He pushed back the left lung with his finger. ‘There’s a fragment of something here. We’re going to have to extend the incision.’

‘What?’

‘Anterior. A long way. I need to get at what’s in there. Is he still out?’

The nurse lifted the man’s eyelid with her bloodied fingers. ‘Yes.’

‘Is there a better scalpel? This one’s not very sharp.”

Breathing in, the surgeon slid the blade through flesh, making an incision round the ribcage, halfway across the back, the skin recoiling either side of the purple wound.

The tent flap banged open and the man and the woman came in, breathing hard.

‘You can wash in that bucket. And there’s disinfectant in the bowl,’ said the surgeon.

While the others got ready, he swept between the ribs with his fingers. ‘Are you all right?’ he said to the nurse. ‘You look pale.’

‘It’s the lamplight. I’m fine.’

‘We need something to spread the ribs. Otherwise—’

‘There’s no equipment like that here. It’s just a tent where—’

‘It’s so dark. I can hardly see …’

With the help of the orderly, he pulled the ribs apart enough to reveal the indifferent heart, twitching in its bony cage.

‘He’s lucky,’ said the surgeon. ‘I can see something now. Move him onto his side. Give me the forceps. Don’t twist his arm. Untie it now. You: hold his elbow up.’

Dusk was falling on the field as the pilot, his observations made, banked his plane one more time, gained height and set his course for home, fifteen minutes over the blackened landscape, along the river, using the spire of the church to guide him back to the raised landing strip.

‘I’ve got it,’ said the surgeon. He dropped a piece of metal into an enamelled tray. ‘Help me close the wound. You, stop this bleeding here. Nurse, give me whatever needles you have.’

‘We haven’t got the kind of thread you need.’

‘Just do the best you can. You do know how to sew?’

‘We used to make our own dresses at home.’

‘Do your best.’

‘Is he going to survive?’

‘Of course he is. Poor soul.’

2

Anton Heideck had arrived in Vienna at the age of nineteen in the wet autumn of 1906. The fallen leaves stuck to the pavements of the narrow street in Spittelberg in which, after a demoralising search, he’d found a room to rent. He was one of the few students not to press into the cafés after lectures in the hope of catching a glimpse of some literary hero; what he admired were the newspaper dispatches from Viennese correspondents in Paris and Moscow. This could be a life, he dared to think one day, when he was buying a late edition of Die Presse. Writing reports from a foreign country might be a way of engaging with the world – not as the protagonist, but as the recorder of other men’s actions.

The Styrian town in which he had been brought up was known as a centre of Catholicism and the old ways; to Anton as a boy it had seemed simply disconnected from anything that was urgent, or desirable, or worth striving for. His brother Gerhard was seven years older and did everything that was asked of him by their father: he was the victor ludorum at the school athletics and took his First Communion with shining hair and a pious look; he was the subject of admiring reports from his teachers at the end of the year. His parents hardly seemed to notice Anton, who sometimes wondered if his arrival in the world had come as a surprise to them. Gerhard meanwhile treated him with maddening tolerance, even when Anton brought his best friend Friedrich home from school and used his elder brother’s bedroom for a wrestling match.