Exhausted, derided, Mr. Wilson suffered a crippling stroke before he could sway public opinion. Europe was already doomed to a conflagration that would make the Great War seem almost quaint, with its horse-drawn caissons, its Christmas truce, and the chivalric notion that soldiers should fight one another instead of carpet-bombing civilians or gassing noncombatants by the trainload.

Read aloud the names of the nations and the colonies whose dreams were fired by Mr. Wilson’s promise of freedom, then burned to cinders by his fever. Germany, Austria, Hungary. Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia. Kosovo, Albania. China, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam. Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia. The Lebanon and the Philippines, the Congo and the Sudan. Algeria, Egypt. Ethiopia, Eritrea. Somalia, Mozambique, Angola …

Or simply look at a globe, and weep.

Despite it all, there was still a chance for peace, even then, in some few places. If no single person could make things right after the Great War, young Neddy Lawrence still hoped to make them less wrong in one corner of the world. The rest of my story is a small part of his, and a large part of yours, I’m afraid.

WHEN DID THE IDEA of going to Egypt begin to take hold? Sometime around Christmas in 1920, I think. Certainly by February of ’21, I had booked passage and was packing for the trip. By then I’d served nearly two years’ hard labor as the executrix of three estates and had largely completed my duties. A second solitary Thanksgiving had come and gone, and I’m afraid I was feeling quite sorry for myself.

To stave off “the blues,” I set myself a task I’d put off until then as unimportant: the bundling up of hundreds of magazines for the paper-and-rags man who collected them for paper mills.