Gossip from the Forest

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Gossip from the Forest

A Novel

Thomas Keneally

TO MY FATHER

In the season in which this book

was written, the French government

persisted in exploding nuclear devices

above the ocean where my children swim
.

PART ONE

JOURNEYS AND ARRIVALS

FEAR OF TRAINS AND FORESTS

On Wednesday afternoon, at his headquarters in Senlis, the Marshal had a visit from the Premier of France. They read through the agenda of the meeting in the forest. When that business was finished, the Premier wanted to chat. The Marshal could tell that the old man was secretly seeking reassurance. In spite of that need, the Premier did not abandon his tone of mocking.

They sat by the fire in the Marshal's office on the ground floor. The Marshal's armies went forward up every main and country road. Although they were not used to such movement they had no need to appeal to him. Therefore few staff and liaison officers infested the park, no staff limousines cluttered the gravel under the terraces. Without hard-driven generals to salute, the chasseurs at the main steps kept a sleepy watch all afternoon. It was quiet enough and dim enough in the drizzling park to throw the nightjars into disorder. They sat in a birch tree from noon onward, calling endlessly.

The old Marshal and older Premier could have been two semi-friends in front of a fire in a first-class convalescent home.

Clemenceau:
Then how far will your train be from theirs?

The Marshal:
I've never seen the place myself. But they tell me sixty meters or so. There's a siding for rail-mounted cannon. We'll take that, they can have the main line.

Clemenceau:
In a train … in a forest …

The Marshal:
That's right.

Clemenceau:
Be careful of forests, my Marshal. Forests are full of omens. Ivy, for example. It's the symbol of womanhood. It cleans the forest floors. It keeps down the corpses of the autumns. It keeps down fallen deer. And robins. And soldiers …

The Marshal played a second with his mustache. He was accustomed to the Premier's bad taste and artistic vanity.

The Marshal:
There aren't any dead soldiers in
that
forest.

Clemenceau:
Be careful too of living in trains. The Kaiser spent a long time in his train this summer. One day he dreamed that the Queen of Norway pinned a rose to his collar. When he touched the rose with his finger tips, he found it was a bullet hole.

The Marshal laughed at the idea that the Kaiser's dream could with any accuracy be transshipped from sleep to awakening, and so from the Kaiser's train to the War Office in Paris.

The Marshal:
I suppose your agents in Spa got the story from that drink waiter.

Clemenceau:
Yes, the Kaiser woke screaming and the waiter had to feed him schnapps. Waiters are always good value for agents. If they'd sell the best table in the restaurant for money they'd certainly sell their Emperor.

The Marshal:
I never paid waiters a cent. To me it was always a matter of determination.…

Clemenceau:
I always paid. Something tangible. Bluff is intangible. That's the difference between us.

The Marshal:
I suppose it may be. There seem to be quite a few differences. In any case, I have no reason to be afraid of trains. Or forests.

This pronouncement fortified the old man, or so the Marshal suspected. For soon after, the Premier called for his car and was driven back to the Senate in Paris.

Early the next morning, however, the Marshal did awake aghast from a dream of forests. Walking amongst trees he had come on some young soldiers, informally lined up in a clearing. He had presumed that they were from Castelnau's army group, resting for a future offensive in Lorraine. Those at the end of the queue were kicking a ball of rags about and stopped to salute him. At the head of the line three seated matrons worked at some task he could not identify. Their fervor reminded him of any bandage-rolling, sock-knitting committee in any town of the interior.

As he came closer to them he saw that each was busy fixing, somehow, rich military ribbons to the foreheads of the soldiers. He noticed that up to the place where the three worked so heartily and—it had to be admitted—deftly, the soldiers were the normal horselaughing, catcalling crowd you'd find at a delousing station in a rest area. Once they had their oddly placed ribbons they kept silent, not one of them speaking to another.

They abandoned their helmets and stripped their equipment away. They walked naked over the ivy, and the ribbons they had so easily accepted became bleeding wounds. He called to them. They didn't care. The forest was full of quiet, seeking boys. Bloodied, they looked behind this and that elm. They were somber children returned to a playroom after a long winter. Behind the trees, somewhere, cunningly amongst leaves, were the utterly adequate toys of childhood.

In the end all he could do was stride out of the woods, not looking either side at the mute boys who peopled it. Advancing on the woman in the center chair, he put a hand on her shoulder. She hadn't any fear, she knew her business and her right to be there.

Woman:
Good morning, my Marshal.

It was his wife's wide face looking up as he had seen it look up at the sun on summer holidays in Brittany, when the children would bring in blackberries and she would sit outside their summerhouse excising the stems of the fruit with a hand plump from child-making, child-raising, and honest submission.

The Marshal:
But what are you doing, Julie?

The un-answer from her woke him. He lay in bed feeling, until he was properly awake, that she had somehow usurped him. Then he noticed that his bladder was full. He got out of his bed. There was a little moan, wind or thin rain, at the window. The oak trees in the garden pressed the dark hard up against the panes.

Saying prayers for the dead he fetched the chamber pot and wet into it, standing.

… and remember in Your mercy Lieutenant Germain Foch and Captain Bécourt Both of the cavalry, now in the fifth year of their deaths. Dead of high explosive in the war's first summer. Hippophiles, cavaliers, innocents, dead before they found out the truth. That this war was not of the same species as all those others they studied at the École de Guerre. Amongst the shell fragments they had suffered a not unenviable delivery from knowledge, he thought. His framework had had to take in so much more knowledge that he had sometimes heard his ribs creak (though he never informed doctors or anyone else of it).

His elder girl had now been a widow more than four years. And Julie and he four years sonless.

The dream. The dream grew out of the conference he had had with the Premier yesterday. Downstairs.

It made him feel more content about it to understand its external origins. To let it stop him sleeping was ridiculous. He owed his sleep to the nation. The flow of urine ceased. He covered the pot with a beaded cover and muttered.

The Marshal:
Guise, La Capelle, Fourmies, Chimay.

It was the road his enemies would travel, seeking a truce. He had bid them down that road. Even through the insulation of the battle lines, he believed he could sense the aura of those Berlin delegates, detraining by now in Belgium. Bringing their slack wills to OHL.
*

And if this morning the German Emperor's poisonous nightmare had entered the Marshal's own bed and bitten him, it was a last and puny Prussian success. The toxin would not enter his nervous system. He would willfully exclude it. He felt sure, this autumn, that he could willfully exclude the venom of a mamba.

He scratched himself and spoke as if someone were standing at the bed end.

The Marshal:
You must be mad. If you think you can derail me so easily.

Lying, he got the covers up over his ears. The room was full of the frozen stench of his bedtime pipe.

*
Oberste Herresleitung—German Supreme Headquarters, situated in Spa, Belgium.

THE MARSHAL LISTENS TO CHASSEURS' BOOTS

A soldier woke him at six with coffee. Before he got his head off the pillow he was full of excitement. In the dim park of the Château of Senlis it still rained. He could hear the boots of the GQG
†
company of chasseurs marching to morning parade, past the orangery, around the ornamental fountain and up the length of the façade.
That
sound. Until 1914 it had been an audible statement of the battle will, it had some sacramental meaning, like church bells ringing, and what it said was
élan
, dash,
volonté
, will,
cran
, guts,
cran, cran, cran
. Army boots on gravel. The crisp, monotone background scoring of all the aphorisms he produced in the classrooms of the École Supérieure de Guerre in his academic years.
If defeat can arise from moral causes so can victory
.…
A battle won is a battle in which one will not confess oneself beaten
.…
Victoire, c'est la volonté
…
Modern war knows but one argument, the tactical fact, battle
.…
War is in itself only a matter of maintaining harmonious proportion between the spiritual and bodily elements
.… The spies sent by the Freemasons at the Ministry of War could go back to their chief and say, that Colonel Foch talks metaphysics! But the young officers understood and he would open the windows so they could hear the soldiers drilling in the yard of the École Militaire next door. The crunch of boots made his meaning palpable to the chosen men who took courses at the École Supérieure.

The Freemasons at the Ministry of War said, he talks like a Jesuit—spiritual and bodily elements, acts of the will, faith—his brother's a Jesuit. A dangerous bastard. And popular with those fledgling staff officers.