A Dead Man In Trieste

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Trieste was, so they had told him, the tinderbox of Europe: the sort of place where, at any moment, a spark might ignite the whole powder keg. And they were nearly right, only the spark came almost four years later, in 1914, and it wasn’t in Trieste but just round the corner, in Sarajevo, when the assassination of the Archduke set in motion the train of events which became the First World War. Might, if things had been different, the killing of Lomax have been that spark, Seymour asked himself later? Only that was after the powder keg had exploded, and he was asking himself among the hailstorm of shells and bullets that was the Battle of the Somme, when he wasn’t really in a condition to think clearly about anything.

On that earlier day, in Trieste, as he sat, newly arrived from London, in one of the cafes on the great central piazza, outside in the sun, all that was not just far away but totally unimaginable, so far beyond the reach of normal experience that you just, somehow, couldn’t even think it.

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