When was he born?

"When was he born?" "Well, he wasn't thirty when I was born, so he must have been born about eighteen ninety-five I should think." "So he was the right age?" "Search me. I don't know when the wretched thing was. You ask Erich. Men know all about these things." Erich poured what remained of the litre carafe into his glass. "Even I am not old enough to have fought. I do remember it a little. I was a school-boy." "But what was it _like?" _said Elizabeth. "I have no idea. I don't think about war. In any case your English schools should have taught you all about it." "Perhaps they did. I don't seem to have been paying attention. It all seemed so boring and depressing, all those battles and guns and things." "Exactly," said Erich. "It's morbid to dwell on it. I've seen enough of that kind of thing in my own lifetime without raking up the past." What are you suddenly so interested in ancient history for?" said Irene. "I'm not sure it _is _ancient history," said Elizabeth. "It isn't very long ago. There must be old men alive now who fought in it." "You ought to ask my Bob. He knows everything." "I bring you coffee now?" said Lucca. * The road swept down into Dover on a wide, banking curve that overlooked the locked, grey sea to her left. Some childish sense of joy came up in Elizabeth at the sight of the water; it was the start of holidays, it was the end of England. On a Thursday evening in winter, it was like breaking bounds. She drove, as instructed, beneath towering gantries, up a ramp, and down through narrow marked lanes, peering round the piece of paper that a man in a kiosk had slapped on to the middle of her windscreen. She was waved to the head of an empty file. She got out of the car and felt the sea wind whip her hair. There were two container lorries to her left and a dozen or so smaller goods vehicles between marked lines round the dock; it was not a popular crossing. In the shop she bought a map of northeast France, and another of the motorways of Europe that would help her on to Brussels. In the trembling hold of the ship she gathered up her book, her spectacles, and a spare sweater, in case she should decide to go on deck. She gratefully escaped the diesel fumes of the huge articulated trucks and climbed the steep stairs to the passenger decks.