‘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.’