I’ll tell you a story about time travelers and I’ll try to make it quick because it’s a sad tale and I don’t want to see you cry. It encompasses not one tragedy, or two, but the fate of nations for centuries on end. It encompasses all the greatest tragedies of our age and the deaths of millions, and then more deaths of millions, and then the deaths of millions more.
As I say, it is too sad a tale to dwell on for too long.
It starts with four time travelers in a bar. Two Germans, a Brit and the last one claimed to be a Yank but I don’t know if she could be trusted. I was at the next table over, but we’ll come to that at the end.
The first one at the table we’ll call Hans, although understandably none of them gave their names. He was a beast of a man. Gnarled is a word. Grizzled is another. Cantankerous is a third. His coat was thick with grime from many different sources. His hair matted to one side of his face. The guy was a mess, but it was war time so we make allowances, don’t we.
He had a bottle of dirty red cowering before him between his hands. He refilled his glass every other minute and if it was not for the others arriving I’m sure he would have ordered a second bottle, then a third, and so on until the table was full of dead soldiers.
Raising a heavy mitt each gulp of wine gave him a tighter edge. His left eye flickered with rage at every taste, which is odd because, for most of us, wine is a great loosener. You should see me dance after a skin full. I’m so loose I positively come apart.
Not Hans. It was like he was drinking pint after pint of glue, sticking his insides together and rendering the poor man mute.
When German number two arrived she could not have been more different. Yes, a woman. I know, I know, but no matter how unlikely that might sound I swear to you it was the case. Lean, clean and radiating affluence she was. She may not have had a monocle or a pearl handled walking stick but the woman radiated an easy aristocracy.
She waved at Hans with a jolly “Servus!” to which Hans half stood up and then fell back down onto his hard working chair with a creak. We’ll called German number two Mia for now.
The pair shook hands as Mia sat and the waiter took her order, all the while bowing and scrapping in a most embarrassing fashion like it was the dark ages or something. Mind you Mia did not seem to mind and Otto was beyond noticing.
My brandy was burning a whole in my throat but I didn’t have the money to keep ordering so I just kept my head down and my attention firmly fixed on the pair of chronological interlopers, temporal tamperers, horological renegades. My ears were waggling no doubt so intent was I on their conversation.
Hans and Mia were friendlier than you might expect for such different characters. Hans would grumble and complain, slurring his unhappiness between them like a filthy rag. Mia would offer helpful advice like “It will all work out in the end” and “chin up old thing”. If this was helping it certainly did not show on Hans’ face.
The pair were very keen to tell each other with regular repetition that they were not nationalists. By no means. That what they were doing was for the common good across the globe. That their presence here was all about averting future disasters and had nothing to do with wanting to win the war. Oh no. What was the war to them anyway?
The bar had begun to fill up. Working women and old men in the main. Many of the younger men were away in the trenches East and West so we had what was left behind. It was a real locals’ place. People would call out greetings as they entered. They would shout crude jokes across the room and buy each other drinks, especially when they were not going to get one back in return.
You might have thought that at any moment they might burst into song. It was that kind of place.
Then the Brit arrived. Let’s call him Smythe. He had a military bearing and a serious look. Slightly haunted I thought at the time. He saw his fellow travelers and, after scanning the room nervously, he joined them at their table.
He ordered a beer in rather good German, but he was hardly accentless and the waiter gave him one of those looks. Smythe didn’t bat an eyelid though, which made me think he was from a class where waiters were not quite actual people. Actually, scratch that. Waiters did not even exist in any meaningful sense, just like that table or those terrible curtains. The dishes got cleared away in the same way that the tide eventually came in then swept out, no human agency was needed it was simply the way of things.
Smythe shook hands with Mia and Hans. With she as equals and with him as a function of manners. The three of them leaned in towards the centre of the table and discussed the future’s past.
Gone were the justifications and intentions that had characterised the previous conversation and in were detailed discussions of their plans. Of how they were going to proceed. My ears were flapping so hard I’m sure they must have caused a breezed. Smythe took a sip of his beer, proclaimed it delicious and never touched another drop.
He kept fidgeting with his hands, as if they were missing a pipe or a cigarette, or a phone or perhaps a vape. Probably the latter. Hans was a rock, almost motionless even when he spoke. Only Mia had the fluid confidence that you might expect from a master spy. Perhaps she was the only master spy among them, labels can be tricky and no one gets a certificate and a ceremony “Congratulations you are now a qualified shadow” do they now.
The inevitably singing began around the bar and so the table had to speak up to be heard amongst themselves. That was good for me as I pretended to sip my so called brandy.
The fourth traveler arrived. What year she was from I do not know but her haircut was outrageously provocative of the kind we might see in the twenties but certainly not today in 1915. I have no idea what her handlers were thinking, if indeed she had any. How was she to know I suppose.
Whatever the cause she carried it off very well and the two men both began simpering and vying for her attention while Mia simply winked and pulled out a cigar. The bar of course were completely distracted from their singing at this point, for good and ill. You can’t seat two outlandish women and their bizarre companions in a Munich bar and expect to go unnoticed, Berlin perhaps, Munich never.
The yank, if that is what she was, we shall call Tracey. It’s as good a name as any I’m sure you agree. I couldn’t hear what she ordered but it was dark red in colour and came in a small glass. I do know that she had a little laugh and a joke with the waiter and her German was absolutely immaculate.
The waiter was reluctant to leave. I thought this was because, like the others, he was drawn towards her flame, but later I realised she must have given herself away. Whatever faux pas she had made coupled with the Brit’s ludicrously clunky accent they were bound to cause ripples.
Regardless. Tracey got them all chatting about their worlds. All of them were from different times, but more importantly from different streams of time.
Hans described the horror of a world where fascism had been victorious, the camps, the slavery, forced sterilisation and regulation of every aspect of human life. As part of his underground team Hans had desperately stolen time travel technology and been hurled back to do something, anything, to avert a world of suffocating fear.
Mia tutted to herself and agreed that that world did indeed sound terrible. She then began to describe something far worse. A world on the brink of self destruction, intent on using civilisation ending weapons in the name of a holy war. She was an emissary of something she called the Free World that was locked in an existential conflict with evil. A liberal to her core.
Mia was the fourth such traveler that they had sent. The previous missions had focused on eliminating the leadership of the Nazi Party. I forget the names but their assassins had been tasked with taking down the most evil man, or men, of history. Kill them as young men. Kill their parents. Kill them in their cribs. Each assassination simply brought forth another despot, a new hitherto unknown despoiler of nations.
I could barely constrain my anger. As if history is made by single individuals. Of course the forces and causes were still there. Of course the reasons for great events remained, the very idea that one man could be taken out of history and the whole of economics and politics would simply dissolve in a puff of sulphur. Such stupidity.
And on this basis they had killed babies. I finished my brandy accidentally then had to hold my hand over my glass to prevent myself having to buy another.
At last her government had come to the blindingly obvious conclusion that instead of flinging assassins around time if they truly wanted to alter world events they needed to intervene at the root of them, not simply dabble with the walk on actors fulfilling the available roles.
Anyway, let’s not get distracted. The Brit was more pragmatic. He argued that if you look at history the First World War created two streams of horror that poured forth into the decades to come. The first, those most concerning the Germans, the rise of the Nazis, a Holocaust of millions and a second war encompassing the world. The second stream was that of Communism. Millions dead in gulags, or of starvation, a dictatorship that lasted to the end of the century and a legacy of horror that had to be averted.
Smythe believed that if the Great War could end differently, and end before February 1917, then the whole terrain of the twentieth century would be free from the horrors and blights that beset it. He got passionate for a moment and then realised he was attracting glances so he lowered his voice and just said “and that is, my friends, the way I see it.”
Hans waggled his finger and said that Smythe should not confuse the Bolsheviks of 1917 with the Stalinist horrors that came after. Smythe would have none of it, “but they did come after” he said simply, “and how are we to prevent that? Smother Stalin as a babe? Haven’t you been listening?”
The yank was less direct. Tracey spoke of the arc of history and turning an incoming tide of hate into one of a rising tide of civilisation. She referenced the NHS, the UN, and social democracy. To her this seemed a very radical option and who are we to argue with her when you consider the alternatives.
Over the course of two hours the four of them became very tight knit. Whispering and banging the table by turns. They agreed on a plan and what a plan it was. Although they came from different futures they all agreed on one thing. If Germany could win the Great War (and preferably win it early) then tens of millions of lives could be saved from the Holocaust, the Gulags and the Spanish Flu to boot.
Put simply they were preparing to arm the Kaiser’s armies with weaponry that would easily outmatch the allies. And with victories against Russia, Italy, France and Britain then the future would be secured for more gentle and nuanced push towards a civilised world.
If this plan failed then the horrors to come were simply inevitable. The engine of history driving the world inexorably towards the fire and the earth. The companions would stay the night in this bar, it had some very nicely appointed rooms in the floors above, and in the morning would present themselves to the Minister of War with their weapons for victory.
I had to smile. The plan was perfect. The four of them were confident new friends, reassured of the loyalty of each of the others. But sadly it was not to be.
If I was to suggest anything for those considering changing the course of history my first piece of advice would be this: do not have a British toff who cannot control his braying among your number. I mean, if you do want to speak loudly in a German bar with an obviously English accent a time of war just seems an unwise time to do it.
Whether it was the waiter or someone else who had tipped off the police I neither knew nor cared. I was simply there to observe, to learn and to repress my inevitable sorrow. I was not there to intervene, but to swallow coarse brandy and keep my head down.
For weeks the four of them were questioned in local dungeons. Their bodies were forfeit to the needs of their interrogators and no matter how much they pleaded that they were there to help Germany win the war, no matter how much they claimed they could aid in the production of superior weaponry the police were suspicious to say the least and, at last, lost patience.
All four were shot at dawn in separate courtyards in the same complex of buildings. Another sad end to yet more brave agents from the future hoping to forge a better world, or at the very least a less horrifying one.
I reported back without incident and those in charge of my stream of time decided to simply draw a line under the whole affair and say that there was nothing to be done. The past would have to remain a horror and our focus should return to making the future, what was left of it, rather better than what had come before.
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