Stanton felt a thrill at that. This was, after all, the first historic front page of a new and different twentieth century. He found himself thinking how one day the very headline he was looking at would be reproduced digitally in documentaries on the television in some other version of his own age.
But there was certainly going to be a price to pay. The mood in the street was getting angrier. Strangers were exchanging rumours that the police had uncovered a massive leftist conspiracy to overthrow the government. Stanton heard people speaking confidently about hundreds of ‘Revolutionaries’ and ‘Anarchists’ who had been poised to seize control.
Over and over again he heard the word ‘revenge’.
33
RETURNING TO HIS room he drank a little more schnapps and read the first reports in the evening paper.
The police had proved every bit as efficient as he’d expected they would be and more. They had already discovered his firing position and the Mauser shell. Also there was a mention of a wounded man who’d been found nearby on the roof. The reporter presumed this person to have been a security guard. It seemed that the police were waiting to ascertain the extent of his injuries before trying to question him.
Stanton was glad he hadn’t killed the guy, although he did wonder whether there was now a chance he could be identified. He decided that the risk of the guard having got a good enough look at him to give a description was pretty small. After all, as Stanton had spun around he’d been bringing up his gun in front of his face. All anyone could have seen with confidence was that he was tall and his hair was sandy blond. Plenty like that in the German capital. Besides which, the guard would probably die of his wounds anyway.
Despite the aching in his chest and back Stanton decided to take a walk. He drained his glass and went to the stairwell, then on an afterthought he returned to his room and took the Glock pistol from his damaged jacket and slipped it into his trouser pocket. It was an ugly night to be on the streets.
Stanton joined the milling throng which it seemed to him was gravitating towards the Brandenburg Gate. The gate had been erected by the Kaiser’s father to commemorate Prussia’s great victory over France and was therefore an obvious place to gather to remember a fallen German hero.
The mood outside was intensely emotional. Many wept as they walked, genuinely devastated by their collective loss. Others, however, had already transmuted their grief into fury and were shouting to the heavens for vengeance as they marched. Stanton was quite surprised at how quickly things were turning nasty. Of course he’d known that there’d be a massive public reaction and no doubt some random violence to go with it but he hadn’t quite expected what seemed to be developing into a collective and self-perpetuating hysteria for instant retribution.
People were acting as if they’d lost a saint. A guiding star.
Of course it made sense. After all, he’d killed the Kaiser before the man had screwed up. The Emperor had died while he was still the leader of a country untainted by war and barbarism and whose principal features were a world-beating industrial economy, a global technological lead and a highly developed Social Democratic movement.
Watching the growing fury of the crowd Stanton was uncomfortably aware that for the German people in July 1914 their Kaiser represented nothing so much as progress, prosperity and peace. Yes, of all things – peace. The crowd didn’t know what Stanton knew. As far as they were concerned, their King Emperor had been on the throne for twenty-six years and for all that time the nation had been at peace. And during that time Germany had grown into a premier world power with an industry to rival the United States, a navy that was threatening to one day equal Britain’s and an army that had no rival at all.
Understandably those early-twentieth-century Berliners surging through the streets in angry despair saw the Kaiser as the most potent symbol of their growing power and prosperity and were fearful that with his death their good luck would end. Only Stanton among them knew that it was the Kaiser’s survival that would have brought an end to their peaceful, comfortable world.
He wanted to shout it out: ‘Hey, guys! It’s OK! It’s all good! The man was a warmonger.’ He wanted to tell them that this apparent bastion of peace and stability had in fact led his country into suicidal conflict, and what was more had done it within five weeks of the current date. And that a mere four years after that, this man whom they were lamenting as the essential rock on which Germany’s future depended would be skulking out of Berlin into shameful and ignominious exile in Holland.
But of course all that was history now, or more to the point it wasn’t history. It never had been history and it never would be; it was just a strange dream in the mind of one single man on the planet. The new reality was that the mighty leader of the most successful ever period in German history was dead and his people were devastated.
And some of them were crazy angry.
Angry and getting dangerous.
Night had fallen and Stanton saw young men carrying clubs. Nobody carried a club unless they were looking for somebody to hit and these people really wanted to find somebody to hit. More sinister still were the gangs of students in their semi-military uniforms and caps, surging about in well-disciplined squads. They were carrying Imperial flags and the eagle banner and swearing that they would have vengeance or death.
But vengeance on whom?
Who should they hit with their clubs? Who should they march over with their banners? Who had done the deed? And who had put them up to it?
It was the Socialists that had done it. Nobody in Berlin was in any doubt about that. But which Socialists? And where were they? Where was their nest? Where were they hiding? The Chronos leaflet had been deliberately vague, leaving the mob with little to go on.
The later editions of evening papers changed all that. The journalists had had time to collect their thoughts and do some research and now began to name names. And while the newspapers couldn’t actually name any specific conspirators, they could certainly name Socialists. And did so with great enthusiasm, in so doing pointing a finger of implied guilt.
‘To the SPD Headquarters!’ the cry went up. ‘We’ll flush the bastards out.’
And so the Brandenburg Gate was forgotten in favour of converging on the offices of the Social Democratic Party, a highly respectable parliamentary party which had attracted millions of votes at the last election, but a party which the newspapers were eager to remind their readers had until 1890 been known as the Socialist Workers Party.
Stanton hoped for their own sake that the leaders of the SPD were not at their constituency offices that night.
Or, more particularly, one leader. Because above the general din and shouts, Stanton noticed one name beginning to emerge as the principal figure of hate. One name whom the evening papers had taken particular care in advertising.
Rosa Luxemburg.
Bernadette’s hero.
A famous Socialist who would one day set up the German Communist Party and die at the hands of a paramilitary death squad.
Or at least that had been Luxemburg’s fate in the first loop of time.
Who could guess what her fate would be in the second?
But it didn’t look good.
The very idea of Rosa Luxemburg seemed to infuriate the crowds. They hated her for a number of reasons. Because she was an uncompromising and highly vocal Socialist. Because she was a dirty foreigner, a Pollack no less, and only a naturalized German. Because she was a woman. And, most damning of all, because she was a Jew.
Stanton hadn’t thought of that.
That the Jews would get the blame.