Angels in the Gloom (17 page)

It was all couched in terms of village politics, but Mason knew enough of what it meant for his interest to be held as if in a vise. When he finished reading the letter, he put it in his pocket and sat crouched on an ammunition box, his feet on duckboards awash with rainwater, the weak spring sun thawing some of the chill out of his flesh. He could hear the sounds of men moving about. Someone was singing a bawdy song. There was a burst of laughter, and then others joined in. There was a kind of desperate courage in the singing that he admired with a passion so intense he found his hands were shaking on the tin mug he was holding, slopping the tea over. Anything that would save them was worth trying. Tired, beaten, bereaved, afraid—none of them were excuses for not trying. Pride was not even the beginning of an excuse. He would go back and listen to the Peacemaker, see if there was anything worth attempting. Then men like these around him could go home, and a woman like Judith could drive ordinary cars crazily along country roads instead of carrying the bleeding and the dead through this carnage.

He was on his way back to London anyway. He had only come through Ypres in the hope of seeing Judith. He was startled and a little afraid how much it had mattered to him. He was not at all certain it was what he wanted, not now, not when nothing could be held on to, treasured, promised for life.

But there should be life, for all these tens of thousands of men around him, its possibilities and hopes and chances for good or ill.

He drank the rest of the tea and climbed to his feet. He could not afford to stay here any longer. He must leave before the night’s bombardment began, and cadge a lift toward the train.

Mason arrived on a troop train in London and climbed out onto the platform at Waterloo station, stiff and cold. He heard the doors open and men call out, the clatter of boots, the whistle and hiss of steam as the engine belched. The platform was crowded, people pushing and jostling together, all straining eagerly to catch sight of a particular face, and growing more and more desperate if they didn’t. There were nurses in long, gray uniforms, always busy, too much to do, too little time; porters with luggage, men too old to fight, or not fit enough; and multitudes of men in khaki with white bandages, some spotted with blood.

Outside the station most of the people waiting in the taxi line were wounded. Though Mason was stiff and cold, he was unhurt so he walked to the nearest stop and waited for an omnibus. It could even end up being quicker in the end.

London looked drabber and more exhausted than Mason had remembered it. The women wore smart, elegant jackets, skirts to the midcalf with often a longer one beneath, but there was no color, no extravagance. There were no lace parasols as there used to be before the war, no hats with big flowers on them.

The street was alive with both horse-drawn carriages and automobiles and contained all the familiar advertisements, all the noise and the movement—but it looked dirty in the sun.

Since the last time he had been to Marchmont Street, he had reported not only from the Western Front and Gallipoli again, but also the desperate Italian resistance to Austria and the fighting in the Balkans. His emotions were raw with the bitter sameness of the loss. And now Judith’s face, blank with misery, haunted his mind. He wanted to hear her laugh again, to see her walk with a lift in her stride, with the energy, passion, and even arrogance that had caught his eye before.

The horns and the traffic brought him back to the present and the street again. The bus came and he boarded it, glad to find a seat.

He alighted while he was still half a mile from Marchmont Street. It was easier and certainly faster to walk the rest of the way than wait for another bus.

He recalled the first time he had come here, before the war. He had been full of hope and the belief that they really could make a difference; the horror of the Boer War need never happen again. Their ideals had been vast, a new age of peace and progress for mankind. Of course there was a price—nothing came without one, least of all change. But it had seemed then to be infinitely worth doing. How long ago that was now!

He reached the door he was looking for and rang the bell. He was shown upstairs by a manservant. Here again after a full year in which so much had happened, Mason felt self-conscious. The whole world was drawn in and seemed bent on slaughter, except the Americas. Only they remained the same, huge and aloof, blanketed in peace and prosperity while Europe drowned in its own blood.

Now he had returned to the Peacemaker’s house. Nothing had changed in the hallway or the landing. The walls were the same soft red. The same pictures were still hanging, landscape masterpieces of mountains and lakes, country by-roads, fields with great trees and quiet cows beneath them. There was even the same Chinese porcelain ginger jar on the stand at the top of the stairs.

The Peacemaker himself looked no different, either, except perhaps around the eyes. He was more tired, more guarded. Something of the fire was spent, but when Mason looked more closely he knew the determination was the same.

The Peacemaker held out his hand. “Good to see you, Mason. How are you? Tired, I imagine. Tea, or whisky? I have a good Glenmorangie if you’d like it.”

Mason declined. “But tea would be excellent.”

“Earl Grey?”

“Thank you.”

The Peacemaker gave instructions, adding the request for sandwiches as well, then returned, closing the door and inviting Mason to sit down. “I imagine Verdun was worse than you wrote in your dispatch?” he said quietly.

“Everything is worse than I write,” Mason answered. He knew roughly why the Peacemaker had summoned him. Russia, of course, but to do what? Mason believed in the same cause, with a passion even deeper and more consuming than before, but he was not prepared to bring it to pass in the same way. Watching the slaughter at Verdun until he could hear the guns in his dreams and taste blood, there was still no such thing as “peace at any price.” Some prices in their very nature made peace impossible, except in a way that could not last. He had said as much last year.

Was it conceivable that the Peacemaker had finally realized this himself?

Mason looked at the man opposite him with a kind of desperate hope. He had the intelligence, the power, and the vision to stop it! Personal feelings, likes and dislikes, even individual pride, were nothing compared with that gain, if it were possible.

“You can’t tell people what it’s really like,” he finished quietly. “The only pain of it we know is in the broken bodies that return, and the faces of the women who have lost their men.”

The Peacemaker sat motionless, his mouth drawn into a tight grip of pain. “We came close to stopping it, Mason,” he said softly, his voice thick with emotion. “We missed by hours! God knows what absurd chance made Reavley find that treaty, or what quixotic idiocy made him take it.” He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “But we have to deal with what we have now. That much of the past is irrelevant. It’s blood under the bridge,” he said with a bitter smile. “The situation is approaching a crisis. That is why I asked you to come.”

As the Peacemaker leaned forward, his face caught the light. “We are bogged down in France and Flanders, losing a thousand men a day! Gallipoli was a disaster. Italy may survive, but it hangs in the balance. The news from German East Africa is not good. Van Deventer is leading twelve hundred men to Kondoa Irangi, but the going is hard and they are being decimated by disease. In Mesopotamia our forces have still not lifted the siege of Kut and saved our men inside. The Tigris Corps’ casualties number about ten thousand men! That’s a quarter of Aylmer’s total force, which means it’s a loss all together of twenty-three thousand.”

Mason had not known the figures. They were far worse than he had assumed, but what puzzled him was what the Peacemaker wanted of him. Had he misunderstood the letter, and it was not Russia at all?

“But the change that matters most is that in the German High Command,” the Peacemaker went on, lowering his voice still further. “With every week that passes they too are losing more men, and their attitude hardens. They have held Narotch to Russian losses estimated well over a hundred thousand men. There will be a counteroffensive, probably next month. So far the Germans have resisted withdrawing men from Verdun to redirect them to the Eastern Front, but that may not last.”

“Exactly what is it you want?” Mason asked.

Before he answered, the Peacemaker smiled, softening his features startlingly, as if he had seen across a crowded room someone he liked enormously. “I want an understanding on both sides that there will be no victors in this war, except those who did not participate. Mason, it must be stopped somehow, before there is such bitterness on both sides that there can be no realistic peace afterward. Too much bloodshed, and the fury for vengeance may become so overwhelming that no settlement is possible, except when one side or the other has been utterly destroyed. Considering recent developments, that may be Britain. And God knows, that would be a tragedy unsurpassed even in the futile and terrible history of the world.”

Mason felt cold, as if he were overtaken with illness.

“I don’t want it for Germany, either,” the Peacemaker continued earnestly. “They are a great people, with a culture that has enriched mankind. Who can read their poets, their philosophers, or benefit from their science without gratitude? Who can listen to Beethoven and not be enlarged in spirit? His genius bestrides the world and transcends the petty language of words.”

Mason agreed wholeheartedly, but he was still waiting for clarification of why he had been summoned.

The manservant brought the tea tray with delicate sandwiches, left it on the table, and departed as silently as he had arrived.

“The death toll is already hideous,” the Peacemaker resumed, pouring for both of them. “It is mounting every day, and it is the best who die, the bravest and the most honorable, and very often the strongest, those who would have been the leaders of the future. In a little while Europe will be impossible to rebuild because the best will be gone.”

His lips pursed into a dry smile terrible with sadness. “The social changes are already irrevocable. Women are doing the jobs men used to. Many of them will not marry because the men who would have been their husbands are dead. Generations will pass before the loss is caught up. And we will all be degraded by the savagery, the starvation, and the betrayals that follow war.”

His eyes searched Mason’s face.

“We have a duty to save them, and ourselves, from that, and we haven’t much longer in which to do it,” he said, emotion cracking his voice. “The old governments, the men who wanted peace, are being replaced by warmongers who make their name and fame out of ruin. Are you still willing to help? Do you still have the strength and the courage to care?”

“Of course I care!” Mason retorted, angry that the Peacemaker felt any need to ask the question, even rhetorically. “What is it you plan? What has it to do with Russia, beyond dreams?”

The Peacemaker’s expression did not alter, but something in him relaxed so his elegantly cut suit eased into different lines on his body.

“Simply?” he asked. “Have you any concept of how many troops, how many tanks and guns could be released if Russia came out of the war?”

“I’m sure I could calculate it,” Mason replied. “But I can’t see any likelihood of that happening. It was the tsar’s treaties within Europe that took them in in the first place. None of that has changed.”

“It could do,” the Peacemaker answered, the excitement sharp in his voice now. “What do you know about Russia—not the army, but the society, the government, the mass of the people?”

Mason thought for a few moments. “Hunger, social injustice, crop failure,” he replied. “I suppose it could be summed up as chaos and shocking numbers of dead not only in battle but right across the land, due to poverty and climate, and lack of resources except in the hands of the few. They won’t beat Germany!” He frowned. “But Germany won’t beat them, either. Nobody ever has. It’s not just the stoicism of the people and their unbelievable sacrifice.” He shivered as he remembered the carnage he had seen. “It’s the land itself. We western Europeans can’t begin to comprehend how vast Russia is. It’s… endless! It swallowed Napoleon. It will swallow the kaiser if he’s stupid enough to try to invade it.”

“And God knows how many people,” the Peacemaker said, a hush of awe in his voice, as if he were already in the presence of the dead. “And what of the Russian government?”

“The tsar? Out of touch with everything,” Mason replied. “No concept of reality at all. His only son is a hemophiliac and not likely to live long. The tsarina is terrified for him, poor woman, and seems entirely dominated by the lunatic Rasputin. The whole edifice is corrupt from floor to ceiling.”

“Exactly,” the Peacemaker agreed. “Ready to fall. It will only need a little assistance…”

Mason stiffened. “Assistance?”

The Peacemaker’s eyes were burning. “If it does not happen soon, it will be very violent, worse than the revolution in France in 1789 when the gutters of Paris ran with blood. Russia needs change, and soon, before the country is torn apart. The Russian people have no stake in the war! They should make peace with Germany, pull out, gain a new government and a new order of social justice.”

“And how can we bring that about?” It was a rhetorical question. Mason did not expect an answer.