If Then (35 page)

“When we were ready, I travelled to London with the intention of confronting Masterman at his office on the top floor of Wellington House. I walked the streets with the war boiling in my mind. On the street, a woman gave a passerby a white feather from her basket. I decided to audition my ability. I gave her the war as if I were returning her umbrella. With a silent, quivering grimace, she fell down into her skirts.”

He ventured another drag upon the cigarette.

“London was different than I remembered it. There were women driving motor cars, women eating sandwiches in the ABC. Always the smell of hot tea from those places. Every bus had a different coloured ticket and when they were torn and discarded, the tickets lined the gutters like confetti. The city was a party to which I was not invited. At the Bank of England, the statue of Wellington on his horse was black with pollution; it reminded me of the burned men of Chocolate Hill. I knocked the straw boater from a chap’s head and when he and his chums confronted me I gave them all a taste of the
fucking war
. A traffic policeman with long white sleeves ran over to see what could be making these adult males whinny and soil themselves so. I hopped onto a bus.”

The cigarette made him swoon. Omega John sank back onto the bed, the sweat from his large head darkening the pillow case. Huxley insisted he rest and recover his strength. But there was to be no recovery. “Am I really dying?” asked Omega John, and, seeing Huxley’s silent pained expression, his fingers gripped the bedsheets. His lips and tongue worked dryly at the thought of death. It was too much. Better to return to the past.

He turned back to James, and told him that after the Bank of England, he got off the bus at Charing Cross Road, where the wounded used to come in from the trenches. There was a soldier dressed as a medieval knight lecturing on the war. His audience was entirely made up of other soldiers as if they all required further instruction in the matter. The irony of it, he laughed and that made him cough. Save your breath, ministered Huxley. Save it for what, he replied. The act of remembering gave him solace.

“I met up with Collinson at the free bar in Victoria Station. A woman in a black tie and hat served us tea from under a portrait of the king. Masterman’s office was nearby at Buckingham Gate. I was closing in on my quarry.” He reached out with a dithering open hand, then closed it slowly around an invisible object. “We watched the crowds gather around another trench train: beseeching mothers, angry silent wives, children hefted up for one last turn in father’s arms. Collinson asked me if I thought grief could be quantified. I said that it was in the nature of emotions that they swelled to new and unexpected proportions, although I was thinking more of my anger than any sorrow.” He let his hand fall upon the blanket, where it opened slowly.

“Collinson counselled me to be careful. It was a crime to spread unease. The work of Masterman’s department was secret but he had a weakness for literature, and it was under the guise of young writers that we secured an appointment with him. He remembered me, of course. In the first weeks of the war, Masterman had struck me as indecently dishevelled. By the time of our second meeting, more than a year later, the nightmare of the war lay heavy upon him. He needed a stick to walk and his complexion was gelatinous. Yes, imagine a great sullen fish in a tailcoat, propping itself upright upon a walking stick.”

The image of Masterman stirred him. He smiled somewhat.

“We spoke about my service. I told him that Collinson and I had served at Suvla Bay as stretcher bearers, and had been assigned that duty due to our Quaker background; he said he admired the attitude of the Quakers toward the war, felt they had come out of it much better than the Anglicans. He confessed that the proofs of a history of the battle of Gallipoli were on his desk. He had the decency to show a modicum of shame at its contents.

“Collinson took out a book of his own. In Suvla Bay, the professor had devised a mathematical proof of the efficacy of pacifism. It hinged upon the reduction of warlike activity to zero, a reduction we felt should begin with the publications of Wellington House.

“It was early evening, and outside the tall windows of the office, the street lamps gave out a dark blue light. Masterman sat behind his desk and inspected Collinson’s paper on the Equation of War. Then he put it aside. There was no question, Masterman said, of Wellington House ceasing in its operation. He returned the book to Collinson and asked us to leave, citing a heavy workload and a hades of a liver.

“I said, ‘What if it were possible to communicate the experience of war directly from mind-to-mind? Given your knowledge of the masses, don’t you think that such an ability would quickly reduce warlike activity to naught?’

“He did not entirely comprehend my point. So I tried again.

“‘If I could place the experience of thousands of men as they fight and die into the thoughts of a politician, a lady, the king himself using some mechanism, a combination of Marconi’s wireless and the energies of the
elan vital
, then what?’

“He confessed that, at Cambridge, he had undertaken psychical research work but had refused further involvement in it.

“‘We disproved every report of psychic activity,’ he said. ‘Except one. The only verified phenomena were time slips.’”

Omega John took up another cigarette.

“A time slip is when a person finds themselves unaccountably in a different era and returns with knowledge so detailed that it could only have been accrued at first hand. I said to Masterman that my ability was a phenomenon related to the time slip. It was a collective memory of the sensations and emotions of thousands of men, everything they saw, heard, smelt and tasted in the heat of battle. More like a time loop.”

“I understand.”

“Yes, you experienced a recurrence of it. I saw fear in Masterman’s eyes. He was a widow’s son. He had no facility for confrontation with another man.”

Omega John relished this aspect of the story.

“‘I can communicate the experience of war mind-to-mind,’ I said to Masterman, ‘by touch and act of will. What effect would that have on the nation?’

“He told me that I was mad. I put my hands over his eyes so that he could see only what I had to show him: my compressed symphony of horrors. Did you know that when I pass on the war in this way, I relive it also? I never tire of it. That is why I think of it as a symphony. It has such complexity of thought and feeling, and one never tires of Bach or Vaughan Williams.

“Masterman went down onto his knees and sobbed. I demanded that he reconvene the old men of letters so that I could impart the war to each and every one of them. Masterman pushed the drapes of hair from his eyes and moaned like a bereaved mother. We were indifferent to his suffering, Collinson and I. We waited for his faculties to return. He took a drink from his desk drawer, and flopped back in his chair.

“I said, ‘We intend to invent a mechanism for communicating the war to the crowd, all at once, for which we will need money and resources.’

“He muttered, ‘I wonder if anybody is sane.’

“I repeated our intentions, that he was to divert resources from Wellington House to our jurisdiction. Collinson’s formula demonstrated that the Allies and the Central Powers were locked in an endless war of attrition and reprisal. My talent would provide the revelation necessary to break the deadlock before Europe became a bankrupt slaughterhouse of unmated women.

“Collinson pressed Masterman for an opinion as to what percentage of the population would need to be exposed to the experience of war in order for the crowd to turn against it. Masterman shook his head.

“‘Far fewer than the numbers of men who are fighting. Far fewer than the number of women who have lost fathers, brothers, sons. Far fewer than the number of fatherless children. If you want to end the war, then you don’t persuade the masses to your cause, you bring around the elite few.’

“I asked for names and addresses. Masterman flopped a pallid hand around his desk, took out a copy of a book and threw it across the room. It was the British edition of
Who’s Who
.

“‘Work alphabetically through these people.’

“‘Then we will persuade the masses,’ I said.

“‘The masses are already persuaded. We monitor the mail, we tabulate and track its sentiment. Trust me, the mass mind is against the war.’

“At that moment I glimpsed victory. The Order of the Omega would provide a lightning rod for the nascent resistance. Between us, we would carry the idea of peace into the population and lay it down before them like a wounded son. That was how we would end the war.

“I did not know that Masterman was manipulating me. He was playing up my pathetic desire to be a saviour. Had I not stood before him in the first weeks of the war and displayed my vanity? He knew that I was in love with the romantic myth of the man who makes a difference.

“Masterman shuffled around his office in a state of feigned shock. ‘You mean that our boys are perishing like dumb animals,’ he whimpered. ‘Then you are right. We must end the war.’

“He gave us everything we asked for. Wellington House signed over this house and its estate to the Order of the Omega. We were persuaded against visiting the war upon the names in
Who’s Who
in preference to developing a mechanism by which the war could be imparted to many people at once. Only that, Masterman argued, would ensure peace. He was so plausible. There was no confrontation. That was not his way. He took the risk that over time our idealism could be distracted, our intent delayed. That disappointments and minor defeats would sour us and make us malleable. Masterman visited us here, and he was so black-hearted and down about the war, and bleak about the human condition, that it never entered my mind that his nihilism was a delaying tactic.

“It was on one such visit that he raised the question of the enemy. ‘Of course you will have to use your talent upon Germany,’ he said. ‘If you persuade the allies to lay down their arms first, the Hun will put us all to the sword.’ And that was it: the Order was dedicated to reducing the German will to fight.”

“Did they?”

“The Germans surrendered, eventually. Did we help bring that about? Perhaps, but we could have ended the war much earlier if we had followed our original plan.”

Omega John flicked his cigarette butt away and it skittered across the painted floorboards.

“I’m the last man left.” He lay back, and his breathing laboured under the weight of his years. He turned to Huxley. “I’ll need another injection.”

Huxley dithered.

“It will kill you.”

Omega John closed his eyes.

“Then prepare me for death.”

Huxley smeared embrocation upon the young-old skin of the dying man. He prayed for the forgiveness of this servant of God, for whatsoever sin had been done by his eyes and ears, by his nose and lips and palate, by the touch of his hand and the step of his feet.

Omega John said, “Trevenen, I heard you deliver Extreme Unction so many times on Suvla Bay. It always brought death so close by.” Then he grasped the hand of Father Huxley and whispered, “It’s you, isn’t it? You really came back to me, and that’s all that I ever wanted.”

James stepped away from the bed and left the other inmates to witness the administering of last rites.

J
ames woke
in his room before dawn. He dressed and washed quietly. He passed the bedroom of Omega John and saw the inert body covered over in the bed. He met Alex Drown quietly closing the door to her room behind her. She was carrying a suitcase.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “We survived.”

“Yes, we did.”

She took a long look at him. “You could come with me.”

“For work?”

“And more,” she ventured a smile.

“I am part of this now.”

“‘The refining cycle of the Process has been reset with a new entrant.’”

“What does that mean?”

“They were Omega John’s last words. If you are staying, then you will have to figure them out for yourself.”

She put her arms around him and kissed him goodbye. Alone, he went down to the kitchens and made himself breakfast from what he could find in the cupboards. He went out into the dark lawn with a cup of tea and found Father Huxley there, smoking. Together they gazed down into the gardens.

“Omega John is dead but we’re still alive,” said James.

Huxley was quizzical.

“We are still very much alive,” said the priest.

“For a time there, I was concerned we were all figments of his imagination.”

Huxley smiled.

“Not
his
imagination, James. We are the arguments of God.”

He was part of the Institute now. He had been with Hector when he was shot, had carried him on his back. It would be different this time. His actions had made it so.

James said, “I’m going for a last patrol on the Downs. Would you care to join me?”

Huxley demurred. He was, he explained, expecting visitors. So James set off alone. He had lost everything in the war, but the sacrifice and suffering had meant something. The exact meaning was obscure to him. He had shown kindness and courage in the war, and he had lived through it. Yes, that was it. He had endured the war, and endurance was beautiful.

On the road out of Glynde, the sun was bright and cold. The assembled company of the Order of the Omega came down the lane, his former comrades-at-arms bearing their flags and banners on their way to the Institute. At their rear, under the shadow of a hood, he glimpsed the blade of a nose, dark brows and ghostly pallor of John Hector. He sought a look of recognition from the stretcher bearer but Hector’s smile remained tight-lipped, his gaze fixed forward.

Author’s Note

T
he reader may wish
to know more about the historical record from which this novel deviates.

The account of the Suvla Bay landing draws upon two books by John Hargrave:
At Suvla Bay: Being the Notes and Sketches of Scenes, Characters and Adventures of the Dardanelles Campaign
published in 1916, and his later, more candid account,
The Suvla Bay Landing
, 1964. A Quaker, an artist, a writer, boy scout and student of the world’s religions, Hargrave would go on to found the radical outdoor movement, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.

As I researched the life of John Hargrave, I noticed a few men of his type scattered through the war: men of pacifist persuasion who chose the lowly position of stretcher bearer or ambulance driver as a way of serving in the war without fighting, and from this particular vantage point – half-observer, half-participant – developed a trench mysticism directed toward the transformation of society. I began compiling a folder entitled “The Mystical Stretcher Bearers of the Great War”.

The soldier-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin served heroically on various battlefields across the Western Front. He was the tall thin corporal of the Zouaves, the North African sharpshooters who maintained that he was protected by his
baraka –
that is, his spiritual stature. Before the war, he had studied theology at Ore Place in Hastings. He attended the archaeological dig of the Piltdown Man, finding the canine tooth of man’s supposedly ancient ancestor. Teilhard de Chardin even dined at Lewes in the lee of the castle. It was during his time in Sussex, with its ancient yet incessantly renewed landscape, that he grew more conscious of the drift of the universe.

Teilhard de Chardin’s war-time letters collected in
The
Makings of a Mind
, and his
Writings In Time of War
were invaluable sources in compiling the trench mysticism of the character of Trevenen Huxley. History records that Noel Trevenen Huxley committed suicide in 1914 so he did not serve. The history of the Huxley family is interwoven with evolutionary speculation, science fiction and progressive causes, and his brother Julian Huxley wrote the introduction to Teilhard de Chardin’s
The Phenomenon of Man
. It was this affinity that led to me to concoct a different life for Trevenen.

The Quaker-led volunteer group of Friends Ambulance Unit also served at the Western Front. Two of its number, science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, and the professor and meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson, influenced the characters of James and Professor Collinson.

Stapledon’s voluminous letters to his future wife Agnes during the conflict, collected in
The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913-1919
, edited by Robert Crossley, were consulted. The most obvious and significant debt I owe to Stapledon is the character of Odd John, the
Homo superior
from his novel of the same name. Lewis Fry Richardson’s paper on the
Mathematical Psychology of War
provides the equations found in Collinson’s Equation of War.

The Eleonte necropolis was discovered by French soldiers during the Gallipoli campaign, prior to the Suvla landing and many miles south of the location given in the novel. For an account of that archaeological dig under fire, I referred to
Uncensored Letters from the Dardanelles
by French medical officer Joseph Marguerite Jean Vassal.

Other sources for the landing at Suvla Bay include
The Pals at Suvla Bay
by Henry Hanna,
Conditions: Evacuation of the Sick and Wounded from Suvla Bay
, and the diary of Private Wilfred Knott and the papers of Reverend Private Thomas, who served with the Royal Ambulance Military Corps at Suvla Bay: these are held at the Imperial War Museum.

As for the bailiff’s armour, the term “colloid” is used by Rudyard Kipling to describe the transparent layer covering the windows of the airships in his story “With the Night Mail”. Its “pedrails” were invented by Bramah Joseph Diplock and inspired HG Wells’ short story “The Land Ironclads”. In the war, Wells would advocate the use of the land ironclad to Winston Churchill, who was involved in the development of the tank. The private armour fashioned for James by the Process is based upon the more recent research of Marc Meyers at the University of California, San Diego.

The meeting at Wellington House between Charles Masterman and the great authors of the day took place on the afternoon of September 2, 1914. I could not locate the minutes of that meeting. It is believed that detailed records were destroyed during the Second World War. My sources were the diary entries of Arnold Bennett, the recollections of Thomas Hardy, the subsequent articles written by HG Wells and GK Chesterton, and
The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914-18 and After
by Peter Beuitenhuis. There was no one like John Hector in attendance at this meeting.

Some of Masterman’s dialogue is drawn from his book
England After War
. The description of Europe as “a bankrupt slaughterhouse inhabited by unmated women… I wonder that anybody is sane,” was spoken by Mr Page, American Ambassador in London to Mr Alderman in Hampton, Virginia in 1916. And it is to Masterman that I am indebted for the conceit of Omega John’s talent. In
England After War
, Masterman speculates, “If but a fraction of the active torment or dull misery of the war combatants could have been transferred, not by the clumsy interpretation of picture, written or spoken word, but by some mind current affecting another’s human sensation, lighting up in another mind the unassailable and uncommunicable direct apprehension of pain, then the war would have come to an end in less weeks than it endured years.”

M
atthew De Abaitua
, Hackney, 2015