Fall of Giants

Gus Dewar was among the guests at Tŷ Gwyn, and at teatime he sought Maud out. All the men wore plus fours, tweed trousers buttoned just below the knee, and the tall American looked particularly foolish in them. He held a cup of tea precariously in one hand as he crossed the crowded morning room to where she sat.

She suppressed a sigh. When a single man approached her he usually had romance on his mind, and she had to fight him off without admitting she was married, which was sometimes difficult. Nowadays, so many eligible upper-class bachelors had been killed in the war that the most unprepossessing men fancied their chances with her: younger sons of bankrupt barons, weedy clergymen with bad breath, even homosexuals looking for a woman to give them respectability.

Not that Gus Dewar was such a poor prospect. He was not handsome, nor did he have the easy grace of such men as Walter and Fitz, but he had a sharp mind and high ideals, and he shared Maud’s passionate interest in world affairs. And the combination of his slight awkwardness, physical and social, with a certain blunt honesty somehow amounted to a kind of charm. If she had been single he might even have had a chance.

He folded his long legs beside her on a yellow silk sofa. “Such a pleasure to be at Tŷ Gwyn again,” he said.

“You were here shortly before the war,” Maud recalled. She would never forget that weekend in January 1914, when the king had come to stay and there had been a terrible disaster at the Aberowen pit. What she remembered most vividly-she was ashamed to realize-was kissing Walter. She wished she could kiss him now. What fools they had been to do no more than kiss! She wished now that they had made love, and she had got pregnant, so that they were obliged to marry in undignified haste, and had been sent away to live in perpetual social disgrace somewhere frightful like Rhodesia or Bengal. All the considerations that had inhibited them-parents, society, career-seemed trivial by comparison with the awful possibility that Walter might be killed and she would never see him again. “How can men be so stupid as to go to war?” she said to Gus. “And to continue fighting when the dreadful cost in men’s lives has long ago dwarfed any conceivable gain?”

He said: “President Wilson believes the two sides should consider peace without victory.”

She was relieved that he did not want to tell her what fine eyes she had, or some such rubbish. “I agree with the president,” she said. “The British army has already lost a million men. The Somme alone cost us four hundred thousand casualties.”

“But what do the British people think?”

Maud considered. “Most of the newspapers are still pretending the Somme was a great victory. Any attempt at a realistic assessment is labeled unpatriotic. I’m sure Lord Northcliffe would really rather live under a military dictatorship. But most of our people know we’re not making much progress.”

“The Germans may be about to propose peace talks.”

“Oh, I hope you’re right.”

“I believe a formal approach may be made soon.”

Maud stared at him. “Pardon me,” she said. “I assumed you were making polite conversation. But you’re not.” She felt excited. Peace talks? Could it happen?

“No, I’m not making conversation,” Gus said. “I know you have friends in the Liberal government.”

“It’s not really a Liberal government anymore,” she said. “It’s a coalition, with several Conservative ministers in the cabinet.”

“Excuse me, I misspoke. I did know about the coalition. All the same, Asquith is still prime minister, and he is a Liberal, and I know you are close to many leading Liberals.”

“Yes.”

“So I’ve come here to ask your opinion as to how the German proposal might be received.”

She considered carefully. She knew who Gus represented. The president of the United States was asking her this question. She had better be exact. As it happened, she had a key item of information. “Ten days ago the cabinet discussed a paper by Lord Lansdowne, a former Conservative foreign secretary, arguing that we cannot win the war.”

Gus lit up. “Really? I had no idea.”

“Of course you didn’t. It was secret. However, there have been rumors, and Northcliffe has been fulminating against what he calls defeatist talk of negotiated peace.”

Gus said eagerly: “And how was Lansdowne’s paper received?”

“I’d say there are four men inclined to sympathize with him: the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey; the chancellor, McKenna; the president of the Board of Trade, Runciman; and the prime minister himself.”

Gus’s face brightened with hope. “That’s a powerful faction!”

“Especially now that the aggressive Winston Churchill has gone. He never recovered from the catastrophe of the Dardanelles expedition, which was his pet project.”

“Who in the cabinet was against Lansdowne?”