No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [31]
“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, one that Joseph seemed to refuse or to be incapable of understanding. “Why?” he said bitterly. “The Israelites were the chosen people, and where are they now? We study their language as a curiosity. It matters only because it is the language of Christ, whom they denied and crucified. If the Bible didn’t speak of Him, we wouldn’t care about Hebrew. We can’t say that of English. Why should anyone remember it if we were conquered? For Shakespeare? We don’t remember the language of Aristotle, Homer, Aeschylus. It’s taught in the best schools, to the privileged few, as a relic of a great civilization of the past.” His voice choked with sudden, uncontrollable anger and his face was twisted with pain. “I don’t want to become a relic! I want people a thousand years from now to speak the same tongue that I do, to love the same beauty, to understand my dreams and how they mattered to me. I want to write something, or even do something, that preserves the soul of who we are.”
The last of the light was now only a pale wash low across the horizon. “War changes us, even if we win.” He turned away from Joseph, as if to hide a nakedness within. “Too many of us become barbarians of the heart. Have you any idea how many could die? How many of those left would be consumed by hate, all over Europe? Everything that was good in them eaten away by the things they had seen and, worse, the things they had been forced to do?”
“It won’t happen!” Joseph responded, and the moment the words were gone from his lips he wondered if they were true. “If you can’t have faith in people, the leaders of nations, then have faith that God will not allow the world to plunge into the kind of destruction you are thinking of,” he said. “What purpose of His could it serve?”
Sebastian’s lip curled in a tiny smile. “I’ve no idea! I don’t know the purposes of God! Do you, sir?” The softness of his voice, and the sir on the end, robbed it of offense.
“To save the souls of men,” Joseph replied without hesitation.
“And what does that mean?” Sebastian turned back to face him. “Do you suppose He sees it the same way I do?” Again the smile touched his lips, this time self-mocking.
Joseph was obliged to smile in answer, although the sadness jolted him as if the fading of the light were in some terrible way a permanent thing. “Not necessarily,