‘You’re on the five o’clock boat? You’re sure?’ Clarke demanded gruffly. Time was always of the essence.

The soldier looked jubilant. ‘Yes, sir, and not a minute too soon.’

Howard knew his friend thrived on the excitement of delivering something ahead of the other newspapermen. He himself wasn’t the competitive type. Even back in the theatre he’d had a different approach to most. He loved a full house (more than anything!), but he didn’t resent the other playwrights the same. Was there any real need in rushing this news home to Britain? Did it make any genuine difference to know more men were dead? It couldn’t be a surprise to anyone, not any more. It seemed futile. So much about the war did. He knew that the boat would be laden with letters from men who might already be dead. Was there any point in delivering the letter of a dead man?

Any point in killing a man?

Since he found that he could not write he wondered, with increasing frequency, what he was doing out here. What were any of them doing, come to that? Clarke was not offering the full picture; beyond the concern for the families of those fighting, the government’s censoring of his work meant it often failed to reflect the truth as to how the battle was progressing. God only knew what was really going on in the war. Who was winning and who was losing seemed an incalculable thing to report.

Howard sat down on the small wooden chair and gulped back half a glass of wine. He noticed a little vein pulsing in Clarke’s forehead, blue like a new bruise. He was pressing his lips tightly together so that they almost vanished. He pushed his gold-rimmed spectacles up his nose, two or three times over.

‘You don’t look like a man who believes his own reports,’ commented Howard. Clarke had described the German army as ‘despairing’. He’d even gone so far as to claim that there were old men and sixteen-year-old boys in the German ranks and that this was a sign of desperation, the implication being that they were running out of troops. Howard knew his friend well enough to bet that the account was not fictionalised; Clarke must have spotted the occasional old German patriot, a boy soldier or two, but Howard had only seen tall, strong, virile men in the enemy ranks. They looked a lot like the Allied men. Both in life and death. There was no shortage of them; they kept on coming. Line after line. Clarke had written about Germany approaching the end of its tether in northern Belgium, but that wasn’t the belief in Dunkirk. The streets were strewn with spiky barbed wire and smashed bottles. A neglected, hopeless air had descended on the cobbles; people breathed it in, and spewed it out. True, the Germans had met with gutsy doggedness, but what was doggedness in the face of superior military power, greater reserves in ammunition and endless waterproof boots?