The lieutenant had begun eating the minute that the major took up his fork, bending low over his plate and shovelling the food fast into his mouth. He stared at Madame Ariane who seemed to find his one-eyed glare disconcerting. She raised her eyes to a portrait on the wall.

‘She didn’t understand what you wanted her to do or why,’ he commented to the major. ‘She didn’t realise that this is a company of the wounded, the lame and the blind and the limbless. She didn’t know that they,’ he jerked his head at the world outside the window, ‘call themselves the Hospital Company. And it doesn’t mean they’re invalids; it means we’re all survivors of wounding on the eastern front. To survive there, wounded, meant you were harder than the men who were still fit. The Russians take no prisoners, you know, and in that climate … It was twenty-five degrees below zero for weeks on end in the winter of forty-two. So if you were left wounded on the battlefield, there were only two alternatives. You froze to death or you were bayoneted where you lay.’

Suzie found the lieutenant easy to understand. He was just the boastful warrior, trying to impress Madame Ariane how tough he was. The major was another matter. He wanted humiliation. He took pleasure in making Madame Ariane knock on the door in her own house, in commanding her to cut up his food. These were cruelties that Suzie understood: petty in themselves, they mounted up to make life unbearable.

‘The major lost his arm last autumn,’ the lieutenant was saying. ‘His hand was smashed up in an attack and he retreated for five days with a tourniquet round his elbow and gangrene creeping into his fingers, before he reached a field hospital where they amputated his hand at once without anaesthetic, to kill him or save his life. And he survived.’

The lieutenant’s face was mobile; he saw no need to maintain the dignified impassivity of the major’s expression. He chewed his food as he talked and swilled the red wine to cleanse his mouth before he swallowed. He pursed his lips, trying to extract a shred of poultry meat from between his back teeth.

‘Now, I lost my eye two years ago, at Stalingrad. A piece of shrapnel, the luckiest hit I ever received. It got me out of that hell-hole before the lid of the coffin came down on us. I was walking wounded and I managed to get on a plane and stay on it. When they found it was too heavily loaded for take-off they started to kick people out. The unconscious can’t protest. They’re the easiest to dispose of and they’re probably going to die anyway. But I still lost my toes to frostbite while I waited for the plane at the landing ground at Pitomnik. Five days and five nights I was there, without medical treatment. Beside me was a comrade who had been shot up. He was on a stretcher and lay in agony, crying and calling for his mother for two days. Finally, he understood he wasn’t going to make it and he begged us to put a bullet through him to end his misery.’