“Quite so, Michael, quite so,” Macmillan said with an apologetic smile in my direction. “But all that really matters right now is that Anthony has joined us of his own free will, and we can press ahead as planned.
“So, what exactly are you planning?” I tried to ask in a steady voice.
“You say a word to this piece of offal,” Foot snarled, “and I’m walking straight out of the room. Whatever really prompted him to come back here, he’s a prisoner. He does as he’s told. He lives if he’s lucky. We don’t tell him anything!” He went and stood by the fireplace and lit one of his Russian cigarettes. Being half way through one myself, I was ready to admit they were rather nice. Even so, this one set him off on a mild coughing fit. He threw it at the fireplace. As Macmillan got hurriedly up to recover it from the carpet and drop it into the fire, I heard a chuckle from Foot.
“Behold your new leash, Dr Markham,” he said with another cough. He’d produced a second radio box and was allowing his fingers to flutter lightly over its button. “I need but press the red and green buttons at the same time, and then flick this switch, and you will appreciate the technical proficiency of the Workers’ State.”
“Oh, do put that away, Michael!” Macmillan sighed. He looked at his watch and muttered something about a cold menu for his guests by candle light. There was suddenly a loud sputter that filled the house, and the lights came on. He got up and smiled. Foot twisted in his chair as if the burning sensation in my own bottom had been transferred to him. He licked dry lips and seemed about to say something. With equal suddenness, though, the lights went out. A few seconds later, they came back on. Another few seconds, and they’d gone back out again. We sat a while, staring at the candles. Foot relaxed and smoked steadily. It seemed his acid—whatever his men had been doing with it—had done for the generators until professional help could be brought in.
“The only telephone that currently works is in the servants’ hall,” Macmillan said with a hurt look at Foot. “I suppose I’d better make what calls I dare from below stairs. I do hope that, in my absence, you can find something more congenial to discuss than murder à la mode in Mother Russia.” He finished his whisky and got up to leave the room.
I sat, looking at one of the candles. Except I was to do whatever Macmillan demanded, my instructions might as well not have been given. “The more I tell you, the more you’re likely to bugger things up again if they torture you,” Stanhope had barked in response to my terrified pleas for enlightenment. He had promised “help at the appropriate moment”. If I believed that now, I’d have to be more stupid than I felt. I reached for the cigarette box.
“I don’t suppose you saw last week’s Observer,” Foot struck up, an oddly friendly tone in his voice. “It carried a long and remarkably fine article of my own about the new Soviet penal code. However, what I most enjoyed reading was a symposium, led by A.J.P. Taylor, on what might have happened during the past forty four years if the world hadn’t gone to war in 1914. The three contributions, including Taylor’s, were fascinating. You haven’t read any of them, of course. But would you care to give me your own take on the subject?” He smiled politely and lit a cigarette. I smiled back at him and reached for the decanter. Talking history with the man was an improvement on begging for mercy.
“The War broke out in 1914,” I began. “We are now in 1959. With all respect to Alan Taylor, I suggest that it’s too long now to say what would have happened if Princip’s gun had misfired at Sarajevo. Oh, I can see it now. The boy gets up onto the Archduke’s car and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He tries to fire again—but the guards have him firm. He’s taken off into custody, and the Archduke and his wife continue about their business before getting on the railway train back to Vienna. The problem is that too many things have happened since then because of the war that did break out. Trying to disentangle these things from what else might have happened is too hard for getting anything sensible. The electronic people talk about white noise. There really is too much of that to see any clear picture.
“However”—I didn’t like the hard look that was coming again over Foot—“however, let’s take a shorter time. Let’s not assume 1959, but 1934, which is twenty years after a Great War that never happened. What might we have seen then? Some things, no doubt, would have happened anyway, and were only accelerated or retarded by the War. Among these must be the emancipation of women, and universal suffrage, and Irish Home Rule, and the decline of France as a great power, and the rise of Japan. You can add to this the development of radio communications and the simplification of clothing. I think you can also add the greater devolution of power to the White Dominions.
“We can be more certain about the things that wouldn’t have happened. Obviously there wouldn’t have been the violent death, by 1923, of between ten and twenty million people. There would still have been Imperial governments in Berlin and Vienna and probably Moscow. Turkey wouldn’t have gone though the eclipse that ended with its reconquest of Syria and the Arabian Gulf, and its conquest of Persia. The American genie would not have been so abruptly summoned from its bottle—and then so brutally stuffed back in. There would have been no Great Depression. Music and the arts wouldn’t have gone through that long descent into freakishness. We’d probably not have continued so long up the dead ends of the distributed power that you like so much, or of oil power, or of aeroplane development. Hitler would never have got his statues put up all over Germany and its Eastern Territories. Lenin”—I stared at Foot and flicked ash from my cigarette—“would have died in Switzerland of tertiary syphilis. Stalin would have been caught and hanged for bank robbery.
“Turning to what might have happened is rather hard, even just looking at 1934. But, if most of the millions who died in or because of the Great War would otherwise have passed unmemorable lives—and there’s nothing bad about that!—there must have been other Beethovens and Pasteurs and Edisons who would have enriched mankind. Without their early deaths, we might, by 1934, have been roughly where we are now. The tuberculosis and polio vaccines might have been developed twenty or thirty years earlier. The development of the cancer vaccines might not have had to wait until now to be at the testing stage. The non-development of certain technologies would have been balanced by the earlier development of other technologies—and even by the development of some that are as yet unknown. But, as I’ve said, these are difficult conjectures to make. Think of the unfinished Mozart Requiem. We know what Mozart wrote. We can scrape away the additions that Süssmayr made to complete the work. Saying how Mozart would have completed it himself is as hard as saying how the world would have gone without the Great War.
“I suppose I should add that the non-occurrence of known evils does not mean that other evils would not have taken their place. Perhaps, without the Great War, all manner of other bad things would have happened in its place. It requires a leap of faith to say it—but I do believe that, but for the Great War, mankind would have been far better off by 1934 than it was.”
I would have said more, but Foot was now twisting his face into the best sneer he could manage. He got up and went over to the dead wireless set. He played a moment with its buttons, then turned back to me.
“I really should have expected nothing more from you,” he said with amusement and contempt. “The problem with all you bourgeois historians is your utter superficiality. I see you’ve changed your mind since your book about Churchill. Then, I recall, you were almost foaming at the mouth about the German naval challenge. But, if you’ve changed your mind, you’ve still seen no deeper into the nature of things. The Great War was historically inevitable. Lenin himself said that capitalism proceeds by its own natural unfolding through imperialism to world war. The Sarajevo assassinations may have been contingent. But there are no great contingencies. If Princip’s gun had jammed, the War would only have been delayed. If the first breakthrough to socialism hadn’t occurred in Russia, it would have done so in Germany or America.”