Gossip from the Forest

New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. First American Edition Stated . Hard Back. Near Fine/Very Good. 6 1/4" X 9 1/2. 220 Pages. BCDE showing on copyright page. Beige boards with black quarter-spine and red lettering with front cover embossed decoration. Boards are very lightly faded at top - otherwise As New condition. Page edges are bright white. Interior is faultless. Black endpapers. Compiegne, France, November 1918. A place and a date that will forever be associated in Europe with the 1914-18 World War armistice. In a dank forest three first-class carriages await the arrival of the victors and the defeated. Monumental old Marshal Foch leads the Allied team, singleminded in his determination to force the German delegation to choke down all Allied proposals for the armistice terms. He is accompanied by his acolyte, meticulous Maxime Weygand. Then there is the bluff British plenipotentiary, Admiral Wemyss, whose parish is the sea and whose pre-occupation is that Britain, as always, should continue to rule the waves. They are the victors. The defeated are led by an idealist, Matthias Erzberger, circumspect leader of the Center Party. He had been peremptorily dispatched by a German Chancellor at the end of his tether to wring whatever measures of mercy he could extract from the victors. Already the Kaiser was away from it all in dazed retreat at Wilhelmshohe. There they foregather, to negotiate an armistice, to put a stop the slaughter and end the war. Except Foch isn't in a negotiating mood. And Erzberger is Foch's rendered ineffectual and distraught by Foch's ferocious terms, by his own nightmare responsibility and his agonized visions of widespread famine thoughout Germany. And so they talk and talk.