For What Its Worth - Keyes
---For Whats Its Worth - Part 3
--- Paris, June 1915
The heavy truck rumbled down the fashionable boulevard, its cargo of
war materiel a stark and grim reminder to those few privileged souls about
in that quarter at that time of day that not far out West brave French
- and British, and Belgian - soldiers were giving their all, their future
and their lives in what was now being termed the fight for civilisation.
Roger Keyes looked away, back down at the tiny cup of too-thick coffee
upon the small wrought iron table. The pavement café was almost
deserted at this hour of the afternoon, only two elderly veterans of 1871
sitting inside with the Jewish proprietor. It seemed to be like that everywhere
in Paris, Keyes mused - all the young, healthy men were at the battlefront
- that, or dead.
He picked up the newspaper that lay beside the delicate cup, "L'Homme
Enchaine' published by the Radical Georges Clemenceau. Before the war
it had been titled "L'Homme Libre" but, in protest at government
censorship, he had changed it from 'The Free Man' to 'The Enchained Man'.
Keyes scanned the front cover, and sighed deeply. The headlines were what
the relevant minister would call 'encouraging', the content bland. Even
in the middle of the biggest crisis since August 1914 there were no details
on the Battle of Skaggerak, only a brief mention, no intimation that the
Dardanelles offensive was soon to be abandoned, nor about the gathering
crises in Rome or Athens. There was mention of political upheaval in Britain,
all spoken in a positive light - reorganisation, new initiatives, new
energies. Keyes doubted that things were truly that rosy.
From inside a small clock upon the wall struck two deep dull bongs. Two
o'clock in the afternoon…Keyes sighed again. There had been a major
derailment outside Paris to the North, the line torn up by the lateral
slewing of the heavily-laden wagons. The best estimate of the authorities
at the Gare du Nord was seven or eight in the evening before trains to
Calais would be running again. He had bitten down on his natural instinct
to find a motor vehicle and drive himself there - an afternoon in Paris
was little loss and a mad drive o the coast would provide little gain
in time upon a later train. So, he stayed…and had an afternoon to
kill.
Taking a sip of the bitter, gritty coffee, Keyes reminisced on his journey
up from Marseilles. Rather to his surprise Prince Sixtus de Bourbon-Parma
had continued to take an interest in him, insisting that they share a
berth and exerting his evident diplomatic authority to secure them one
on the first available train Northwards. Keyes had enjoyed a most interesting
few hours, sitting talking, sipping brandy. In himself Prince Sixtus was
a fascinating man - scion of an old respected, but deposed, noble family,
loyal to France though banned by law from serving in her armed forces,
thus an artillery officer in the army of the king of Belgium, that and
in dire diplomatic circumstances a potential weapon that the French Prime
Minister Viviani had tried to utilise against the increasingly neutralist
Italy. And that to no avail Sixtus had informed him. On their trip North
they had talked of many things - of France and Italy, of the vanished
noble duchies of central Italy, of Sixtus' sister Zeta, married to the
Archduke Karl, heir to the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary, of the
war in the West where the Entente armies were still recovering after the
costly bloody failure of the Artois Offensive, of the war in the East
where the Russians were reported to be in full retreat. They had talked
of victory and defeat, their hopes and fears, the best cases and the worst
cases - the whole gamut of conversation when two intelligent articulate
men met in the field of discussion.
Once at Paris, Sixtus had bid his farewell, a government Renault there
to meet him, sweep him to the Elysee Palace for a debriefing with President
Poincare and the Prime Minister. Keyes knew that he would have little
good to tell them, scarce a hope of Italian intervention in the near future,
but Sixtus would not shrink from making the realisation plain to the French
leadership; they could not have a better man.
"Is there anything I can get you?" the Jewish proprietor inquired
at the Briton's side, his accented French cutting deep into his thoughts.
Keyes swallowed down the last of the bitter, noisome liquid, but down
upon a grimace of distaste and rose courteously from his seat.
"Non merci", he said, "I have business to attend to."
Watched by the curious Jew, Keyes struck out along the road for the British
embassy . . .
By Jon' N. Davies
