No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [103]
She lowered her eyes, and then looked up at him quickly. “But Sebastian said it would, ‘cause it’s the nature o’ governments, and the army, and they’re the ones who have the power. Their heads are stuffed with dreams about glory, and they haven’t any idea how it would be for real. He said they were loike a bunch o’ blind men tied together, runnin’ towards the abyss. He thought millions would die.” She searched his face, longing for him to tell her it would not happen.
“No sane person wants war,” he said carefully, but with the earnestness that her passion and intelligence deserved. “Not really. A few expeditions here and there, but not out-and-out war. And nobody would kill Sebastian because he didn’t, either.” He knew as soon as the words were out of his mouth that they were of little use. Why could he not speak to the heart?
“You don’t understand,” she argued, embarrassed to be contradicting him, and yet her feeling was too strong to be overridden. “He meant to do something about it; he was a pacifist. Oi don’t mean he just didn’t want to foight—he was going to do something to stop it happening.” Her face pinched a little. “Oi know his brother didn’t loike that, and his mother would have hated it. She’d think it was cowardice. For her you’re loyal and you fight, or you’re disloyal, and that means you betray your own people. There’s no other way. At least that’s what he said.”
She looked down at her hands. “But he’d grown away from them. He knew that. His oideas were different, a hundred years after theirs. He wanted Europe to be all one and not ever to foight each other again like the Franco-Prussian War, or all the wars we’ve had with France.”
She raised her eyes and met his with intense seriousness. “That meant more to him than anything else in the world, Mr. Reavley. He knew summink about the Boer War and the way everybody suffered, women and children as well, horrible things. And not only the victims, but what it did to people when they foight like that.” Her face was tight and bleak in the soft light. The sun shimmered on the millpond like an old mirror tarnished by the weeds. Dragonflies hovered above it on invisible wings. The evening was so still a dog barking in the distance seemed close enough to touch.
“It changes them inside,” she went on, still searching his face to see how much he really understood. “Can you think how you’d feel if it was your brother or husband, someone you loved, who killed people like a butcher—all sorts, women, children, the old, just like your own family?”
Her voice was soft and a little ragged with the pain she could see. “Can you think o’ trying to feel like a good person again afterwards? Sitting over the breakfast table talking, just as if it all happened to somebody else and you’d never done all those things? Or telling your children a story, putting flowers in a jug, thinking what to make for dinner, and you were the same person who’d driven a hundred women and children into a concentration camp and let them starve? Sebastian would have done anything at all to stop that happening again—ever. But Oi can’t tell that to anybody else. His parents’d hate it; they wouldn’t understand at all. They’d see him as a coward.” Even saying the word hurt her; it was naked in the soft, sad lines of her face.
“No . . . ,” Joseph said slowly, knowing without question that she was right. He could imagine Mary Allard’s reaction to such a concept. She would have refused to believe it. No son of hers, especially her beloved Sebastian, could have espoused anything so alien to the kind of patriotism she had believed in all her life, with its devotion to duty, sacrifice, and the innate superiority of her own way of life, her own code of honor. “Did his brother know how he felt?” he added.
She shook her head. “Oi don’t think so. He’s idealistic, but in a different kind o’