Half an hour later, an officer came to question Johannes. He wore a tasselled sword and knee-high boots and silver spurs, a tall Englishman in a well-tailored uniform, covered in far less mud than the soldiers Johannes had seen. He was clean-shaven but very pale and he sat down before Johannes with some weariness and a brief expression of pain. Then he asked questions in perfect German. Where was Johannes from and how had he come to be there? What was his regiment, who was his commanding officer? How many men did the French have, where else had he served? Was he a spy?

With the last question, the officer smiled.

‘No,’ Johannes said.

The Englishman nodded. ‘From Berlin, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me, is there still a tavern on Brüderstraße, towards the Schloßplatz end of the street, called the Win auf den?’

‘I haven’t been in Berlin for a long time,’ Johannes said. ‘But it was still there when the French arrested me.’

‘Good,’ the officer said. He stood up and patted Johannes on the shoulder. ‘Das ist alles gut.’

A little while later, a soldier came and handed Johannes a British uniform.

‘Should fit,’ he said and waited for Johannes to get dressed. The uniform proved short in the arms and legs. The soldier said, ‘Oh well, mate.’

Johannes was led to another part of the camp and issued a rifle and ammunition, and then, with a signature and a salute, he was formally enlisted into the 2nd Light Battalion of the King’s German Legion. Two days later, he was back in Flushing, part of the British infantry assault. The town was taken, but the effort proved a complete and colossal waste of time. The French fleet had already retreated to Antwerp even before the bombardment had begun.

Worse still, on the island of Walcheren, the British had been decimated by Flushing fever: a rampant, ruthless spread of malaria, typhoid and dysentery, which eventually killed four thousand men (barely one hundred were killed in action) and infected a further sixteen thousand. The campaign was reduced to a desperate evacuation of the dying.

Johannes Meyer remained miraculously uninfected. Some weeks later he was finally shipped across the Channel to the Sussex coast, to a town called Bexhill-on-Sea, where the King’s German Legion had its training depot.

He began planning his escape the moment he arrived.

PARAMARIBO

The heat. And in the air, an intense fragrance of lemon and orange blossom.

The River Surinam was choked with ships, barges and launches, loading sugar, molasses, coffee, cacao, indigo and cotton all bound for Holland, and unloading flour, beef and pork, salted fish and spermaceti candles, timber, horses and slaves. Krüger walked and watched. His legs were shaky. It had been forty-seven days at sea and stepping onto land hadn’t changed anything. The heat was inebriating.