court would string him up by the . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
“I see.”
“Is that helpful?”
“It . . . it proves the theory is wrong,” Joseph said with surprise, and a strange, dizzy sense of relief, which was absurd. They must find the Peacemaker, for John and Alys Reavley, for Sebastian, for Reisenburg, and now for Cullingford. He had not been beaten because the treaty was taken from him before it could be presented to the king. No one knew if the king would even have signed it! The Peacemaker would have other plans, and they needed desperately to know what they were. All kinds of sabotage, betrayal, and deceit were possible, and the very fact that he would murder Cullingford showed he was still powerful, and dangerous.
But something in Joseph still shrank from finding it was a man he had liked. The face of evil should not be familiar, it should be strange, terrifying, unknown before the instant of confrontation.
The Peacemaker was a man who would sell a nation of forty million people into oblivion, betray into bondage their history, their culture, their language, and everything they had created over a thousand years. French in all its wit, color, sophistication, and pride would become a dead language. And after France and Belgium, one by one the other nations would fall, subjugated to the iron control necessary to keep them obedient, afraid, and unable to move against the center.
And England would be worse, not the betrayed but the betrayer! That was the ultimate sin.
He stared out to sea where the rising moon barely glimmered on the faint ripples of the water. It was becoming difficult to see the black outlines of the ships, or the boats plying between them. Around him he could hear the clang of iron shovels on the rock in the earth as burial parties worked.
The army had not been long here. Blood was still fresh. There were no rats like those at Ypres—at least he had not seen any. The latrines smelled much the same, but there was not the stench of corpses—so many of them weeks and months old. There you could hardly dig a trench or shore up a broken wall without slicing into a limb.
If the Peacemaker’s plan had worked, all those men would still be alive. This hill would be empty of everything but wild irises and the purple-flowering Judas trees. There would be silence but for the lap of water, and perhaps the odd bleat of a goat or two.
These men would be at home with their families in the far corners of the earth.
But which was the greater madness, and which the sanity—to fight and die by the tens of thousands for what you believe, not knowing if you could win, or to surrender before the bloodshed, and save all the lives, the young and brave and so passionately innocent, to live out their days a conquered people, prisoners to someone else’s will?
“I don’t know anything else about Chetwin,” Mynott said apologetically.
“No . . . no, I think that’s probably enough,” Joseph answered him. “We were wrong. It couldn’t be what we thought.”
“Does it matter a lot?”
“Yes. It matters a hell of a lot.” Of course Matthew would have to check that it was true, but Joseph believed it. The Peacemaker had intended to succeed. Setting up a double bluff like this, at the expense of a young German noblewoman’s life, was absurd, disgusting, and above all completely self-defeating. “Thank you. I’ll see if I can get a lift on the next ship going home again.”
“Well, there’s nothing going out tonight. You might as well get a little sleep,” Mynott observed. “Tomorrow look for a fellow called Richard Mason, war correspondent. He’s down to go either tomorrow or the next day. If you can find him, you can probably thumb a lift with him.”
“Thank you. I’ll do that.”
Joseph slept on the earth about fifty feet up. It was hard and cold and only exhaustion gave him any rest at all. Perhaps a few nights on the ship had made him soft?
He woke quite a while after dawn and looked down on the beach full of activity. Men were moving about as if on the scene of some busy factory yard, digging, carrying, piling up boxes and crates. The smell of smoke drifted up from cooking.
Joseph thanked the Australians with whom he had camped for the night.
“Hooray, mate!” Blue answered cheerfully. “Holy Joe! I like that!” He laughed till the tears filled his eyes.
“G’day, sport,” Flanagan called out. “Mind where you go!”
“You, too.” Joseph refused to think what their chances were. He would choose to believe they would be among the few who would survive. “Thank you,” he said again.
He set off along the ridge and down on the grass toward the level, in roughly the direction he had been told he might find the correspondent Richard Mason. Actually he was looking forward to it—he had seen his name on many of the best and most honest articles he had read. The man had an ability to catch the experience of a small group in all its passion and immediacy, and make it represent them all. There was something clean and unsentimental in his use of language, and yet the depth of his feeling was never in doubt.
It took him nearly two hours, by which time his feet were sore and he was horribly aware of the flies everywhere.
“Over there, mate,” a lanky Australian pointed. “That’s the Pommie writer feller.”
“Thank you,” Joseph said with profound relief. He could see only the man’s back. He wore a plain khaki- colored jacket and trousers and a wide-brimmed hat jammed on his head.
“Excuse me, are you Richard Mason?” Joseph asked when he reached him.
The man turned around slowly. He had an unusual face, with wide cheekbones and a broad, full-lipped mouth. It was a face of high intelligence, but far more striking was the brooding emotion in it, the sense of will. Joseph was certain he had found the right man; such features belonged to one who would write with blazing honesty.
“Yes,” Mason answered. “Who are you? A chaplain!” He looked surprised and very slightly amused.
“Joseph Reavley,” Joseph told him. “I had a mission out here, which I have completed. I understand you are shortly leaving for England. I need to return as soon as possible, and if there is room in your transport I would be grateful.”
Mason’s eyes flickered for a moment of puzzlement, then he looked beyond them both at the milling men on the beach and up the slope at the dugouts, the shallow trenches, the makeshift shelters of stones and boxes. Finally he looked back at Joseph. “Your mission is finished, you said?” His implication was clear.
Joseph regarded him levelly and a little coldly. “Yes, it is. I have only a few days more leave before I have to report back to my regiment at Ypres.”
Mason colored faintly. “I’m sorry.” It was said frankly. His diction was perfect, a little sibilant, but there was a beauty in its exactness as if words were precious to him.
Joseph offered his hand.
Mason grasped it. “There’s a ship going back toward Malta tomorrow. Probably about dawn. They’ll find room for you. Won’t be hard to get a troopship home from there.” His eyes searched Joseph’s face curiously. “Yours must be a rotten job a lot of the time. How the hell do you tell people they can make sense out of all this?” He gestured toward the rock escarpments almost six hundred feet above them where the Turkish guns commanded most of the bay. “Fever, dysentery, gunshot and shrapnel wounds, seasickness, overcrowding. One hospital ship out there has eight hundred and fifty wounded, and two doctors to look after them all. And one of those a bloody vet!” The anger was profound and so deep inside him it showed only in the lines of his face and the rigid tension of his shoulders, there was no surface fire anymore. It had long since worn itself out.
“I don’t try,” Joseph answered. “I deal with people one at a time. I can only address the small things.”
“In other words you can’t make sense of it either,” Mason concluded with a certainty that obviously gave him no pleasure. “You’ve given up on telling them this is some kind of divine destiny, and necessary furnace of affliction, and they should cling onto belief, and just endure?”
“Actually I don’t tell people much of what they should do at all,” Joseph answered. “Most people are doing their best anyway. The big choices are taken away from us, it’s only how we react that’s left.”
Mason turned away. The sunlight was harsh on his face, showing the lines of strain around his eyes. He looked about Joseph’s own age, but the knowledge and the rage inside him were timeless. “It would have been nice if you could have given some great cosmic answer,” he said drily. “But I wouldn’t have believed you anyway. Have
