Gossip from the Forest (22 page)

Clemenceau:
The point is: you have to sign as soon as you can.

The Marshal:
Of course.

Clemenceau:
I called in on Monet yesterday on my way to the senate. You're not keen on art, are you, my Marshal?

The Marshal:
No.

Clemenceau:
I told him yesterday that things were so close to an end.

The Marshal:
I suppose he's very discreet.

Clemenceau:
Telling Monet is like telling God. I imagine you yourself, Marshal, have taken the time to inform
that
good friend of yours.

When the Premier was most afraid (the Marshal knew) his jokes ran to the easy mark and were most fatuous.

The Marshal:
For both of us. For you as well, Monsieur.

Clemenceau:
Do you know what old Monet said to me? He said, Now we'll be able to settle down to build the memorial to Cézanne. But this morning I wonder. Nothing's sure.

A plangent sigh out of the old fellow's ample-bore, bull organs. Cut off by brassy Mordacq. Orchestrated agnosticism.

Mordacq:
For that reason, all of us at the War Office trust that the Marshal will keep in mind the diplomatic realities.

The Marshal:
What else?

Mordacq:
Also that he will firmly understand that it is not a mystical exercise.

The Marshal:
Monsieur Premier, if you don't silence him I will consider it an insult.

The Premier transferred the stick between his knees and clapped his hands.

Clemenceau:
A duel, a duel.

Knowing that the Marshal could not duel, whatever his blood told him. Remembering too the years when he himself had kept the Chamber of Deputies in place with dueling pistols, until one day at Fontainebleau in 1893 he had had three shots at a deputy called Boudouaument and missed with all three and was therefore considered to have lost his fangs.

The Marshal saw the Premier's eyes glowing viscid. The glue of his memories ran there. Sentiment, sentiment.

The fire spat and returned Clemenceau to the indecisive Saturday in which he sat. He did not like it there. He dried his flaccid mustache carefully. Perhaps the upper lip it hid was sweating wildly.

Clemenceau:
All jokes aside …

His right hand plucked and crumpled the air, a word spinner's mannerism he'd picked up twenty-five years back, when he'd sat down in middle age to become a novelist and done badly at it.

The Marshal understood but would not forgive his helplessness this dripping Saturday. The Marshal thought, he never learned to sniff out the moment when reason should be suspended. Whereas I, alone with the enemy in the forest's eye, have sniffed it out.

SAILOR KINGS AND DÉBUTANTES

“While [wrote the Admiral, in a memorandum for the Marshal] the British Government would certainly understand the desire of the French Army to exact payment for the insults inflicted by the German empire in 1871, it is confident that the Generalissimo will also understand that this war has been fought on every ocean and a cease-fire (as well as an eventual peace settlement) must provide for the security, navally guaranteed, of all the 500 million and more British subjects from the southern ocean to the Orkneys.…”

As always, the wonder of this benign imperial concept brought him to a stop and he remembered sailing round it, the empire which was not only a geographical reality but a resonant abstraction also; so that on its seas you had a sense of being not simply sailor but metaphysician as well.

He had navigated it once with Teddy, his revered king of the time. It was always temperate summer that year, for there is always summer in some limb of the empire. And the itinerary was so planned. The
Ophir
had been chartered for the voyage, and staffed by aristocratic officers.

Teddy knew Rosslyn Wemyss was illicitly related through some rutting of William IV's. Himself a sailor.

King Teddy used to wink at me when he came up to the bridge. Never trust sailors, he'd say. If you left it to sailors we'd all be related. Not that Teddy was a slouch with the women. You had to remember his mother had never allowed him any contact with the Cabinet. The one time he'd read cabinet papers she'd raised the roof. So Teddy never got used to
that
side of government even after his mother died and left him to it. His specialty was
droit du seigneur
. Carried in the
Ophir
, he exercised it amongst the well-fed daughters of rich colonies.

How long the journey took. A year. The French did not understand that: the extent of the world. All they sought was to beat the German Army in set-piece battles more or less on their common frontier. In arguing with them you faced, far more than mere inadvertence, this manic obsession.

He began to write again but was distracted by memory breaking open in his belly like a pod. In Melbourne the king and queen had disembarked from
Ophir
to travel to Brisbane by train. They left on board the officers, the crew, some officials and three ladies-in-waiting, creatures only a year or so out of the débutante pages of
The Queen, The Field, Country Life
. Mezzotint complexions now teased a little dusky by the empire's recurring suns.

You had to be careful. A king's ship could go a little slack once the king left it. But dining was somehow a pleasanter business and you drank more and had rowdy card games with the ladies the queen had left with you. And you danced with them, tipsily believing their nice breasts were burning holes in your mess jacket. And one night you bent and, your head ringing, made the sumptuous suggestion: my love, have you thought of the royal bed?

The lady-in-waiting and he had both told each other, while still drunk and given to repetition, how much Teddy would have been tickled to know. Even if Queen Alexandra would have looked on it as trespass.

THE DUELING SLAP

That afternoon, it could be seen, Maiberling was drunk. He went about making trouble with Vanselow and von Winterfeldt, who worked innocently, with slight executive frowns, at separate tables amongst the black Moroccan footstools of the saloon.
Busy, busy
, he would say.
Scribble, scribble
.

Erzberger had been writing a sort of gallows speech. He hoped to append it to the clauses. He covered with a clean sheet of paper the paragraphs he had already prepared and called to the count to sit down.

The count's answer was disconnected, mocking.

Maiberling:
How much did they pay you as a director of Thyssen's?

Erzberger:
Really, Alfred …!

Maiberling:
No, come on. Tell a friend.

Erzberger:
Forty thousand marks.

Maiberling:
That's not much as soul money goes.

Erzberger:
Not if you're running a house in Schöneberg. But I suppose they consider it's the honor.…

Maiberling:
Do you think they'd have me?

Erzberger:
If they still exist.

Maiberling:
You're supposed to be the optimistic one.

Matthias could smell the class contempt in Maiberling. There was sinew to it that had not been there last night.

Erzberger:
Do you want to rest, Alfred?

Maiberling:
No, Matthias. Neither rest nor work. I am mourning my good friend the twentieth century. Like all the other youngsters, about to turn his toes up in his eighteenth year.

With a wave of the hand, Matthias begged off such fulsome despair.

Erzberger:
It's painful for me to speak like this. I demand better behavior from you, Alfred.

Maiberling:
You can go to hell. My behavior, your behavior. Behavior's ceased to have bearing.

Erzberger:
If you get drunk I won't let you sit at the conference table.

Maiberling slapped Erzberger's cheek. Not an uncontrolled gesture, not a peasant haymaker; an exact, dueler's slap, delivered from the wrist, a measured dose. Vanselow and von Winterfeldt both looked up, sat rigidly. We've heard that noise before. Points of honor in the mess. Their faces said, We hadn't expected to be diverted this way.

Erzberger remembered then: he hadn't made peace with Vanselow.

After Maiberling had about-turned and taken steps, again exactly measured, toward the far end of the carriage, Erzberger quashed the tears in his left eye and uncovered what he had been writing. Exactly like a school child who, in the face of punishment, pleads the quality of his schoolwork.

“Considering the discussions [the uncovered page said] leading to the armistice, we might have hoped for conditions that would have brought an end to the suffering of noncombatants, of women and children, at the same time that it assured the enemy full and complete military security.

“The German people, which has held off a world of enemies for fifty months, will preserve their liberty and their unity despite every kind of violence.

“A nation of seventy millions of peoples suffers but it does not die.”

It's very well to write it. Is it a nation? Where are the men who would have negotiated a victory, with what whore do they now huddle and are they one race with us? Are Maiberling and Erzberger one race? And what is Rosa Luxemburg doing in Berlin? Is Max still Chancellor? Is the Kaiser still darting and resisting beneath the paranoid chandeliers of the Château de la Fraineuse? What are the Swabians thinking and what the East Prussians? Can Paula, Maria, and Gabrielle, from the steps of the bungalow on Wansee, see reflected in the sky the red glow of Bolshevik Berlin? And what pan-German dolt of an officer is this moment loading his service revolver with a bullet for me, a bullet for the piss-pot count?

THE SUICIDAL HORSE

The Marshal lowered his face so that the steam from the pea soup stung and cleansed it.

The Marshal:
And where did this happen, my Lord Admiral?

Wemyss:
Off the South African coast. Columbine Point is the name of the place.

Weygand:
This would be during your war with the Boers?

He seemed to intimate: since that was an unfortunate affair perhaps your story is also questionable.

Rosslyn Wemyss could not prevent himself coughing. He could tell too there was a sudden radiant hostility in General Weygand.

Wemyss:
That's right. Our war in Africa.

The Marshal:
A horse, you say?

Wemyss:
Yes. A troopship ran upon the rocks at Columbine Point. In foul weather.

The Marshal:
As you said.

To show he would not repent of delays or repetitions, the admiral took his time lighting, drawing upon a cigar, inspecting its kindled tip.

Wemyss:
It carried a regiment of hussars. At that time I was the humble commander of a little patrol boat. So we were able to work in close abeam … I'm sorry, I don't know the French term … abeam the troopship. “Abeam” means at right angles.

The Marshal:
The general and I know the term. We have sailed in Brittany.

Wemyss:
Forgive me.

He took a long and uncontrite savoring of his cigar. They waited for him.

Wemyss:
It was late afternoon but there was still plenty of light. The captain had lit the “ship-aground” night lights fore and aft but the way she was heeled over we knew she wouldn't last till night. I could see the hussars on deck shooting the horses in case they broke loose from the deck stalls and ran wild. Even before I could send them a line some of the cavalrymen jumped overboard but were carried to the rocks. It was frightful. They were ground up and down the rough edges until they lost consciousness. Then the currents sucked them down. I don't know if it's so in France, but we found that soldiers feared sea perils more than going into combat. They lost all their discipline during shipwreck.

The Marshal sighed, lifting his hand concessively.

The Marshal:
I never sailed to colonial wars. But I imagine you're right about soldiers. Water is not their medium.

The general, frowning a little, was not beguiled by this debate on the eccentric terrors of soldiers.

Weygand:
And you saw this horse?

Wemyss:
Yes. It ran free and jumped a railing to get into the sea. It must have been a fine horse to find propulsion on the sloping deck.

Weygand:
They are extraordinary creatures.

Wemyss:
It knew it was bound to die.

The Marshal:
I think they
do
know. I think they suffer beyond the mere pain of the moment. I think like us they know they are mortal. Artillery horses are very sensitive. And, I suppose, steeplechasers.

The First Sea Lord did not like a certain gloss in the Marshal's eye and the too eager way he agreed that hussars feared water and horses foreknew their deaths. It was as if he were setting him up to be undercut by that tight-lipped little hippophile, brother Maxime.

He found it, however, too late to stop telling the story. To hell with their dragoon disdain, he decided.

He looked for an instant to his staff. Hope and Marriott neutrally spooning their soup: knowing it wasn't their place to introduce anecdotes and influence the audience's acceptance.

Wemyss:
It was obvious. The horse tried to commit suicide. I have never seen such a thing, before or since. It was washed to the rocks and back again at least a dozen times and each time it flung its head quite deliberately at an outcrop, and a dozen times it missed. In the end though it managed what it wanted. I saw its body go loose and its blood coloring the water. It vanished in a little while. An ominous thing, a horse killing itself. You could say, despite the conditions, quite
coolly
committing suicide.

The Marshal:
Amazing.

But little General Weygand watched the cheese sideways and absorbed into himself this story of horse suicide as if he were taking account of a libel against one of the family.