In the course of doing research for a World War I film script, the Australian Thomas Keneally was, fortunately for novel readers, sidetracked into an exhaustive study of the members of the Armistice Team. The result of his effort is Gossip from the Forest, a gripping evocation of the tensions of the time and of the men who made the Armistice….

All of the shortsighted military arrogance in the story arouses mainly disgust in the reader. What the politicians and military officers did there at Compiègne to end their war games is not presented as either very intelligent or very important. This is one sense, at least, in which the story amounts, ironically, to mere gossip from the forest. That Marshal Foch and his attendants, in forcing their terms on Germany did little more than "weave a scab over that pit of corpses four years deep" seems painfully clear now. (p. 157)

In probing the murk of personality, Keneally demonstrates that the men who made the event are more compelling than the event itself. He examines the characters' private and public lives in detail—through their dreams, through comments of the men about each other, through copious conversations, through reminiscences about lovers and home and family.

Atrocities, both military and civilian, and the brutal execution of power are commonplace in Keneally's books, as readers of Bring Larks and Heroes, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and Blood Red, Sister Rose are aware. But with Gossip from the Forest Keneally has succeeded better than in any of his previous books in lighting the lives of historical figures and in convincing us that people are really the events of history. (pp. 157-58)