Gossip from the Forest (14 page)

Von Winterfeldt still waited, irrelevantly stiff, facing the blank doorway of the municipal building. The rain hissed down, which made his game of hurt honor, his mute back, seem even more precious and astounding. It was when the rain began that Erzberger noticed, by the sound of rustling ground-sheets, that they were surrounded by French poilus, young boys smooth-shaven and men of thirty-five or more with heavy rustic mustaches. With them too, Erzberger thought, the middle areas of youth have been destroyed. They scarcely talked, they did not poke fun at von Winterfeldt, perhaps because they did not understand his gesture. They were engrossed, like recruits, say, watching the dismantling of a machine gun. They seemed to have no more hate than cattle.

Lapsing from grace, Matthias saw that von Winterfeldt and Major Bourbon-Busset were more of a common nationality than Bourbon-Busset and these Frenchmen. But to think that was a dirty Bolshevik thought. Erzberger suppressed it by conscious effort.

Maiberling was already halfway up the steps and called to Matthias.

Maiberling:
How are you enjoying the Third Republic?

In the waiting room three German officers in muddy uniforms stood beneath a wall-high portrait of Napoleon III. They were the ones sent ahead with truce flags and they were pale and kept their voices low beneath the statuesque vulgarity of the painting.

The count nudged Matthias and pointed to Vanselow. The captain surveyed, in his stiff-necked way, the lower reaches of the masterpiece.

Maiberling:
Perhaps sailors don't see much art.

But there was an edge to the comment and his eyes returned to the three officers. As if they proved the killing pervasiveness of the German army by being here, so deep down a road they had already given up.

At nine o'clock Bourbon-Busset came back. There were to be five cars and no two plenipotentiaries were to travel in the same car. It was for safety's sake.

Outside, the near-silent crowd had invaded the machines, standing on the bumpers and the mudguards. A military photographer exploded a flash powder at the base of the stairs. The powder charred an umbrella the photographer's assistant held over it and when Erzberger could see again the assistant was inspecting the fabric in a melancholy, anything-for-art's-sake manner. Umbrella, umbrella, thought Erzberger.

Matthias told the count.

Erzberger:
I'm going to protest to this Bourbon-Busset. He's got too many little shocks arranged for us.

Where, for example, had this further crowd come from? Had Bourbon-Busset cleared out the
estaminet
and ordered all the poilus to HQ steps.

Matthias, though he knew it wouldn't profit him, attempted to impart to his heavy body movements of crisp, jolting protest.

Bourbon-Busset:
Make way there.

As Erzberger turned to his car the poilus came crowding around him.
Finie la guerre?
they asked quietly, flatly. Just perceptibly they pulled at his coat.
Finie la guerre? Finie la guerre?
Bourbon-Busset did nothing to protect him from their exhalations, which were of sweat, excreta, mud, death, cordite, sperm. An old soldier asked him,
Cigaretten, Kamarad?

Erzberger: Excusez-moi, je ne fume pas. Je n'ai pas rien cigarettes
.

A few laughed quietly at his tourist's French. Someone said,
Eh bien, vive la France!
From disappointment over the cigarettes.

The drivers were speeding their engines but still the broad peasant faces, the damp factory-hand mustaches blocked him off from haven amongst the upholstery.
Finie la guerre?

What's French for “perhaps”? his brain cried out. Is it
peut-être?
And how do you say
eu
in French? Without turning Frenchmen hostile?

Erzberger: Peut-être
. May be.
Peut-être finie la guerre. Je ne sais pas
.

Then the car doorway presented itself. Bourbon-Busset sat up in his pillbox hat. Erzberger pulled himself inside and the poilus shut the door for him.

A playful voice from amongst the soldiers called
Gang nach Paris
and there was a little laughter.

Bourbon-Busset:
The general!

Von Winterfeldt still stood, his back to poilus and the whole mêlée, in the spot where his French had first been rejected. Had he stood there, unheeded as a piece of municipal statuary, all the time they'd been inside? Maiberling yelled to him from the second car and called again. The general made a regimental turn and walked, tight-faced, straight to the vehicle and in its door. No poilus bothered asking him for predictions or handouts.

Bourbon-Busset had taken the count's corner—no jump-seat deference for him. He rapped on the driver's glass.

Bourbon-Busset:
Driver! Straight on to the left!

Out of a sudden loose encirclement of whistles and catcalls the vehicles escaped.
Nach Paris
.

Bourbon-Busset smiled privately.

Bourbon-Busset:
Your friend the general likes to speak French.

Erzberger:
He has a name for admiring your country.

Bourbon-Busset:
Oh?

His eyes significantly took stock of the rubble across the street.

Bourbon-Busset:
We'd better give him his head a little. Eh?

SMART JEW MAYER

Beneath his used cheese plate the Marshal found a note. All at table observed him finding it because the discovery was enacted in the midst of some sentence, not a significant one, since Wemyss, disarmed by the cognac, immediately forgot what they had been talking about. As the Marshal glowered at the note, Wemyss took the chance to smile at George Hope.

The smile said, those poor Germans out on the cold roads now, or jolting along behind a locomotive driven roughly by some hostile French patriot. They're not being amused like us.

But it was only a marginal smile. You had, out of artistic respect as much as for diplomacy, to give the mass of your attention to the thunderous performance of the Marshal.

The Marshal:
The same insult!

He gave the note to Weygand. Weygand bent his compact face to it.

The Marshal:
That smart Jew Mayer! Could he have managed the war though? Could he, Maxime? Could he have conducted campaigns?

Weygand:
No. Not that I knew him personally. But by report, the practice of war was beyond him.

Wemyss thought, do the French ever really speak like that? The Marshal and Maxime sound like historical melodrama. In rehearsal at that.

The Marshal's ham fist took the note back from his chief of staff.

The Marshal:
My friends must forgive me. I cannot expect them to know that in the remote past I published
The Principles of Warfare
. A work of faith rather than of science. Clever Jews don't understand these things. A clever Jew called Mayer was one of my chief critics. Mayer had made a grand study of your Boer War, and such. Someone—I don't know who—has written an opinion of Mayer's and left it here under my plate.

He bowed to his three officers.

The Marshal:
I know it is none of my staff.

They returned the bow over their coffee cups and the fragments of wafer and Gruyère.

The Marshal:
And of course not my British brothers.

Feeling with some justice that he was being forced into some alien stock part, Marriott bowed as awkwardly as an Etonian third-former in a Nativity play.

The Marshal:
Someone has gone to the trouble of copying out in their own hand Mayer's prognostication. “A great European war will put face-to-face two human walls, almost in contact, separated only by a strip of death. This double wall will remain almost inert despite the will to advance on one side or the other, despite the attempts that will be made to break through.” And the second paragraph. “One of these lines, baffled frontally, will try to outflank the other. That, in its turn, will extend its front; there will be competition as to which can extend the most, so far as its resources allow. Or at least, this would happen if it were possible to extend indefinitely. But nature presents obstacles. The line will come to a halt at the sea, at the mountains, at the frontiers of a neutral country. The families of soldiers will grow tired of seeing the armies marking time without advancing, if not without suffering grievous losses. It is this that will put an end to the campaign.…”

The Marshal raised his eyes, his forehead and jaw had somehow grown more delicate, like the face of a monk.

The Marshal:
“It is this that will put an end to the campaign rather than the great victories of other times.” Captain de Mierry, do you think that this is a true forecast of what has happened in the last four years?

The captain answered with valor, though the valor too sounded rehearsed.

de Mierry:
It has a certain …
limited
validity.

Weygand:
It is easy to be right in the privacy of one's study.

The Marshal:
Could you call in the chef and his assistant, the wine waiter and both the servants?

All the naval men felt that they had blundered into the annual general meeting of a club to which they did not belong and whose rituals might prove disgusting.

Wemyss:
Would you like us to excuse ourselves, my Marshal?

The Marshal's face coruscated with furious attachment to all the four Englishmen at table.

The Marshal:
Please, my friends, you mustn't leave the table. This will quickly be attended to.

Wemyss nodded. He was beaten by the man's blatant use of unction, such as he had beheld only during productions of
King Lear
or once when he went with his mother to the burial of a high-church peer (his uncle) and listened to a frenzied panegyric given by some homosexual pulpit orator.

The French nanny who had raised him, taught him his French and what his father's lowland relatives considered effeminate and continental ways, had never behaved so perfervidly.

Wearing an apron, carrying his hat, the chef was let in.

The Marshal:
Do you read military journals?

Chef:
No, my Marshal. I know the crêpes were a little too dry round the edges.

The Marshal:
Crêpes? I'm not worried about crepes. I want to know, do you read military journals?

Chef:
I went to work at the age of ten. I'm afraid I never was much of a reader.

The Marshal:
For God's sake, do you read military journals? Do you follow debates on strategy?

Chef:
I know I ought to try. After all, I'm a soldier.

He was middle-aged, pressed into service from some good restaurant somewhere, maybe Bordeaux or somewhere in the Marshal's part of the country. He had the same Spanish look and the same hint of excess in the use of his hands.

The Marshal:
You misunderstand me, it isn't my purpose to criticize your reading habits. Have you lost sons in this war?

Chef:
One. I only had one. Four daughters.

He began sniggering at the idea of this imbalance in his breeding pattern.

The Marshal's voice grew more intimate.

The Marshal:
He was killed?

Chef:
Ages ago. Artois. July 1915, I think.

His hand made wary scooping movements as if he were actually digging through the strata of more recent corpses to get some memory of his son.

The Marshal:
Do you feel bitter about it?

Chef:
He was missing, thought dead. So we hoped. All his sisters hoped. There's no bitterness while you're busy hoping. By the time we got over the hope a lot of other people had lost boys. We had to look to them. It keeps my daughters busy, sir.

The Marshal put his hands, palms out, concessively, toward his cook.

The Marshal:
There should be better things for girls to do.

Chef:
Better, sir.

But he looked more at ease, seeing the Marshal's persona swing to become that of Father of Unhusbanded Daughters.

The Marshal:
It isn't good for young women to be Sisters of Charity. Unless they feel called.…

Chef:
No. There's no one for
my
girls. No one left. To speak of.

The Marshal:
Do you know someone called Mayer?

Chef:
Claude Mayer, sir. Assistant dining-room manager at the Metropole.

The Marshal:
No. Not him.

By now the inquiry had grown idle. Already the Marshal visibly considered the chef his brother in loss; his face, blazing all evening with idiosyncrasies, went blank, so utterly bereft that for a second Wemyss felt his own breath detained at the bottom of his windpipe. What is it: grief, victimhood, death, lunacy? Wemyss felt he must know if his breath were to travel ever again with ease.

When the illusion died he understood his honest lungs had not considered seizing, but noticed other men at that table looking obliquely at each other, wanting to verify their fellow diners were not fading.

The Marshal:
When you go, send in your assistant.

Chef:
Yessir.

The Marshal:
I lost my own son, you know. And my daughter is a widow.

Chef:
Of course, sir.

The Marshal:
Sufficient to the day is the pain thereof. Eh?

The chef went back to his kitchen. You could then see the Marshal settle himself, workmanlike, in his chair for the next interview.

Wemyss thought, it's indecent to go on watching. It was like the rigmarole of interrogations and ownings-up in the house-master's study at some school. The air in 2417D, as in the best of schools at scandaltime, was full of the master's moist and obscenely sweet paternal rightness.

Wemyss:
I think perhaps, my Marshal, it is a domestic matter. I must repeat that if you want us to withdraw …

The Marshal:
You are disquieted, Lord Admiral?

Wemyss:
No, I wouldn't put it so strongly.