She gets up and starts to limp towards him. Dried leaves and twigs are sharp under her feet so she decides to put her shoes back on. Her toes squish into clotting blood. One strap is almost broken but she manages to cinch it tight. I’m tottering like a whore, she thinks, as she steps out onto the road. There, bearing down on them in a cloud of dust, is the car, small, green and open-topped. It looks like a toy, in which its three occupants barely fit.

CHAPTER TEN

‘How long, do you think, Sergeant?’ Tom peers into the smoking engine of the Austin 8. The oily castings and tubing are as interesting to him, and as meaningless, as Chinese calligraphy. The Signals sergeant is stripped to the waist and is rattling a spanner around in the depths of the machine. Arms glistening with sweat and grease, he looks like a vet straining to deliver an iron calf.

‘Couple of minutes, sir,’ he gasps. ‘If you’ll hand me that socket wrench … no, that one, please, sir …’ He grunts, swears lividly, his New Zealand vowels echoing tinnily off the raised bonnet. Tom looks up and down the road. He watches the heat rising, the long view rippling to the north and to the south. Two weeks ago, he thinks, it was snowing.

Tom watches the sergeant’s back, sunburnt pink skin contrasting with the dingy olive green of the car. He resists the urge to reach for the watercolours in his map case. Second Lieutenant Kerr is sitting on the boot of the open-topped car, feet on the passenger seat, scanning the sky. He works the bolt of his tommy gun, pulling it back, letting it snap back. Pull, snap. Pull, snap. He has been doing it since they left Kriekouki.

I was in a battle, Tom says to himself, but I have no bloody idea what I did. Two weeks – less – of fighting, of terrible roads, snow and bombs. Sleep, when it has come, has only brought the cold-sweat memory of Stukas. Daylight brings the real thing, and the hollow cough of mortars.

They were going to hold the line at Thermopylae. ‘It’s been done before,’ said a jolly captain who was trying as hard as he could, and Tom didn’t have the heart to tell him that it hadn’t turned out particularly well the first time. This time, though, it went better than expected: the New Zealand and British artillery managed to hold up the German tanks long enough for the rest of the troops to withdraw south. Tom’s battery were in action by a little stream that ran across a plain lush with olives and stands of reeds. Mountains rising on the left, the sea close enough to smell on the right. Then they pulled back through Molos. Tom was getting his guns into position again when his colonel sauntered over.