'My goodness,' said Stewart. 'Yours?' A tobacco field stretched ahead of them, all alive with the wind and with the shifting backs of peons labouring among the leaves.

Ά good year for it,' said Whytehead. He could not use a word so vulgar as 'mine'. Oh bliss.

They would not talk of the war – like tradesmen, like traitors – they would talk of the weather, like gentlemen, and they would do their jobs, which were to kill and to save on a large scale; to build cannon and hospitals and put their shoulders to the wheel, which was the wheel of History itself.

'And that I grew from a cutting, sent over by Mme Lynch.'

Eliza spent her time these days crusading for the troops. She held grand soirées, at which she stood, taking the ladies' jewellery personally, at the door. 'Gold into guns,' she said, 'gold into guns', and the women went into the ball as though on their way to bed, reaching in a somnolent way to undo the clasps at their wrists and ears and necks.

And still she had time to grow a few lavender bushes, it seemed. Stewart had heard of this slippings and samplers conversation she held with Whytehead across town; a traffic of chutneys and jams, umbrellas for the sun and galoshes for the rain; small comforts such as sisters might send, which were as intimate a sign as might be seen of a nation's grateful solicitation. Eliza Lynch was Paraguay. She had produced, for the honour of the country, three living sons. She was also, since Lopez had deeded his lands to her, one of the richest women alive. And she gave Whytehead dried seedpods she had cut with her own hands and laid in her own wicker basket. Which made it all worthwhile.

'And how is II Mariscal?'

'In excellent health,' said his doctor. 'Excellent.'

'Good. Good. His catarrh?'

'Greatly improved.'

'Thank God.'

They stared at Eliza's lavender bush with gathering regret. The fact was that it was hard for a gentleman (or what passed for a gentleman in Paraguay) to apply himself to the wheel of History when the driver of the Juggernaut was a tyrant like Lopez. Not to mention the slaves toiling at the ropes. Whytehead's miners worked in chains and it disturbed him just to think about it. To use men so degraded, you needed finer blood – blood that flowed somewhere between blue and pitch-black; blood that was not particularly stirred by the sight of green velvet curtains, or even by a framed portrait of The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy.

At the side of the house, they leaned on a very British fence to admire Whytehead's best horse; a big-hearted, gorgeous Colorado who galloped at the sight of them, then stood, trembling, and would not approach.

'The glory of his nostrils is terrible,' said Whytehead and, when Stewart made no attempt to call the verse, he said, 'The horse. Job: 39.'

'Ah,' said Stewart.

'He saith among the trumpets Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.'

Feeling pursued, Stewart pushed back from the fence rail and turned to the house. Whytehead moved with him. He lapsed into an easy tone, as though talking to an intimate; as though talking to someone who quite liked him.

Ί had an idling idea of Israel somewhere hereabouts,' he said. 'When I was on that boat. That terrible journey by sea. I was thinking – well I was thinking of how many tons per mile of track, of course, but also, you know, of a lost tribe. Or some Arcadia.'

'And all is Arcadian here,' said Stewart, hopelessly charitable, pulled into it by the sudden knowledge that the man he was talking to was going to die. And what of that? he thought. So do we all.

'Yes. It has everything,' said Whytehead. 'Except elephants.'

After Whytehead died the Arsenal would collapse and there would be no more guns. It occurred to Stewart, looking at this man's nervous, disrupted face, that his own death had just moved a notch closer. How does that feel,Doctor? And because he knew they had come to the truth of it now, Whytehead stopped and turned.

Ί went to the office of the Minister of War, yesterday,' he said. 'When I got there, I was asked to wait at the gate. In the sun. Of course I did not wait. I have a hundred things to do. I am not a waiting man. But when I wrote to complain of the guard's impudence, he sent me this.'

Stewart took the piece of paper and scanned it from 'Your excessive sensitiveness' to the scratchy signature at the end. Benigno Lopez. The wretched brother. The only surprise was that he could write.

'You must rise above it,' he said.

Ί cannot rise above it. Any of it. I was not built to rise.'

'Then for God's sake sink. Flatter the man a little.'

Ί don't know how.'

This was true. Whytehead could flatter neither rich nor poor. He thought it democratic. Stewart thought it merely small. Which is why he would survive this country, Stewart thought, and Whytehead would not. Skinner treated him for a looseness of the bowel, Fox for cervical rheumatism, and now, Stewart for a hole in the hand. No one however could cure him of his dignity.

He suffered, under Fox, a daily morphine injection, in the neck. Perhaps it was this that made him stop, or turn, or sit down without warning. Or, as he did now, lie down entirely on the grass. Stewart sat beside him, close by his head. He found the arrangement uncomfortably erotic.

'But Ο for the touch of a vanished hand,' said Whytehead. 'And the sound of a voice that is still.'

For a while, one man watched the sky and the other the distant trees.

Ί used to hit my sisters,' said Whytehead, dreamily. 'Quite hard. I don't regret it in the least. It is an odd thing for a man to worry about. Isn't it? But I worry about it now, all the time. And who was that boy, anyway? I am not entirely sure if that boy was me.'

He pushed himself up on one arm, and turned to look at Stewart.

'The boy on whose actions I will be judged.'

'And you think we will be judged?' said Stewart.

Ί am sure of it.'

'Harshly? I mean.'

'There is only one way.'

Ί am very taken, recently,' Stewart ventured, 'by the idea of a compassionate God.'

Whytehead laughed.

Stewart walked back along The Path Where My Kisses Eat Your Mouth. He wished he knew what joined him to this man. Race was the least of it. Every time the threads of their lives crossed, they snarled into a knot. No wonder they avoided each other. Or repelled each other, rather, like magnets – if one or the other turned, even slightly, they swung around and were stuck fast.

They were also rivals in business, of course. Lopez, who liked a foreign bank account, afforded them the same easy deal, though Whytehead was doing rather better out of it than he was. Money, thought Stewart, it was always the money that smothered a man's heart.

It was the money that maddened them now, the better sort of British man trapped in Asuncion, or working down the railway line in the huge military camp at Léon. As the war trickled on, somewhere in the Mato Grosso to the north or Corrientes to the south, their pay was changed from gold to silver and then to paper, until it was hard to tell if they were paid at all. Still, they held on. If anyone were to funk, it would be late at night after too much to drink with something blurted and wrong – the chances a chap had of making it overland to Buenos Aires, for example, or whether Lopez was 'sound', or who the war was against, anyway. And Stewart, being sober, would sit in a corner, silently answering each in disgust that, No, a chap had no chance of making it to Buenos Aires, since the Brazilians held the river, and, No, Lopez was not 'sound', he went to the wrong sort of school, don't you know, and finally that the war was against everyone. Of course it was – it was a war.