‘True. Then in Vienna I saw so much poverty and degradation it gave me a taste for some aspects of bourgeois life. Comfortable beds. French wine after hard work. But my life was always in some crisis or another. I was travelling, I was writing, I was fighting a war.’

‘So you were a bourgeois manqué.’

‘In a way. And then Delphine … She didn’t seem to be a wife. She was not that kind of woman. Don’t get me wrong, she was a wonderful companion – intellectually rather my superior. But not a wife. Certainly not a mother.’

‘She told you that?’

‘She said she couldn’t have children.’

‘Did that alter things between you?’

‘Only as far as contraception was concerned. It didn’t alter what I felt for her.’

‘Do you think it altered things for her, though?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The way she saw the future?’

Anton thought for a long time. ‘Perhaps.’

‘And after Delphine? All these young women in Vienna?’

‘Not that many. I may have exaggerated the number.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘The point is not the number. The point is that I was then not someone you would want to marry. I had nothing to offer.’

‘Why?’

With a wheezing sigh, Anton began. ‘My unit of the Common Army fought at first in Galicia. Part of Poland now. It was not as bad as I’d expected. We were alongside the Germans. Often our billets were in barns or farm buildings. Or we’d take over whole villages. I was in with other men from Vienna, including Friedrich, my best friend. I think I mentioned him.’

‘Many times.’

‘We were always hoping to be switched to the Italian front. To be up in the mountains.’

He saw Martha glance towards the photograph of Daniel.

‘Asiago, wasn’t it?’ he said.

She nodded.

‘I never got there. In 1916 we had the pleasure of moving to the Ukraine, where we lost half our men. The Brusilov Offensive. You probably remember.’

‘They said it was the worst event of the war.’

‘I’m not sure how you measure that. Each side lost about a million men. When the Russians left to have their revolution we were sent home on leave. I even went back to see my mother and uncle at the sausage works. We hoped it would soon be over. Unfortunately, our German allies had different ideas and in 1918 they launched their Spring Offensive in France.’

‘It failed, didn’t it?’

‘Eventually. Our leave was cut short and we had to report back to Vienna. Training and manoeuvres. Then we were told we were being moved to the Western Front, where we were going to have new enemies. We might even be fighting the Americans. I was a commissioned officer by this time – not because I was a good soldier, you understand, but because I’d been to university. They thought that meant I’d be good at planning. Because I’d read Plato and Kant. Or some of Kant, at least. Prague, Nuremberg, Saarbrucken, Metz … That was the route to the Western Front. German railways and roads were good. It was just the numbers that were a problem. So many grumbling Slavs and Magyars. One night in Nuremberg …’ He coughed. ‘Do you want to hear all this?’