I had almost reached our redoubt when I stepped into a shell hole and found myself waist deep in mud and sinking. I shouted for help, but the noise of the barrage was too loud for anyone to hear. Struggling only seemed to make me sink more quickly, and in less than five minutes I was up to my neck and facing the horrible fate of being drowned in a small sea of brown glue. I’d seen horses stuck in the mud, and nearly always they were shot, such was the effort of pulling one out. I struggled to take hold of my pistol so that I might shoot myself in the head before being drowned, but that was hopeless, too. The mud held me tightly now. I tried to lean back so that I might “float” on the surface, but that was no use, either.

And then, just as the mud was up to my jaw, there was an enormous explosion a few meters away as a shell hit the ground and, miraculously, I was lifted right out of the morass and high into the air to land twenty meters away, winded but uninjured. Had it not been for the mud enveloping me, the shock of the blast would certainly have killed me.

That was my recurring nightmare, and I never had it without waking up, soaked with perspiration and out of breath, as if I had just sprinted across no-man’s-land. Even now, in broad daylight, I had to drop down on my haunches and take several deep breaths in an effort to pull myself together. A few spots of color in the once fertile but now devastated landscape served my mental recovery: some blue thistle at the edge of the distant tree line; red dead nettle close to where I’d left the car; some yellow-flowered tansy ragwort; a robin redbreast picking a juicy pink worm out of the ground; the empty blue sky; and finally an army of workmen and a railway line conveying a small red train of earthmoving wagons from one end of the site to the other.

“Are you all right?”

The man wore a workman’s peaked cap and a quilted jacket as voluminous as a smock. His black trousers ended several centimeters above boots doubled in size by several kilos of clay. Over a shoulder as big as Jutland rested a sledgehammer. His blond hair was almost white, and his eyes were as blue as the thistle flowers. His chin and cheekbones might have been sketched by one of those Nazi artists, like Josef Thorak.

“I’m okay.” I stood up, lit a cigarette, and waved it at the landscape. “When I saw no-man’s-land, I went off a bit like August Stramm, you know? ‘Yielding clod lulls iron off to sleep, Blood clots the patches where they oozed, Rust crumbles, flesh is slime, Sucking lusts around decay.’ ”