Timothy staggered back, staring down at the body. Then he started to laugh, wiping his mouth on the back of his unbuttoned sleeve. ‘You’ll die in pain, in ten years, with a tumour on your bowel,’ he told the unconscious figure. Then he turned and ran from the room.

Mr Hodges had been kneeling in the middle of the road, praying, when the army convoy rolled up. An officer had hopped out of the first of the dusty green vans, introduced himself as Major Wrightson and asked what the trouble was.

Hodges told him that he’d had a vision up ahead and been called upon to change his ways. He asked the major to leave him alone, and, with a nod and shrug to his comrades back in the van, the soldier did so.

They drove around him, with great care, and picked up speed as they returned to the centre of the road.

That was when the first van compacted, its front flattening like it had hit a wall.

The cap on the radiator blew upwards in a blast of steam. The other two vans braked before they ran into the back of the first.

Mr Hodges had stood up to watch the soldiers scramble out and stare at what was in their way: nothing. The front of the crashed van was rapidly rusting, a thin red layer rising to smudge the air around its bonnet. To Hodges, it made the soldiers look like they were just figures in a painting, staring at a puff of paint that had fallen across the canvas. A smell of passing thunderstorms suddenly filled the air, but this was a clear spring morning.

Some of the men, those who lived through the next few months, claimed that they’d smelt something sulphurous in that suspended red cloud, but the recollections everybody had of the spring of 1914 were full of portents after the fact.

The major had clambered out of the cab and started shouting at his driver to back up. He probed the red cloud with his baton. With a sudden crash, the whole front end of the van gave way and the cloud grew heavier. It was following a gently upward slope, describing the perimeter of something invisible that the major measured by walking along it, slapping the air with the baton.

The air made a fearful series of echoes.