write to your father about Isobel’s manuscript?” she said.
“I will, but it may take some time. Now that the German delegation is in town the hard bargaining begins and I’ll be pretty tied up.”
She nodded.
Whistles blew, steam hissed, a hooter sounded down the platform, and the train eased forward. Sam held Will as he leaned out of the window, waving. I waved back, waiting till the train had quite disappeared from sight.
That afternoon I moved back into the Majestic. For the next forty-eight hours I was frantically busy, helping finalize our position papers for the resumption of the last phase of the conference.
Lloyd George was in buoyant mood, despite having to cope with labor unrest at home even as great events were under way in Paris. He disdained the Foreign Office staff and preferred the use of his own people, which meant there was always plenty for us to do. I remember that one of our main problems just then was to curb the jingoistic mood among the French. We found that our allies had wired the rooms at the Hôtel des Réservoirs and always knew what the Germans were thinking. Some among the British delegation thought this was unsporting and bad form, but the full peace terms hadn’t been agreed yet, only the Armistice, so who were we to complain? In a sense the war was still on.
There was also a big disagreement between us and the French about how much reparation the Germans were to be forced to pay. The French had their own war-audit unit, similar to ours, though they had concentrated on the naked financial costs of the fighting, rather than the moral costs. Their calculations of loss were much, much higher than ours and, privately, I didn’t think that the Germans, much as I had come to loathe them, had a hope in hell of ever repaying what the French wanted.
No amount of money would bring Isobel back.
Normally, we broke for lunch each day around twelve-thirty, a compromise between the American and French desire to stop at twelve and the British and Italian wish to eat later. I usually had a quick sandwich, a glass of water, and a smoke and then, because we were sitting all day long during the negotiations, took a brisk walk in the Versailles gardens. There was more peace among the chestnut trees and rhododendron bushes than in the palace itself.
At the lunch break on the second day of the German session, I was walking back from the Jardin de France, admiring the façade of the Petit Trianon, when I scuffed my shoes on the gravel. There was a fountain nearby, surrounded by a circular pond with a stone rim. I stepped across to the pond, taking a handkerchief from my pocket as I did so. I rested my shoe on the stone rim and bent to wipe my toe cap. As I was doing this, the bottom half of two gray trousers appeared in my line of sight and a voice said softly, “Hal? Is that you?”
I looked up.
It was a German officer, an Oberstleutnant, or lieutenant colonel, the same rank as me. I recognized these things now.
I straightened up, uncomprehending at first. We’d had nothing to do with German officers yet, or at least I hadn’t. They had only just arrived. How did he know my name?
Who am I fooling? Whatever my head said, my body told me straightaway. A bolt of recognition shivered down my spine.
Despite the lines on his face, the tired, liver-colored patches under his eyes, the exhausted expression, the longer but better-cut hair, the different uniform, my skin burned, my heart seemed to swell, my throat turned dry and it hurt to swallow.
Wilhelm had survived the war.
His cheeks were sunk; he didn’t fill his uniform properly. He was still handsome but he had lost his dash and swagger.
But Wilhelm had survived the war.
I had read that day in Northumberland Avenue that the Saxon Regiment, his regiment, had won a drill contest. Not with Wilhelm they hadn’t. He was a shadow of what he had been.
Did I salute? We had shaken hands in no-man’s-land and, as he took off his cap, we did the same again.
For a moment, neither of us said anything. My blood was pulsing through my ears. The back of my neck was damp with sweat. I felt my chest would explode.
“What happened to you?” I managed to breathe in German.
He smiled and, speaking in English, said he had eventually made it