V.

From the window of a cab, proceeding in the rain along Strada Reale, Stencil could detect none of the holiday one saw in other capitals of Europe. Perhaps it was only the rain. But welcome relief surely. Stencil was fed to surfeit on songs, bunting, parades, promiscuous loves, uncouth noisemakings; all the normal responses of noncombatants-in-the-mass to Armistice or peace. Even in the normally sober offices in Whitehall, it had been impossible. Armistice, ha!

"I cannot understand your attitude," from Carruthers-Pillow, then Stencil's superior. "Armistice, ha, indeed."

Stencil muttered something about things not being stabilized. How could he tell Carruthers-Pillow of all people, who felt in the presence of the most inconsequential chit initialed by the Foreign Secretary much as Moses must have toward the Decalogue God blasted out for him on stone. Wasn't the Armistice signed by legally-constituted heads of government? How could there not be peace? It would never be worth the trouble arguing. So they'd stood that November morning, watching the lamplighter extinguish the lights in St. James's Park, as if having long ago passed through some quicksilver surface from when Viscount Grey had stood perhaps at the same window and made his famous remark about the lamps going out all over Europe. Stencil, of course, didn't see the difference between event and image, but saw no advantage in disturbing his chief's euphoria. Let the poor innocent sleep. Stencil had merely been dour, which in him passed for high celebration.

Lieutenant Mungo Sheaves, aide to the Officer Administrating Government on Malta, had set before Whitehall an architecture of discontent: among the police force, the University students, the civil service, the Dockyard workers. Behind it all lurked "the Doctor"; organizer, civil engineer: E. Mizzi. A bogeyman to Major General Hunter-Blair, the OAG, Stencil guessed; but found it took him an effort to see Mizzi as anything but a busy man-of-policy, agile, Machiavellian, a trifle old-fashioned, who'd managed to last as far as 1919. For a survival like that Stencil could only feel a wistful pride. His good friend Porpentine - twenty years ago in Egypt - hadn't he been the same sort? Belonged to a time where which side a man was on didn't matter: only the state of opposition itself, the tests of virtue, the cricket game? Stencil may have come in on the tail end.

It must be shock, fine: even Stencil could feel shock. Ten million dead and twice that wounded, if nothing else. "But we reach a point," he'd thought of telling Carruthers-Pillow, "we old campaigners, when the habits of the past become too strong. Where we can say, and believe, that this abattoir, but lately bankrupt, was fundamentally no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Sudanese wars, even the Crimea. It is perhaps a delusion - say a convenience - necessary to our line of work. But more honorable surely than this loathsome weakness of retreat into dreams: pastel visions of disarmament, a League, a universal law. Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public, then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself."

On route to Valletta - the steamer to Syracuse, the week of lying doggo in a waterfront tavern till Mehemet's xebec arrived; all the way across a Mediterranean whose teeming history and full depth he could not feel, nor try, nor afford to try to feel, old Stencil had had it out with himself. Mehemet had helped.