We Shall Not Sleep (41 page)

Lloyd George turned instantly to Schenckendorff, the one man in the room about whom he knew nothing. He wore a British volunteer uniform, but the command in his bearing, and the obviously painful injury to his foot, which was still heavily bandaged, marked him as other than he seemed.

Schenckendorff stood up, without the slightest wince even as he put his weight on his foot, and bowed. His face was tight and pale. "Manfred von Schenckendorff, sir. It was I who obtained the kaiser's signature to the treaty. At the time I believed it was for the peace of Europe and so that we might rule without war for all the years to come. Now I know that that dream was never possible. I have seen both your country and my own lose the best men of a generation, and wash the earth in blood. I have come through the lines to where Chaplain Reavley fought in Ypres, in order to expose my cousin, my former British ally, so this never happens again. Because if he is not stopped, he will engineer a peace that is only a hiatus between this war and the next."

"Your cousin?" Lloyd George asked tensely.

"Dermot Sandwell. His mother and mine were sisters," Schenckendorff replied. Then, seeing the disbelief in Lloyd George's face, he added, "Beautiful women, Irish, not English or German."

"For God's sake!" Lloyd George exploded. "Sandwell's one of the best, most loyal men we have! That's preposterous." He looked at Shearing with increasing anger. "What possessed you to believe this poppycock, man? Have you no more sense—"

Mason stepped forward, freeing himself from Judith's arm. He stood to the right of Schenckendorff, facing the prime minister. His voice shook as he began to speak, then gathered emotion and strength.

"My name is Richard Mason, sir, war correspondent. As a young man I reported on the Boer War and was horrified beyond my power or ability ever to forget by the brutality and waste of life I saw there. So was Dermot Sandwell. I met him shortly afterward, and we both swore that such slaughter should never happen again. I believed that there must be a better way, even if it had to be brought about by deceit and a conspiracy of men who had more power than our soldiers or politicians. I was prepared to give my life to that cause. All through the war I reported to Sandwell to help at least part of his activities, in an attempt to bring the carnage to an end, and create a peace that would last."

Lloyd George stared at him in incredulity and something close to dismay.

"What Colonel Schenckendorff says is true, sir," Mason continued. "I could give you chapter and verse of it, were there time, but there isn't. Colonel Schenckendorff and I are willing to give our lives to pay the price of our delusion. Matthew, Joseph, and Judith Reavley have followed in the steps of their father to lay this open and show that we fight our wars, we do not appease. Their passion and belief have showed now that it can and must be done. I will face Sandwell. He cannot deny me; I know far too much."

Lloyd George sighed, his face masked with a deep grief. It was clear that he no longer denied it to himself.

There was a deferential but insistent knocking on the door.

"What is it?" he demanded.

A man put his head around it. "Mr. Sandwell is here, sir."

"Good! Just the man I want. Send him in," Lloyd George ordered. "And have the policeman at the door come inside."

The man looked startled.

"Do it!" Lloyd George shouted at him.

A moment later the door opened again and Dermot Sandwell came into the room. He was tall and startlingly elegant. His fair hair was polished smooth, his eyes a curious, pale, brilliant blue. He looked first at the prime minister, then at Mason and Schenckendorff. The others he ignored. His face, already lean, seemed to tighten and fade to a pallor so bleached he looked about to faint, but he stood rigidly straight.

The door behind him closed with a sharp snick.

It was Schenckendorff who spoke. His pronunciation was precise, his English so perfect it was almost without accent. Only the pain thickened his voice. "It is over, Dermot. The slaughter of nations and the murder of individuals has come to an end, and those of us who tried to force on them a peace without honor must pay the price. I saw the same vision as you did, in the beginning, but now it is finished. We cannot do this again; we must not. If you will not stop yourself, then I will stop you."

Sandwell stared at him, the shock in his face turning to scalding contempt. "Coward," he said simply. "I trusted you with a vision of Europe without war, and you have betrayed me. If we had succeeded, if that idiot John Reavley had had a larger mind unfettered by the petty prejudices of nationalism, we could have saved the lives of thirty million men who now lie dead or mutilated across the world. Think of that, Manfred, when you weep for Germany. We were betrayed in the beginning by lesser men, too blinded by what they thought was patriotism to see the whole of humanity. Now it seems I stand alone. That does not make me any the less right."

He turned to face the prime minister, then caught sight of Mason. "And it seems you have turned out to be no more than a Little Englander after all, despite the horror and the death that you have seen. In the end you ran back to your own small square of the earth, blind to the rest of it." He looked at Joseph. "Of you I expected no better. You are your fathers son. We might have hoped that a man who professes a Christian religion would have a larger view, but we hoped in vain."

Lloyd George rose to his feet. "I trusted you, Dermot. It pains me to find you a traitor of such monumental proportions. You will hang for this."

Sandwell gave a bark of laughter. "Don't be absurd! You dare not prosecute me. What will you say? That I tried to save the world from this ... this charnel house of blood and ruin, but I failed because of the shortsightedness of a few men who thought more of England than they did of humanity? And now that you have won, and we are up to our knees in the corpses of our own men, you are going to kill me, too, because I would have saved them? How long do you think an exhausted and bereaved country will thank you for that?"

"Your proposed treaty was iniquitous," Lloyd George said bitterly. "It would have been a peace without honor."

Sandwell's eyebrows rose high over his brilliant eyes. "Tell that to the millions of women with fathers, uncles, brothers, husbands, and sons whose broken bodies lie buried in the fields of France and Belgium. See if they agree with you."

Lloyd George's hands closed over the piece of paper, which had rolled back upon itself after four and a half years inside the barrel of the punt gun.

Sandwell stared at it as he finally realized what it was. He made a movement toward it, then froze. Very slowly he turned to Matthew.

"Yes," Matthew replied, staring back at him. "We had it all the time. My father hid it where all your searches failed to find it."

"Then the blood of millions is on your hands," Sandwell replied between his teeth. "The best and the bravest of the nations of the earth lie crushed beneath the weight of your stupidity."

"You are wrong," Joseph answered him with absolute conviction. "I do not believe our king would have signed it, but if he had, it would not have bound us, not all of us. There would always have been some who would pay for the freedom for us to make our own laws, speak our differences aloud, follow the faith we choose, make our own mistakes, laugh at ourselves and try again. If we pay with our lives, then so be it. We will not pay with the slow death of our minds or the withering of our souls."

"You patronizing idiot!" Sandwell spat at him. "Do you think anybody cares for that kind of empty sermon now? Death is real! It's broken bodies, men blinded, crippled, choked on their own blood! It's corpses riddled with bullets, frozen to death. It's not high-minded valor, you fool! Look at reality! Say that to the mutilated, the blind if you dare!"

"I dare," Joseph replied unflinchingly. "I know them as you never will, or you would not have misjudged them so completely. Again and again you were wrong. You did not understand their courage, their loyalty, their friendship, their love of the right to come and go as they like, to keep their ancient customs, the little ways that make life sweet. Men and nations will always seek the right to make their own choices, whatever the cost. You can guide, but you cannot rule. You misjudged humanity in general, and Britain in particular.

"But worse than that, and far worse, you confused the ends with the means until they became one in your mind. You destroyed the very spark of life that you wanted to give us. Without the freedom to be right or wrong, to choose your own way rather than the way forced upon you, there is no virtue, no courage, no honor or laughter or love worth having. Men with far less intellect than yours know this in their blood and their bones, and they will die rather than sell it to you and your dreams of
dominion. And that is what they have become— dreams. It is not the wisdom or the intent of power that corrupts, it is the totality of power that can no longer be curbed."

Sandwell stared at Joseph with a hatred so violent, his whole slender body trembled with it, then he quickly stepped toward him and hit him as hard as he could.

Joseph staggered backward, overbalanced, and fell, his head striking the floor with a crack. He lay still.

Judith went ashen. Lizzie drew in her breath with a sob and started forward, but Matthew blocked her way.

Sandwell moved forward to hit Joseph again. Matthew suddenly saw in Joseph's motionless body all the dead men he had loved: his father, Sebastian Allard, Owen Cullingford, and all the others once full of passion and dreams, who had talked and laughed and cared so much. He struck Sandwell in the middle of the back and, as the man swayed, caught him and spun him around. He hit him with the blow he had been taught and never expected to use, hard under the nose, driving the bone into his brain.

Sandwell slithered to the floor, and when Matthew bent over him he was not breathing. Without rising to his feet Matthew turned to his brother. Lizzie was beside him. Joseph was coughing, struggling to get his breath and to sit up. He looked dazed and unsteady, but unquestionably alive.

Matthew was overcome by a wave of relief so intense he felt dizzy with it himself. He realized that for an instant he had thought Joseph was dead. The crack of bone on the hard wooden floor had filled him with a fear just like the terrible grief he had felt for his father.

"Joe?" he said huskily.

Joseph groaned and put a hand to his head, then stared beyond Matthew to the Peacemaker lying on the floor. "You hit him," he observed. "Thank you. I think I really angered him. He wanted to kill me."

Matthew looked at the figure almost at his feet, sprawled out, one leg under the other. He seemed smaller than when standing up. His brilliant eyes were open and staring sightlessly.

"He is dead," Schenckendorff said quietly. "I think perhaps that is a good thing." He looked at Joseph as he was being helped into a chair by Lizzie and Matthew. "I hope you are not badly hurt. You are quite right: You angered him, because what you said is true. Great men use power as little as possible. It takes supreme humility to allow others to disagree and to make their own mistakes. The right to be wrong is worth dying to protect, because without it all our virtues are empty. What we have not paid for slips through our fingers, because we do not value it enough to do what is necessary to keep it." He held out his hand to Joseph.

Joseph reached up to take it, and clasped it tightly.

Schenckendorff stood to attention and faced Lloyd George.

"I am at your service, sir," he said stiffly.

Lloyd George was still standing, pale-faced. "Thank you," he said simply. “You are a prisoner of war. You will be treated accordingly, and in time repatriated. I am mindful of how much we owe you, and it will not be forgotten." He walked to the door and spoke to the man outside.

Minutes later Schenckendorff said goodbye to them. Matthew and Joseph saluted him. Two more men came to take the body of the Peacemaker.

"Heart attack," the prime minister told them, even though it was patently untrue. No one argued or made the slightest movement to intervene as the men carried the body out. The door closed behind them, and those left in the room faced the prime minister.

Joseph's head ached appallingly, but his vision had cleared. All he could think of was Judith, and how she would bear it when Mason was arrested. Since she was no blood relation of Masons, she might not even see him again. Were he in her place, and it was Lizzie who would be taken away to face trial and execution, he would not know how to endure it.
And yet there was nothing he could do to help. Mason was as alone as if there were no one else in the building.

Mason stared at Lloyd George, waiting, his face white, eyes steady.

Lloyd George chewed his lip and very slowly shook his head. "This grieves me," he said softly. "You were the bravest and the best of all our war correspondents. You went to every field of conflict. Your words framed the way we at home saw and felt the pain of our men, and their valor. Through your experience we have shared what our men endured, and the spirit they carried with them. You were the voice of those who could not and now never will speak for themselves."

Mason swayed a little. Joseph held Judith's arm to prevent her from going to him.

"We are weary of war," Lloyd George went on. "We are heartsick, bereaved, and frightened of a future that is stranger and more complex and difficult than ever we have faced before. We do not need to know that one of the voices that comforted us and led us through our darkest hours was that of a traitor. I shall hide that—not for your sake, but for the sake of my country. You will never speak of it again. No one in this room will." He looked from one to the other of them, and saw agreement in their silence.

"Your punishment," he went on, addressing Mason, "is that you will leave these shores and never return. You are no longer an Englishman."

Mason drew his breath in with a gasp, as if he had been struck a blow that took the breath from his body, but he did not complain.