Gossip from the Forest Read Online Free Page A

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