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avoid the coming conflagration.
    Then there had been the idiotic assassination in Sarajevo, and Europe had hurtled toward war. Estimates of the dead and lost—those crippled, maimed, or damaged in heart and mind—amounted to more than thirty-five million. The futile, blind idiocy of it boiled inside him with a rage so intense it caused him physical pain.
    He had done everything he could, and failed. Now, if he did not succeed in forcing the Allied powers to create a just peace, it would all happen again. A handful of years and a new war would foment like a disease incubating in the body, and a new generation would be slaughtered just as this one had been.
    He had tried persuasion, but was not listened to. President Wilson had no concept of European politics, and no understanding of history. He wanted to dismantle Germany's heavy industry, destroy her army and navy, shatter the heart of her people, and weigh them down with debt that could never be repaid. He could not see the damage that would do to all of Europe, perhaps to the whole world.
    The torrent of his despair was interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. He knew Mason would have come on foot, but how had he not seen him in the street? He had been waiting for him all evening.
    "Come in!" he said sharply in answer to the knock.
    The door opened and the manservant announced Richard Mason.
    The Peacemaker nodded, and the manservant stepped back to allow Mason in. They had conducted this ritual often enough over the last five years that it needed no words.
    The Peacemaker went back to the window, closed the curtains, and then turned on the lamps near the two large chairs. The yellow light shone vividly on Mason's face. It was gold across his high cheekbones and broad mouth, making his nose look even stronger and his eyes darker, the lines around them accentuating his weariness. His hair was so thick and black that he barely looked English, although in fact he was born and bred in Yorkshire and loved its wild moors and dales and the storms along the coast as a man can love only the land where his roots burrow deep into the earth.
    The Peacemaker had no need to ask the question that was in his mind. He and Mason had known each other since Boer War days. They had seen the same horrors and made the same covenants with the future, and both had failed.
    "Three or four weeks at most." Mason was just back from the Western Front, where the Allied troops were now moving forward so rapidly it was hard to keep up with the numbers of prisoners or the land gained. The fighting line was always advancing, and the casualties were still high. Each report looked much like the last, except that the names of the towns were different.
    The balance of hope and tragedy was especially poignant. As a journalist, Mason found it difficult to write without his own anger pouring through, and he did not want it to. The whole continent had suffered enough, and there would be far more pain and loss still to come than most people realized. The long, grueling aftermath of war would very rapidly overtake the first wild joy of the cease-fire. Unlike the Peacemaker sitting opposite him in this safe, elegant room, he had spent the last four years reporting from every battlefront in the world. He had lived in the violence and the fear, the cold, the hunger, and the stench of death. The war was not simply an idea and a set of emotions to him; it was a terrible, physical reality.
    He looked at the Peacemakers face in the lamplight, one-sided in shadow, as his own must be, and to him now the imbalance in it was disturbingly visible. In the lit side were the dreams and the compassion of the early years, the vision of healing; in the shadowed side toward the open room were the arrogance and the disregard for the curbs of morality, the refusal to see the dreams of others. The Peacemaker had argued over and over that the greater end justified the smaller ugliness of the means.
    Joseph Reavley had said that