Martha tilted her head, but said nothing.

‘Of course, the war took time to digest. Was this what everything had all along been leading up to? The young men of the world’s greatest nations dug into ditches a few paces apart firing metal into one another to see who would be the last man standing. Was this what Mozart and Montaigne had really had in mind?’

He looked round the room as he spoke, finding Martha’s gaze too personal; it might be easier to remember if he focused not on a face but on some vague distance. Panama, he said, looking at a patch of sky through the window, had shown the worst and the best of human ambition, of men driving towards their goal at a heavy price. The aim, ostensibly, had been to help sea traffic, trade and the wealth of nations; but the men in the Culebra Cut had fought a war with nature and with their masters. The Caillaux trial had been a struggle of a different kind. The performers in front of the cloth enacted a comedy about sex; behind the curtain there was a drama about the need to avoid a war that would leave the world impoverished, in more senses than one.

‘But war came, as we know,’ said Anton. ‘Men wanted it. The French needed it to prove themselves. Their warrior virility after a hundred years of political chaos. And humiliation by the Prussians at Sedan. The Germans wanted it, too. And our government provoked the Serbians, knowing what that would mean. But why? Why did we want to fight Russia? To make sure Austria-Hungary had its share of worldly goods? Or some idea of our people being better than their people. But who are “our people” anyway? The Vienna Parliament had thirty parties speaking ten different languages – with no translators. That wasn’t even an entity, let alone one worth dying for. It was a Babel. With a crazy old emperor riding back and forth between his palaces in a horse-drawn carriage.’

He cast round again, feeling he had lost his way. ‘Of course, if they’d known on the first day that it would last four years and cost ten million dead and twice that wounded, perhaps the men in charge might have thought again. But I don’t think so.’

After a pause, Martha said, ‘Your book must make rather gloomy reading.’

‘No. I put in lots of stories and left out most of the speculation. I’m just going through that for your benefit.’

‘How thoughtful.’

‘But I came to have a low view of the human creature, the male in particular. He seems to be a deformed animal.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We are obsessive,’ Anton said. ‘We appear to have bigger brains than other creatures, but we behave in a way that’s contrary to our own interests. These harmful passions that drive us mad with love or with the need to slaughter one another. We don’t seem very well … evolved.’