Time and Time Again

28

THE FOLLOWING MORNING Bernadette and Stanton parted company and he continued his journey to Berlin, Imperial capital of the Second Reich and the place where he knew he must kill the Emperor.

Berlin was two cities.

That was the conclusion Stanton came to as he ate a dish of ice cream on the terrace of the Kranzler patisserie on Unter Den Linden.

One was nineteenth century and the other twentieth century.

The nineteenth-century one was about as nineteenth century a city as you could find, steeped in the Imperialist mind-set of the time. A fiercely militaristic town, capital of the garrison state of Prussia. No people since the Spartans had so gloried in martial ardour. No nation of the modern world, with the possible exception of the Zulus, ever idolized its army so completely. The army was far and away the most important and the most visible institution in the city after the monarchy, with which it was inextricably linked. The military were everywhere. Marching bands in every park. Grand parades on every Sunday (and any other day on the tiniest excuse). Officers strutting in the boulevards and lounging in the cafes in ornate dress uniforms which would have been entirely impractical for any other activity than raising a glass or bowing to a lady. Columns of troops marched about wherever there was space to march about. And there were sentries everywhere. Stanton had had no idea of the number of soldiers on the streets of pre-war Imperial Berlin. It was frankly a bit weird. No other city felt the need to place uniformed sentries outside every public building. Museums were guarded, national monuments, railway stations, public toilets. Anywhere that crown or municipal authority was extended there was a spike-headed soldier with rifle at his shoulder marching about, usually with the ubiquitous black-and-white sentry box behind him. To a military man like Stanton it was all quite fun; he enjoyed the sight of their impeccable turnout, their faultless drill and the shine on every boot. The Germans did military ceremony almost as well as the British and they did a lot more of it. The sort of show the Horse Guards put on outside Buckingham Palace once a day, the Reichsheer would mount at a sewage pumping station on the hour.

And where there could be no soldiers, then there were people trying to look like soldiers. Half the population of Berlin was in uniform, three-quarters if you counted waiters and hotel doormen. Every institution in the city seemed to have been moulded in the image of the military. Everyone from policemen to postmen to students to hotel concierges dressed like soldiers. Teachers wore uniforms.

And yet strangely Stanton found the overall effect was neither warlike nor threatening. Rather, it gave a slightly comical impression of benign and self-satisfied permanence. The postmen that looked like captains and the water board officials that looked like generals and the telegram delivery boys that looked like field marshals were just part of a happy pantomime. As if the whole city was the set of some Ruritanian comic opera and the people its chorus and principals.

Germany hadn’t fought a real war since Bismarck had unified the country forty years before, and for all the martial music and stamping about, Stanton sensed no desire among the people of its capital city to fight one now.

A cake trolley passed by Stanton’s table. They really liked their cakes, the Germans. Or, perhaps more to the point, they liked their cream. For as far as Stanton could see, cakes were really no more than whipped cream delivery systems, thin layers of sponge set between inch-thick layers of dairy fat. Kaffee und Kuchen, that was what they liked in Berlin. Stanton liked it too.

The whole place just felt so contented.

And of course that was because of the other Berlin. The twentieth-century Berlin.

The Berlin whose time had come.

Because, military pantomime aside, the place was modern. Even to a visitor from the twenty-first century it felt that way. It seemed to Stanton that there was scarcely a single building that was over fifty years old and many more appeared only to have been built the previous week. This was a city expanding more quickly and more dynamically than any other town in the world. There was a huge amount of motor traffic, far more so than Stanton had noticed in London, and everywhere there was evidence of power-house industry and cutting-edge technology. On the same streets where squads of soldiers marched there were banks of public telephones, automatic ticketing machines and the most efficient and well-organized trams in Europe. There were elevated railway lines and underground railways with stations on almost every corner. There was electricity everywhere; the whole town was wired, and more reliably than anywhere on the planet. When Stanton plugged in his personal computer using a customized transformer he’d found as steady a current as ever he’d had in the twenty-first century.

Berlin made everything. Most of the world’s chemicals. The bulk of the world’s electrical engineering. A large chunk of the world’s steel. All the world’s advanced cameras, telescopes and precision instruments. And above all it made incredible amounts of money. Even the great cities of the industrial USA looked enviously at Berlin.

Nutters aside, the last thing anybody in this city wanted was a war.

War would cost it everything. It had cost it everything.

The last time.

Stanton had seen the pictures. Pictures of this magnificent city in ruins. Hatred and slaughter stalking the town. He knew the history; every school kid from his time did, it was all they studied. How Germany had led the twentieth century to nightmarish ruin and in so doing had destroyed itself. How these plump, busy, prosperous people would in just a few years’ time be shattered ghosts, disease-ridden and on the very brink of starvation, their world-beating economy destroyed and facing decades of nightmare, revolution, deprivation and oppression.

But it wasn’t going to happen this time.

Because Stanton was going to stop it. He would save Berlin and he would save Germany. He would save its foolish, stamping toy soldiers and he would save its brilliant people, whom Stanton admired so much for their industry and their inventiveness, their crazy originality, their commerce, their science and their arts. He would save them from the terrible fate that awaited them.

He would save them from their kaiser.

Because outrage in Sarajevo or not, sooner or later Emperor Wilhelm, with his militaristic obsessions, his vanity and his raw wounded ego, would drag this young, dynamic nation into suicidal war.

A large picture of the Emperor hung on the wall opposite and to Stanton’s mind that picture said it all. It was cartoonish in its vainglorious swagger, the great man viewed slightly from below as if surveying the whole world and intent on being its master. Dressed in a white uniform with steel breastplate like some angel of war, a colonnaded Roman background made his Imperial pretensions all the more clear.

And the left arm on his sword hilt, where it usually was, disguising the birth defect which many believed had shaped the psyche of the man. It was withered and fully six inches shorter than his right arm. Wilhelm had always bravely ignored the disability, taking part in every sport and military practice, but nonetheless he had remained secretly prey to deep self-doubt and also a self-disgust.

Stanton asked for his bill and laid some Reichmarks on the saucer. And there was the Emperor again, on the notes and coins, Kaiser Bill. The man with the pointy-up moustache. The man for whom there was still only one Germany. The military one. Because it meant nothing to Wilhelm the Second that German industry was conquering the world. For him it had to be German arms that did the conquering, with him at the front in a helmet with a huge eagle on top.

Stanton looked at his watch. In less than twenty-four hours the Emperor would be dead.

He felt a pang of pity. Wilhelm was by no means all bad. But he was vain and cantankerous and pompous and unreasonable and emotionally unstable with a well-established small empire complex. Those were very dangerous characteristics in a person who was the undisputed war lord of the finest army on the planet.

He simply had to die.