We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [85]
Mason’s mouth was dry, his throat tight. He could not have spoken even if he could have thought of anything to say.
“The man behind it,” Matthew went on, “we called ‘the Peacemaker,’ because we had no idea of his identity. He continued to campaign against Britain and the Allies even though the war—”
Mason started to protest but bit the words off, ending as if he had choked on his own breath.
Matthew had no idea of the turmoil inside him. He continued, lost in his own anger and grief. “He was always trying to bring the war to an end while both sides were still strong enough to ally together in an Anglo-German Empire that could dominate most of the world. It would be peace, but without any passion or individuality, any freedom to think and question, to be different, to dare new ideas, to complain against stupidity or injustice, to question or work or laugh aloud. It would be the peace of death.”
Again Mason drew breath to interrupt, but here in this bunker dug out of the Flanders earth where so many men had died hideously, all rational justification of such grandiose philosophical issues seemed not only vaguely obscene, but divorced from any kind of reality. It had once been the hope for a better, saner world, a way of avoiding all this wealth of loss. Now it looked like the arrogance of a lunatic, and as doomed as all madmen’s dreams.
“The Peacemaker went on murdering,” Matthew continued quietly. “General Cullingford; Augustus Tempany; indirectly Lizzie Blaine’s husband, Theo, one of the best scientists we ever had. Perhaps even worse than murder was the corruption, and you could call that murder of the soul. Except, of course, we have to allow it ourselves before we can be corrupted. We collude in our own destruction there.”
Mason still did not answer. Everything Matthew was describing was a world away from the high ideals with which he and the Peacemaker had begun, but Matthew had not seen South Africa in the Boer War: the slaughter of men; the caging of women and children in camps, starving and imprisoned. He’d had no conception before this of what total war was like.
Finally he looked up at Matthew’s face in the lamplight. “If you had known, in 1914, what this would have been like, the sheer overwhelming horror of it, would you have tried to stop it?” he asked, then wished he had not. He sounded like an apologist for the Peacemaker, and he was frightened by how powerful the compulsion was within him to be honest, to cleanse himself from lies. But he had asked, and he had to wait for the answer.
Matthew looked surprised. “Maybe,” he admitted. “I don’t know. If I had, I hope it would have been openly, without betrayal. But it would have been futile. The balance of power was fatally flawed in Europe. We could never have bought peace without coercion and oppression. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing from within. So was Russia, in its own way. If you are asking me if I could see that at the time, no, of course not, not clearly enough to have done anything useful about it. Could you?”
“No. But I might have thought I could.” Mason had already come closer to honesty than he should have. “What has this to do with finding out who murdered Sarah Price?”
“The Peacemaker hasn’t given up yet,” Matthew said with a jerky little laugh. “He’s still in power, and there’s the armistice and its terms to negotiate, and all the peace after that to fight for. If we get it wrong we could sow the seeds of another war just as terrible as this.”
“Didn’t you say he wanted peace?” Mason asked, remembering everything the Peacemaker had said about crushing German industry and creating a huge vacuum in the economy of Europe.
“Peace on his terms,” Matthew amended. “He still hasn’t learned that you can’t force people without at the same time destroying them. He may well be an idealist, but that does not excuse the lies