‘Calm yourself,’ I urged. ‘The best and most modern pistol won’t make even a tiny hole in anyone at whom it is not accurately pointed. Most pistols are only for frightening people and making loud noises. The thing is to have it handy. Chaps like you and me only need a pistol perhaps once in our lives’ – I wasn’t being quite truthful there – but then we want it in a great hurry indeed. Take my advice and buy a capable, vintage one which you can make a profit on when all this has died down. There is, for instance, a very splendid old Mauser 7.65 mm not five miles away, which can be bought for £150; it’s the sort with a wooden scabbard which clips onto the pistol-butt to form a stock and transforms it into a small carbine. It is a most reliable pistol and if you can point it straight it will knock an ox over at half a mile. It is also rather a beautiful object in an ugly sort of way.’ He grumbled a bit but took my advice and the Mauserchap’s telephone number.

‘Yes, yes,’ said George, ‘that’s all very well about the small-arms issue but this is supposed to be an O-Group and we should be doing an Appreciation of the Situation.’

(Those of you who haven’t had the luck to serve in the Army should be told that an O-Group is a conference called by an infantry leader below field rank who is finally facing the fact that he is lost and wants his junior officers and senior NCOs to admit that they, too, are lost. An O-Group is always held out of ear-shot of the men, naturally, although the men have known that their officers were lost hours before the O-Group is summoned; their idea of a good officer is simply one who calls an O-Group at a time when they want tea. Soldiers, up to and, sometimes, including the rank of major, are capital chaps: join now – you’re too late to have a crack at the Japs but the Irish are good for years yet.)

‘I have here,’ said George in an efficient sort of voice, ‘a list of all nubile women within a mile’s radius of this house. I propose we lie out at night, turn and turn about, watching their houses and ready to blow the arse off the filthy hog when he next tries to, er, strike.’

‘George,’ I said gently. ‘George? Who furnished you with this list?’

‘The Centenier – he spent hours with his Vingteniers drawing it up.’ I let one of those long silences develop, so that all of us could see the daftness of that. Then I said: