Time and Time Again (9 page)

Stanton had just determined that his first move would be a left-hooked karate chop to the prominent Adam’s apple of the group leader, and in fact his left arm was already in motion, when the owner of the cafe appeared once more.

‘Stop this please,’ he said softly. ‘Prayers are completed in the mosque.’

‘Oh, so you can speak a civilized language when it suits you, can you, Abdul?’ the leader of the five said over his shoulder as he advanced the final step towards Stanton. ‘Well, bully for you, but I’m not interested in your prayers or your damned mosque.’ The man addressed Stanton once more. ‘Now you show me your papers, my friend, or you’re coming with us to the military police to explain why you’re impersonating a British officer.’

‘And in a moment my cafe will be full,’ the Turkish owner went on, and something about his tone gave both Stanton and his opponent pause. ‘Full of Muslims, sir, devout Muslims and also Turkish patriots. Must I tell them that you have insulted me and my house with your crude observations and your demands for alcohol?’

The young Englishmen were astonished.

‘Are you
threatening
us?’ the leader asked.

‘This is Stamboul, not Pera,’ the owner went on. ‘This part of the city does not belong to foreigners. It belongs to us. You should leave now.’

Clearly the young Englishmen were torn, their pride and arrogance baulked at being ordered about by mere natives, but they could see that outside the window beyond the hookah pipe the tiny, ancient square was already filling up as the mosque disgorged. And the crowd was not the kind of westernized Turk that lived in Pera, this was Old Stamboul. There were no linen suits, no fezes, no clean chins, and no women at all. Instead there were pyjama-y trousers, flowing robes and flowing beards. Already two or three of the worshippers were at the door of the little cafe. Fierce men with knives at their belts. Stanton saw a pistol, although it must have been fifty years old.

The five officers might have been arrogant and half drunk but they weren’t completely beyond reason. This was still the age of Empire, the British had been spread very thinly and precariously across the globe for two centuries, and they knew they wouldn’t be the first soldiers of the Crown to disappear into a resentful local crowd, never to be seen again. The shock of Gordon’s fate at Khartoum had cast a shadow across the psyche of late Imperial Britain every bit as traumatic as the death of any fairy-tale princess had done a hundred years later.

‘All right, we’ll go,’ the leader said. ‘But you’re coming with us,’ he added, turning to Stanton. ‘Guy, get his bag.’

Once more Stanton stiffened in readiness. They most certainly were not getting his bag.

Once more it was the cafe owner who diffused the situation.

‘No,’ he commanded. ‘My friend did not insult the Prophet. He stays. You leave.’

Now the door of the cafe opened and the first thirsty customers came in from prayer. Within a moment the little space was packed with at least ten puzzled-looking men watching what was clearly some kind of stand-off between a group of
feringi
. The owner turned to the newcomers and spoke to them in Turkish. Whatever he said caused them to glare menacingly at the five now beleaguered Englishmen.

‘You’d better not let me see you again,’ the leader snarled in Stanton’s face. Then, with what dignity he could, he led his comrades out into the square, where they were the object of many sullen stares.

Stanton turned to his saviour and thanked him.

‘It is I who should thank you,’ the owner replied. ‘It is not so common for a foreigner crusader in our city to treat a Muslim as his equal.’

‘You speak very good English,’ Stanton observed.

‘Only when I choose to. Please. Another coffee.’

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?’