We Shall Not Sleep Page 4

  He had tried. God knew, he had done everything in his power, sacrificing the time and substance of his life for the cause. And yet war had still broken out, and continued for four long, ruinous years. He and his cousin Manfred von Schenckendorff had almost prevented it four and a half years ago. They had been days away from success when John Reavley, a retired Member of Parliament and sometime inventor from a Cambridgeshire village, had stumbled on the treaty and understood what it meant. In his narrow-minded patriotism, he had stolen it. The Peacemaker had learned what had happened and had him killed before he could show it to anyone, but despite all his efforts he had failed to retrieve the treaty. The one copy he had was insufficient to take to the king in the hope that he would sign it, and avoid the coming conflagration.

  Then there had been the idiotic assassination in Sarajevo, and Europe had hurtled toward war. Estimates of the dead and lost—those crippled, maimed, or damaged in heart and mind—amounted to more than thirty-five million. The futile, blind idiocy of it boiled inside him with a rage so intense it caused him physical pain.

  He had done everything he could, and failed. Now, if he did not succeed in forcing the Allied powers to create a just peace, it would all happen again. A handful of years and a new war would foment like a disease incubating in the body, and a new generation would be slaughtered just as this one had been.

  He had tried persuasion, but was not listened to. President Wilson had no concept of European politics, and no understanding of history. He wanted to dismantle Germany’s heavy industry, destroy her army and navy, shatter the heart of her people, and weigh them down with debt that could never be repaid. He could not see the damage that would do to all of Europe, perhaps to the whole world.

  The torrent of his despair was interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. He knew Mason would have come on foot, but how had he not seen him in the street? He had been waiting for him all evening.

  “Come in!” he said sharply in answer to the knock.

  The door opened and the manservant announced Richard Mason.

  The Peacemaker nodded, and the manservant stepped back to allow Mason in. They had conducted this ritual often enough over the last five years that it needed no words.

  The Peacemaker went back to the window, closed the curtains, and then turned on the lamps near the two large chairs. The yellow light shone vividly on Mason’s face. It was gold across his high cheekbones and broad mouth, making his nose look even stronger and his eyes darker, the lines around them accentuating his weariness. His hair was so thick and black that he barely looked English, although in fact he was born and bred in Yorkshire and loved its wild moors and dales and the storms along the coast as a man can love only the land where his roots burrow deep into the earth.

  The Peacemaker had no need to ask the question that was in his mind. He and Mason had known each other since Boer War days. They had seen the same horrors and made the same covenants with the future, and both had failed.

  “Three or four weeks at most.” Mason was just back from the Western Front, where the Allied troops were now moving forward so rapidly it was hard to keep up with the numbers of prisoners or the land gained. The fighting line was always advancing, and the casualties were still high. Each report looked much like the last, except that the names of the towns were different.

  The balance of hope and tragedy was especially poignant. As a journalist, Mason found it difficult to write without his own anger pouring through, and he did not want it to. The whole continent had suffered enough, and there would be far more pain and loss still to come than most people realized. The long, grueling aftermath of war would very rapidly overtake the first wild joy of the cease-fire. Unlike the Peacemaker sitting opposite him in this safe, elegant room, he had spent the last four years reporting from every battlefront in the world. He had lived in the violence and the fear, the cold, the hunger, and the stench of death. The war was not simply an idea and a set of emotions to him; it was a terrible, physical reality.

  He looked at the Peacemaker’s face in the lamplight, one-sided in shadow, as his own must be, and to him now the imbalance in it was disturbingly visible. In the lit side were the dreams and the compassion of the early years, the vision of healing; in the shadowed side toward the open room were the arrogance and the disregard for the curbs of morality, the refusal to see the dreams of others. The Peacemaker had argued over and over that the greater end justified the smaller ugliness of the means.

  Joseph Reavley had said that the means were inextricably bound into and part of the end. Being a chaplain, he had put it in religious terms. He had said that if you picked up and used the devil’s tools, you had already served his purpose, because using them had changed you, and that was all he wanted.

  Mason had thought it fanciful, an easy sermon. Now, sitting in this quiet room, he knew it was true. The Peacemaker was no longer the man with whom Mason had planned such noble things five years ago. They had used means he despised, and still they had not achieved their ends of peace. They had fought a war inconceivable even a decade ago and brought ruin that seemed endless and irredeemable. Art, society, and faith had changed forever.

  He remembered how the Peacemaker had envisioned the revolution in Russia as the birth of a new social order sweeping away the old tyranny and putting in its place justice for the ordinary man. Mason had been to Russia and seen the blood and the violence, and the same old weapons of oppression, secrecy, and deceit, no more skilled and certainly no more merciful.

  Above all, he could see in the Peacemaker an imbalance of judgment, a hunger for glory that disturbed him. His visions ignored the passions and the vulnerabilities of men.

  The Peacemaker, leaning forward, broke the silence between them. “We have to affect the terms of the armistice now!” he said urgently. “Before Wilson can force a punitive settlement on Germany and start an economic ruin that will draw into it the whole of Europe. Germany is the key, Mason. Never forget that! They’ll rise again. Let it be as our friends—not as our enemies. Think of the future. Whatever you believe of the morality of any of it, the simple truth is that we cannot afford revenge. The ordinary German soldier is no different from the ordinary British soldier. How often have you told me that? The mothers and the widows in a German town are the same as those in London or Cambridge or anywhere. Think, Mason! Use your intelligence, not your sentimentality.”

  Mason’s resolve had been firm, yet in one short speech the Peacemaker had moved the ground under it, and it wavered. Revenge was the last thing Mason wanted. There was nothing left to take, no one left to hurt any more terribly than they already had been. How could he have been so certain only a few moments ago?

  “There is nothing I can do,” he said aloud. It was an evasion, an escape from responsibility, and he knew it before the words were finished.

  “For God’s sake, man, you can try!” the Peacemaker snarled, fury suddenly twisting his features. Then with an effort so profound the strain of it was visible, he forced himself to lean back and lower his voice. “If we don’t make a just peace—one on which we can build a new and united Europe—then economic chaos will ruin every chance we have of building up what is left of our civilization. We must repair the spirit of our people so they have a will to work, and a faith that it is to some purpose. Can’t you see that?” His face was pale, his eyes glittering. “Do I have to explain to you what happens to a nation if we rob it of its identity, its means of regeneration, its faith in its own worth and destiny?” He flexed his long, thin hands. “If the Germans accept that the terms are just, we can be allies in the future. If they can’t, then they will hate us. Secretly, violently, they will plan revenge, and it won’t matter how long it takes—they will have it. Nothing good is built upon hatred.”

  Mason knew this was true, but the use of the word allies shivered through him with all the warnings he had not seen or understood the first time, before John and Alys Reavley were murdered—or Sebastian Allard, or Owen Cullingford, Augu
stus Tempany, or Theo Blaine—and every village in Britain bereaved of its youth.

  He rose to his feet, surprised at how stiff he was.

  The Peacemaker stared up at him. “What?” he demanded.

  “I’ll consider what there is to say that will cut across emotion and make them look at reason and reality in the future,” Mason answered.

  The Peacemaker stood also, an inch or two taller than Mason. “There’s no time to weigh and measure,” he said grimly. “It sounds like the evasion of a moral coward who won’t say no to a man’s face.”

  At another time, even months ago, Mason’s temper would have risen to such a charge. Now he was too weary, too clenched inside in his gut with the reality of death, to be stung by the wound of words. He smiled. “And that sounds like the attempt at manipulation of an armchair warrior who is used to shedding other people’s blood,” he answered. “I told you, I would consider what I think, and then act accordingly. I am just as aware as you of how little time there is.” And without looking back to see if the Peacemaker’s face was twisted with rage or pain, or simply blank with surprise, he walked to the door, down the steps, and finally into the dark, windy street.

  By early afternoon the following day, Mason was back in Yorkshire, in the land he loved. He had booked a room at the village pub and, after a late lunch of homemade sausages—he did not ask what went into them in these times of hardship—he put on good walking shoes and set out in the evening light. He was high up, and the whole panorama of the dales spread out in front of him, valleys already shadowed, high slopes gold in the sun. The purple was fading from the heather, and the dark bronze bracken gave the color a sudden depth. The sky was ragged with clouds toward the west, and there was a chill in the air with the sweetness of great distances and clean winds.

  The South had a gentleness with its great trees and richly harvested fields, its winding lanes and meal-drift autumn skies, but it never healed him as this land did. It was too soft, too comfortable. It forgave too much.

  The North was different. The bones of the earth were naked here, and there was a beauty in it that spared nothing. You could stand on a narrow road like this and stare across the hills, fold after fold, wind-scoured, to the horizon. In a month’s time, when at last there was peace in the world, there would be the first snows on the shaws, pale-gleaming. The air would smell of it. The wild birds would be flying in for the winter, long skeins of them across the sky, wings creaking. The reeds would spear upward in the rippled water of the tarns. Strangers would disappear, and only the men who loved them would walk these ways.

  There was wood smoke rising below him. Over the hills he could see, perhaps five miles away, the roofs of the next village, the church spire high above them.

  He turned and continued climbing. He would be tired by the time he got back to the pub, and probably cold, but he would not lose himself up here. There was only one road, and he was long familiar with it. He needed to be alone in the darkness with the wind and the stars.

  He thought of Judith Reavley. The painful memory was something he should let go of. Their last parting a year ago had seemed final, and yet he kept turning it over and over. He could not change to please her. Her dreams, like Joseph’s, had no foothold in reality. She fought battles she could not win, for ideals that were rooted in religion rather than the nature of men or of nations.

  And yet her face haunted his mind. He found himself watching women who walked as she did, with the same ease, the stride that was a little too long for femininity yet filled with its own grace. He heard someone laugh and turned to find her, then disappointment cut deep when he realized it was a woman he had never seen before but who, for a moment, had sounded like her.

  He wanted her ridiculous hopes to be attainable, and he was angry because they were not, and she would always be hurt. He was angry with Joseph Reavley for not having taught her better, protected her. And yet how could he? He was just as naïve himself. Perhaps Matthew, the second brother, was more of a realist. At least he was not a preacher, trying to create a belief in God in the trenches. That was a dreamer’s errand if ever there was one.

  He turned and walked back down the hill with the cold wind in his face. A blaze of stars swept above him from horizon to horizon, so low in the clear sky that he felt as if he should have been able to gather them with his hands.

  The following morning he took the bus into Harrogate and had lunch in the Rat and Parrot with Robert Oldroyd, who had retired from teaching the year Mason had started secondary school, but Oldroyd’s energy of mind and love of learning had infected Mason, as they had so many of the boys who had come to him raw and ready to be shaped. His former teacher was nearly ninety now, white-haired and bent but still interested in everything, as inquisitive and irascible in his opinions as always.

  “Read your pieces,” Oldroyd said, nodding slowly and staring at Mason. They were sitting opposite each other at a small table near the window. “You did well, boy. Don’t want to get your head too big for your shoulders, but you have a nice turn of phrase. Say what you mean, no nonsense, no silly pretensions of making yourself immortal. Make us feel we’re there with you.” He reached a gnarled hand for his glass of cider and drank deeply before continuing. “Would like to have been with you, once or twice.”

  “Would you, sir?” Mason said doubtfully. He was grateful for the praise. He had admired Oldroyd intensely in his boyhood. A single word of praise from him then had been as precious as an accolade from anyone else. If Oldroyd acknowledged that you were alive, it made everything worthwhile. You became important, and your wildest dreams were possible. It was a lifetime ago, but the memory lingered with an innocence he thought he despised…but for some reason clung to. “It was pretty grim most of the time.”

  “’Course it was,” Oldroyd agreed, ignoring his lunch of bread and cheese. “Do you think I don’t know that?” There was a challenge in his voice.

  That was exactly what Mason had thought, and anger at the old men who stayed at home burned hot inside him. The delusions of glory and the ignorance of what real death was like in the mud and terror of the trenches were what made wars like this possible. “Where exactly would you like to have been?” he asked, and then wished he had not. The cruelty would serve nothing. Oldroyd belonged to the past. It was pointless to try to drag him into the harsher light of the present. He would die of old age soon, still understanding nothing.

  “One place?” Oldroyd asked, thinking about it, his face pursed up, eyes almost lost in the folds of his skin. “I would like to have walked into Jerusalem last year with Allenby. I could just about imagine it from what you wrote, but you saw it, you were there. December 11. You didn’t say much about his big cavalry victory at Megiddo last month. Reckon Aleppo and Damascus won’t be long. But Jerusalem is different; it’ll always be different. Went in as a man should, to the Holy City.” He looked at Mason. “Jaffa Gate, wasn’t it, with that big, square tower above it, and the crenellated walls? Crowded with people, you said. All looking down at one Englishman, alone and on foot.”

  “Did I say that?” Mason thought it sounded overemotional, sentimental, and he despised himself for it.

  Oldroyd was watching him intently now, judging. “Yes, you did. Did you lie?”

  Mason was too tired to be offended. He picked up his bread to eat it. “No. That’s how it was. It just sounds…predictable.”

  “Shouldn’t it?” Oldroyd asked. “Did you expect differently?”

  “I don’t think I expected it to happen at all.” Mason was quite honest. “After so much dust and blood it all seemed ridiculously pedestrian, exhausted and aching men doing things we have become desperately used to. No trumpets, no drumrolls, just a bald, middle-aged Englishman in an army uniform. Apart from his badges of rank, he looked like anyone else.” He bit into his bread and continued with his mouth full. “I was actually thinking about the future of the Middle East after the Turkish Empire is gone. Who will rule what, and how? Will the ordinary peopl
e be any better off, any freer from hunger or oppression?”

  “Heroes are ordinary people, Mason,” Oldroyd told him. “They’re not ten feet tall. It’s the inside that’s different, not the outside. You could walk past Christ in the street if you weren’t looking for Him.” He sighed. “Come to think of it, most of us do.”

  “Maybe that’s why we usually put Him on a cross,” Mason said grimly. “At least that’s different. Although I think it’s peculiarly appropriate as a symbol of humiliation and pointless suffering. No wonder Europe worships Him. We see ourselves, our whole race, in one image of the ultimate defeat.”

  Oldroyd leaned forward, his hands clenched, his face so grave that his skin was tight across the sharp bones of his cheeks beneath his sunken eyes. “It’s what a man fights for that defines who he is, boy! And a man who doesn’t love anything enough to pay what it costs doesn’t deserve to have it. Sometimes it costs pain and blood and terror. Sometimes it’s years of quiet weeping. Sometimes it’s waiting in the dark, without giving up.” He blinked, as if seeing other times and people for an instant. “My grandfather fought Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. My father and I fought in the Crimea, Battle of the Alma, 1854. I was twenty-three. Heard General Campbell tell us, ‘There’s no retreat from here, men. You must die where you stand.’ He died in my arms. My son lost his legs in the Zulu Wars, 1879, at Rorke’s Drift—hundred and thirty-nine of us against five thousand Zulus. My grandson fell at Passchendaele. Fifty thousand we lost in the first day.”

  Mason said nothing. In spite of himself, the ache in his throat was too tight and hard for him to swallow.

  Oldroyd blinked. “Of course we lose sometimes. What has that to do with anything? It’s not winning or losing that says who you are, it’s the courage that makes you stand fast, with your eyes forward, and fight for what you love. Never let go of hope. Real victories happen one by one, and they’re over the enemy inside. If I didn’t teach you that, boy, then I didn’t teach you anything.”