knot.

MATTHIAS ERZBERGER'S FINAL FOREST

It is against all feeling to leave Matthias without conducting him to his final forest. The journey is quickly fulfilled.

He reached the capital on Wednesday. The republic eked its existence daily forward between poles. For one pole the conservative wing, swelled by thousands of inveterate ex-officers. For another, the deep socialists and authentic Reds.

Politics wasn't a remote art as in stable government. You didn't practice it through memoranda, secretaries, and public officials. It was an act of immediate and hourly contrivance. Most of all, you went yourself and talked with people. You were a sort of transcendental shop steward or dry-goods salesman.

This style of work appealed to Matthias Erzberger, gave him a sense of forcing a mold upon time, instead of being himself molded by it. So the fatalism was soothed which he had suffered from during the armistice days. And might suffer again any day he was left idle.