Ben Bova
The Cafe Coup
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or do they? Two time travelers will find out for themselves in the latest story from the prolific author of Mars, Brothers, and many other novels and works of nonfiction.
Paris was not friendly to Americans in the soft springtime of 1922. The French didn’t care much for the English, either, and they hated the victorious Germans, of course.
I couldn’t blame them very much. The Great War had been over for more than three years, yet Paris had still not recovered its gaiety, its light and color, despite the hordes of boisterous German tourists who spent so freely on the boulevards. More likely, because of them.
I sat in one of the crowded sidewalk cafes beneath a splendid warm sun, waiting for my lovely wife to show up. Because of all the Germans, I was forced to share my minuscule round table with a tall, gaunt Frenchman who looked me over with suspicious eyes.
“You are an American?” he asked, looking down his prominent nose at me. His accent was worse than mine, certainly not Parisian.
“No,” I answered truthfully. Then I lied, “I’m from New Zealand.” It was as far away in distance as my real birthplace was in time.
“Ah,” he said with an exhalation of breath that was somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “Your countrymen fought well at Gallipoli. Were you there?”
“No,” I said. “I was too young.”
That apparently puzzled him. Obviously I was of an age to fight in the Great War. But in fact, I hadn’t been born when the British Empire troops were decimated at Gallipoli. I hadn’t been born in the twentieth century at all.
“Were you in the war?” I asked needlessly.
“But certainly. To the very last moment I fought the Boche.”
“It was a great tragedy.”
“The Americans betrayed us,” he muttered.
My brows rose a few millimeters. He was quite tall for a Frenchman, but painfully thin. Half starved. Even his eyes looked hungry. The inflation, of course. It cost a basketful of francs, literally, to buy a loaf of bread. I wondered how he could afford the price of an aperitif. Despite the warm afternoon he had wrapped himself in a shabby old leather coat, worn shiny at the elbows.
From what I could see there were hardly any Frenchmen in the cafe; mostly raucous Germans roaring with laughter and heartily pounding on the little tables as they bellowed for more beer. To my amazement, the waiters had learned to speak German.
“Wilson,” my companion continued bitterly. “He had the gall to speak of Lafayette.”
“I thought that the American president was the one who arranged the armistice.”
“Yes, with his fourteen points. Fourteen daggers plunged into the heart of France.”
“Really?”
“The Americans should have entered the war on our side! Instead they sat idly by and watched us bleed to death while their bankers extorted every gram of gold we possessed.”
“But the Americans had no reason to go to war,” I protested mildly.
“France needed them! When their pitiful little colonies rebelled against the British lion, France was the only nation to come to their aid. They owe their existence to France, yet when we needed them they turned their backs on us.”
That was largely my fault, although he didn’t know it. I averted the sinking of the Lusitania by the German U-boat. It took enormous energies, but my darling wife arranged it so that the Lusitania was crawling along at a mere five knots that fateful morning. I convinced Lieutenant Walther Schwieger, skipper of the U-20, that it was safe enough to surface and hold the British liner captive with the deck gun while a boarding party searched for the ammunition that I knew the English had stored aboard her.
The entire affair was handled with great tact and honor. No shots were fired, no lives were lost, and the 123 American passengers arrived safely in Liverpool with glowing stories of how correct, how chivalrous, the German U-boat sailors had been. America remained neutral throughout the Great War. Indeed, a good deal of anti-British sentiment swept the United States, especially the midwest, when their newspapers reported that the British were transporting military contraband in secret and thus risking the lives of American passengers.