We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [142]
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 father’s 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