‘I saw more locals packing up today,’ Howard added. ‘Who can blame them?’

‘Not me.’ Clarke reached for his cigarettes and offered Howard one.

‘They’re scrambling to safety whilst disbelieving in the concept.’

‘Yes. The poor buggers. I wonder how they’ve managed this far. To live for days on tenterhooks in this nightmare of anxiety and foreboding, the threat of invasion ever present. That’s what it is to live here.’

Both men felt it. The tension, palpable. Choking. ‘Do you think the Germans will break through?’ Howard glanced around the bar as he asked this and then bit the nail of his thumb. He felt disloyal and defeatist just giving the question life. He was surprised to notice his hand quivering. It wasn’t that he was afraid for himself – he didn’t feel that in his core, he really didn’t – but he was afraid for the people of Dunkirk, for the Allied soldiers, and although he could never say this aloud, for the Germans too. Truthfully, he’d begun to fear for mankind. He couldn’t tell anyone, not even Clarke, but when he was alone at night and doing the thing most people would call praying but he didn’t know how to name, what he wished and longed for was peace. Not victory. Just peace. He wanted it to stop.

‘I don’t know.’ Clarke’s glass eye was very convincing and Howard generally forgot about it except when something brilliant or painful slipped into Clarke’s mind and flooded across his one good eye, leaving the other dead by contrast. ‘It’s a silken slimness of a margin by which we’re avoiding disaster. So who knows.’

Howard and Clarke had struck up a sort of ritual. In the evenings, after they’d eaten and retired to their own rooms, they would each lean out of their hotel window to observe the battles on the front line. They would nod to one another across the darkness but then behave almost as though the other man wasn’t there. They did not speak; there wasn’t anything to say. They listened intently to the sound of guns as though they were listening to an orchestra in the Albert Hall, and they surveyed the flares in the sky and the fires blazing in the distance as closely as if they were watching rare wildlife. As he looked on, Howard speculated whether he was watching the Germans breaking through the Allied lines. Were they advancing? He imagined Clarke must have been wondering the same. After twenty, thirty, sometimes forty minutes, Clarke would say good night and pull his window closed on the horror. Often Howard stayed awake all night, until the apology for dawn – the murk of the autumn morning – signalled that a new day had blundered through. He’d sleep for a couple of hours, and then after breakfast they’d visit the Yser Canal and count the bodies of those who had been killed while they’d looked on.

As they made their way to the canal, there were wounded everywhere, some walking, others being carried on stretchers, some lying on the ground having given up or been given up on. Howard now expected to see maimed soldiers at every junction; he knew the hospitals were packed with blind or otherwise injured men who moaned and wept in confusion and agony as they inched towards their deaths. They’d started to live in a way that made the state of crisis the usual.