Gossip from the Forest (3 page)

The Marshal:
Ah, there! You do think I'm senile.

Ferrason:
If you have to have the truth I think you're the most brilliant man left standing in Europe today.

The Marshal:
I didn't ask you here to talk about that. Please return to your post.

The young man saluted and went toward the door. Feeling the nausea which men of powerful fatherhood can induce in their chosen young.

The Marshal thought, if all he wanted to do was become a family man I could have strolled with someone else.

The Marshal:
Ferrason.

Ferrason:
Sir.

The Marshal:
I want you to tell the adjutant to bring me an order for signature. That all staff officers are to be subject to the eight o'clock curfew whether or not an armistice is signed.

Ferrason:
Sir, you were a military teacher until the age of fifty-eight …

The Marshal:
Fifty-nine.

Ferrason:
I would not be ashamed to follow that pattern if it equipped me for war as well as you are equipped.

The Marshal rejected him with both hands.

The Marshal:
Get out.

Ferrason did, the door handle moist and warm in his palm as a living organ.

THE MARSHAL'S BREAKFAST

The Marshal put on his winter drawers and his blue serge uniform. Simply decorated. Only two long rows of campaign ribbons. None of the cut the English affected. The pockets rather baggy. Old Field Marshal French, the English Commander, had once said you could tell the class of people the French generals were by the way they dressed. It had appalled Him to see General Berthelot slopping round GQG in a white smock and slippers.

But we're still here, we slapdash dressers. French has vanished in spite of the cut of his suit. Because
battle
might
not
be the only tactical fact, but trim pockets weren't any sort of tactical fact at all.

The Marshal insisted on a large breakfast even though he might be what they called a fussy eater. He took it in a room on the ground floor, beside the office of the Chief of Intelligence. The lights shone on him as he crossed the lobby. No typewriters sounded, no muddy couriers ran toward the Operations Boom. Only during emergencies did an HQ experience the rush of messengers, the cry for maps, the telephones pealing and staff officers chary of picking them up for fear of what they'd hear. During the offensive of 1914 and the crisis of last spring it was not unknown for wounded men to come crawling determinedly over Corps HQ doorsteps, bringing the blame home to you.

At the breakfast table only his Chief of Staff, General Maxime Weygand, himself a small eater, was permitted to join him. Together they viewed the good linen and china and the delicacies.

At half past seven Weygand entered the breakfast room. Though the Marshal was halfway through a hard-boiled egg, he stood up.

The Marshal:
Maxime.

Chief of Staff:
My Marshal.

The Marshal:
Sit down then.

Chief of Staff:
Just some coffee, thanks.

The Marshal:
Good ham, Maxime. Danish.

The Chief of Staff handed him some flimsies; a summary of the state of war on this, one of its last mornings. While an orderly poured him the thick-brewed coffee the Marshal favored, Weygand passed across the table a second page. The Marshal put it flat on his hand so that it would catch all the light from the chandelier.

The Marshal:
When did it come?

Weygand:
During the night. Transmitted from OHL at Spa.

It was the list of German plenipotentiaries.

The Marshal:
Erzberger … Maiberling … von Winterfeldt. Who in God's name are they?

Weygand:
Maiberling and von Winterfeldt are obscure. But you have probably heard of the first man. A politician.

The Marshal:
No, Maxime, I don't know any Erzberger.

Weygand mentioned an incident to do with Erzberger's past: some peace motion in the Reichstag. It was meant to trip the Marshal's memory.

The Marshal:
No, Maxime. The Reichstag isn't my favorite house. The question stands.
Who in God's name is Erzberger?

Painstaking Maxime (my encyclopedia, the Marshal called him) had read at first light a résumé of Matthias Erzberger's career prepared by the political section of the War Office. He answered the Marshal's question.

HERR ERZBERGER'S DREAM

What dream parallel to the Marshal's had Plenipotentiary Matthias Erzberger been dreaming all the night? In his special train, Berlin—Spa?

His boy Oskar had died three weeks back of influenza in the officers' school at Karlsruhe. Oskar had got a delicate frame from his mother, no peasant barrel chest. He had always been weak in the lungs. Only desperate nations called on such boys.

Herr Erzberger's dreams now were a sort of seepage from that death. Therefore he avoided sleep. He stayed up till two in the morning, drinking schnapps with Count Maiberling in the saloon. The Count had been tiresome earlier in the evening. There had been berserk switches of mood. But since the staff officers who traveled with them had gone to bed, Maiberling became a better companion. He had always had the jitters about officers: a strange phobia to show up in an aristocrat.

At two, feeling better than he had for days, Matthias decided that he and Maiberling
must
sleep, must not be blunted. Their special train rolled slowly through rail-junctions jammed with troop trains. They found their
couchettes
in the next carriage.

Erzberger:
I'm going to dream, damn it!

Maiberling:
Everyone dreams. Tonight, even the drunks!

Erzberger:
I dream every night.

So he went in foredoomed to do it in his own plush and enameled compartment.

The second he fell asleep, there he was, at a summerhouse in a forest—the Black Forest inevitably. The space in front of the house was covered with small wild strawberries and butterflies. Sunlight lit up all the stone façade of the house. At the door he felt very pleasantly ready for the first forest stroll of his vacation and was waiting for his wife to get her hat. Down the stairs she came but dropped the hat, the mannish straw item in her trim hand, on the bare boards of the hall. She said she'd decided to stay and cook pastries. Instead, she said, producing a treacherous umbrella, instead take this.

He had never felt threat from her before. His anger and terror were greater than anything he'd experienced in politics. For one thing, she knew after all their marriage that umbrellas couldn't be tolerated. He refused. She said yes, now that he had a dead son he must take the umbrella and go, go for his damned walk.

It was all at once out of his power. He took the thing, feeling nausea. He was now like a man under orders.

Erzberger:
Kiss me good-by.

She didn't do that but had in her hand, from nowhere, a fresh strawberry. She rubbed it along his lips. They were rather long, rather full lips, so that it took her some time to cover them—like a child coloring in. Then, more savagely, she crushed the strawberry to a pulp against his forehead.

Wife:
Now do you believe I love you?

Erzberger:
Yes.

Wife:
Time for your walk.

He went without looking back lest she should think less of him than she did of his son. For they both knew the boy had forced his way from delirium to delirium, clear-headed about death and grappling the earth to him, since to him, drifting as he was amongst breathless constellations, it had become so small.

With such a son, you didn't look back although you were coerced to walk into the forest with a terrible umbrella.

It was a clammy and fungoid forest. It wasn't summer here. Some renting agent, too smart for his own good, must have put one over Paula by letting a summer cottage in a winter or, at best, autumn forest.

Why do I come here for holidays? he wondered. I detest stepping back into the forest, it's like going back into a womb, not your mother's but Kali's. He went on, finding the paths more and more repulsive. The elms seeped as slum walls seep with waters of uncertain origin. His journey to the place he knew, where the path turned a full corner, took some time. But when he got there two men with black masks were waiting with repeating revolvers in their hands. He didn't like seeing them so he raised the umbrella and put it before his face. They began shooting the umbrella full of holes. He felt it struggle, was one with its panic and pains. When they'd finished he dropped it. Its wounds were blood-bespattered.

Erzberger:
Why did you do it? Now I can never go back to her.

From each bullet hole in the sickening umbrella a pale young soldier struggled. The masked men who had done the damage ran away. One of the soldiers said
it's about time
and began rapping Erzberger's skull below the hairline.

Erzberger awoke with angina pain in his chest. Somebody was knocking on the door. He told them to come in. It was a steward with coffee. Erzberger leaned out of his
couchette
and raised the blind a little. Rain fell and rain beads on the window distorted the faces of soldiers in the troop train they were passing.

Steward:
A foul morning, sir.

Herr Erzberger thought everyone must be dreaming this November. Of pale soldiers, bullet holes, forests, seeping waters. Why do I fear umbrellas in my sleep? he wondered.

GOSSIP FROM THE FOREST

Since this account is not scholarly but merely gossip from the forest, the reader does not need to carry with him to Compiègne a history of the Marshal. He will find it haphazardly in these pages. He knows that the Marshal was a pontiff in Armageddon, that there is a statue to him outside Victoria Station, that his name has been given to parks, avenues and bandstands in Clermont, Birmingham, Toronto, Sydney, and the republic of Chad. As a start, that is nearly enough to know, for it accords with the Marshal's monumental personality.

But Erzberger's is a name not favored by municipalities. It has to be some way explained how he comes to be on the train to Spa with his friend, Count Maiberling.

In that November he is forty-three years old, of country stock, big-boned, plump to his friends, obese to enemies. He wears pince-nez, and the eyes behind them in the big face are delicate, and the lips are capable of being delicate. He grew up in the south, trained as a rural teacher, took to journalism and politics, organized a trade-union congress and got himself elected to the Reichstag when he was twenty-eight. He had political gifts: memory, an ability to line up votes and drive wedges between people. People said he was cunning and chivalrous. From within his own skin he did not see himself as having especial gifts of cunning.

His specialties in those early days were budgetary, colonial, and military matters. He did not admire the colonies, or the military.

When he was thirty-one he exposed in the house the nature of German occupation in Africa. His motives were both opportunist and visionary: that was Erzberger's nature. He caused the government to resign. His reputation was made, though not with his party (the Center) which had had an arrangement with the government.

Like any country boy he thought, why are all these big names letting me get away with it? There was a vein of fatalism in him: he knew that one day the guard dogs that savage presumptuous rustics would catch and savage him.

Within a few years Thyssen's made him a director. They thought that he might make a grateful board member and feed them Reichstag information. It was only on looking at him a second time that they saw the fat young man made a lot of his sensible but, at its nucleus, incorruptible conscience. None the less he has been a capable director and has been able to give them sufficient expert forecasts to justify his salary.

When war started he was made director of the Office of Propaganda for Neutral Countries. It is said the press corps liked him.

He believed that the war would prove a thesis basic to European peace: that Germany could not be encircled. He also believed Germany should be permitted to annex Belgium and some coal areas on the French border.

By 1917 he had grown out of his annexationist beliefs. He was less callow now, more visibly quixotic. He was already talking peace with Russian diplomats in Stockholm, with papal officials in Rome. In July he spoke in the Reichstag. He was a polished speaker, obsessed with grammatical correctness, though his Swabian accent was broad.

He began by detailing some special communications he had received concerning failures in Galicia and the west. It was acceptable to speak of military disasters in the house. What he said next the delegates were not quite so accustomed to.

Erzberger:
Our military resources are coming to an end.… The basis of my argument is the danger of revolution. It is no good telling me that the monarchical idea is too firmly rooted in Berlin or Vienna for the monarchs to be overthrown. This war has no precedent. If the monarchs do not make peace in the next few months, our people will do it over their heads.

What are you? some of the Conservatives whispered in his ear in the Reichstag library. A socialist? Even socialists don't talk like that.

A day or so later he moved a motion in the Reichstag: that Germany should negotiate for peace, renounce all her conquests. His party voted with him, and the socialists of all varieties. The motion was carried 212 votes to 126; it sent the Kaiser into dazed retreat at Wilhelmshohe. With his Empress, whose heart was suspect. But the advice of Matthias Erzberger and 211 others was not followed.

ERZBERGER GETS THE JOB

For this and other reasons, Matthias Erzberger was taken into the cabinet of peace-makers appointed in October 1918 to bring the war to an end. The Chancellor was a quiet Red Cross official who had married the daughter of an English duke. His name was Prince Max of Baden and his nickname was Max-Pax. Within three weeks he caught severe influenza, took too much sleeping draught and did not wake again until Turkey had surrendered and Austria sought an armistice. His ruinous reawakening made him prejudiced against sleep. He avoided it and grew sallow.