said, too, and Foubister. They think the world won’t ever change, or not more than an inch at a time. There are others, like Elwyn, who think that even if there is war, it will all be quick and noble, a rather more dramatic version of a good Rider Haggard story, or Anthony Hope. You know
“A little,” Joseph acknowledged. He knew it had been ruthless, and there was a great deal for Britain to be ashamed of. But perhaps there was for the Boers, too. “That was Africa, though,” he said aloud. “And perhaps we’ve learned from it. Europe would be different. But there’s no reason to think there’ll be war, unless there’s more trouble in Ireland and we let it get completely out of hand.”
Sebastian said nothing.
“Sarajevo was the isolated act of a group of assassins,” Joseph went on. “Europe is hardly going to go to war over it. It was a crime, not an—”
Sebastian turned to him, his eyes astonishingly clear in the waning light. “Not an act of war?” he interrupted. “Are you sure, sir? I’m not. The kaiser restated his alliance with Austria-Hungary last Sunday, you know.”
The twilight breeze rippled faintly across the surface of the river. It was still warm, like a soft touch to the skin.
“And Serbia is on Russia’s back doorstep,” Sebastian continued. “If Austria demands too much reparation, they could get drawn in. And there’s always the old enmity between France and Germany. The men who fought the Franco-Prussian War are still alive, and still bitter.” He started to walk again, perhaps to avoid the group of students coming toward them across the grass. It was clear he did not want to be caught up in their conversation and interrupted in his infinitely more serious thoughts.
Joseph kept pace with him, moving into the shadow of the trees, their leaves whispering faintly above them. “There may be an unjust suppression of the Serbs,” he said, trying to return to the safety of reason. “And the people in general may be punished for the violent acts of a few, which is wrong—of course it is. But it is not the catastrophe for civilization that you are suggesting.” He, too, spread his hands to encompass the fading scene in front of them, with its sudden dashes of silver and blue on the water. “All this is safe.” He said it with unquestioning certainty. It was a thousand years of unbroken progress toward even greater humanity. “We shall still be here, learning, exploring, creating our own beauty, adding to the richness of mankind.”
Sebastian studied him, his face torn with conflicting rage and pity, almost tenderness. “You believe that, don’t you?” he said with incredulity verging on despair. Then he continued to walk again without waiting for the answer. Somehow the movement suggested a kind of dismissal.
“What is it you think will happen?” Joseph asked firmly.
“Darkness,” Sebastian answered. “Complacency without the vision to see, or the courage to act. And it takes courage! You have to see beyond the obvious, the comfortable morality everyone else agrees with, and understand that at times, terrible times, the end justifies the means.” His voice dropped. “Even when the cost is high. Otherwise they’ll lead us blindly down the path to a war like nothing we’ve ever even imagined before.” His words were cutting, and without the slightest hesitation. “It won’t be a few cavalry charges here and there, a few brave men killed or injured. It’ll be everyone—the ordinary man in the street sucked into endless mind- and body-breaking bombardment by even bigger guns. It’ll be hunger and fear and hatred until that’s all we know.” He squinted a little as the sun blazed level with the treetops to the west and painted fire on the top of the walls of Trinity and Caius. “Think of the towns and villages you know—St. Giles, Haslingfield, Grantchester, all the rest—with black on every window, no marriages, no christenings, only deaths.” His voice dropped and was filled with a hurting tenderness. “Think of the countryside, the fields with no men to plant them or to reap. Think of the woods in April with no one to see the blossom. Schoolboys won’t dream of this.” He gestured toward the rooftops. “Only of carrying guns. Their only ambition will be to kill and to survive.”
He turned to face Joseph again, his eyes clear as seawater in the long light. “Isn’t it worth any price to save us from that? Isn’t it what human beings are here for, to nourish and protect what we’ve been given, and add to it before we pass it on? Look at it!” he demanded. “Don’t you love it almost more than you can bear?”
Joseph did not need to look to know his answer. “Yes, I do,” he said with the same depth of absolute knowledge. “It is the ultimate sanity of life. In the end, it is all there is to hold on to.”
Sebastian winced, his face looking suddenly bruised and hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said in a whisper. He moved his hand as if to touch Joseph’s arm, then withdrew. “But this is a universal sanity, isn’t it? Bigger than any one of us, a purpose, a healing for mankind?” His voice was urgent, begging for assurance.
“Yes, it is,” Joseph agreed gently. He meant it more profoundly than he had imagined he would, but as had happened so many times in their friendship, Sebastian put it in exactly the words that framed his own belief. “And yes, it is the duty of those who have seen it and become part of it to protect it with all our power.”
Sebastian smiled very slightly and turned away as they started back again. “But you don’t fear war, do you, sir? I mean real, literal war.”
“I would fear it horribly if I considered it a real danger,” Joseph assured him. “But I don’t think it is. We’ve had many wars before, and we’ve lost many men. We’ve faced invasion more than once and beaten it off. It hasn’t broken us irreparably; if anything, it’s made us stronger.”
“Not this time,” Sebastian said bitterly. “If it happens, it’ll be pure, blind destruction.”
Joseph looked sideways at him. He could see in Sebastian’s face the love for all that was precious and vulnerable, all that could be broken by the unthinking. There was a pain in him that was naked in this strange, fierce light of dusk, which cast such black shadows.
Time and again they had talked of all manner of things, no boundaries of time or place had held them: the men half human, half divine in the epic legends of Egypt and Babylon; the God of the Old Testament, who was the creator of worlds, yet spoke face-to-face with Moses, as one man talks with another. They had basked in the lean, golden classicism of Greece, the teeming magnificence of Rome, the intricate glories of Byzantium, the sophistication of Persia. All had been the furniture of their dreams. Wherever Joseph had led, Sebastian had followed eagerly, grasping after each new experience with insatiable joy.
The light was almost gone. The color burned only on the horizon, the shadows dense on the Backs. The water was pale and polished like old silver, indigo under the bridges.
“We could disappear into the ruins of time if there’s war,” Sebastian resumed. “In a thousand years’ time, scholars from cultures we haven’t even imagined, young and curious, could dig up what’s left of us, and from a few shards, scraps of writing, try to work out what we were really like. And get it wrong,” he added bitterly.
“English would become a dead language, lost, like Aramaic or Etruscan,” Sebastian went on with quiet misery. “No more wit of Oscar Wilde, or grandeur of Shakespeare, no more thunder of Milton, music of Keats, or . . . God knows how many more . . . and worst of all, the future culled. All that this generation might do. We have to prevent that—whatever it costs!”
“It is impossible to care too much,” Joseph said gently. “It is all infinitely precious.” He must bring back reason, ground this fear in the lasting realities.
“There is nothing you or I can do to affect the quarrels of Austria and Serbia,” he went on. “There will always be fighting somewhere, from time to time. And as inventions like telephones and wireless get better, we will know of them sooner. A hundred years ago it would have taken weeks for us to learn about it, if we did at all. And by that time it would all have been over. Now we read about it the day after, so we feel it to be more immediate, but it’s only a perception. Hold on to the certainties that endure.”
Sebastian looked at him, his back to the last of the light, so Joseph could not make out his expression. His voice was rough-edged. “You don’t think this is different? A hundred years ago we were nearly conquered by Napoleon.”
Joseph realized he had made a tactical error in choosing a hundred years as an example. “Yes, but we weren’t,” he said confidently. “No French soldier set foot in England, except as a prisoner.”
“As you said, sir, things have changed in a hundred years,” Sebastian pointed out. “We have steamships, airplanes, guns that can shoot further and destroy more than ever before. A west wind won’t keep the navies of Europe locked in harbor now.”
“You’re allowing your fears to run away with your reason,” Joseph chided him. “We have had far more desperate times, but we have always prevailed. And we have grown stronger since the Napoleonic Wars, not weaker. You must have faith in us . . . and in God.”
Sebastian gave a little grunt, ironic and dismissive, as if there were some deeper fear he could not explain,
