Time and Time Again

9

AFTER SENGUPTA’S LECTURE Stanton and McCluskey made their way back across the quad from the Great Hall of Trinity to the Master’s Lodge.

‘You seriously believe that you can send me back to 1914?’ Stanton said, having to raise his voice over the blizzard that was blasting into their faces. ‘And from the point when that happens … the previous one hundred and eleven years will never have existed?’

‘They will be yours to remake.’

‘But in the meantime you’ve wiped out the entire population of the world, killing billions of people.’

‘You can’t kill someone who hasn’t been born,’ McCluskey said. ‘But we will all be born, born again and better! A population made up of the same organic components and DNA but radically improved by the massive injection of the blood which will no longer be spilled in Flanders fields and in all the wars and genocides that followed. We’ll all be back, captain! Every one of us and more, but not as we are now, a species of sick and sickening spiritual degenerates waiting for extinction, but as humanity ought to be. As I believe God intended us to be, or else why would he have given us this second chance to get it right?’

They had arrived at the lodge. McCluskey opened the front door but Stanton paused on the doorstep, allowing the snow to blow into the hall.

‘God?’ Stanton replied. ‘You really think God wants you to remove the current entirety of the human race from the universe?’

‘Why not?’ McCluskey said, ushering him over the threshold and closing the door behind him. ‘They just sit around staring at their phones, what difference will it make? Besides, think of the lives you’ll save! Starting with the Battle of Mons, the Marne, then first Ypres, then Gallipoli, Loos, the Somme, Ypres again and then Ypres for a third time and on and on. You were a British soldier, weren’t you? The men who died in those battles are your comrades, it’s your duty to save them. And all the other tens of millions of anguished souls who died in misery in the benighted twentieth century! Do you really think you have a right to fail to prevent a catastrophe just because that catastrophe has already happened?’ McCluskey didn’t allow Stanton time to answer this convoluted point before pressing on. ‘Isn’t that dereliction of duty, captain? If I didn’t know you better I might even call it cowardice.’

She turned and began to mount the famous staircase, the one on which Master Bentley had spent so much money three centuries before and which Isaac Newton had climbed on the day he had begun the business of Chronos.

‘Now wait a minute,’ Stanton said, striding after her. ‘Cowardice? I notice that you bunch of superannuated old fossils have been careful to avoid including anybody who might still feel their life was worth living.’

‘Exactly!’ McCluskey shouted, clapping her hands with joy. ‘Newton thought of everything. And let them be old! he said. He guessed that if history needed any necessary readjustment then only those with little to lose would have the courage, the foresight, the soul to attempt it. But the old and decrepit can’t save the world. Only the young and strong can do that. Which is why we found you, Hugh! You will be the last Companion of Chronos. And it’s Christmas! This calls for champagne.’

She went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle from the fridge. Soon they were both back where they had been that morning, glasses in hand, Stanton sitting in the old Queen Anne chair, McCluskey, as ever, hogging the fire.

‘All right,’ Stanton said, smiling. ‘Let’s suppose for a minute that you’re not all deluded lunatics and that there really is an opportunity for a person to step into 1914. What do you think me or whoever it is should do when they get there? And please don’t say you want me to prevent the assassination at Sarajevo.’

‘Why not? That’s exactly what I want you to do.’

‘Oh come on, professor! That is just so lame.’

‘Isn’t the Archduke’s murder generally considered to be the spark that kicked the whole thing off?’

‘Yes, the spark! That’s the point. You know as well as I do that there were complex underlying—’

‘Dear me, Hugh,’ McCluskey interrupted. ‘You’re not going to tell me that the war was an economic inevitability, are you? I cannot abide a Marxist, you know that. Cheers.’

McCluskey drank deep at her champagne and then struggled to contain the belch that followed.

‘You don’t need to be a Marxist to believe that global wars do not depend exclusively for their beginnings on the life or death of a single man.’

‘But this one did,’ McCluskey replied, when once more she was master of her oesophagus. ‘Although not Archduke Ferdinand, as it happens.’

‘What?’

‘His death was, as you say, just a spark, and one we must of course prevent from igniting the bonfire. But the underlying cause was down to another man altogether. A Germanic royal, but not Franz Ferdinand. You see, the wrong one died.’

‘What wrong one? How could it possibly come down to one man, royal or not? What about the balance of power? The system of alliances …’

‘Yes, yes and the naval arms race and Germany’s economic miracle and the railway timetables and all the endless catalogue of “causes of the Great War” which every school kid used to know and are now almost forgotten.’ McCluskey picked up an antique flintlock from the mantelpiece and took absent-minded aim at a painting on the wall, a serious-looking cleric from the time of Henry VIII. ‘John Redman, first Master of Trinity,’ she said, squinting along the barrel. ‘There’s every possibility he was staring down from that frame when Newton visited Bentley and set this whole business in motion. I like to think so, anyway.’

Stanton didn’t want to talk about John Redman.

‘Stick to the point, professor,’ he said. ‘What man caused the Great War?’

‘Well, the Kaiser, obviously. Stupid, stupid Wilhelm, Queen Victoria’s wayward grandson. Unstable, bitter, jealous, dangerously ambitious, nursing any number of private jealousies and grudges. He wanted war. Nobody else did. They were all just falling dominoes. The Austro-Hungarians? They were having enough trouble deciding which languages to speak in their own parliament.’

‘But the Russians …’ Stanton began.

‘Can’t speak about the Russians.’ McCluskey laughed. ‘You can only speak about the Tsar. Poor, timid, confused Nicholas. He’d never have fought Cousin Willy if he’d been given any other choice. But Willy didn’t give him a choice; Willy kept ramping up the odds. And of course Nicholas was allied to the French. Did they want war? Ha! They’d spent forty years draping their statues in black and moaning about Alsace after the Prussians beat ’em the last time and never done a thing about it, and never would have done either if the Kaiser hadn’t thrown a million men at them. So who’s left that matters? Us and the Yanks. The Americans were totally isolationist. It was in their blood. They’d opted out of Europe on the Mayflower and didn’t want back in. They never would have joined in at all if the Germans hadn’t started sinking their ships and sending inflammatory telegrams to Mexico. Which brings us to the British. The global top dogs, the ones with it all to lose. Totally secure behind the guns of the Royal Navy. Financial centre of the planet and carrying the bulk of the world’s trade in our ships, a global pre-eminence that depended entirely on peace. Do you think anybody in Whitehall wanted to blow all that? No, Hugh, the truth is undeniable, it was Germany’s fault, more specifically the Kaiser’s fault. Everyone was talking about war, as nations always do, and no doubt there were plenty of romantic young men itching to lead a cavalry charge, as young men will, particularly young men who have yet to grasp the full significance of what the machine gun can do to a cavalry charge. But the only world leader who genuinely wanted war was the Kaiser. We know it now and they knew it then because if there was one thing on which everybody agreed in the summer of 1914, it was that if war came it would be between Germany and the rest of us.’

‘Germany had its allies,’ Stanton protested, feeling very much as if he was in a lecture theatre.

‘Oh come on! The poxy old Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires? They weren’t allies, they were liabilities. The real powers in the world, the ones with a future as well as a past, were Britain, France, Russia, Japan and America on one side and Germany on the other – except it wasn’t even Germany. It was the Kaiser. Him and his Prussian war clique sitting in Potsdam singing hymns to war. The rest of Germany wanted to do business. They were the workshop of the world. If they’d waited another decade they could have bought France and no doubt Britain too in the end. Germany had the biggest social democratic party in the world, the Reichstag wanted peace. But the Kaiser wanted conquest. And he was still the boss. That crazy bastard with a chip on his disabled shoulder the size of the Brandenburg Gate was itching for a fight. That’s why he always wore military uniform. Where is he in all the photographs? Just think of a picture of Kaiser Bill pre-war and where was he?’

Stanton knew the answer McCluskey was angling for and of course she was right.

‘On manoeuvres,’ he said.

‘Exactly! Playing bloody soldiers. It’s all he ever did. He led the most scientifically and industrially advanced nation on earth and all he wanted to do was stand in a field staring at a map with his crippled arm resting on his sword hilt. How did Edward the Seventh spend his time? Boozing, gambling and whoring in Paris. George the Fifth? Bloody stamp collecting. Tsar Nicholas? Pretending to be a minor country landowner and pottering about his garden with his bossy wife, who was clearly infatuated with a whore-mongering peasant lunatic. The French were dancing La Belle Epoque. The Americans wanted to wind up the drawbridge and forget Europe existed. And who was out on manoeuvres? Who wore a helmet with a spike on top to walk the dog? Who was rearming at the kind of rate that would have made Genghis Khan blush?’

‘Kaiser Wilhelm,’ Stanton conceded.

‘Yes, Kaiser Wilhelm,’ McCluskey shouted. ‘The cause of the whole damn catastrophe. So that’s the plan, Hugh. We swap one dead Germanic royal for another. You will go to Sarajevo and prevent the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and then you will go to Berlin and kill the Kaiser.’

‘In 1914?’

‘In 1914.’

Outside the bells of Trinity Chapel chimed midnight. It was Christmas Day.

‘Now, I know what you’re thinking,’ McCluskey continued.

‘I’m thinking we must be out of our minds to be having this conversation.’

‘Yes, but apart from that, you’re thinking if the murder of an archduke caused as much trouble as it did, surely killing an emperor could make things even worse.’

‘Well, that’s certainly a fair point.’

‘But not if the right people get the blame.’

‘The right people?’

‘Absolutely. You see, if the Kaiser is assassinated, the first thing people are going to ask themselves is who did it?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘And nobody is likely to suggest that the culprit was a time traveller who’d leapt across a closed loop within the space– time continuum.’

‘No, I think that’s fair.’

‘The problem with the murder of Franz Ferdinand was that it was committed by a foreigner and hence had the instant potential to precipitate an international crisis. If the Kaiser were killed by a German, or at least if it appeared that way, then the crisis is German and German alone. If it turns out that the killer was also a Socialist, then you have a bun fight that is likely to consume Germany for a considerable time. Germany had the largest and by far the most sophisticated Socialist movement in Europe. As far as the German establishment was concerned, the Left was public enemy number one. If the Left can be shown to have killed the Emperor, there will be a brutal police crackdown and the Left, knowing themselves to be innocent, will fight back. Germany will descend into internal strife. Britain will refocus its attention on the Irish Question, which was tearing it apart at the time, not to mention the Suffragettes. Russia will continue its slow progress towards modern statehood. France will be overjoyed at Germany’s self-imposed agonies, which will most certainly keep it occupied through 1914 and probably for years to come. And whatever the Germany that emerges afterwards, be it left-leaning or right, it will at least no longer be led by a psychopathic warmonger. Besides which, by then the increasing prosperity and economic interdependence of the European powers, coupled with democratic reform, both of which were already well under way across the country, will have made war impossible. No two modern capitalist democracies have ever gone to war. And do you know what is the best part of all about this plan? Those lovely Russian princesses will never be murdered! Do close your mouth, Hugh. It’s gaping open and making you look like a fish.’