Gossip from the Forest (2 page)

Tall, amorous, peasant boy Colonel Pétain used to question whether
Modern war knew only one argument, the tactical fact, battle
. He cited high explosives, muzzle velocities, enfilading machine guns. He'd said, they're the tactical facts. It was because Pétain was a melancholy and edgy farm boy that he raised these points. He'd been right, but through a defect of temperament. In the Marshal's eyes, defects of temperament were no excuse for being right.

What did it mean to the Marshal today when GQG Company B noisily occupied the carriageway and the courtyard and squared off in the rain for inspection? This morning the tactical, strategic, political, simple fact was: he was the most powerful man in the world. This afternoon he would take a train ride. At the end of which he would lay down all the precedents for a new world.

†
GQG—Grand Quartier Général. That is, GHQ.

THE TITANS OF THE HOME FRONT

He had already imposed precedents on the titans of the home front. To detail his art in this area would take too long. But something of his manner toward statesmen should be marked down.

Throughout the autumn he spent his mornings above the Quai d'Orsay, inside or outside a small conference room on the second floor of the War Office, where only the few more powerful met. Old Clemenceau and the Welsh Prime Minister of Britain. Colonel House, the American representative, and the Foreign Minister of Italy.

Whenever the Marshal was invited to speak in this room, old Clemenceau would rest in his chair, content that French interests were now being stated or overstated. The Premier's Kirghiz eyes shifted, brooding on the river beyond the high windows. Some of the autumn haze entered his face. A Mongolian horseman dreams of the steppes, the Marshal would think ironically. The Marshal noticed too that because of the thick glass of the windows, and the autumn vapors hanging over Paris, the angle of the river he could himself see from the conference table resembled urban rivers as they were painted by the Impressionists, by the Premier's old prostate-ridden familiar and master spirit, Monet. Nature going to a lot of trouble to imitate Monet's art. Too much trouble.

While the Premier drowsed in this way, the Marshal would tell the foreign few that the enemy must give up not only the Rhineland but four bridgeheads, thirty kilometers deep, on the far side of the great river. The debate was always complicated, but never from his side, for he always stated the same argument and said, you ask me what is strategically necessary to demand. This (tapping the map), this is strategically necessary.

And whether it was or was not the map of a strategic necessity, it was the outline of what was psychically necessary to the Marshal. At a given depth of his soul, where distinctions between military and diplomatic business had no meaning, he had decided he could not sleep if this map was not fleshed out across the forests, coal fields, foundries, sweet valleys in western Germany.

If his argument was simple, his acting out of the argument had many strands to it. He had a gift for looking at times as if his will (or the Holy Spirit) were swelling him, that he might at any instant levitate or explode like a bladder. Sometimes he would pound his horizon-blue hip so emphatically that those at table could not help becoming a little alarmed in case their generalissimo gave himself a blood clot.

When the hairy Welsh satyr (called Lloyd George) accused him of trying to gag statesmen in debate about the bridgeheads, he could knead his jaws or paw the arms of his plush chair in a gesture of overbearing contrition which seemed to satisfy, above all, to silence everyone.

In fact, his conversations with politicians appeared in transcript to be howling melodrama. So that statesmen, reading over their notes after interviews with the Marshal, often thought, how did we tolerate such behavior, such bombast, such bathos?

They had forgotten how the prophetic fever in the man had seduced them. He made them suspect that if they let themselves float they could be as unqualified and certain as he. It was like offering an exhausted businessman a holiday in the south.

PERILOUS TO HEALTH AND SANITY

The Marshal could also pretend to find British demands concerning the German fleet to be perilous to health and sanity.

Lloyd George would sometimes bring with him a square and meaty British admiral called Wemyss. He was an aristocratic presence, very genial. When Wemyss sat at his side, the Welshman nagged the cabinet room about what was to be done to Germany's navy. All German submarines were to surrender, the High Seas Fleet was to be interned and stripped of arms.

Whenever Lloyd George brought up these naval terms, the Marshal took fire, clutched the rim of the table as if invisible tides of folly, set in motion by the Welshman, were about to swirl him off his chair, out the door, down the steps, across the foyer and so on.

The High Seas Fleet hadn't put to sea for two years. Did the Prime Minister of Britain want our soldiers to go on dying just because the enemy would not give up a fleet that never put to sea?

The Welshman of course pursued, defined, ranted. But the marginal imputation hung over him: that his demands were unbalanced, that he had a sickness of the mind about ships. Meanwhile the Marshal could direct looks at his blotter. What he told his blotter was the old story: the Welshman is descending to particulars. We'll …
I'll
… impose our intentions on the enemy. Wholesale.

THE MARSHAL AND THE CALVINIST TEXAN

One other of his contacts with statesmen is worth recording. Sometimes in the afternoons of late October or early November 1918 he was required to go out to the Supreme War Council, who had convened beneath chandeliers in the dining hall of the Trianon palace. Here Colonel House, a small chinless Texan, struggled to retain the mildness, the unvengefulness of the Fourteen Point peace plan his President had uttered earlier in the year. His task was like that of persuading wolves and tigers to take up a vegetarian diet.

Yet President Wilson was Europe's angel of reconciliation. Even the left-wing deputies in the German Reichstag praised him on the floor of the house during debates. His voice, his incarnation in Paris, this Colonel House certainly wasn't a military colonel, but was, at least, remote, seemly, no cowboy. The Marshal suspected there was Indian in him, he had high Mongolian cheekbones. Apart from that he looked like someone you'd find driving an elevator in a very good family hotel.

One afternoon, in the dining hall, he asked the Marshal this question: if the enemy does not give in to an armistice, how long would it be before our armies got to the Rhine?

The Marshal told him four months, five. His troops weren't used to fast advances and tended to be needlessly delayed by the screens of elite machine gunners the enemy threw in their tracks. He, in the meantime, had demanded that troops be trained to bypass, infiltrate. But still, four months, five …

House:
It would be a great victory—to drive them all the way back to the Rhine.

The little Mongolian face suggested: and you'd be the victor and honored forever. So why should you want to end the war? Therefore why should you lead the armistice powwow?

None the less the Marshal knew that this Texas (perhaps Comanche!) Calvinist had smelt out the most dangerous lust he carried within him. Even now, in the fifth year, his creativity cried out for a war of movement, for making a gap without losing 150,000 men, for having reserves to exploit it. By next spring there would be two million American soldiers in France.

The war had so far been a Satanic denial of talent and fire. And now that it had become possible to make war in a Napoleonic manner he was told to make a truce instead. The Marshal had now to force cease-fire terms not only on the nations but on his creative lust.

But he wouldn't admit all that to a Calvinist Texan.

FERRASON SAYS HE WILL TEACH

The Marshal told the orderly to put down the razor and ring a bell connecting his dressing room to the operations section downstairs. In answer, after half a minute, a young officer entered the dressing room, saluting. Clever Major Ferrason. Less than thirty. Would have been a general by now if he'd been in the field. Or else dead.

The Marshal:
Situation, Ferrason! Situation?

Ferrason:
I'll have an immediate report written for you, sir.

The Marshal:
No, tell me. Or don't you know?

Ferrason:
I know, sir.

The Marshal:
I'm not so old I'll forget.

The orderly's razor made a subtle turn round the limits of the old man's heavy mustache. The Marshal sat beneath the razor as marmoreal as he had lain asleep before dawn. He was
that
freak: the man whose private and public selves were one.

Ferrason:
The British have cleared Bruges and are west of Ath on the Brussels Road. The Americans are going forward ten kilometers east of Le Cateau. On the line of the Aisne our forces are fifteen kilometers west of Rethel. The roads are mined and barricaded. But French forces are progressing at a somewhat better rate than the others.

He paused to signify
End of Report
.

The Marshal:
A little hazy, but it gives me an idea. News of the Russians?

Ferrason:
None that I know, sir.

The barber used scissors on the Marshal's hairy earholes.

The Marshal:
When I see you again there will be no war. I must thank you for the walks we have enjoyed together.

Ferrason:
You embarrass me, sir.

The Marshal:
I hope not. We have surely shared enough …

In all the headquarters they had occupied, they had been walking companions. He'd acquired Ferrason when he took over IX Army in 1914. In that autumn the boy had been an adoring lieutenant, a vacant thing, a spout down which you could pour ideas about troop movement, epistemology, music, and hear them resound flatteringly. Now Ferrason was older and his own man. But they still liked each other.

The Marshal:
I thank you because even if we do walk together again the quality of the debate, the urgency … will all have changed.

Ferrason:
One can only hope so.

The Marshal:
What are you going to do then? Grand Quartier Général will run down. It seems a lot of its members are already harboring plans. What might yours be? I ask myself.

Ferrason:
I've been offered a teaching job at the École de Guerre. You see, they think your ideas have rubbed off.

The Marshal:
I congratulate you.

The words were flanneled: an orderly was toweling and massaging the Marshal's face.

The Marshal:
If it were 1872 I'd advise you to take it.

Ferrason smiled.

Ferrason:
I wouldn't say your ideas were as old-fashioned as all that, sir.

The Marshal:
Make your jokes. What I'm getting at is: there will be a vast allied crusade against the Bolsheviks. Yes, yes, there will be, don't make a face.

Ferrason:
I assure you, sir …

The Marshal lifted his thumb and for five seconds the wind surged and caterwauled in the park. You were tempted for an instant to think the Marshal had commanded and orchestrated the gale.

The Marshal:
There will
be!

Already he had prepared memoranda. French officers would staff the campaign. And those two million American boys Pershing would have by the spring. They would have their chance in wide-open Russia.

The Marshal:
I hope to be involved myself. You … you could be an army commander. In a war of movement too! You can't have a static war in Russia, you know. The countryside doesn't permit it.

Upright Ferrason wore braid around the rim of his coat and was in fact crumpling it with his left hand. He gave no other sign of war weariness.

Ferrason:
With the Marshal's permission … I would like to pass on to the new generation the lessons of this war.

The Marshal:
Don't be a hypocrite, Ferrason.

Ferrason:
I wasn't aware …

The Marshal:
You want one of those pleasant staff houses, you want a garden of roses and your infants staggering about amongst them. You want your wife's endearments.

Ferrason:
I have reasons of honor.

The Marshal:
You mean then your wife's endearments don't count?

Ferrason:
Sir, I know you're amusing yourself.

The Marshal:
Oh no.

And the wind too thudded its dissent under the eaves.

The Marshal:
You'll be a fat colonel of fifty before you know it.

Ferrason:
I regret disappointing you, sir.

The Marshal:
Ferrason, any damn private soldier can want to go home.

Ferrason:
Yes.

The Marshal:
That takes no talent.

If God were not in my soul (the Marshal told himself), if I enjoyed my power in a cosmic vacuum, and if I did not eat the Bread of Peace on Sundays, I know what I'd damn well do. I'd detach Ferrason off to Salonika to report on means of repatriating the French Army. He couldn't take his dumpling wife to Salonika. It was full of typhoid.

The Marshal:
Did you go to a Jesuit College, Ferrason?

Ferrason's hand worked again, surreptitiously, at the braid. My God, thought the Marshal, he doesn't think it's a relevant question.

Ferrason:
When I was a boy.

The Marshal:
Of course. That's when you
do
go, when you're a boy.

Ferrason:
I went to the Jesuits at la Poste, sir.

The Marshal:
Astonishing. Did they teach you to make acts of the will?

Ferrason:
Yes. We often talked about the Jesuits and the faculty of the will, sir. On our walks.

When the Marshal performed his bitter laugh, his over-large head looked like a gargoyle's. Ferrason saw the mysterious ferocity of his stained teeth. Yet it was still hard to tell if the old man was playing with him or, in fact, suffering parental hurt.